MOVING TO FRONT FROM 2 DAYS AGO, SINCE THE DISCUSSION IS STILL GOING STRONG
Here. I'll quote just one striking criticism Kitcher levels:
THE SECOND OBJECTION concerns the method employed throughout On What Matters. Short schematic fictions—“puzzle cases”—are used as if they were analogues of experimental results that could be used to test putative theoretical hypotheses. One deep difficulty with this method is that, for all the words that Parfit expends on attempts to clarify his central concepts, particularly the notion of a reason, the concepts finally remain imprecise, and readers must constantly struggle to decide whether his assertions about the bearing of the evidence are justified. Even more importantly, the reactions he intends us to share are strikingly different from the kinds of reports that play a valuable role in the development of the sciences: whereas the standardization of observations and experimental findings is crucial to scientific objectivity, when people offer their judgments about puzzle cases in ethics there are absolutely no standards for when they are doing it well, no serious understanding of what they are doing or how, no sense of how their judgments might be distorted by prior commitment to some ethical principle—and thus no way of knowing whether their reports have the slightest evidential worth.
Comments are open, for those who would like to discuss this criticism.
