What role should empirical methods play in political philosophy? What might be the merits of employing social science methods to address the fundamental questions political philosophers explore, such as what makes the state politically legitimate or what is the nature of a good society? A useful point of comparison here is political science. Although political science and political philosophy are closely adjacent disciplines, political scientists typically make far greater use of empirical methods. Moreover, many political scientists are highly critical of what they see as the unacceptable aprioristic methods employed by great deal of contemporary political philosophy. Such criticisms are, however, highly contentious and contested. Many political philosophers are opposed, on primarily normative political grounds, to such moves that they regard as embodying the methodological vice of “scientism”. What should we think? Might there be specifically political reasons for rejecting some methodological practices? Might there also be straightforward philosophical grounds for objecting to strong empiricist programs of reform? In this talk, I shall begin by considering the disagreement between the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School on whether philosophy should model itself on the natural sciences before providing a defence of the thought that when investigating the normative questions that lie at the heart of political philosophy, non-empirical philosophical speculation has a significant role to play. In the final section, I shall briefly outline some reasons why this methodological stance matters politically.
Few philosophers nowadays doubt the existence and significance of a persistent ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of the nature of conscious experiences and their relation to the material world. Contemporary concerns about the explanatory gap have their roots in Saul Kripke’s 1972 argument against the mind–brain identity theory: if a is identical with b, then there is no world at which a fails to be identical with b; as Descartes showed, however, it is conceivable for minds to exist in the absence of material bodies; so, Kripke concluded, minds cannot be identified with material bodies or their parts. In 1983 Joseph Levine argued that, although Kripke’s original argument falls short of establishing that minds are distinct from material bodies, the argument has an epistemological counterpart. The disparate character of conscious qualities and qualities of material bodies creates an impeneratrable barrier to our understanding how the mental could be identified with the physical. This, and other, expressly epistemological arguments have subsequently been deployed in the service of the metaphysical thesis originally defended by Kripke: the mental cannot be identified with the material. This paper critically examines the widely invoked practice of drawing metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises.
