21 | Alex Rosenberg on Naturalism, History, and Theory of Mind

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2018

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply an accurate recounting of the facts, but part of it is generally taken to be some kind of explanation about why. How much should we trust these explanations? This is a question with philosophical implications as well as historical ones, and philosopher Alex Rosenberg's new book How History Gets Things Wrong claims that we should basically not trust them at all. It's not that we get the facts wrong, it's that we have wrong ideas about causality and how the human mind works, and we can't help but import these wrong ideas to our beliefs about history. Alex and I dig into how this claim arises naturally from a certain way that naturalists should think about the world. Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, with secondary appointments in biology and political science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lakatos Award for the best book in the philosophy of science. Rosenberg is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophical aspects of various subjects, including biology, cognitive science, economics, history, causation, and atheism. He has also written two novels, The Girl from Krakow and Autumn in Oxford. Web site Duke home page Wikipedia page Amazon author page Interview at 3:AM Interview at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.8	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:05.8	And if you've read my book, The Big Picture, you know that one of the things I'm extremely
0:10.2	interested in is the project of reconciling what's called the Manifest Image of the World
0:16.0	with the scientific image of the world.
0:18.4	These are terms that go back to the philosopher Wilfred Sellers.
0:21.2	I learned them from Daniel Dennett, but it's pretty obvious what's going on.
0:25.3	You have a manifest image of the world which is the world we see and talk about in our
0:29.2	everyday lives, a world of people and tables and chairs, but also a world of purposes and
0:35.4	meanings and other terms that we use to describe how human beings navigate this world around
0:41.0	us.
0:42.0	And then we have the scientific image, which if you're a biologist, it's a story of organisms
0:47.2	and cells.
0:49.0	And if you're a physicist, it's a story of wave functions and particles and things like
0:52.9	that.
0:53.9	These ways of talking about the world speak very different vocabularies.
0:57.7	How do we match them up with each other?
1:01.0	Some of this project is just a matter of doing science, but there's also deep philosophical
1:05.3	issues that need to be resolved.
1:07.1	So today, I'm happy to welcome Alex Rosenberg from Duke University, a leading philosopher who's
1:12.6	also very interested in this project of reconciling, the manifest in scientific images.
1:18.4	And Alex has highlighted a specific example of this problem that most of us never even
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