Response from Alexander George on October 15, 2005

Here are some reactions, each of which would require greater amplification and defense:

1) If psychology is a science, then it's results are not irrefutable. Science doesn't prove claims to be true in the way mathematics does. It's a fallible enterprise, and even its strongest results are advanced in the knowledge that they just might be wrong.

2) Quite a few philosophers are not impressed by what they consider bureaucratic boundaries and take themselves to be working on the same problems that psychologists are, perhaps at a slightly greater level of abstraction. They believe that their own work is really of a piece with psychological research: both constrained by it and simultaneously contributing to it. Their contributions don't usually consist in gathering data with which to test theories, but rather in the clarification and development of concepts or claims that figure in those theories.

3) Finally, some philosophers are skeptical that many of the most vexing philosophical problems about the mind are amenable to resolution through empirical inquiry. These philosophers believe that our perennial philosophical problems arise from deep and stubborn conceptual confusions whose dissipation will not be furthered by empirical psychology. For them, to look to psychology for philosophical relief is simply to look in the wrong direction.

Response from Richard Heck on October 18, 2005