Review HERE.
The highpoint of the criticism is Kitcher's discontent with gedankenexperiments, e.g.
You cannot respond to the imagined predicament without thinking hard, but hard thinking leads through a cloud of questions to a state of confusion. A few conditions are simply declared: the outcomes are known and the options limited. But since that sort of certainty and limitation is exceedingly remote from the circumstances in which we make our practical decisions, our judgmental capacities cannot be put to work in their normal ways. Readers are pitched into a fantasy world, remote from reality, in which our natural reactions are sharply curtailed by authorial fiat. When we are called on to render a verdict, the dominant feeling is a disruption of whatever skills we possess, and a corresponding distrust of anything we might say-often publicly visible when lecturers ask their audiences to respond to some puzzle case: only partisans of some particular theory answer confidently, while the rest sit in uncomfortable silence. The reader may even be left with a deep sense of unease that matters of life and death are to be judged on the basis of such cursory and rigged information.
The low point is the paean to naturalism at the end, as predictable as it is disappointing. I think Kitcher felt he had to do that because it ties to his bread and butter epistemology stuff and because he knows that the criticism from the first part of his article has historically been articulated by Moorean anti-naturalists.
When I finally get around to closely reading Becker's fantastic book on Stoicism I could conceivably come around to something closer to Kitcher's view on this too, minus the predictable Stephen Pinkerish just-so evolutionary story that seems to be the null hypothesis for contemporary naturalists (not to give one inch to Fodor, Chomsky, or Plantinga's ignorant remarks about evolutionary theory; it's rather that evolutionary theory doesn't do any of the meta-ethical work that Kitcher hints at in the article, so with Kitcher type naturalists you end up with just-so stories defending whatever prejudice the teller wants to defend).
Anyhow, Becker defends a quite different form of naturalism, one that actually necessitates sages in a manner inconsistent with Kitcher's dismissal of the same. Maybe I'll do a post on that topic in the next few weeks. I really hope to teach Becker's book (as well as Feldman's book on hedonism) at some point in the next few years, after I complete the Speculative Realism book. I think some of the issues I'm working out there will have some friction in these debates, but it's kind of a roundabout story.
