Observe, the bizarre metaphysics of philosopher Dean Dennett (The Intentional Stance):
It is important to recognize the objective reality of the intentional patterns discernible in the activities of intelligent creatures, but also important to recognize the incompleteness and imperfections in the patterns. [...]No one is perfectly rational, perfectly unforgetful, all-observant, or invulnerable to fatigue, malfunction, or design imperfection.
[...]
[T]here is no fact of the matter of exactly which beliefs and desires a person has in these degenerate cases.
In other words, if a person's--Sally's, say--beliefs are not rational (or "degenerate") it is not just that we can not know Sally's beliefs, or predict the actions she will take based on those beliefs, it is that, Sally doesn't actually have the belief. That is, it's not just a problem of epistemology, it's a problem of metaphysics.
If I'm reading Dennett right, I think that's pretty fucking strange.
And, if you were wondering why philosophy as a discipline has been marginalized among scientific disciplines, it's, in part, due to theories like Dennett's. After all, implicit in Dennett's argument is the claim that beliefs are not physical (or at least, not just physical), and that no matter how good our ability to map the brain, we wouldn't be able to point to a mental state called "a belief." And, what's stranger, if a belief isn't rational, then it doesn't exist--physically or otherwise.
So, is it any wonder scientists don't take philosophers seriously?
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