Free Will, Knowledge, Science...

and the "solid" vs. pragmatic conceptions of justification and reasoning.

Best summed up with an example. Deductively I find (at this current point in my life) that determinism is true, free will is not. If this is so, ethics is useless, is it not? People will not change if determinism is true. So why continue ethics? Well, ultimately the reasoning seems to rest on common sense intuitions of what will happen if we do that and what people are like. Of course, I don’t like “common sense” in philosophy. But perhaps I should mend that. I don’t like common sense in epistemology, given a certain conception of knowledge. Also, as a side note I do have doubts about deduction (see the notes on systems). So we can go to ethics, given certain (recognized) assumptions and a somewhat different method of achieving “knowledge”. Science does this. It is inductive, not fool-proof, and that is recognized (as most scientific knowledge is theoretical, conditional). Yet we consider it a body of knowledge in a certain generally accepted world, and it is accepted by most. Descartes might talk about evil geniuses all he wants, but he won’t jump off a bridge if you ask him to (I call this the “Cartesian Bridge”). If you want to get very far in different fields of philosophy it seems you must sometimes start with different rule sets that can be contradictory. The question I then ask myself is, is this wrong, and if so what should be done?