Stuart Brock
Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. (Gandhi)
Consider the following question:
Main Question: Is there enough progress in philosophy?
Here is the answer: Yes!
The progress philosophy has made over the last century is impressive. Moreover, I am optimistic that it will continue to advance at an impressive rate in the years to come.
But I am an optimist, and not all professional philosophers agree with me. Indeed, in the last few years, a flurry of philosophers have expressed a deep sense of disappointment at what they see as the underwhelming state of the discipline and the apparent lack of progress made in philosophy generally. Perhaps the most salient articulation of this sense of communal self‐doubt comes from Timothy Williamson, who in a well‐known paper aptly titled “Must Do Better,” says:
It seems likely that some parts of contemporary analytic philosophy just pass the methodological threshold for some cumulative progress to occur, however slowly, while others fall short of the threshold … How can we do better? We can make a useful start by getting the simple things right … To one degree or another, we all fall short not just of the ideal but of the desirable and quite easily possible.
(Williamson 2007, 288–291)
The point of the paper is to encourage philosophers to lift their game. Williamson presupposes that we are collectively not making enough progress, and his aim is in part to explain this supposed failure in terms of a lack of discipline and determination on the part of philosophy’s practitioners. We are not trying hard enough; we are not careful enough; we are not rigorous enough; we are not persistent enough.
A few years later, in 2011, Eric Dietrich went even further, publishing a paper in which he suggests that philosophy is not only not progressing fast enough, it has not progressed at all in the last 3000 years. As he puts it:
Philosophy does not even stumble forward. Philosophy does not move forward at all. It is exactly the same today as it was 3000 years ago; indeed, as it was from the beginning. What it does do is stay current; philosophers confuse this with advancing, with making progress. Staying current is not moving forward any more than staying up on the latest fashions or music is movement toward greater social justice.
(Dietrich 2011, 332)
Dietrich claims that philosophers don’t see this obvious fact because they collectively suffer from a condition known as anosognosia, a secondary pathology in which an individual suffering from a salient primary pathology denies suffering from it.
Dietrich’s thesis should be easy enough to refute. All that’s required is the provision of just one case in which philosophy has made an advance in the last 3000 years. As Dietrich makes clear, though, the example has to be a clear instance of philosophical progress. We can’t merely point to a change in terminology. Nor is it enough to point to a new method for finding solutions or a new way of thinking about an old problem. Nor should the example be one where an advance has been made independent of philosophy, even if philosophers themselves have embraced the advance. Are there such cases? I think there are. I think the work of contemporary philosophers has helped solve significant problems. Philosophers have shown, among other things, that knowledge isn’t justified true belief (Gettier), that proper names as they occur in natural language are rigid designators (Kripke), that the probability of a conditional is not the same as a conditional probability (Lewis), that some propositions can be true but not believed, and some truths are not even believable by a rational agent (Moore). None of these things were known prior to the twentieth century, and their discovery has helped resolve other problems and has reduced confusion both within and beyond philosophy.
But even if these discoveries are examples of genuine philosophical progress, there is still a concern in some quarters that such advances are too infrequent and too inconsequential for us to give a positive answer to the Main Question. This is the position David Chalmers takes in his paper “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?” He says:
The glass‐half‐empty view is that there is not as much as we would like … I will articulate a version of the glass‐half‐empty thesis [and] argue for it.
(Chalmers 2015, 3–4)
Chalmers’ glass‐half‐empty thesis would more aptly be named a glass‐not‐quite‐but‐almost‐empty thesis. Chalmers is clearly of the view that there has not been enough progress in philosophy, and this lack of progress, characterized by a lack of consensus around the biggest problems in the discipline, is in his view “the largest disappointment in the practice of philosophy.”
This pessimism about philosophy’s progress from within the discipline is not a recent phenomenon. The perception of failure by philosophers can be seen one hundred years ago, soon after the birth of analytic philosophy. Arthur Lovejoy made the following observations as part of his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1916:
I well remember, as undergraduate[s] … we were told that one of the conventional reproaches against philosophy is that it merely moves in cycles – that there is neither stability in philosophic opinion nor continuous progress in philosophic insight, but that the speculative fashion of one generation becomes a discredited error to the next, and returns to vogue (perhaps with the air of a new discovery) in a third … But if we fail to achieve a measurable amount of agreement and a consecutive and cumulative progress there, we fail altogether … The fact [that we don’t] remains, then, a standing scandal to philosophy, bringing just discredit upon the entire business in which we are professionally engaged.
(Lovejoy 1917, 126–130)
Lovejoy gave expression to the same kind of frustration at philosophy’s apparent lack of progress as that articulated by Williamson, Dietrich, and Chalmers. But he also proposed an explanation of the phenomenon. As Lovejoy saw it, philosophy has two goals that are in tension with one another: it aims to verify (that is, to solve problems by logical, dispassionate, and objective means) and to edify (by delivering an imaginative and emotionally engaging discourse about these very same problems). In order to make meaningful advances in philosophy, Lovejoy thought philosophers had to reject one of the aims in pursuit of the other. Philosophy’s practitioners took his advice – as far as I can tell, philosophers within the analytic tradition no longer see themselves as in the business of providing edifying discourse – but it has not provided the panacea Lovejoy hoped it would.
This pessimistic assessment was confirmed by Wilbur Urban, who almost ten years later made the following observations in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1925:
Few of us would be disposed to question the priceless value of the fruits of philosophy even if we were sceptical of progress. Yet after all, it is this faith in progress that keeps us going. With us philosophers, however, more perhaps than with any others of the sons of men, it is a matter of faith rather than of sight.
(Wilbur Urban 1926, 93–94)
But Urban was more sanguine about philosophy’s future prospects. He speculated that philosophy was on the cusp of making many important groundbreaking discoveries. Almost 100 years later, the assessment of the profession is that Urban got it wrong. It appears that we are still waiting for a new period of enlightenment and many of us are not hopeful that it will come.1
In this chapter, I defend a very different view of philosophy’s past. Unlike the pessimists, I believe philosophy has made outstanding progress. In the next section, I explain where I think the arguments for pessimism fail. In the final section, I explain why I think a clear and precise articulation of the Main Question is likely to yield a positive answer. If I’m right about all of this, we have every reason to be proud of philosophy’s past achievements and confident that philosophy’s future is very bright indeed.
Pessimism about philosophy’s progress isn’t baseless. To be sure, there are at least two reasons commonly given in defense of this kind of pessimism. The first reason points to a flaw in the methods adopted by philosophers; the second points to an enduring lack of consensus among philosophers on answers to the big questions in their discipline. Each reason can be expressed as a formal argument, and the flaws in the reasoning are then easier to spot.
Sometimes pessimism about philosophy’s past successes and future prospects stems from observations about philosophers’ reliance on historical texts. Eric Dietrich expresses the concern as follows:
From our twenty‐first century perspective, we see that Aristotle was not even in the ballpark with most of his scientific ideas, theories and conclusions. His works in science are only of historical interest. But he is a giant to this day in philosophy. We can learn by reading his philosophical works. This pattern of ignoring old science but rereading over and over again old philosophy repeats throughout the histories of science and philosophy.
(Dietrich 2011, 335)
One interpretation of this general concern can be expressed as the following argument.
The argument from historical method
- Philosophers look for answers to many philosophical problems in the actual writings of eminent historical figures.
- If enough progress were made in these areas of philosophy, philosophers would not be looking for answers in the actual writings of eminent historical figures.
- Therefore, philosophy has not made enough progress.
While this argument is seductive, both premises are controversial.
Consider the first premise. Although some sub‐disciplines in philosophy (e.g., the history of philosophy) may emphasize research methods that require us to look at primary historical texts for insight, much of contemporary research in philosophy makes no more than a passing reference to historical figures. And when such references are made, it is often merely to give credit for a general approach or broad philosophical framework first articulated by the historical figure.
Now consider the second premise. It proves too much. History, classics, and anthropology, for example, also rely heavily on historical texts to draw inferences about the past. Consequently, if the second premise were true, the above argument could, mutatis mutandis, be wielded with equal force to show implausibly that history, classics, and anthropology have not made enough progress. Furthermore, the second premise is question‐begging. Why think that an appeal to primary texts is something philosophers would do only if other methods used within philosophy proved fruitless? We would not, for example, make a similar inference about physics, if, for whatever reason, physicists decided (perhaps misguidedly) to add to their current repertoire of methods a textual analysis of the writings of Newton, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Heisenberg, and Rutherford. So long as philosophy has other methods it employs and no independent doubt is cast on these alternative methods, then the mere observation that philosophers sometimes look to historical texts for insight gives us no reason for thinking that the discipline as a whole has not made enough progress.
Of course, there may be independent reasons for doubting the alternative methods employed by philosophers. Indeed, in recent times a number of philosophers have suggested that the main method used by philosophers is one that essentially employs intuitions as evidence. But intuitions, at least in some domains, are an unreliable guide to the truth. So, using this alternative method is not conducive for success in philosophy. This line of thought might be glossed as follows:
The argument from the method of intuition
- Philosophers use intuitions as evidence in support of their favored philosophical positions.
- Philosophical intuitions are unreliable.
- If philosophy were to make enough progress, philosophers would not use unreliable evidence in support of their favored philosophical positions.
- Therefore, philosophy has not made enough progress.
Like the argument from historical method, every premise in this argument is contentious. Consider the first premise. Notice that it is, and needs to be, a descriptive claim, one that describes philosophical practice rather than prescribing a practice that may or may not in fact be adopted by philosophers. It is, after all, this cited practice that is put forward as an explanation of philosophy’s lack of progress. But recently many philosophers have suggested that when intuitions are in fact appealed to, they are not appealed to as evidence. Moreover, other philosophers have claimed plausibly that intuitions are rarely appealed to in philosophical arguments. Instead, it is suggested, philosophers use arguments as evidence for their claims and simply assume or take for granted presuppositions agreed to by others engaged in the discussion rather than appeal to intuitions in their support (see, for example, Cappelen 2012; Ichikawa 2014; Molyneux 2014; Deutsch 2015).
Consider next the second premise. Although experimental philosophers have provided good evidence that some intuitions in some domains by some individuals are unreliable, it is controversial whether these observations can be generalized to support the view that all intuitions are unreliable tout court. Some philosophers suggest that while folk intuitions are unreliable, the “expert” intuitions of philosophers aren’t susceptible to the same kinds of biases and errors (see, for example, Ludwig 2007; Williamson 2007). Other philosophers suggest that, while intuitions (of both the folk and philosophers) are unstable in certain respects, there are other respects in which they show significant stability (see, for example, Wright 2016).
Finally, consider the third premise. Most disciplines use numerous methods, and philosophy is no exception. If the methods philosophy employs do not need to be used in conjunction with any of the others, then it should not matter if one or more of the methods are unreliable. So long as at least one of philosophy’s methods is reliable, progress can be made by applying the reliable method. Moreover, the rate of progress within philosophy can be rapid, so long as there is a bias in favor of the more reliable methods. The argument from the method of intuition (and also the argument from historical method) assumes, without argument, that the target method is the predominant (if not the only) method employed by philosophers. That assumption needs evidential support. In the section “The case for optimism” I give reasons for thinking that the assumption is misguided.
A more common argument for pessimism appeals to the apparent lack of expert consensus around the correct answer to any philosophical question. David Chalmers (2015, 7) articulates the argument for this claim as follows.
Chalmers’ argument from disagreement
- There has not been large collective convergence on the big questions of philosophy.
- If there has not been large collective convergence on the big questions of philosophy, there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy.
- Therefore, there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy.
The basic underlying idea in Chalmers’ argument is that in order to get large convergence on the truth within a discipline one must see a large convergence around something or other. But in philosophy we see no such thing. According to Chalmers, there is rarely a consensus of any kind around any proposition, so (almost trivially) there can be no consensus around the truth.
Before evaluating the argument, we need to understand better some of its technical terms. Somewhat roughly, we can say that “collective convergence” is convergence of opinion; convergence of opinion occurs in a group G with respect to a question Q when there is movement over time toward consensus or agreement on the answer to Q by members of G. But what is large (as opposed to small) collective convergence? And what are the big (as opposed to the little) questions in philosophy? Chalmers isn’t altogether helpful here, but he does suggest that by “large collective convergence” he means a movement toward consensus over a large range of big questions. Chalmers understands this notion of largeness comparatively, suggesting that large collective convergence in any discipline “requires as much convergence as there has been over big questions in the hard sciences” (2015, 7). On Chalmers’ conception, then, it looks a priori that there is large collective convergence of opinion in the hard sciences, but not so for disciplines falling outside the hard sciences. (I make heavy weather of this comparative claim in the next section.)
Chalmers also tentatively suggests that what counts as a big question is relative to a discipline. According to Chalmers, Q is a big question within a discipline at a time t if and only if Q is a question that members of that discipline at t would count as one of the big questions of the discipline. On this conception, big questions within a discipline need not be questions that preoccupy practitioners of that discipline throughout history – if they were, consensus would be unlikely. On Chalmers’ conception, then, the big questions at one time might be questions that, at a later time, seem silly.
Putting these worries about terminology to one side, how might an optimist respond to Chalmers’ argument? Daniel Stoljar (forthcoming), in an excellent monograph on progress in philosophy, is a self‐professed optimist. Stoljar’s aim in the monograph is to demonstrate that philosophy has indeed made significant progress in the past and, on inductive grounds, he suggests that philosophy is likely to continue to do so in the future. His approach is to draw attention to two different kinds of philosophical problem: (i) Boundary and Transgression Problems, problems requiring the resolution of an inconsistency between two intuitive theses, a boundary thesis about what the world or the mind is like, and a transgression thesis, according to which something salient is not like that; and (ii) Provision of Information Problems, problems requiring the provision of adequate information about some salient item of philosophical interest. The weight of Stoljar’s argument is involved in demonstrating that a large number of philosophical problems can be categorized as either a Boundary and Transgression Problem or as a Provision of Information Problem; that philosophers have had significant successes in resolving these kinds of problems in the past; and that this success is reflected in a philosophical consensus about what to say about these cases. According to Stoljar, the domains in which philosophers have failed to make serious progress – domains pessimists focus on – center around problems that do not fall into either of these two categories. If Stoljar is right, the first premise of Chalmers’ argument is false.
There is, however, another way optimists can respond to the argument. One might accept that there has not been significant consensus around the truth in philosophy, and yet maintain that philosophy has made significant – even outstanding – progress over the last 3000 years. The basic idea here is to accept Chalmers’ conclusion, and his argument for it, but to deny that the conclusion gives the required support for a negative answer to the Main Question.
To motivate this idea, notice that to ask whether philosophy progresses at all, let alone whether it progresses fast enough, presupposes that the discipline has a goal or aim. This point applies quite generally to progress of any kind. To say we’ve progressed in our travels, presupposes that there is a destination we are aiming at, and that we’ve got closer to that destination. To say that a business has made progress presupposes that it has a goal (e.g., maximizing profits) and that it has performed better against this benchmark recently than it has in the past.
So what is the goal against which we can measure philosophy’s progress? Chalmers’ conclusion, if it is taken as an argument for a pessimistic answer to the Main Question, presupposes that knowledge and truth are the sole aims of philosophy. Many philosophers throughout history have rightfully challenged this assumption. For example, Vladimir Mironov (2013) suggests that philosophy has no goal, and therefore that, strictly speaking, it can make no progress. If Mironov is right, it is trivial that philosophy makes enough progress – indeed, it makes as much progress as it can. Todd Moody (1986) suggests that philosophy has no specifiable goal, in which case progress in philosophy might be possible, but if it is, that progress is impossible to quantify. Other philosophers have suggested that philosophy has a practical aim, independent of truth and knowledge, against which we can measure its progress. These alternative philosophical values and goals might include the following:
None of these proposed values requires any sort of consensus around the truth. As a consequence, there is ample room for progress to be made within philosophy so long as philosophy is moving closer to at least one of these goals.
It is important to note, however, that Chalmers himself does not deny that philosophy has such aims, and hence he does not think the conclusion of the argument from disagreement supports a negative answer to the Main Question. Indeed, Chalmers explicitly states that he is “not simply equating progress with convergence to the truth.” He says he is “a pluralist about progress: there are many values that can be realized through philosophy, and there are many ways of advancing and realizing those values. Attaining the truth is certainly not the only such value.” Nonetheless, he goes on to stress that truth “is certainly one such value” and later even more strongly that “attaining the truth is the primary aim … [of] analytic philosophy” (see Chalmers 2015, 14).
In this respect, I am in agreement with Chalmers. But we still have a residual and important disagreement. Even if we restrict our attention to this “primary aim” of philosophy, I remain an optimist about philosophy’s progress. I believe, and Chalmers does not, that philosophy has made significant and impressive progress towards the truth. In the next section I explain why.
Consider again the Main Question: Is there enough progress in philosophy? This really conflates two separate questions, the first descriptive and the second normative:
Neither of these questions has a straightforward answer, and pessimists often fail to appreciate why. Consider the Descriptive Question first. Suppose we somehow manage to get a grip on what counts as an increment of progress. We still have to ascertain the overall rate of progress in the discipline. That cannot straightforwardly be done by appealing to intuition, because, (i) it is not clear that intuitions in this kind of domain are reliable, and (ii) intuitions in this context vary wildly (as witnessed in the current collection).
Nor is it clear that the rate of progress could be ascertained by a simple act of counting, because that would require us not only to count every single instance of an agreed upon solution to a problem and also every instance of a problem in the discipline that is yet to be solved. We’d have to have a mechanism to ensure no problems were missed. (We could hardly rely on just a sample given our propensity for selection biases.) Moreover, we would not just need to count points of current consensus and disagreement, we would need to compare these to the relevant points of consensus and disagreement in the past. But the nature of philosophy is such that there is a strong bias against publishing arguments or discussions around theses that enjoy widespread support. So, I am uncertain how to answer the Descriptive Question.
I think the prospects are better for answering the Normative Question: How fast should philosophy be progressing. It would be unreasonable to answer “as fast as it possibly can.” Recognition of this fact has seduced many trying to answer the Normative Question – Chalmers and Dietrich included – by benchmarking philosophy’s successes against those in the natural sciences. They interpret the question to be a question about whether philosophy is progressing as fast as the sciences are. My main aim in this section is to argue that this comparative exercise is misguided, and once we recognize the error, we are in a position to see why philosophy is progressing at an impressive rate.
There are many contingent and practical reasons why philosophy should not be expected to progress at the same rate as the natural sciences. First, science has a greater wealth of methodological and financial resources to draw upon to help solve its problems. Government and private research funding across the world favors science over the humanities. Second, scientific problems might, for all we know, be easier to solve than philosophical problems, perhaps because empirical evidence is easier to come by than the kind of a priori evidence required to solve a philosophical problem. Third, there might, for all we know, be more problems to solve in science than there are in philosophy. And that would naturally lead to a wider selection of problems for scientists to choose from to suit their interests and expertise.
But there are also, in principle, reasons why science might be an inappropriate benchmark to focus on when attempting to answer the normative component of the Main Question. One such purported reason, often cited in this kind of context, is that advances in science can be seen as advances in philosophy (see, for example, Kitcher 2011). On this line of thought, philosophy is an ancient discipline that attempts to reliably answer questions about the world and the mind. Philosophy, by its very nature, grapples to find the best methods for answering questions in a wide variety of different domains. Sometimes practitioners of philosophy manage to hit upon a reliable method, at which point philosophy branches off to form another distinct science using those methods in that domain. Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, invented physics and biology. Arguably, ancient philosophers such as Thales and Empedocles invented chemistry. More recently – within the last century or so – we have seen philosophy branch off into the disciplines of psychology, economics, and linguistics. In short, philosophy is the search for reliable methods. And all science is the result of philosophy’s successes in finding those methods. Thus, progress in science can also be viewed as progress in philosophy.
While I have some sympathy with this view, ultimately I cannot accept it. On this conception, philosophy as it is practiced today has no distinctive method; it is instead a discipline in search of a method. But nothing could be further from the truth. Philosophy has numerous well‐established and partially overlapping methods: the method of possible cases, the method of bringing theories into reflective equilibrium, the methods of formal and informal logic, the method of thought experiments, the method of conceptual analysis, the methods of experimental philosophy, and so on. These methods are characteristic of philosophical practice. Not all of them will be used by any given philosopher. And many, if not all of them, will also be used by practitioners in other disciplines. But all philosophers working in the analytic tradition can be expected to use some of the methods in this (expanded) canonical list.
One very broad and overarching method must, I think, be included on this list: the method of disagreement. The method of disagreement is the method of attempting to find counter‐examples or flaws in the work of others. Success in philosophy can take one of two forms: it can involve successfully refuting someone else’s position, or alternatively putting forward a positive view that survives the attempted refutations of others. One might even think of various named methods practiced by philosophers throughout history – the method of possible cases, the method of doubt, the Socratic method – as being variations of the very general method of disagreement.
If I am right, and the method of disagreement is a characteristic method practiced by philosophers, it becomes clear why philosophy is likely to make less progress than disciplines more inclined to accept the results of those working within it. If progress in a discipline is conceived of in terms of the achievement of consensus of expert opinion, then disciplines that employ the method of disagreement are almost guaranteed to progress more slowly than those that don’t.
But do these observations give us an incentive to abandon the method of disagreement? I don’t think so. If our aim is to get at the truth, and attain new knowledge, we should not strive for total disagreement. That’s a way to guarantee that a discipline has no knowledge whatsoever. But nor should we aim for complete consensus. For that ensures that we never learn anything new; we can never move forward because no idea is challenged. So how much consensus should a discipline strive for? There is no correct answer here, but it will depend on the tolerance for error of those working in the field. Scientists have a lower tolerance for false negatives but a higher tolerance for false positives than philosophers. The lower our tolerance is for false positives, the more rigorously we should apply the method of disagreement. That ensures – as far as we can – that we don’t accept false theories of the world or of the mind. But it also ensures that fewer theories will be accepted as true. So, it is inevitable that philosophy will progress more slowly than science. But given that philosophers so self‐consciously apply this filter to their views, it is impressive how much progress philosophy has made.