Richard Kamber
Twenty‐five centuries after the Presocratics sought to understand nature and culture without recourse to tales about the gods, it is time to re‐examine how much progress philosophy1 has made and whether the pace and extent of its progress should worry us. What are the goals towards which philosophy has sought to progress? Philosophy has had various goals at different times and in different hands, but there are five enduring goals that merit special attention. They are: (i) exposing logical fallacies and other deficiencies in arguments; (ii) clarifying concepts, problems, definitions, and theories; (iii) making people better and wiser; (iv) constructing a view of the world that improves our understanding of how things hang together – or, as Wilfrid Sellars put it, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (1963, 1); (v) solving philosophical problems. Socrates pursued the first three goals. Plato and Aristotle pursued all five.
Philosophy has clearly made progress with respect to the first two goals. Advances in logic and semantics over the centuries have given philosophers increasingly powerful tools for exposing deficiencies in arguments. These tools are used as a matter of course in critiquing arguments both inside and outside of philosophy. Philosophers have also become increasingly precise in their analyses of concepts, problems, definitions, and theories. Much of this progress is the result of the ongoing accumulation and refinement of critical distinctions.
Among the most influential distinctions from antiquity to the present are: Plato’s contrast between knowledge and true belief; Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties; Hume’s observation that an “ought” statement cannot be deduced from “is” statements alone; Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments; Frege’s distinction between sense and reference; Husserl’s differentiation of noesis (acting) and noema (object) as correlates within intentional acts of consciousness; Wittgenstein’s distinction between meaning as use and meaning as representation; and Kripke’s contrast of rigid with descriptive designators. Although there is still disagreement over how to interpret these distinctions, where they admit exceptions, and whether they are ultimately tenable, philosophers concur in acknowledging their importance to an understanding of the fine points at issue in debates over concepts, problems, definitions, and theories.
When we turn to the goal of making people better and wiser the picture is muddier and rather discouraging. “Wiser” has a broad range of meanings: more learned, more enlightened, more insightful, more astute, more prudent, shrewder, and so on. “Better” is even broader, but I think we can restrict its sense here to morally better. So let me simplify this goal a little by redefining it as making people better at judging and doing what is morally good. This still leaves open two big questions. First, against what norms of moral goodness is progress of this kind to be measured? Even if we rule out norms that promote or tolerate wanton disregard for the lives, dignity, and wellbeing of persons, this still leaves plenty of room for disagreement. Second, are we speaking here only of active philosophizing, or are we also counting the passive reception of philosophical ideas? People raised in Buddhist or Confucian traditions are likely to be influenced by the philosophical ideas that the Buddha and Confucius developed, even if they don’t actively philosophize. Something similar is true of people raised in societies where the prescriptions of Locke and Adam Smith or Marx and Engels have been woven into the fabric of civic culture. The most I can do in this brief chapter is to offer some fragments of information germane to the question of whether active philosophizing makes people better at judging and doing good.
The martyrdom of Socrates has enchanted philosophers for over two thousand years, but very few have followed his example. One who did was the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno. After a trial that dragged on for seven years, he was convicted of theological, scientific, and philosophical “errors.” He refused to recant and was burned at the stake in Rome. On the other side of the balance sheet are philosophers who chose prudence over the risk of martyrdom. Aristotle fled Athens in 323 BC rather than face charges of impiety and growing resentment against his former student Alexander the Great. He is alleged to have said that he would not let Athens sin against philosophy twice. Descartes, though French and Catholic, spent most of his adult life in the tolerant and predominantly Protestant Dutch Republic. He also cancelled the publication of his major scientific treatise The World (Le Monde) in 1633 after learning that Galileo had been condemned in Rome as “vehemently suspected of heresy.”
It might be argued that this tepid record has more to do with opportunity than character. Since philosophers lead contemplative lives, they have fewer occasions than people engaged in the rough and tumble of worldly affairs to leave a mark on history with acts of heroism or saintliness. But Nazi Germany was a notable exception. In the early years of the Third Reich, Germany’s intellectual elites (physicians, lawyers, clergy, teachers, etc.) were faced with the challenge of setting an example for the German people by publicly condemning the Nazi worldview. Sadly, Germany’s philosophers behaved pretty much like other elites. For some, there was little choice. Jews, spouses of Jews, and declared leftists had to flee or try to live in seclusion if they wanted to survive. As for the rest, only a handful of German philosophers who had some freedom of choice took even modest steps to oppose Nazism. Heidegger was the most distinguished philosopher to actively back the Nazis, but his subservience to the regime was typical.
The conduct of philosophers in fascist Italy was not much better. Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), one of Italy’s two most distinguished philosophers, dubbed himself “the philosopher of fascism” and served as the ghostwriter for Mussolini’s A Doctrine of Fascism (1932), thereby helping to make fascism more palatable to thinking people. So loyal was Gentile to the fascist cause that he left Rome after Mussolini was deposed in 1943 and joined him in the puppet state (the Salò Republic) that the Nazis imposed on the northern half of Italy. Gentile was assassinated in 1944, the year before partisans shot Mussolini and his mistress and strung up their corpses in Milan. Arguably, the most distinguished philosopher in Italy was the idealist Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). After a brief flirtation with fascism, Croce became a staunch opponent. His works and words were banned by the regime. The Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was arrested in 1926 along with other Marxists. He spent the remainder of his life in prison or under police guard in hospitals. In 1932, university professors in Italy were ordered to swear an oath of allegiance to fascism (as well as to the king). Only fourteen refused. In 1938, Italian intellectuals were ordered to complete a government questionnaire on their racial backgrounds. Croce was the only non‐Jewish intellectual who refused.
What does the conduct of German and Italian philosophers during this time of trial tell us about the power of ethical inquiry to make us better and wiser? Hans Sluga offers an intriguing answer:
The failure was not merely one of political judgment, nor was it simply a moral failure. It was above all a philosophical failure. The philosophers who became so involved never asked (at least not seriously enough) how they should be acting at this “decisive moment.” … They wanted to be spiritual leaders and never wondered whether this was the right way.
(Sluga 1993, 255)
Perhaps Sluga is justified in claiming that the failure was philosophical as well as moral and political, but he neglects to ask whether these philosophers failed philosophy or philosophy failed them. The German rocket scientists who built the V1s and V2s that rained destruction on British civilians may have failed science by using their discipline to serve an evil cause, but their science (unfortunately) did not fail them. The philosophers who supported Hitler and Mussolini might be more aptly described as professionals let down by a profession whose practice was supposed to make them better and wiser moral agents, but did nothing of the kind.
Although the history of philosophy offers little encouragement to those who assume that persistent philosophizing makes people better and wiser, a disciple of Socrates might object that what really counts is the kind of philosophy one practices. When Socrates extolled the examined life, he meant that we should examine our beliefs about the virtues and how they can be acquired. He did not claim that a life spent contemplating being (Heidegger’s preoccupation) or working in some other branch of philosophy remote from ethics would make us more virtuous. Does ethical rumination improve conduct, even if practicing other forms of philosophy does not? If so, then, other things being equal, one would expect the personal conduct of ethicists to be better on average than the personal conduct of philosophers outside ethics.
The experimental philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has addressed this issue in a series of clever studies. In one pair of studies, “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?”, he examines the online records of philosophy books missing from 32 academic library systems and reports the following results:
Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non‐ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre‐1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing.
(Schwitzgebel 2009, 711)
Studies that Schwitgebel conducted with Joshua Rust and other colleagues found that ethicists were no more likely than non‐ethicists to pay their registration fees or behave courteously at professional meetings (Schwitzgebel et al. 2012), vote in public elections (Schwitgebel and Rust 2010), stay in touch with their mothers, respond to student emails, donate blood, register to donate organs in the event of death, refrain from eating the meat of mammals, or be strictly honest in answering survey questions (Schwitzgebel and Rust in draft). One study concludes: “It remains to be shown that even a lifetime’s worth of philosophical moral reflection has any influence upon one’s real‐world moral behavior” (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2011). Surely, lack of progress in this arena matters.
The fourth goal is constructing a view of the world that improves our understanding of how things hang together. In pursuit of this goal, philosophers have created a remarkable set of worldviews. The striking worldviews of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas (and other great philosophers of the Middle Ages), Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Sartre are monuments to intellectual daring and ingenuity. The worldviews forged by philosophers in the empirical tradition are less striking as individual visions, but they are admirable efforts to clarify how the beliefs we form about ourselves and the world on the basis of lived‐experience can be reconciled with the discoveries and prevailing theories of the sciences. Authors of empirical worldviews are split between those who treat the work of philosophy as continuous with science and those who regard it as autonomous. Comte, Mill, James, Dewey, Quine, and contemporary advocates for the naturalization of philosophy belong to the former camp. The Logical Positivists, Michael Dummett, and Timothy Williamson belong to the latter camp.
Has there been progress in the creation of philosophical worldviews? If originality is the measure, it is doubtful that the worldviews of Plato and Aristotle have ever been surpassed. If accessibility to non‐philosophers is the measure, then philosophy may well have lost ground over the course of its history. If keeping up with the advances of science is the measure, the prize will have to go to recent efforts, but this is a kind of piggyback progress. If educating the human race on how things hang together is the measure, then the task is Sisyphean, since each generation has to be taught anew. This is true of science education as well, but science education can offer each succeeding generation better science. The sciences advance by gathering new data, discarding theories that prove inadequate, reaching provisional agreement on the solution to scientific problems, and achieving greater consilience with one another. Since philosophers today (other than experimental philosophers) gather no data, adhere to no regular procedures for discarding theories (philosophical theories fall from favor by going out of fashion), and have not reached agreement – provisional or otherwise – on the solution to central philosophical problems, they do not enjoy the benefits of consilience.
Does lack of progress in the creation of worldviews matter? If one thinks of philosophy as a humanistic enterprise akin to the arts and literature, then its lack of progress may not matter. Perhaps the power of philosophy is like the power of poetry. I don’t share John Milton’s theology, but I am happy to share the world he envisioned. In Milton’s world the ways of God and the woes of man are united in poetic intelligibility. Sometimes I like to slip into Jane Austen’s class‐bound realm of landed gentry where courtship is magnified to reveal a lavish spectrum of human foibles and saving graces. At other times I prefer the creepy thrill of Franz Kafka’s dark warrens where earnest protagonists strive vainly to get on with their lives in the face of nightmarish obstacles and cosmic silence. I also take pleasure in roaming the cobblestone streets of James Joyce’s turn‐of‐the‐twentieth‐century Dublin. Here microcosm becomes macrocosm and the mundane is transfigured into the mythic. Each of these worlds is true in its own way and remarkable in its own right. It would be obtuse to ask which represents the way things really are or captures the consensus of poets. Why not say the same of the worlds that philosophers create?
A good reason for not saying this is that it distorts the history of philosophy. Plato’s dazzling dialogues may leave us wondering whether he was more interested in trying out ideas and arguments than reaching settled answers, but the same cannot be said of his most able successors. Philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Mill did not see themselves as poets of the intellect, each spinning his own fine story. They wanted to answer philosophical questions and to do so in ways that would be persuasive to anyone who was willing and able to follow their arguments. This brings us to the fifth goal: solving philosophical problems.
More than any other goal, seeking to solve philosophical problems is what sets philosophy apart from other disciplines. Without earnest debates over what we can know, what there is, what we ought morally to do, what, if anything, we may hope for theologically, the nature of art and beauty, the existence of free will and responsibility, and so on, philosophy would be unrecognizable. Yet here, at the heart of philosophy, philosophers have failed to reach even provisional agreement.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, most philosophers nurtured hopes that revolution or reform could eventually lead to agreement on the solution or dissolution of many of philosophy’s perennial problems. Revolutionaries like Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists thought they could effect agreement by delineating the limits of reason and language. Reformers like G.E. Moore, a champion of common sense, and the pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller promised growing consensus through gradual improvements in the standards and practice of philosophy. Would‐be revolutionaries and reformers can still be found today. George Bealer argues that rational intuitions may be the revolutionary key to solving a wide range of philosophical problems – even if only a species superior to Homo sapiens could avail itself of that key. Dummett and Williamson counsel patience in philosophy’s slow but steady progress and urge modest reforms. Williamson’s recipe is: “collective hard work and self‐discipline” (Williamson 2007, 8).
Yet today’s revolutionaries and reformers inspire less confidence than their predecessors. Most twenty‐first century philosophers seem resigned to the likelihood that philosophy’s future as a problem‐solving discipline will be as contentious as its past, although few commit to well‐developed views on why philosophers can’t agree or what this ancient impasse signifies for the practice of philosophy. Some console themselves with upbeat reflections like Stanley Cavell’s observation that even if philosophical problems can’t be solved “there are better and worse ways of thinking about them” (Cavell 1992, 9) or Hector Neri‐Castañeda’s cheerful comparison of philosophers to classical musicians where: “we are all sym‐philosophers: playing our varied instruments in the production of the dia‐philosophical symphony” (Neri‐Castañeda 1989, 45). Many philosophers, although less optimistic, are reluctant to confront their own doubts about philosophy’s future as a problem‐solving discipline and try to get to the bottom of what it is about philosophy – its problems, methods, or practitioners – that bars the way to agreement. Ask a philosopher today why philosophers can’t agree and you are likely to get an evasive reply such as: “that’s just the way philosophy is,” or “that’s what makes philosophy so rich and exciting,” or “some progress is being made among likeminded philosophers on technical aspects of this issue or that.”
The intractability of philosophical disagreement is the bad conscience of philosophy, and most philosophers today prefer to ignore it. Among the few who have confronted the issue and tried to explain it, there is – not surprisingly – disagreement about why philosophers can’t agree. Some, like Richard Rorty, appeal to historicism or relativism, others, like Nicholas Rescher, to pluralism, and still others, like Colin McGinn, to skepticism about the capacity of the human mind to deal successfully with philosophical problems.
I believe that philosophy’s lack of progress in reaching agreement on solutions to philosophical problems – including the problem of why philosophers can’t agree – matters. Although I am confident that philosophy’s rich history and the irresistible pull of its subject matter on some minds will keep it from going the way of phrenology, I fear that it is going to be increasingly marginalized. What’s to be done? I recommend that philosophy take steps toward a reunification with science through the naturalization of philosophical methodology. I propose that philosophers use data‐based methods to help adjudicate the conflicting claims of philosophical theories – whenever possible.
Some philosophers argue this is never possible. Dummett, for example, says philosophy is “a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience: an armchair subject, requiring only thought” (Dummett 2010, 4). Richard Fumerton declares: “if you can’t answer a question from the armchair it isn’t philosophical” (Fumerton 2007). More generally, philosophers are wedded to a discipline‐specific epistemic mission that prescribes that the kinds of knowledge for which philosophers should search – the kinds of knowledge that could count as solutions to philosophical problems – differ in one feature or another from the data‐based knowledge sought by the empirical sciences. Prominent among these features are: a priori, rather than a posteriori; necessary, rather than contingent; essential, rather than accidental; categorical, rather than hypothetical; permanent, rather than provisional or probable; confirmed or disconfirmed by intuitions, rather than by empirical data.
The general effect of seeking knowledge with one or more of these features is to sustain a methodological divide between philosophy and the sciences, but the last feature presents an opportunity for accommodation. If intuitions can count as evidence for or against philosophical claims, as many philosophers suggest, then one can gather data on the frequency of an intuition and whether the frequency varies with variables such as the cultural background of subjects, extraneous stimuli, or emotions aroused by slight changes in the case presented. Experimental philosophy, a movement whose birth coincides auspiciously with the beginning of the twenty‐first century, has seized this opportunity and collected data on intuitions (as well as on behavioral phenomena such as stealing books) in order to explore their significance for issues in branches of philosophy as diverse as epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, semantics, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. Although the unofficial symbol for experimental philosophy (x‐phi) is an armchair in flames, experimental philosophers generally see their methodology as a supplement to rather than a replacement for the traditional work of philosophers.
Nevertheless, experimental philosophy is revolutionary. If data on people’s intuitions can help to confirm or disconfirm philosophical claims, then there is hope that philosophers can forge better procedures for discarding theories than waiting to see what goes out of fashion, begin to converge on provisional solutions to some problems, and eventually enjoy the benefits of consilience. Rather than worrying about disciplinary autonomy, they could advance their own research by seeking opportunities to work in collaboration with colleagues in the sciences – especially the cognitive sciences. There is, however, a price to be paid for progress of this kind. Data‐based resolutions live under the threat of being overturned by new data. They are a posteriori, probable, and provisional rather than a priori, certain, and permanent. Even though philosophers can’t agree on solutions to philosophical problems, they can shield their own preferences from disconfirmation by refusing to concede that data on intuitions could count as evidence against them.
Experimental philosophy has drawn more jeers than cheers from traditional philosophers. Although some of its detractors are indiscriminate in their criticism, others voice well‐focused challenges. Williamson (2007), Herbert Cappelen (2012), and Max Deutsch (2015), for example, question the evidentiary role of intuitions in analytic philosophy. All three posit a divide between first‐order philosophy, where intuitions play little or no evidentiary role in practice, and metaphilosophy, where they are often (mistakenly) assumed to play a key role in principle. Williamson and Cappelen charge that this disparity is due in part to lack of rigor in philosophical talk about intuitions. They note that some philosophers insist that intuitions have distinguishing characteristics like being spontaneous, non‐perceptual, non‐inferential, or seeming necessarily true, while others equate them with judgments, beliefs, or dispositions to believe.
Williamson warns against psychologizing intuitive judgments. He argues that intuitions in philosophy, such as those elicited by philosophical thought experiments, should be appraised as judgments about facts rather than facts about judgments. He writes that:
the method of conducting opinion polls among non‐philosophers is not very much more likely to be the best way of answering philosophical questions than the method of conducting opinion polls among non‐physicists is to be the best way of answering physical questions.
(Williamson 2007, 7)
I am not persuaded. Williamson conflates popularity polls with polls as data‐gathering instruments and overlooks the capacity of such instruments to gather information that bears on the reliability of evidence. If a witness testifies that, in fact, the defendant threatened the plaintiff, she might be asked several questions: (i) How did she know – did she overhear a threat, see a threatening gesture, or read an ominous note? (ii) Who can corroborate her testimony? (iii) Is she qualified to identify the defendant’s voice, face, or handwriting? These questions probe facts about her testimony that could be relevant to its reliability. Likewise, we may want to probe facts about intuitions elicited by a philosophical thought‐experiment that could be relevant to their reliability – facts such as variations in subjects’ expertise, cultural background, or emotional reactions.
Deutsch and Cappelen contend that philosophers rely on arguments rather than intuitions. As Deutsch puts it: “philosophers argue for their judgments about cases, and the cogency of these arguments is independent of who intuits them” (Deutsch 2015, 155). In defense of this claim, he offers close examinations of the original texts of well‐known thought‐experiments. These include Gettier’s two counterexamples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief (Gettier 1963), Kripke’s “Kurt Gödel” counterexample to descriptivist theories of reference for proper names (Kripke 1980, 83–92), and Frankfurt’s counterfactual intervener counterexample to the principle of alternative possibilities (Frankfurt 1969). What Deutsch fails to note is that the arguments in the original texts are logically incomplete and consist almost entirely of premises stipulated within the thought‐experiments. These arguments are enthymemes, which, in order to be valid and cogent, require an additional premise. In the Gettier cases the missing premise could be a principle of the form: “a justified true belief x is knowledge only if it satisfies condition c,” but Gettier does not supply that premise. Neither do Kripke or Frankfurt. I suspect these cases continue to fascinate precisely because they elicit striking intuitions without committing to general premises that, once articulated, would have to run the gauntlet of philosophical criticism.
Can an intuition that p (where p is a proposition) count as evidence that p is true? If so, then data about the frequency of that intuition and how it varies could bear on the truth of p. I think the correct answer is: sometimes. Consider the cases discussed above. Each of Gettier’s cases is intended to elicit the intuition that a particular instance of belief, though justified and true, is not knowledge. Deutsch dismisses the relevance of cross‐cultural studies that show that Asian subjects are more likely than Western subjects to regard justified true belief as knowledge. Under what conditions would Deutsch be right? He would be right, I think, if knowledge were a natural kind. The truth of the intuition that diamonds are carbon does not vary from culture to culture, even if the frequency of that intuition does. But if knowledge is, at least in part, a cultural kind, then variation from culture to culture may indeed be relevant to what knowledge is.
Kripke presents the Gödel Case to illustrate what he believes to be a fact (not a necessary truth) about the use of personal names by ordinary people. He concedes that one could commit in the privacy of one’s room to use a personal name in the descriptivist way but adds: “In general our reference depends not just on what we think ourselves, but on other people in the community, the history of how the name reached one, and things like that” (Kripke 1980, 95). Note that the semantic fact Kripke is trying to establish is akin to the facts sought by lexicographers, who gather data on how competent speakers in a language community use words to talk about the world with other members of that community. We would laugh at a dictionary entry that said this word means X, though competent speakers don’t use it that way. I think Deutsch is wrong when he says that appealing to “the intuitions of competent speakers about the reference of proper names” (Deutsch 2015, 111) cannot be relevant to an assessment of Kripke’s view.
The intuitions at issue in Frankfurt’s case are, as Frankfurt acknowledges, moral intuitions. Specifically, they are judgments of moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness. Can an intuition “that p” be evidence that p is true, where p is a proposition that a person is morally responsible and blameworthy for an action? If being morally responsible and blameworthy are inseparable from being judged or held responsible and blameworthy, if they are grounded, as Hume might say, in affections of disapprobation within human breasts, then the answer is affirmative.
I find in considerations like these, and in their investigation by experimental philosophy, the best hope for progress in philosophy as a problem‐solving discipline.