Christopher Norris
“Well, of course it depends on what you mean by ‘progress’.” Or again: “Well, if that’s all you mean by ‘progress’ then it’s hardly worth debating.” Definitional issues are apt to get on top of us here so that nothing substantive comes out of the discussion. Arguably that is pretty much what has happened across large swathes of modern philosophy, most of all in the mainstream analytic tradition. Yet, of course, to take such a position from the start would be to pre‐judge the outcome and render the exercise pointless. So I shall stick with my weasel‐word “arguably,” not bother too much about definitions beyond a very basic opening shot, and then go on to treat the special case of analytic philosophy in a broader – and on the whole more optimism‐inducing – context. No doubt there has to be plenty of room left for the possibility of occasional, more‐or‐less protracted regressive episodes when the broadly forward‐moving current hits an obstacle and goes into contra‐flow or breaks up into confused swirls and eddies. Let’s weasel it again: “arguably” this has been the case with large parts of the analytic tradition during the four (maybe five) decades since its academic heyday stretching roughly from Bertrand Russell to P.F. Strawson (or perhaps Michael Dummett). All the same, such melancholy thoughts do nothing to discredit the general case, and indeed do a great deal to prop it up since, after all, we should have no means of recognizing or diagnosing regress – no criteria by which to adjudicate the claim – if we didn’t have an adequate working notion of just what constitutes progress.
Time was, and not so long ago, when charges of Whiggishness were thick in the air at any use (or even mention) of the p‐word, mostly lobbed around by po‐faced disciples of Wittgenstein much struck by his thoughts about Frazer’s The Golden Bough and apt to say things like “‘Progress’ in whose language‐game, cultural life‐form, customary way of carrying on?” and so on (Winch 1958; Wittgenstein 1987). This sort of rejoinder is less often met with nowadays, perhaps because it has got a bad name (and deservedly so) through association with the wilder extremes of postmodernist and cultural‐relativist thought. However, it is still knocking around in less overtly self‐disabling forms, such as the idea – also with its proximate source in Wittgenstein – that critique (in whatever precise sense of the term) is always a misconceived, presumptuous, epistemically arrogant activity since conducted per definiens from a standpoint outside the belief‐set in question and hence incapable of achieving a genuine, inward, or empathetic grasp (Winch 1958). Then there would be simply no room for any workable conception of intellectual advancement. That thinkers who take this line in the name of “progressive” cultural, ethical, and political values might be blithely cutting off the branch on which they have no choice but to sit – in other words, that of enlightened or rational critique aimed against the effects of unthinking cultural prejudice – seems never to cross their minds (Norris 1993, 1997).
The question whether or not philosophy makes progress falls somewhere within a large, but not inherently ill‐defined, region on the scale that runs from the physical sciences at one end to the fine arts at the other. Denying it in the case of physics is an intellectual party trick much beloved of postmodernists, but best seen off by a robust appeal to the evidence in sundry well‐documented fields plus a quick course in philosophy of science and a salutary glance at the errors and absurdities endorsed by some of the deniers (Sokal and Bricmont 1998; Norris 2000a). Affirming it in the case of music, literature, and the visual arts cannot be counted simply absurd or perverse – indeed it is an argument often advanced with great conviction – but it does go flat against some ruling cultural pieties of our time. Where philosophy is concerned one can affirm or deny that progress has occurred and gain credence either way. There are well‐regarded arguments both for representing one’s discipline as constructive and problem‐solving in the manner of the physical sciences and – conversely – for representing it as a timeless repository of ideas and arguments where talk of “progress” is off‐the‐point since the great dead philosophers are our peers and constant collocutors.
Combining these conceptions might appear difficult, quixotic, or downright impossible, but it is an attractive notion and one pursued valiantly by those, like Jonathan Bennett, who think we should adopt a “collegial” approach based on an attitude of qualified respect for the great dead philosophers (Bennett 2003). By this, Bennett means respect for the fact that they were perceptive, intelligent, and resourceful thinkers whom we should always read with an eye to those enduring qualities, but “qualified” in so far as their merits can now be seen, from our own more conceptually (and above all logically) refined vantage point, to have gone along with some large and in certain cases philosophically disastrous errors. “Collegiality” is his term for the happy convergence of those two outlooks on the issue of progress that tend to emerge when philosophers turn their attention – most often, so the analytic line goes, as a spare‐time or second‐best activity – to the history of ideas as it bears (or fails to bear) on their own specialist interests.
Bennett’s aim is to avoid both what E.P. Thompson, in his history of the English working classes, called the “enormous condescension of posterity” – in this context, the routine assumption that things have moved on and shown up the errors of the old philosophers once and for all – and its equally damaging converse of relativizing standards of truth, validity, knowledge, or probative warrant to the dominant beliefs or mindset of this or that period (Thompson 1993, 12). These extremes are represented, handily enough, by the great two rival tutelary figures of the analytic tradition. On the one hand is the overly presentist (or progressivist) bias of a thinker like Bertrand Russell who, in his History of Western Philosophy, picked and chose what suited his modernizing purposes with a well‐nigh perfect indifference to matters of changing historical context (Russell 1947). On the other is (late) Wittgenstein’s injunction that we renounce all forms of the progress‐touting (aka “critical,” “enlightened,” “modernist,” or “liberal”) persuasion. According to this option, we cannot see what’s wrong with belief systems other than our own without getting on terms with them to the extent of sympathetically or inwardly sharing their viewpoint (Wittgenstein 1958). If this were the case, criticism would always be stymied at source either through failing to meet that precondition (which it would just by virtue of its critical nature) or through meeting it (at which point it would cease to exert any critical force or leverage). So the Wittgenstein option is, in effect, a resounding vote of no confidence in critical reason and the hopes vested in it by thinkers of diverse kinds, from epistemologists and philosophers of science to ethicists, sociologists, and political theorists seeking to influence our thoughts and actions for the better
Yet it is not at all clear that the Russell option comes off with flying colors in this comparison. It involves a kind and degree of Whiggishness – very much evident in the Russell family history – that would bring the philosopher out on a lofty but isolated peak lacking any meaningful connection with the history of thought that had led up from base camp. Bennett’s “collegiality” seems to offer a good solution with its commitment to a qualified principle of charity extended so far as rationally possible by our best contemporary lights. This would optimize the truth‐content of whatever was still usable in the work of great dead philosophers: it would no doubt reject some parts as just not up to scratch, but it would grant them a decent hearing in the forum of present‐day debate. There would be room to say things like, “They were on the right track but unfortunately lost their way at a certain point because they didn’t have the undoubted advantages of (for instance) Frege’s advances in logic or Kripke’s clarification of issues around reference, modality, and metaphysics.” The qualification would have its sting drawn – or sound less like praising with faint damns – because it went along with a collegial ethos of letting them have their say and making it come out as close as possible to a view one could defend at an APA conference and carry the audience, or at least get away with.
However, anyone who has read Bennett’s often wonderfully acute and informative commentaries on Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume will know that it doesn’t quite work out like that despite his best intentions and his frequent success in updating their period‐specific idioms without distorting their ideas (Bennett 2003). The locus classicus here is his outburst of exasperated disbelief when encountering Spinoza’s quasi‐mystical “third kind of knowledge” after offering a detailed, highly demanding, but mostly sympathetic account of the first two kinds with every sign of acknowledging Spinoza as a thinker from whom we have a great deal to learn (Bennett 1984; also Norris 1991). This is just the most extreme and striking example of the way that Bennett’s collegial stance is apt to lean over, when push comes to shove, in a Russellian direction rather than toward a position that would make some more than notional room for differences of aim, method, priority, idiom, context, or scope. Bennett’s readiness to learn from the six philosophers who figure most prominently in his work turns out to have sharp limits when it comes to squaring their doctrines with current (roughly mainstream‐analytic) thinking.
My point is not that allowances for cultural‐historical difference should be pressed all the way to a Wittgensteinian conclusion that may prevent us from assessing philosophical arguments by the most advanced, refined, and well‐tried procedures. Rather it is that if we hope to get some purchase on the idea of progress then we shall need to find a different way to integrate the two main aspects of Bennett’s collegial approach, that is, the attitude of respect (entailing readiness to learn) and the recognition that, in some cases, a change of philosophical tack may constitute a genuine advance and not just a rationally under‐motivated paradigm‐shift. Otherwise we shall be forever stuck in that most depressingly typical of present‐day intellectual cul‐de‐sacs: the liberal‐pluralist‐relativist failure to specify any adequate set of criteria by which our own principles and values might at least on occasion claim better standing than various alternatives, rivals, or precursors.
The rest of this chapter therefore tries to say how collegiality might be redefined so as to provide some candidate range of criteria for just that evaluative role. It takes aim not only at the Wittgenstein‐influenced idea of language games and cultural life‐forms as the furthest we can get toward specifying any such criteria – a view given its canonical (and I’d say self‐stultifying) statement by Winch – but also (implicitly) at Kuhnian, Quinean, Foucauldian, post‐structuralist, and sundry other variants on the idea (Norris 1993, 1997). That idea is basically the scheme‐relativist persuasion that truth comes down to some existing state of knowledge, knowledge in turn to what counts as present‐best belief, and belief to what makes good sense according to certain in‐place (linguistically or culturally accredited) norms. My main concern is how the issue about truth, knowledge, and belief connects with the issue about progress, itself a term that takes on different senses in different contexts depending on the relationship conceived to exist between those three doxastic/epistemic categories. It is best to start out with a robust conception since it can always be qualified, modified, refined, extended, or contracted under pressure from objections or counterexamples.
“Progress,” then, we can reasonably define for present purposes as “advancement in our capacities of knowledge, understanding, or intellectual grasp as evidenced by improved problem‐solving power or the clarification, and in some cases the effective dissolution, of previously unresolved issues.” To which should be added: “a word most properly used in cases where adequate reasons can be offered for counting such usage uncontroversial according to current‐best standards of probative warrant in the field or discipline concerned.” Every load‐bearing term here will be seized upon by skeptics keen to show how it begs the same question as the word “progress” itself : “progress” according to whom, in what evaluative context, and by what set of standards (scientific? ethical? political? “purely” philosophical?). Still, I think we can make a decent shot at answering the titular question by taking that formula as fairly uncontroversial unless from the standpoint of postmodernists or cultural relativists whose hackles will have been raised at the word’s first mention and won’t go down until it is ruled an unsalvageable relic of bad old cultural‐imperialist times. To these latter, so long as they stick to their skeptical guns, there is ultimately no effective rejoinder except to say – as has been said by realists to anti‐realists, truth‐defenders to truth‐deniers, and rationalists to irrationalists down through the ages – that the burden of proof rests squarely on them since theirs is a case that flies in the face of all our evidence to hand and to date.
Of course they will come back with the well‐worn skeptical response which holds that terms like “realism,” “truth,” “reason,” “evidence,” and “progress” itself are all of them meaningful only in the context of this or that belief‐system or language‐game. Or again – the stock Wittgensteinian twist – they will say “by all means carry on using that realist and progressivist sort of language since, after all, it has its role in your life‐form, and philosophy should always leave everything as it is with our language and practices instead of seeking to impose some deluded revisionist scheme of its own.” However, this generosity comes with the large disadvantage, for realists, of ensuring that any more specific claims they make with regard to such putative realia as (say) objects, properties, causal powers, and dispositions will find themselves routinely re‐construed as dealing in nominal rather than real definitions, or (what then amounts to the same thing) as treating of nominal rather than real essences. That is, it all comes down to how we customarily talk in our various communities of shared understanding, whether culture‐wide or specialist, where “agreement in judgment” is as far as one can get toward knowledge or truth (Wittgenstein 1958). In which case the question as to who gets things right as between (for instance) realism and anti‐realism about truth, or belief and disbelief in progress, is at bottom a question of who is talking to whom and on what mutually acceptable terms of debate.
That the two issues – about truth and progress – are inseparably linked should be evident not only as a matter of philosophical reflection but also, more obliquely, from the way that discussions around them have shaped up over the past half‐century or so. Anti‐realism about truth covers a whole range of positions from out‐and‐out skepticism, conventionalism, cultural relativism, constructivism, fictionalism, or Rorty‐style neo‐pragmatism, via sundry attempted middle‐ground “solutions” (such as framework‐realism, quasi‐realism, or late‐Putnam‐type pragmatist naturalism), to fully fledged objectivist realism with its nonetheless salient differences of outlook concerning (for example) metaphysical issues and the extent to which epistemological questions can or should figure in this context of debate. (See especially, as a very small sample, Dummett 1978; Leplin (ed.) 1984; Putnam 1987, 1990; Tennant 1987; van Fraassen 1980; Rorty 1991; Wright 1992; Misak 1995; Alston 1996; Norris 2002a and 2002b.) The latter sorts of question are especially tricky since realism about truth – and indeed about progress – depends at a basic level on making the case that truth is (in the current jargon) recognition‐transcendent or epistemically unconstrained. This means that – according to the strict (objectivist) realist – anyone who lets issues about the scope and limits of human knowledge obtrude upon issues of truth objectively (knowledge‐independently) conceived is confusing matters by putting the epistemological cart before the ontological horse (Devitt 1991). The anti‐realist tends to confirm that diagnosis, and willingly so, by asserting that it is plain nonsense – humanly unintelligible – to claim that there are truths not only beyond the compass of our present‐best knowledge but beyond the furthest reach of human epistemic grasp. How could anyone, they ask, ever be in a position to talk about truths whose assertibility‐conditions – whose evidential status, probative warrant, or pedigree as a matter of reliably ascertained knowledge – are ex hypothesi unknown and unknowable (Dummett 1991)?
On the contrary, the truth‐realist responds: there exists a non‐denumerable range of objective truths across a non‐denumerable range of subject areas that are unknown to us and may forever so remain. Where the anti‐realists go wrong, on this view, is by reducing truth to knowledge and knowledge, in turn, to a matter of present‐best cognitive or epistemic warrant concerning just those sorts of statements that offer themselves for knowledge‐evaluative purposes within those same limits. Thus they skew the issue to make it appear strictly unintelligible that we might have knowledge concerning the existence of truths beyond our utmost knowledge. But here the anti‐realist is plainly in a muddle because, so far from being contradictory, the statement, “I know that there are unknown (or recognition‐transcendent) truths,” goes along with, and indeed follows from, the statement, “we can reasonably claim to know that there are, now as in the past, many things that exceed the compass of human knowledge and may continue so to do.”
These are the terms – jointly metaphysical and logico‐semantic – in which the issue has been framed since Michael Dummett’s (in its way) decisive intervention during the late 1970s. Dummett slanted the issue heavily in an anti‐realist direction despite often claiming to conduct nothing more partisan or prejudicial than an ongoing research program designed to test realism and anti‐realism about truth across a range of disciplines and subject‐areas (Dummett 1978, 1991). However, those terms are well within reach of the way the debate has gone in epistemology and philosophy of science, or regions where the issue of progress – real and objective or merely a product of cultural‐linguistic‐ideological definition? – is raised with maximum clarity and force. On the one side anti‐realists and anti‐progressivists make use of the “skeptical meta‐induction” which asks, basically, that since we now know that many past theories once taken as unshakeably true have later been proven false (or at best only approximately true), then what rational grounds can we have – aside from hubris or failure of inductive reasoning – for not grasping that our own best theories are destined for the same fate (Laudan 1977)? On the other side, realists bounce back with the obvious tu quoque: how can you (the anti‐realist) talk about “knowing” or “grasping” these truths about the untruth or partial falsity of past (presumptively failed) candidates for truth if not by claiming to know – or have good warrant for asserting the truth of – alternative (mostly later) hypotheses that can safely be taken to have superseded them (Leplin 1984)?
Then it is no great distance to the realist argument from “cosmic coincidence,” that is, the case that anti‐realism (and anti‐progressivism) cannot produce any explanation for the striking practical success of modern science‐led technological innovation except by tacitly invoking an extent of serendipity – of happy chance concurrence between theory and practice – that exceeds all rational (non‐miraculous) accounting (Psillos 1999). So the argument for progress in science, as likewise for progressivism as a viable outlook in epistemology and philosophy of science, can fairly be taken to stand or fall on the merits of realism – objectivist or alethic realism – as compared with the manifold varieties of more or less qualified anti‐realism currently on offer. But does the same apply to philosophy in general and the question whether its history to date has anything to show that might arguably count as progress from any external viewpoint? After all, if the terms “realism” and “progress” are to bear much weight they must denote the kind of retrospectively apparent and objectively determinable theory‐change that would find its scientific equivalent in such episodes as – to quote the well‐known words of W.V. Quine – “the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle” (Quine 1961, 43).
Yet this passage is no sooner cited than it raises doubts for the reader aware of its provenance in Quine’s landmark essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and of that essay’s role in opening the door, or at any rate smoothing the way, to anti‐realism in its current guises. What Quine achieved was not so much a break with empiricism as a final push in the radical‐empiricist direction that would go beyond Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and such latter‐day heirs as Carnap and Tarski. Thus the two “dogmas” were precisely those – that of individual statements matching up with individual facts or states of affairs, and that of the dualism between logic (Humean “ideas of reason”) and sensory experience (Humean “matters of fact”) – which Quine saw as urgently in need of demolition, since they blocked the path to an empiricism shorn of rationalist accretions. Current anti‐realism had a major source in just this radical‐empiricist outlook, most of all when combined with Quine’s equally radical brand of holism (as in his metaphors of the total “web” or “fabric” of beliefs‐held‐true at any given time) and a naturalized (vaguely physics‐led) pragmatism pretty much devoid of normative values or resources (Quine 1961, 1969). The effect was to create the enabling conditions for another of those neat flip‐over tricks, such as Berkeley performed upon Locke, where what looks like a sturdily commonsense‐realist sort of approach – one with plenty of time for science and little or none for school metaphysics – turns out, by the slightest of tweaks, to endorse the most extreme and, on the face of it, absurd though “logically” flawless idealism. This is why the logical empiricists of the 1930s and 1940s embraced something very like a Berkeleian anti‐realist position, albeit – understandably – with certain qualms about the company they were keeping (Misak 1995).
Quine’s ultra‐quick (though question‐begging) way with the two dogmas creates even more problems for realism, and also for the belief in scientific or philosophical progress, since it relativizes truth to present‐best knowledge and knowledge in turn to the seamless fabric that encompasses everything from the axioms of logic and the “fundamental laws” of physics to empirical observation‐statements. They are all, in principle, always up for revision – including the logical axioms – should this yield benefits in terms of economy, overall coherence, or ease of fit with our current physical‐scientific world‐picture. But in that case we are likely to be stuck for an adequate rejoinder when somebody – a postmodernist or all‐purpose skeptic – denies that we are entitled to speak of progress with regard to the large‐scale “shifts” in science that Quine adduces from Ptolemy to Kepler, or Newton to Einstein, or Aristotle to Darwin. Nor will the term have any non‐question‐begging application to the larger‐scale shift by which, to cite his other main example, belief in the existence of Homer’s gods gave way to belief in the range of entities, properties, and forces posited by our current best theories in the physical sciences. Again, talk of “progress” will provoke the standard anti‐realist, postmodernist, social‐constructivist, or cultural‐relativist response. Thus any such talk makes sense only relative to our present‐day view of things and, in particular, our scientific world‐picture with its attendant, more or less triumphalist, idea of how we got from the gods and the centaurs to the quarks and neutrinos. Quite simply, there is no appeal beyond what counts – on that same pragmatist view – as “good in the way of belief,” with “good” here defined as “creating least conflict at any point in the overall fabric of belief‐items held true.”
Nor is it much use retreating, in the face of these problems, to a more formal conception of scientific theories and truth‐claims that would avoid the nemesis of all‐out content relativism by instancing structure at a high (mathematical) level of abstraction as that which remains invariant from one paradigm to the next. This case has lately been promoted with greatest vigor by the exponents of “ontic structural realism,” according to which – in direct opposition to the doctrine in its non‐ontic, that is, epistemic (and to that extent weaker) form – mathematical structure is not only conserved across such shifts but progressively revealed as the ultimate reality (Ladyman and Ross 2007). Should that argument succeed against the obvious objection that structures must be structures of something or other, that is, some specifiable content rather than just structures all the way down, then we would have at least the beginnings of an answer to the skeptic’s denial of progress in science and, a fortiori, in philosophy conceived as a genuine Wissenschaft. But in order for that to be the happy outcome it has to be demonstrated that Quine and like‐minded radical empiricists‐pragmatists are wrong in their pyrrhic idea of relativizing everything, logic included, to the quest for overall coherence. If the logical axioms are themselves revisable – albeit at a push, or when other, less far‐reaching sorts of revision won’t do the trick – then, of course, there is small hope for any putative logic of scientific inquiry, such as those advanced by Lakatos or Popper, that would presuppose the trans‐paradigm validity of certain (as might be thought) strictly indispensable ground rules (Popper 1963; Lakatos 1976).
Indeed, one way of bringing out the difficulty with ontic structural realism is to ask what real explanatory work those structures could be doing in the absence of any substantive or determinate content – something scientifically testable in practice or at any rate in principle – that would save them from representing mere figments of the ultra‐rationalist imaginary. The problem this poses to philosophy of science is then rather like the problem that string theory currently poses to theoretical physics according to skeptics such as Lee Smolin (2006). That is, it looks very much like remaining a conceptually impressive but scientifically unsubstantiated castle in the air unless its increasingly complex (not to say baroque or Ptolemaic) mathematical and formal constructions acquire physically specifiable content. However, this caveat shouldn’t be taken so far in an anti‐formalist or (above all) anti‐logicist direction as to endorse anything like a Quinean across‐the‐board revisionist outlook, or an ultra‐empiricist tendency to throw out the empirically informed rational baby with the echt‐rationalist bathwater. Nothing could more strikingly illustrate the way that contemporary philosophy continues to swing back and forth between the poles set up four centuries ago when it comes to this issue of form, logic, structure, and abstraction versus content, substance, empirical warrant, and whatever serves to fill out those otherwise empty or place‐holder functions.
My point is that any rational hope of justifying claims to the effect that philosophy has made, or could be known to have made, progress of any sort except by its own self‐vindicating lights is inseparably tied to a prior claim with respect to its capacity for reasoning logically on well‐attested evidence. Granted, there are manifold salient differences between the way this requirement works out in the physical sciences and in philosophy of science, epistemology, and philosophy more generally. But those differences are, I think, ultimately less important than the fact that progress in both instances cannot be achieved – or its achievement shown beyond serious (scientifically or philosophically warranted) doubt – unless the requirement is adequately met. Which is also to say that neither Quinean radical empiricism nor structural realism, even when ontically construed, can offer much guidance when it comes to explaining how science makes progress or how such progress can also be observed in disciplines of thought, philosophy among them, where a central concern is with issues of truth and knowledge. Of course, there will be postmodernists and skeptics of various persuasion – including some legatees of Quine via Kuhn – who will either deny that last assertion tout court or count “truth” and “knowledge” as terms that have meaning only in the context of some given paradigm, web of belief, life‐form, language‐game, or whatever (Kuhn 1970). But this position is one that, when applied to the natural sciences, very quickly falls back to a line of such extreme and all‐encompassing skepticism that only the term nescience – the wholesale disavowal of knowledge along with our knowledge of the growth of knowledge – can adequately capture its depth and extent.
So the big question for our purposes is: can the various arguments for a realist understanding of progress in the natural sciences be carried over to philosophy of science and thence to other philosophical domains? One thing that emerges from the checkered history of modern philosophy’s efforts to describe, explain, justify, and (sometimes) correct or improve the conduct of scientific inquiry is that some of those efforts have eventually been exposed – through criticism or counter‐examples – as on the wrong track. One such was the covering‐law theory of causal explanation which famously fell to Sun‐and‐flagpole‐type counter‐instances where it allowed for symmetrical or reverse orderings of cause and effect while the actual process was strictly unidirectional (Salmon 1984). Another classic case was Kant’s error in supposing the principles of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian space–time physics to hold for all possible (conceivable or intelligible) worlds, not merely that of our pre‐scientific sense‐certainty as physically embodied creatures in the three‐plus‐one dimensions of experiential space and time (Kant 1964). To which one might add Locke’s skeptical conviction, albeit understandable (even rational) given the state of chemistry and physics in his time, that knowledge was constitutively incapable of probing beyond “nominal” to “real” essences or definitions (Locke 1975). That is to say, he mistakenly took the limited powers of then‐current observational, investigative, explanatory, and theoretical grasp not only as absolute limits on humanly attainable knowledge but as marking the ne plus ultra point where scientific speculation leaned over into unscientific nonsense.
But if Locke got it wrong about this – and if he (like Hume after him) accordingly drew some overly generalized skeptical conclusions – then it is also the case that subsequent epistemology and philosophy of science learned a good deal from the manifest inadequacies of the Lockean outlook in terms of ontological and causal‐explanatory as well as descriptive adequacy. In particular, the Locke‐Hume quandary with regard to positing anything beyond observable appearances – causes, properties, dispositions, microstructural attributes, chemical affinities, and so forth – gave rise to a vigorous and continuing debate about the character, status, and explanatory role of just such disputed items. Thus it is hard to deny (although the skeptic may wish to) that contemporary debate around the topics of causal powers and their ontology is vastly more sophisticated and better informed than that debate as Locke or Hume left it (Salmon 1984; Psillos 2005; Molnar 2006; Mumford 2009, 2011). On the other hand – a sensitive point with philosophers – this seems to entail that philosophy has its work cut out in merely keeping up with the physical sciences so as to avoid such errors, or (just as wounding in terms of professional dignity) that philosophical problems can best be resolved by keeping up in that way (Norris 2013). So there is progress of a kind that enables us realists to say that Locke was unduly skeptical concerning the reality of microstructural properties or Hume concerning causal powers. However, as even realist philosophers will be apt to complain, it is brought about by extended and deepened physical‐scientific understanding rather than deeper philosophical insight or improvements to our conceptual‐reflective powers. This leaves it open for scientists who take a dim view of philosophy, such as Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, to argue that there is no longer any useful work for philosophers to do since the sciences are now well on the way to either solving all its old questions or showing them up as pseudo‐problems (Weinberg 1994; Hawking and Mlodinow 2010; Norris 2011).
However, there is no need for prickliness on the philosophers’ part, just as there is no warrant for under‐informed put‐downs of philosophy in the Weinberg/Hawking mode. A stronger case for the progressivist view is one that holds, as I have elsewhere, that science during its really creative, inventive, problematical, transformative, or revolutionary periods is always in large part philosophical (Norris 2000b, 2013). By this I mean “philosophical” in the time‐honored sense of raising issues with established certitudes, reflecting on its own ontological commitments, and – crucially for the realist – maintaining a sense of the shifting yet strictly crucial difference between present‐best knowledge and objective truth. The evidence is everywhere to be found in the historiography of scientific revolutions from Copernicus and Galileo, through Newton, to Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger where philosophical reflection of this sort – often provoked by deep‐laid doubts and uncertainties regarding dominant systems of belief – went along with an uncommon openness to new and heterodox ways of thought. Such was most strikingly the case in periods like that which witnessed the advent of quantum mechanics and special/general relativity, since the prime movers here were scientists of a highly philosophical bent whose speculative interests were closely bound up with their physical theories and, in particular, their penchant for thought‐experimental procedures as a means of exploring issues as yet beyond reach of physical testing (Sorensen 1992; Brown 1994; Williamson 2007). One aspect of this is the large amount of clarificatory work that is then typically needed around issues of interpretation, empirical warrant, explanatory reach, ontological commitment, and so forth. Another aspect – equally pertinent here – is the extent to which, at such times, the distinction between genuinely “live” and ailing or soon‐to‐be‐abandoned scientific options is decided more by philosophically inflected preferences in such matters than on “straightforwardly” scientific grounds.
Yet the claim applies more widely than that since there is no mode of inquiry, even in the most settled or Kuhnian “normal” periods of science, that doesn’t avail itself of a great many concepts, axioms, logical resources, methods, and modal assumptions whose provenance and justification are matters of properly philosophical concern (Kuhn 1970). What’s more, the philosopher is strongly placed – at least if she is a realist in the sense outlined above – to argue that her discipline has not only kept up with advances in scientific knowledge (and at times contributed to them) but has also itself achieved progress toward better understanding of just what constitutes progress in its own domain. That is to say, it has developed more adequate, resourceful, self‐critical, scientifically and historically informed ways of grasping how things go right or wrong with its cognitive endeavors. Philosophy of science and epistemology are the sub‐disciplines where this case is easiest to make despite the various forms of relativist, anti‐realist, and anti‐progressivist thinking so prominent in post‐1960 thought. After all, they involve taking stock of developments (or at any rate changes) in the currency of knowledge that inevitably pose the question of progress even if, as with the cultural relativists or “strong” sociologists of knowledge, the question is often treated as senseless or beside the point (Barnes 1977; Bloor 1983, 1991; Collins 1985). Moreover, they put the onus of justification very squarely on the skeptic about progress since it takes a very extreme – even a perversely heroic – kind of skepticism to deny that we are now better informed about a great range of scientific fields and topics than people were one, three, or five hundred years ago.
If the case goes through for philosophy of science then so it does likewise for those other branches of philosophy where, again, the anti‐progressivist has to find some powerful arguments in order to exclude or invalidate any claims of progress in terms of conceptual clarity, analytic power, or explanatory scope. This would mean establishing, first, that philosophy has overcome certain past errors, and second that progress in that regard, while often science‐led or science‐responsive, is nonetheless achievable – and at least fitfully apparent – across a range of distinctively philosophical domains. A quick but dirty way to clinch the case would be to peruse any up‐to‐date scholarly edition of Plato and see to what lengths of special pleading the editor may be driven in the effort to convince readers that this is a text worth his or her dedicated scrutiny despite containing some (by the editor’s own admission) inadequate, confused, or downright dreadful arguments (see, for instance, Plato 2003). And of course the same is true, if in lesser degree, of subsequent philosophers from Aristotle to the present. It is true for just the reasons that I have offered, but also – as concerns the greatest and most influential among them – for another, as it seems, paradoxical but in fact fairly obvious reason. “Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know” (Eliot 1964, 16). T.S. Eliot’s remark about poets applies equally to those philosophers: we read them as they could not have read themselves precisely because it is us reading them, and doing so moreover very often with the benefit of much intervening exegesis, commentary, and criticism.
To be sure, there is no guarantee that later means better, since a good deal of that subsequent comment may fall short of the original in philosophical acuity, or indeed be the product of changed ideas and preconceptions that put the original beyond recovery on anything like appropriate terms. This is where Bennett’s “collegial” approach – his precept (briefly) of “charity but always within certain limits” – has the virtue of avoiding such Whiggish excesses while nonetheless allowing that progress may have occurred and enabled us to see problems and argumentative (especially logical) flaws invisible to our great precursors (Bennett 1984, 1986, 2001). But, as I have said, that approach has its own limits insofar as Bennett’s charity depends very much on his patience in rehearsing (what he takes to be) suboptimal arguments and his patience often runs out in such a way as to make the charity sound less than heartfelt or brain‐endorsed. The missing element here is the philosophical equivalent of what Eliot says about Donne, that is, the idea – one developed by Paul de Man – that error may be not only, in a vaguely charitable sense, something we can “learn from” but the very spring or motor of intellectual progress (de Man 1983, 1986). That is to say, the greatest insights are frequently to be found in maximum proximity to the greatest errors, or through an access of knowledge gained not at all at the expense of some presumptively less than perspicacious piece of thinking, but through its having so perspicuously (even if without the author’s full knowledge) raised some crucial problem with regard to its own express thesis or argument. According to de Man – who diverges from Bennett on just this question – the problem is one that a sufficiently shrewd reader will find prefigured in the text itself, although passed over by what may well be the centuries‐long accretion of “charitable” exegeses.
This claim relies on de Man’s cardinal distinction between “errors” and “mistakes,” the former being due to some strong parti pris or motivating interest that drives the strong thinker into symptomatic (hence non‐accidental and revealing) lapses from straightforward accuracy or truth, while the latter have to do with mere confusion, stupidity, or failure to read and think with adequate care (de Man 1983). Thus his readings repeatedly demonstrate the co‐presence and, beyond that, the intimate co‐dependence of moments when a certain blindness emerges with regard to a text’s governing presuppositions and moments of insight when the blindness is implicitly revealed and the presuppositions are thereby contested. What also becomes clear in the process is the truth of de Man’s claim that the texts in question are enhanced, not in any way diminished, by a deconstructive reading prepared to acknowledge how far they anticipate or pre‐empt its own results. If such readings look decidedly heterodox from a mainstream standpoint, then, that is because, as de Man often remarks, canonical thinkers tend to produce a reception‐history made up of likewise canonical or orthodox commentaries that ignore or occlude textual anomalies that might shake the dominant consensus. Thus the aim is to reveal what has regularly escaped the notice of mainstream commentators brought up in a tradition of exegesis in hock to received ideas of authorial intent, textual fidelity, interpretative method, contextual relevance, the limits of hermeneutic licence, and so forth. Yet this should not be taken to show that de Man is playing fast and loose with texts or granting interpreters free rein to say pretty much whatever they like by way of kicking against the doxological pricks. On the contrary: although his readings arrive at some markedly counter‐canonical conclusions they do so by way of an intensive, detailed, logically compelling, and conceptually rigorous engagement with the text that deviates from standard (intentionalist or traditional) readings only if and when required by aspects of it that just won’t square with those readings. In each case they represent a mode of reading that can justifiably claim to mark a stage of progress beyond what the earlier readings were content to accept as the text’s manifest, intended, or self‐evident purport.
This is how we can best make sense of the claim that philosophy exhibits progress, and that its progress amounts to something other and more than some Rortian switch of preferential vocabulary. If we finally have to decouple philosophy from the physical sciences – since they have prima facie a much stronger claim in that regard – then the operation is performed with least damage by instancing philosophy’s history of continuous self‐critical reflection on its own premises, methods, scope, limits, and achievements to date. Of course the skeptic will then reply, whether with regard to the sciences or to philosophy, that this is the same old smug progressivist doctrine that has always traded on the same old failure to perceive how the terms of debate are being rigged in advance so as to favor just those criteria for “progress,” “advancement,” “knowledge,” and “truth” that are a priori guaranteed to endorse what presently counts as such. In which case – supposedly Q.E.D. – such progressivist talk is as patently fallacious or naively question‐begging as Wittgenstein is reputed to have shown with regard to Frazer’s bumptious rationalist treatment of all those “primitive” myths (Wittgenstein 1987). To such skepticism there is in the end no rejoinder except, as I have said, to point out: (i), that it is definitionally self‐confirming, hence empirically‐evidentially vacuous; (ii), that when applied to the physical sciences it is so massively counter‐intuitive as to bear a likewise massive burden of evidence or proof; and (iii), that philosophy inherits at least enough from the methods and procedures of the physical sciences to legitimate its using (i) and (ii) as maximally strong (though short of knockdown) arguments against the skeptic. Nothing more is to be had, but then – so I would argue – nothing more is required.