Ward E. Jones
The questions one asks about progress in philosophy fall out of one’s notion of what philosophy is. My questions about progress in philosophy are questions about a cultural institution. This institution – more precisely, one instantiation of it – is the topic of this chapter. The aim of this section is to defend my conception of the institution we call Western philosophy. My aim in subsequent sections is to spell out one way in which this institution can and does progress.
Philosophy qua cultural institution is a discipline or a field of study, wholly made up of practitioners, their activities, and their products. When we say of someone that she has studied philosophy, we mean she has studied the activities and products of the practitioners of philosophy. Here, “philosophy” means what philosophers are doing and have done. This raises, of course, the prior question: Who is a philosopher, that is, who is a practitioner of philosophy? Philosophers philosophize, but they are not the only ones who do so; young children philosophize but they are not doing so as practitioners of the discipline of philosophy. If I am going to speak of philosophy in this narrow sense, I need to explain what might be special about the people we call “philosophers.”
We could try to say what a philosopher is by discovering a special relationship between philosophers and the activity of philosophizing – namely reflecting about certain elusive topics concerning herself and her world. This will not get us very far. The difference between a philosopher and a non‐philosopher cannot be a matter of how much philosophizing each has done. There may be non‐philosophers who have done more philosophizing in their lifetimes than certain philosophers have. On the one hand, some novelists (like Fyodor Dostoyevsky or David Foster Wallace) are deeply interested in philosophy and spend a great deal of time thinking about philosophical issues and working through them in their novels; nonetheless, they might not be philosophers. On the other hand, there have been even great philosophers (like David Hume) who spend comparatively little of their lifetimes philosophizing.
Nor can the difference between philosophers and non‐philosophers be a matter of how good each is at philosophizing. Dostoyevsky, surely, was better than I at philosophizing, although he was not a philosopher and I am. Nor will it do any good to appeal to the “role” that philosophizing plays in the philosopher’s life; many prominent philosophers in the history of our field did not make careers out of philosophizing, and some (like Socrates) were never paid for their work.
Philosophers do philosophize, and their doing so is central to their identity as philosophers, but we cannot understand what makes someone a philosopher, a practitioner, simply by looking at her relationship to the activity of philosophizing. We must also appeal to her membership in a discursive community of philosophers, in which members interact by philosophizing with, to, and for each other.
A necessary characteristic of a philosopher is that she has entered into an evolving dialogue or conversation that takes place within a community of individuals. The philosopher takes on as one of her projects the task of contributing to the philosophical conversation, spending much of her time responding to the work of other philosophers, and sharing her work with them. This is not only a matter of writing and publishing papers and books; one’s membership in a philosophical community can also manifest itself in oral and written contributions to conferences, seminars, reading groups, and teaching. It is, in short, fundamental to someone’s identity as a philosopher that she write for and/or speak to other philosophers, contributing to the ongoing conversation that makes up the raison d’être of a community of philosophers.1 In short, we do not call someone a philosopher, someone who belongs to the cultural institution of philosophy, until she contributes to the activities and body of work that make up the discipline of philosophy.
The claim that philosophers belong of necessity to communities raises a further question, namely, which communities are communities of philosophers? After all, philosophizing can take place in communities that are not philosophical communities. Conceiving of philosophers as I have, as “those who are philosophizing in dialogue with others,” does not give us characteristics with which to differentiate a community of philosophers from a community of non‐philosophers (e.g., theoretical biologists or theologians) who may be engaging in an internal and evolving philosophical dialogue with each other. There is just too much overlap between what philosophers do and what those in many other non‐philosophical communities do.
It might help if we could identify specifically what philosophizing is, find some set of characteristics that set philosophizing apart from other activities. Unfortunately, it is implausible to think that there is a “philosophical method” that differentiates philosophical communities from other discursive communities. In my own philosophical community, philosophical authority was once a valid reason for endorsing and pursuing a philosophical theory; recently, in the very same community, there has arisen a respected movement of experimental philosophy.
Such considerations – and many more could be cited – suggest that philosophy is a discipline in which methodology is itself contested. There is no single philosophical method, there are simply individuals defending and using various methodologies, many of which they have got from or share with other communities. So we cannot look to the activity of philosophizing – which is an activity in which one’s method will be a contested choice – to determine who the philosophers are. There is no single activity that can capture what “philosophizing” means, allowing us to distinguish the members of a philosophical community from the members of another community.2
Rather than attempting to pick them out by looking at the activities of their practitioners, we should simply recognize that philosophical communities are individual entities with particular life trajectories. A philosophical community could evolve in any direction, and as long as its ways of proceeding at a given time are distant enough from other dialectical communities to prevent it from merging with them, it still will be thought of as a philosophical community. There is no way to define philosophy by looking to characteristics of philosophers or the community.3 Philosophy is a contingent thing – a conversation – and it has no essential features except those that are necessary to its being a conversation, namely participants and their contributions.
Accordingly, as I use the word in this chapter, “philosophy” refers to the activities and products of the members of a particular philosophical community, and as we see it is a thoroughly historical entity, one in which distant past philosophers are treated as peers. There are various communities of philosophers throughout the world, many of which overlap with each other. The largest community to which I belong – and which is the topic of this chapter – is characterized by the following feature: its current members are involved in a conversation stretching back in time through various canonical European, Ancient Roman and Greek writers, at least to Thales. Richard Rorty is describing this community when he writes:
We can pick out “the philosophers” in the contemporary intellectual world only by noting who is commenting on a certain sequence of historical figures. All that “philosophy” as a name for a sector of culture means is “talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell … and that lot.” … It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition – a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida.
(Rorty 1982, 92)
It is this specific community that interests me here. Its full name is the “Western philosophical community,” which highlights its European ancestry. However, most of the time, I will just call it “philosophy.”
Now that we know that philosophy is a conversation between discussants, we are looking for ways in which the conversation progresses. The question is not whether the work of individual philosophers or groups of philosophers manifests some kind of advancement. Rather, the question is whether the community progresses as a community. Does the conversation progress over time? The biggest hurdle to granting philosophy a discipline‐wide kind of progress is the omnipresence of dissensus.
Dissensus is not only about living members of the community disagreeing with each other. Philosophy, as we see in this section, is in the richest sense a historical community. Philosophers have the deepest kind of epistemic respect for their forebears: we think that many of them were right about some of our deepest problems, and we engage with their work on a continuing basis, treating them as peers. To the philosopher, Aristotle is still one of us; to the biologist, Aristotle is a historical curiosity.
Perhaps the most visible difference between a community in consensus and one in dissensus is the omnipresence of critique in the latter. As Graham Priest writes:
Anything is a fit topic for critical scrutiny and potential rejection … that there is an external world, that there are moral values, that people other than me have minds, even the efficacy of critical reasoning itself … I cite these examples simply to illustrate that there is nothing that is sacrosanct, no criticism that is beyond the pale.
(Priest 2006b, 201)
A community in consensus, like many of the sciences, has commitments that it no longer critiques; in a community like philosophy, in which dissensus reigns, critique is omnipresent.
This is not to say, of course, that members of the philosophical community disagree about everything. All disagreement takes place against a background of agreement; there must be a great deal of agreement before a group of persons can engage in any kind of discussion at all.4 What the members of the philosophical community do not expect agreement upon are claims made by them to other members of the community in their professional roles. They do not expect their publications to convince every reader, or their talks to convince everyone in the room. The members of the philosophical community, in stark contrast to members of science communities, harbor no expectations of converting all of their peers. Of course, philosophers would like to have some of their colleagues agree with them, but they do not expect to obtain community‐wide agreement. The expectations of the individual philosopher are different from those of scientists in a deep and revealing way. More important than agreement, to the philosopher, is attention; she wishes to be read and discussed by her colleagues, to have her claims found interesting.
In the philosophical community, competing theories coexist as potential candidates for discussion, interrogation, and acceptance. Positions perennially exist alongside, and in many cases gain their identity from, other competing positions. A new and groundbreaking claim in philosophy does not supersede a currently available position, in the sense of replacing it; the former more or less takes a place next to the latter. Certain members of the community may see a groundbreaking work as superseding previous positions, and the new position can garner attention that previously belonged to other positions. However, such attention will be both positive and negative. In contrast to the scientist, the philosopher recognizes adherents to positions radically alternative to her own as still being part of her community.
This is not to say that something like full agreement is not possible among currently active members in a philosophical community. Anything is possible in the philosophical community. However, if there is full agreement on some issue of salience in the community, this will be not real consensus but a de facto✔ circumstantial convergence of the current community‐members’ commitments. It will be what we might call mere agreement. Such convergence would not be something the community will have sought. Indeed, many members of the philosophical community would – rightly, I think – see community‐wide agreement as undesirable, and to be treated with suspicion; a subject area that commands full agreement is a subject area, in philosophy at least, that needs more work. This not an attitude that scientists in a state of consensus would have: once consensus is achieved, the matter is regarded as settled, closed.5
The difference between mere agreement and consensus is manifested in the attitude that the community members take toward the revival of unpopular positions held by past members. The community in mere agreement over some position will be open to dissenting positions in a way that the community in consensus will not be. While singularism (or realism) about causation, for example, had not been taken seriously in the Western philosophical community since before David Hume’s work on the topic, philosophers were readily willing to take seriously G.E.M. Anscombe’s defense of singularism in the early 1970s (Anscombe 1971). A scientist who suggests, for example, that human beings have not evolved would not get the same hearing Anscombe received. Examples of de facto agreements being readily broken are common within philosophy: think of Anscombe’s revitalization of virtue theory, or of Norman Malcolm’s renewal of the Ontological Argument for God’s existence.6
This ready openness to unpopular past positions derives, in part, from philosophers’ reverential attitude towards their philosophical predecessors. Part of what led contemporary philosophers to take Anscombe’s re‐introduction of singularism seriously is the deep, ingrained respect that contemporary philosophers have for singularist past members of our community like René Descartes. Indeed, there is a very important sense in which such re‐introductions are not re‐introductions at all, because inputs from past philosophers are treated as current contributions to our community discussion; their work continues to be on the table as contenders. As Stan Godlovitch has written, “Unlike scientists, philosophers never quite bury all their dead. At least, there always appears to be just enough life left in most temporarily superseded views to ensure many of them a comeback when enough of a climate change permits it” (Godlovitch 2000, 7). A philosopher offering her students a metaphysics course covering causation might begin with Descartes’ singularism; it might even end with it. It was a live position, with evidence to support it even when it was accepted by no living philosophers. In contrast, a neurobiology course on the brain would rarely find it useful to begin with a discussion of the phrenologists.
So while consensus in philosophy is possible it is nowhere near being a reality, because dissenting contributions by past members of our community continue to remain as live positions, able to be revived and adhered to. As long as philosophers’ attitudes towards past philosophers remain as reverential as they now are, there will never be full agreement on the nature of causation in the philosophical community. If you work on causation, Descartes constantly stands as one of your interlocutors; he is your peer. If you are concerned about causation but are not a singularist, you feel that you should have something to say to Descartes and other dead singularist peers. The working scientist need feel no such inclinations.
This is not to deny that there are unpopular or minority positions in philosophy. There are very few metaphysical idealists (see Foster 2008), ethical relativists (see Wong 2006), or dialetheists (see Priest 2006a),7 for example, in the philosophical community, but they are nonetheless considered as fully fledged members. They are not “dissidents,” as they might be in the sciences. While mechanisms for “banishing” humanities academics who do certain kinds of work do exist at the sub‐community level – in, say, individual departments and journal editorial boards – they are not utilized by the philosophical community as a whole. Proponents of unpopular positions – think, in recent years, of Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida – occupy coveted university positions, defend their (unpopular) positions in top journals and publishing houses, and frequently command great respect from their dissenting colleagues.
The omnipresence of dissensus in philosophy, rooted in philosophers’ reverence toward their dissenting peers, undercuts the possibility of certain kinds of linear community‐wide progress. Philosophy cannot have the kind of progress that Thomas Kuhn attributed to scientific communities: the progress manifested in the communal acceptance of an overall theory or paradigm and the subsequent communal working out of that theory or paradigm. Because of consensus, Kuhn writes, “scientific development is … a unidirectional and irreversible process” (Kuhn 1970, 206). A practice of unanimous commitment will inevitably lead to clear and community‐wide patterns of theory change, patterns that can readily be interpreted as progress. In contrast, because philosophers are deeply in dissensus, they cannot move on as a community. Dissenting present and past members of our community are our peers, and so they prevent us from a Kuhnian kind of progress. Equally, the community does not speak – assert – with one voice; there will never be any single candidate for what the community thinks of as the truth. So the community as a whole cannot be seen to be progressing toward truth. Certain philosophers, or philosophical traditions might be progressing toward truth, but the community as a whole cannot be. It is beginning to appear that community‐wide progress in philosophy, because of dissensus, cannot be linear. This suggests that progress in philosophy might be non‐linear, of a branching form, and arising not despite dissensus, but in virtue of it. Accordingly, my proposal, in what follows, is that the philosophical community in dissensus can progress in so far as it can offer us more options for seeing ourselves and the world.
If we could figure out why the philosophical community is in dissensus, then perhaps we could understand what dissensus does for us, and upon that basis see how the philosophical community in dissensus can progress. In this section, I speculate that dissensus is the result of our philosophical commitments creating or revealing aspects of our identities.
Some beliefs do not merely contribute to our stock of representations of how the world is: they also individuate us as kinds of persons. I refer to these as our “identity‐conferring beliefs.” Many identity‐conferring beliefs will be evaluative, concerning what is good in the world. These are the beliefs that Charles Taylor emphasizes in much of his work:
To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose.
Taylor 1989, 27)
Think of one’s beliefs that such‐and‐such lives are or are not worth living. Or think of one’s beliefs about how to treat others, about capital punishment, social welfare, or abortion. These are commitments that the world is some way rather than another, of course, but their role in our lives is more than this.
A belief need not be evaluative in order to be identity‐conferring. One prominent example: the belief in God’s existence (or non‐existence). We have common names for the kinds of persons we are in virtue of possessing beliefs in this realm: “believer,” “atheist,” “agnostic.” One’s belief in, or one’s denial of, God’s existence, is part of who one is. This is true of spiritual beliefs in general. As Robert Solomon writes,
Spirituality must … be understood in terms of the transformation of the self. It is not just a conclusion, or a vision … that one can try on like a new pair of pants … The grand thoughts and passions of spirituality do not just move us and inform us, or supplement our already busy day‐to‐day existence. They change us, make us different kinds of people, different kinds of beings.
(Solomon 2002, 6)
This is not true of all of our beliefs. Your belief about what you had for breakfast or the current state of the weather is not identity‐conferring. Philosophical beliefs belong in the same category with spiritual beliefs, not with these latter, non‐identity‐conferring beliefs. So, for example, becoming a confirmed utilitarian makes or reveals one to be a kind of person, namely, the kind of person who believes that a human action is or is not good wholly in virtue of whether the action brings about utility. This deeply dictates the attitudes that one has toward other persons: potential actions toward them are to be always, ultimately, looked at with an eye to utility. Another example: coming to be a hard determinist makes or reveals8 one to be a kind of person; this can be made manifest when the determinist naturally follows her beliefs and starts to form more forgiving attitudes toward human actions.9
Just like the belief in God’s existence, such philosophical commitments can mark us out as certain kinds of persons. They can have the power to change and reveal identities. It would be a stretch to think that all philosophical commitments are identity‐conferring; it is doubtful that my newly formed agreement with a small claim made on an obscure topic changes the kind of person I am. However, most small philosophical claims are intimately associated with, or under the umbrella of, larger claims that are identity‐conferring. As with a commitment to God’s existence, commitment to many philosophical positions stakes us out as persons who see the world, very broadly and very pervasively, in a certain way.
Identity‐conferring beliefs come in two kinds, homogenous and diverse. Homogenous identity‐conferring beliefs are pervasive throughout my community. These are the beliefs that interest Ludwig Wittgenstein in On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969): we cannot make it rain; the earth is older than I am; material objects are made up of unperceivable bits of stuff. These beliefs – along with those intimately related to them – partially constitute my identity, but this is an identity which I invariably share with those around me. My diverse identity‐conferring beliefs are those that contribute to or reveal my identity but which differ from those around me: there are people in my community who disagree with me. The difference between homogenous and diverse identity‐conferring beliefs is a matter of the nature of my interaction with people I take seriously. If I interact, periodically, with people I epistemically respect and who disagree with me with respect to some subset of my identity‐conferring beliefs, then that subset comprises my diverse identity‐conferring beliefs. If I never interact with those who disagree with some of my identity‐conferring beliefs, or if I (for whatever reason) epistemically dismiss everyone who disagrees with me with respect to that portion of my beliefs, then those are my homogenous identity‐conferring beliefs.
When is a belief, or set of beliefs, diverse identity‐conferring? I do not have necessary and sufficient conditions for diverse identity‐conferring beliefs, but it seems to me that there are three things we can say about them. First, and most obviously, diverse identity‐conferring beliefs relate to topics where the truth is not readily settled. They are to be found in subject matters in which the truth about the matter at hand is not readily agreed to by all parties concerned. Second, diverse identity‐conferring beliefs exist where alternatives to what one believes are readily available. By this I mean that such alternatives must be explicitly available to one, in the sense that one is aware of them. Third, diverse identity‐conferring beliefs, like all identity‐conferring commitments, have pervasive doxastic (belief‐relevant) and/or practical implications. The identity‐conferring commitment to a certain vision of the good life or to a certain form of government can have pervasive practical implications. The identity‐conferring commitment to realism has pervasive doxastic implications. The identity‐conferring commitments to utilitarianism or to hard determinism have both pervasive practical and doxastic implications. Identity‐conferring beliefs occupy a large and dominating place in our intellectual and practical lives.
Philosophy, I have suggested, is a realm of diverse identity‐conferring commitments, many of which, when formed, make or reveal a person to have a certain identity. This offers a simple explanation for the widespread, and seemingly unavoidable, dissensus in philosophy. If our philosophical commitments are identity‐conferring, then we should expect philosophical dissensus to be ineliminable. People involved in philosophy are distinct individuals, with varying backgrounds both within and outside of philosophy. They have differing values, differing priorities, in short, differing identities. Not surprisingly, they have differing responses to the elusive and fundamental topics that philosophers study. If, as I have been suggesting, philosophical discourse is (at least partly) a matter of staking out or discovering one’s identity, then we would expect there to be as much variation in philosophical commitment as in other identity‐involving activities, like art, music, or spirituality. Just as with these latter activities, we philosophers find ourselves settling upon different endpoints, endpoints that are reflective and, in turn, revealing of who we are.
Criticisms exist for all positions in philosophy, but philosophical dissensus extends beyond this: it also means that there are various positive positions which exist in the community. Criticism is not only about attacking a position; it is also about creating an alternative position from which to do so. This is the imaginative element in philosophy. Part of what we want from philosophy is for it to offer us positive positions, candidates for how we can see ourselves and the world we live in. As there are many different kinds of human beings, with many different things that they want from their lives, philosophy should – as it now does, at least to some extent – offer us a multiplicity of such candidates. Philosophy in dissensus provides various ways in which we can see ourselves and our world, and the previous section suggested that these ways can be identity‐conferring.
The upshot is that philosophy progresses by offering us more options for adopting kinds of identity. Each of the great philosophical frameworks has substantial value, I have suggested, in offering identity‐conferring beliefs. If these are the source of philosophy’s substantial value, then dissensus in philosophy is not a “scandal” to philosophy. Far from it. Dissensus multiplies the value potentially to be gained from philosophy; it represents more possibilities for those who are exposed to philosophy to obtain identities that suit them.
On my account, the value of philosophy is, at least in part, a matter of increasing our integrity. As Gabriele Taylor has written, “the person possessing integrity is the person who keeps his self intact” (Taylor 1981, 148). In the present context, integrity involves being in a position to properly – judiciously, justifiably – retain or abandon the diverse identity‐conferring beliefs that partially constitute one’s identity. The danger to an individual’s integrity (and identity) in the realm of diverse identity‐conferring beliefs is, primarily, other people around her who disagree with her, often intensely. Exposure to philosophy can help her attain and maintain her doxastic integrity by revealing reasons – which she might not have previously been aware of – for (and against) her own identity‐conferring commitments.10
Coming to see the reasons for one’s identity‐conferring commitments is to see the importance of one’s identity, to see why one’s commitments matter and should be maintained. This is crucial in the realm of diverse identity‐conferring commitments, because of the range of (potentially hostile) alternatives around one. One needs access to reasons in order to see why one’s own diverse identity‐conferring commitments are worth holding onto. Discourse within the philosophical community largely concerns the reasons for and against various positions, and exposure to such reasoning can often reveal the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our current or potential identity‐conferring beliefs. The person of integrity sticks by her identity‐conferring commitments, and being exposed to reasons for her commitments helps her both determine whether she should continue to do so, and, if she should, to deepen and defend her commitments in the face of the kind of challenges that she will inevitably feel from those who disagree with her.
Importantly, the kind of identity‐formation that takes place in philosophy involves thinking and reflecting for oneself. In engaging in philosophical activity, we create or substantiate – in a word, we authenticate – our identities. In discovering, supporting, and unifying my own identity‐conferring beliefs, I can determine, for myself, my own identity – forming it autonomously. John Stuart Mill thought that this was one of the highest achievements of human life:
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need for any other faculty than the ape‐like one of imitation … It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way … But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.
(Mill 1859, 61)
The thought here is that one of the central concerns of a human being should be her reflective consideration and potential endorsement of her identity. Mill’s thought runs deep within our tradition, and it is intimately related to one of the founding thoughts of the Western philosophical community, namely Socrates’ bold insistence that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living” (Plato 2001, Apology 38a).
The extent to which we can choose our identities must not be overstated; much of who we are, and will always be, is out of our control, given to us at our birth and in our childhoods. Nevertheless, we all, by and large, inherit a body of diverse identity‐conferring beliefs, and it can benefit us – by increasing our integrity – if we can think through them further. Inevitably, these beliefs encounter implicit and explicit challenges from our disagreeing peers, and we long for help in determining whether we should keep them or not.
I want to end by gesturing toward one topic on which there has been a great deal of philosophical progress in the past twenty years. Critical race theorists have in this time started to seriously explore and theorize, among other things, the ontology of race. As a result, there are now cultural theories, phenotype/ancestry theories, biological theories, oppression theories, quietist theories, pluralist theories, and more. The importance of that work, from the viewpoint of this chapter, is that it offers us ways of conceiving our racial identities. The importance of that work, from the viewpoint of this chapter, is that it offers us ways of conceiving our racial identities. By accepting one theory or another, we alter our racial identities, however subtly, and come to see them as made up in a certain way rather than another. Thus, my theory of race will inevitably imbue my actions and reactions in the world as a racial being.
One important highlight in the progress made by the cultural institution I have been calling “philosophy” as a whole over the recent past is this new work, offering us, as it does, a range of ways of being raced. In a world in which our racial identities are still so important and contested, it is potentially of great value that the philosophical community has finally come on to the scene, offering us a useful range of conceptions of racial identity that we might usefully adopt.