I’m now entering my second decade as a professor, and feel
like I have amassed enough experience to point out certain trends. I’m not sure
if the trends I want to talk about are the “normal science” of philosophy, or if
they’ve been particularly noticeable in recent years, as philosophy has gotten
more professionalized. What I’ve noticed is that a certain methodology for
addressing a philosophical problem will arise in one particular sub-literature,
where by “methodology” I mean some kind of quasi-technical mechanism for
resolving disputes in any area. Then, that strategy will start to replicate
(much like a computer virus); people will apply it to all the other fields
where it has not yet been applied. For example, at first fictionalism was
advanced to treat the problem of negative existentials; then it was applied by
Gideon Rosen to modal metaphysics. In the intervening years, fictionalists have
appeared in every discipline (fictionalism about morality, fictionalism about
abstract objects, etc.), and in the late 1990s, being on a job-search committee
meant wading through endless stacks of papers advocating fictionalism about
this or that. Contextualist solutions
to philosophical problems arose in a more haphazard way; in philosophical
logic, in application to the liar paradox and the sorites paradox, in
epistemology to the problem of skepticism. Now, a contextualist solution is
part of the standard tool-box of possibilities when faced with an apparent
philosophical problem. Now, we’ve got relativism
about truth, the idea that the truth of a proposition is relative to an
evaluator, and no doubt serving on a junior job search committee will involve
wading through stacks of papers applying relativism to this or that apparent
dispute.
was going to be a central topic in philosophy in the next decade:
For example, at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in
there are two invited symposiums on Saturday on relative truth; you can spend
all day listening to philosophers dispute the topic. It’s like fictionalism five years ago.
fictionalism, contextualism, and relativism. At each point, I thought there
were specific features of the methodology and its applications to which I was
reacting (and certainly, each strategy raises different issues). But I’ve
realized that I have a uniformly negative reaction to methodologies application
of which would resolve a host of apparently distinct philosophical problems. I
think there are two sources for this. First, I think the philosophical problems
are sufficiently distinct from one another that I’m immediately suspicious of
any attempt to resolve several of them by appeal to one mechanism (be it covert
fictions, context-sensitivity, or relativism). I could be convinced
(though I haven’t been so far) that some traditional philosophical problem (be
it future contingents, or skepticism, or the problem of abstracta) is due to
our failure to recognize context-sensitivity, or truth-relativity, or that
we’ve stumbled unknowingly into a fiction. But I think it is prima facie pretty unlikely that the
right account of the sorites paradox will have much to do with the right
account of skepticism. Secondly, since the methodologies are usually awfully
easy to apply, I worry about how to constrain
them. In short, each methodology seems to make philosophy too easy. I’m certainly
not saying these worries can’t be answered by advocates of catch-all methodologies. Many of the profession’s very best and most careful philosophers are attracted
to them. But I do think there is a special burden, when advocating a catch-all
methodological solution to a philosophical problem, to respond to these two
worries.
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