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David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) airs the "dirty laundry" of the "philosophy club." The late Burton Dreben had an answer to this question as well.
(Thanks to Dirk Felleman for the pointer.)
I'm opening this for discussion, but please listen to the Chalmers talk first. Signed comments will be preferred.
Interesting talk. My feeling is that there can be progress in philosophy, but that it will come primarily from paying closer attention to the details of the relevant scientific disciplines. Chalmers says it hasn't produced a lot of convergence yet, but I think that a lot of "empirically informed" philosophy, under the guise of that wonderfully vague term 'naturalism', is more lip service than substantive engagement. However, there are some very good efforts in the right direction. I'm thinking of things like French's and Krause's "Identity in Physics", Price's "Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point", Ladyman and Ross's "Every Thing Must Go", The Churchlands's work, and others I can't recall right now.
So much for nothing I said leaving the room! For people who don't want to listen the whole thing, the slides are at http://consc.net/papers/philprogress.pdf, and a written version of the article (somewhat older and to be updated before long) is at http://consc.net/papers/progress.pdf
BL COMMENT: Thanks, Dave. Cambridge Philosophy put it on their front page!
I enjoyed Professor Chalmers' talk, but I wonder if our perception of historical progress is biased. We might notice more divergence than convergence because we are focusing more on the issues which presently divide us, and don't notice all the ways our thinking has converged over the years.
If I may steer this conversation towards motivating philosophers' social progress…
I'd like to inspire philosophers to take leadership outside their narrow professional circles. Two ideas come to mind. First, it's time to compete against economists for the role of priests in a secular society. I appreciate the historical accident of how this all came to be. Forget the past; philosophers currently have a great opportunity to jump off the pavement into a strong stance after a multi-generational steamrolling. There's no reason to let fear of financial and industrial jargon hold you back, in fact I believe you all are quite good at big words. Second, I'm aghast at the failure of philosophers today to address climate change. You've been dealt a royal flush of your own favorite topics: justice, bounds of human knowledge, sacrifice, etc. Again I appreciate that the profession tends to box itself into narrow, competitive segments making it difficult for modern philosophers to address new topics. Please realize that you all have much to contribute to the tone and goals of society's response.
David raises great questions and interesting answers. I'd like to add one answer (rationalization?) that he hints at but does not develop much: Philosophical questions (at least the unanswered ones) are just really hard. As such, many of them may not be that different from scientific questions that remain unanswered and are potentially unanswerable by humans, such as whether there is intelligent life in the universe, when and where the next earthquake will strike California, how to predict large-scale human behavior, how the replicators that became life first emerged, what exactly caused the rapid expansion in brain size of human ancestors, etc.
Now, one might respond that scientists have at least converged on how to answer these questions and what facts would be required to answer them, so the problem is just human limitations in obtaining the relevant facts (or putting them together effectively enough to make predictions). But first, that might be true of many of the philosophical questions too. Contra David's view, many philosophers of mind seem to think that if we got enough information and had a more complete neuropsychological theory, we would converge on answers regarding consciousness, intentionality, language, etc. (David, it seemed like you suggest something like this with: "if someone can know the fundamental empirical truths and reason ideally, this should get them to all the truths." Does this apply to the hard problem too?)
And second, there is not convergence yet for some of the "open" scientific questions, in that there are not agreed-upon theories that just need the facts to be filled in (at least I think that's the case regarding, say, economic prediction and some explanations regarding evolution–no, intelligent design is not the missing link here!–and of course, in fundamental physics).
So, convergence will emerge, as it has when sciences sprout from philosophy, when we clean up the semantic disputes, get a lot more empirical information, develop the relevant theories, and reason as well as we can… though all this might not be enough (David's meta-humility, but please no premature mysterianism!).
Here's a (possibly too halcyonic) take on it. My partial list of topics on which philosophy has made progress:
– the axiomatic approach in mathematics: important initial steps by Plato and Pythagoras, major progress under Euclid, becoming thoroughly mature by Hilbert.
– the nature of motion: enormous progress under Descartes, Leibniz and Newton
– the origin of complexity in living creatures – significant early work by Hume, moved transformatively forward by Darwin
– the bounds of what can be calculated – major progress in the mid-20th century by Turing.
In each case, of course, we don't call the resultant discipline "philosophy". But that's exactly because it made so *much* progress! Using a twenty-first century definition of philosophy almost guarantees that no really radical philosophical progress will be seen to be made. But in each case, the discipline was deemed part of philosophy until it reached a sufficiently mature state to get its own name. (Remember that Turing's "Can Machines Think?", the foundation stone of computer science, appeared in Mind.)
Dennett defines philosophy as what you do when you're not yet at the stage when the *questions* are clear. Once you've got your methodology and the structure of your problem sorted out, you get a new name for your field.
Russell said something that I think Dennrtt paraphrases, tat when you know what your talking about, it becomes science.
I don't think progress, such as it is, in philosophy, comes through results. It comes, first, through a deeper, clearer understanding of the range of positions,marguments, and objections, a better sense of what you have to give up or say to keep,what you care about.
A lot of philosophy isvaboutbessentially contested matters. Your're not going to get libertarian s and Marxists to agree on justice and freedom. All they can do is clarify their differences,
Philosophy also makes negative progress in that certain positions or approaches become seen as no longer tenable. Logical positivism, for example. This collapsed under the weight of hard objections and decreasing lack of interest in trying to answer them. Deconstruction may be going the same court, if I knew enough about it.
I broadly agree with Justin (post 7): I don't think philosophy makes progress in the sense of marching in a (hopefully) linear fashion towards the truth. Whatever the 'big' questions were to the Greeks, (What is knowledge and how do I get some? How should I live? What is good? What is the nature of reality? Etc.) we're still asking them today and as pointed out in the talk, the recent survey suggests large disagreement on such things.
Rather I think that philosophical progress comes in providing new ways of looking familiar things, that bear fruit. This includes showing that the old ways of looking at stuff no longer serve their purpose as well as they did, or entail more problems than previously realised.
An example I really like is of what sociologists call the 'sociological imagination'. Richard Feynman said that when you get stuck on a problem, having tried the usual approaches, you need to look at the problem from a new point of view. Saying, how could people have believed in witches? That seems so incredible to us today. He gave the example of looking at brushing teeth in a new light (incidentally, an example also used in a college sociology class I had). Using it just as an example, how do you know that it is good for you? Because your parents told you. And so you ask your dentist. And they confirm it. You ask how they know. They learned it in medical school. But who did the experiments? Where are the peer-reviewed articles? Maybe your dentist doesn't know this. You take it on trust but you don't know.
And so maybe (in this example) it could be that there is a line of humans across the planet, where day turns into night, all stood at bathroom altars doing ritualistic brushing as they think if they don't then their teeth will fall out and people will find them ugly and maybe they won't get promoted or get a date etc. In 300 years people might look back and think we were so strange.
The point of course isn't that brushing teeth is no use; it's just about looking at the familiar in an unfamiliar way. That's how I think philosophy makes progress, when doing so bears fruit. So the fact there's no big-time convergence might well just be because more than one point of view bears a lot of fruit and there's not always a need to make it all or nothing, either/or.
I wonder if how we answer certain fundamental, persistent questions might depend on a kind of Gestalt switch in perceptions as discussed (in the context of modern science) by Kuhn, for example; the question then becomes to what extent this switch may be merely expressivist or whether or not there is a kind of logic behind such (or perhaps another set) of choices. One such logic might be sociological, as Chalmers has pointed out, but perhaps there might be an, for lack of a better word, 'anthropological' basis as well, that would govern structures that are longer lived or more extensive than those grounded in sociological explanations. I think something like the former is necessary, because only these kinds of explanations can explain the persistence and re-occurrence of fundamental questions, and their possible answers, across cultures and over time.
By 'govern', I mean, rather roughly, the sense in which Heidegger claimed that 'Metaphysics grounds an age', and the reasons for the kinds of answers to 'What is', that Heidegger claimed to underlie the interpretation of the metaphysics in question, could be sought in certain kinds of anthropologically analyzable situations that might be linked with the age in question, such as, for example, the group-individual relationship (without being, one hopes, crudely reductionist).
I'm not sure whether or not this (the existence of such an underlying logic) implies that there is progress in philosophy or not (it probably doesn't), but at least we are left with something more structured than what pure anti-realism would imply.
Chalmers claims that little progress has been made in philosophy. But he seems to be unaware of the substantial and unquestionable progress I make in my [omitted for blind review].
I argue that seeming lack of progress in philosophy mainly reflects our being quite far from the end of inquiry so far as philosophical method is concerned. More deets here: http://individual.utoronto.ca/jmwilson/TDoMM.doc
BL COMMENT: Could someone please provide the scheduled date for the end of inquiry in philosophy?
It's fine to remark that much of analytic philosophy (and much of philosophy simpliciter) is about reaching truth, as Dr. Chalmers does. But that's consistent with the idea that true belief is only one moment in the quest to greater understanding of ourselves in relation to the world and each other. For that reason, I would have liked to have seen him give more reasons for taking the 'primacy of knowledge' view.
I tend to favor the 'primacy of understanding' view. However, even if this were the correct view to take, it would not be obvious that philosophers make any progress.
Offhand, it seems to me we can say that we've achieved progress of understanding when our work has three features: productivity, consensus, and irreversibility. I think it is right to say that philosophers enjoy moments of productive consensus. For example, in Dr. Chalmers' survey, the majority of respondents indicated that they favored metaphysical realism, and very few endorsed skepticism. But it is not so clear to me that these moments of consensus will never be reversed.
Perhaps the whole allure of the 'primacy of knowledge' view is the idea that, once you have arrived at the truth, it shall not be reversed. If truth is primary, then we can be confident that tomorrow we will not find out that the greater portion of the existing literature is, on balance, unacceptable. But, speaking for myself, I don't tend to care as much about reversibility as I do about productivity. e.g., according to a certain narrative, Gettier 'reversed' the J(i)TB theory of knowledge. Yet even if we accepted that this was a bonefide reversal, I would still like to say that the paper was enormously productive.
In his Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Philosophical Issues and Achievements (The MIT Press, 1997), Clark Glymour provides an unusually accessible account of the evidence for some of David Wallace's claims. See the Preface at http://books.google.com/books?id=PHoxcIbPtuIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=preface&f=false
I think we should be sensitive to the possibility that our idea of "progress in philosophy" has been substantially warped by too many comparisons with the natural sciences. Philosophy, if it is at all scientific, is much more like the social-interpretive sciences (you know, the Geisteswissenschaften), and the more relevant comparison is with progress in *those* disciplines. So, what does it mean to make progress in history or cultural anthropology? It means to understand the relevant social/psychological/historical forms better than we used to. By this sort of standard, I would actually argue that we are living in a philosophical golden age.
Think of the incredibly nuanced picture we now have of scientific inquiry, or of the extraordinary insights into ethical concepts and moral psychology made in the last 150 years. (There is more convergence here than Prof. Chalmers realizes: we don't notice it because we all share in it.) Compare what we say now to what was said 400 years ago: the difference is palpable. However, you will only notice this difference when you drop the idea that "progress" is univocal, that it names the same phenomenon in all disciplines.
Chalmers identifies two ways in which there has not been convergence in philosophy: 1) regarding the answers to the big questions, and 2) regarding the method for answering the big questions. I think there is a third way in which there has not been convergence: 3) regarding the interpretation of the big questions.
Consider the mind-body problem. The disagreement between dualists and materialists is an example of (1). The disagreement between proponents of naturalism, conceptual analysis, phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, etc. is an example of (2). The disagreement between, say, McDowell’s and Lewis’s views on whether the mind-body problem as articulated by Descartes is confused/passe is an example of (3). McDowell and Lewis can agree that the mind-body problem is a paradigmatic big question in philosophy. But this agreement by itself doesn’t amount to much, since they differ so much on what that problem is and how we should think about it.
It seems to me Chalmers is actually underestimating the level of divergence in philosophy. (1) and (2) are pretty significant, but they pale in comparison to divergences along (3). To take a different example, consider Nietzsche’s attacks on the views of Mill and Kant. Nietzsche has disagreements with Mill and Kant along (1) and (2), but this is connected to his disagreement with them along (3); he thinks that the way Mill and Kant understand the questions of moral philosophy involve a misunderstanding of morality and human nature. It seems to me intrinsic to a disagreement along (3) that the two sides are almost suspicious of the other side, the way that Nietzsche is suspicious of Kants’ views or that Fodor can seem suspicious of Wittgensteinian practices, or Ryle is suspicious of Descartes’ views. This kind of suspicion is not mere lacking in charity, but is perhaps something more positive and powerful. It seems to me philosophy would lose one of its essential features if this kind of disagreement was lost.
Perhaps as Chalmers suggests old controversies and questions are endlessly appearing in new forms; thus with his quest
It was a commonplace in medieval theology that the philosophers of antiquity could
not agree about anything, whereas the theologians of the Church spoke with one
voice. In the De civitate Dei Augustine treats the theme, and Lactantius devoted
an entire book of his Divinae institutiones to the subject.
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