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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Progress in Philosophy Revisited

UrizenusSklar

Two years ago I took part in panel in a conference on progress in
philosophy.  (The contributions of me,
Jennifer Nagel  and Dave Chalmers  are still online — I had a tech fail in recording Pettit’s contribution).  My view was and is that philosophical
progress is robust – the growth is Fibonacci (think of a tree branching).  Just speaking from what I’ve seen in areas of
philosophy that I am familiar with, the grown and development has been astounding
over the last thirty years.

Fibonacci growth is impressive, but is it enough?  The second part of my talk was that it is not
nearly enough.

Many people are familiar with Kurzweil’s thesis about the
exponential growth in technology leading to a kind of technological
singularity.   Singularity happens when you hit the elbow in
the exponential curve and the curve effectively shoot straight up (or appears
to).  If that is right, then the
technological curve is pulling away from the philosophy curve very rapidly and
is about to leave it completely behind. 
What that means is that our technology is going to leave our critical
thinking skills behind.  You may think
that is already happening, and I agree: I’m just saying the problem is about to
get much worse.

It doesn’t have to get worse.  The only reason that technology grows
exponentially is that we keep feeding it resources.  The only reason philosophy doesn’t is that we
starve it for resources (we don’t have enough bodies to throw at philosophical
problems).  I say we need to seriously
think about redistributing resources away from technological development and
into philosophy, and allow philosophy departments to grow new programs that
focus on new technologies and their development.  Why would anyone do this?  Well, someone needs to make vivid what can go
wrong if we don’t.  One idea is that if
we don’t understand technology we become alienated from it – a view that I floated
yesterday. 

So here are some questions for discussion.  Is philosophy making the kind of progress I
believe it is?  Is technology pulling
away from us as Kurzweil believes it is? 
Is this a problem?  Can we fix
it?  If so, how?

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24 responses to “Progress in Philosophy Revisited”

  1. Brad

    Peter,
    Your comparison of the pattern of progress in philosophy is similar to an argument developed by Andrew Abbott, a social scientist, at University of Chicago. Abbott says progress in some of the social sciences is less obvious than progress in the natural sciences. In his book *Chaos of Disciplines* Abbott suggests that the development of ideas in the social sciences has a fractal pattern. The social sciences are recycling old concepts, but combined in different ways, they give rise to new insights. I doubt I can do justice to his view in this short post, but I recommend that you (and others) look at it.

    Reply
  2. Michael B

    I'm not sure if this will be fruitful for the discussion but I tend to think of philosophy as analogous to engineering (an idea stolen from Simon Blackburn). What I mean is, engineers have to have a good working knowledge of various sciences relevant to their discipline, as well as practical factors like budget, ethics, environment, business, scheduling, law and more. And they solve very specific, practical problems needed here and now. The teleological question of progress is sort of peripheral: are engineers concerned with building the perfect locomotive vehicle? That specification is so vague as to be useless. For some terrains and some users, a horse is better than a car, but a submarine is better than a horse. I'm not suggesting relativism: some problem/solution pairs are better than others. But that context is relevant.

    So I see philosophy in the same way: one needs to know relevant facts from various disciplines relevant to one's area (be it physics, psychology, ecology, sport, whatever) as well as practical factors – you are ultimately producing something, however abstract, for some particular audience or set of users –

    I don't know what the teleology of philosophy is supposed to be, such that we can say we are making progress towards it or not. (I don't think this is exclusive to philosophy. I feel the same way about drama or mathematics.) And, probably because I lack the imagination, I'm not sure how useful a guiding principle for progress such an aim would be, given the huge range of philosophical areas, methods and questions.

    Reply
  3. Michael Lynch

    These are terrific questions. Russell made a similar plea right after WWII. I don't pretend to have answers, but I will say this: The current technological revolution is also driving changes in how we acquire, distribute and analyze knowledge and information. One thing we as philosophers need to do is think hard about how these changes affect how we value knowledge and even whether they are changing what knowledge is (or at least our concept of it). These are real philosophical issues, and the tools of analytic philosophy can and should be used to address them. Social epistemologists are starting to do so, but more work is needed.
    Thanks for raising this.

    Reply
  4. Will

    How do we convey socio-technological critiques (assuming we, the 'philosophy community' believe them to be true) to people *outside* of philosophy? To the folks on the streets, the policy makers, the politicians, the research scientists, the engineers, etc? Not to pull out that infamous Marx quote, but I think we need to actually STOP doing philosophy and start getting it *out there*…which will definitely pose a challenge. How do you explain to the layman Hediegger's critique of technology without talking about the beginning of Western metaphysics and brining in a slew of new terms to the table.

    Reply
  5. Joe Hatfield

    Philosophy neither equates with nor exhausts "our critical thinking." So how could a relative deficit in philosophical progress mean, as Peter says, "our technology is going to leave our critical thinking skills behind"? Philosophers (I'm one by the way) delude themselves when they consider critical thinking our own special domain – something we're particularly good at vis-à-vis other disciplines.

    Clearing this point up is probably a semantic issue. What does "technology" and "progress" mean here (and "philosophy" for that matter)? I'm not sure I even understand the question.

    But anyway, philosophy is often demarcated in such a way to prevent "progress" by definition. Dewey perceptively wrote that "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men." ("The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy," 1917)

    Seems to me that a HUGE chunk of philosophy could simply vanish and nobody would notice, miss it, or be the worse off. I'm saying this neither as a hard core pragmatist nor as a hard core Wittgensteinian quietist. Rather, it's an empirical point. I used to hear this line from people and think that they were just being pedestrian, lacking an understanding of how debates far removed from human activities can (over time) come to shape the entire landscape of the human psyche. This sometimes does happen, but in the VAST MAJORITY of cases Dewey's observation is more fitting to the type of activity that goes on in the academic world. In this pejorative sense, philosophy becomes a self-licking ice cream cone.

    When philosophy becomes this disconnected from issues that really concern us, even very abstractly, it almost by definition loses any way to demonstrate "progress" as that term is ordinarily defined. And yes, that is a bad thing.

    Reply
  6. Ian

    Maybe this will just show that my critical thinking skills have already been left behind, but I don't understand the situation Sklar is describing. How is philosophical progress supposed to map onto technological progress? How do you know if technology is "pulling away" from philosophy? Is philosophy falling behind if there is great progress in 3D printing, but no developed, engaged, informed philosophy of 3D printing? If it were that simple, then surely philosophy would be well ahead of technology, since philosophers have been thinking about teleportation machines and brain splitters and experience machines for many years, but technology don't got 'em yet.

    Reply
  7. a little birdie

    If we can – and I'm confident that we can – teach a great many people to think the way Aristotle (and Aquinas and Rand and perhaps Hegel) thought, then we shouldn't have any problems with all that.

    Reply
  8. UrizenusSklar

    >Is philosophy falling behind if there is great progress in 3D printing, but no developed, engaged, informed philosophy of 3D printing?

    We *should* be thinking about the consequences of 3D printing. What happens to manufacturing and jobs when we can 3D print whatever we need (or don't need)? What happens when everything becomes intellectual property plus whatever chemicals go into 3D printers? What are the consequences for food and nutrition? But the cases I was thinking of involved things like cloning, end/beginning of life questions made salient by technological developments, technologies that observe behavior and detect intent and mood and so forth.

    Reply
  9. Ben Wolfson

    The fibonacci sequence exhibits exponential growth, so it's somewhat astounding to hear that progress in philosophy emulates it, and that it's not enough.

    Reply
  10. Ben Wolfson

    (And of course it's also startling to read shortly after that philosophy does *not* exhibit exponential growth.)

    Reply
  11. UrizenusSklar

    True, fibonacci growth can be modeled by an exponential function with 1.6 as the base. But if it is paired against a function with 2 as the base the curves still pull away from each other rapidly. Which was sort of the point. Think of Moore's Law where the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.

    Reply
  12. not-a-philosopher

    I think Peter's point regarding the tech curve pulling away from the phil curve isn't that doing philosophy is the extent of our ability to think critically, nor that philosophers need to worry more about fantastical "science fiction" scenarios like brains in vats—as useful as these might be for illustrating our commitments. I bet it's just that as a society we need to put more energy into thinking through the consequences of our actual actions. And that philosophers can be particularly skilled at doing this. Whatever problems philosophy addresses in the process, two guiding tasks are surely (1) semantic maintenance of our cognitive systems (2) in the service of deciding what to do (this, at least, is a metaphilosophy which has ancient roots and which Sellars, for one, has brilliantly defended). But to the extent that philosophers fail to keep up with changes caused by the exponential growth of information technology, technological progress can be said to outstrip philosophical progress. Because if we don't understand our world we can't reason clearly about it. The point is almost exactly similar to why philosophers need to keep up with scientific progress. The only difference is that with technology we as a species are actively manipulating the world we inherited.

    Reply
  13. Tristan Haze

    'Singularity happens when you hit the elbow in the exponential curve and the curve effectively shoot straight up (or appears to). If that is right, then the technological curve is pulling away from the philosophy curve very rapidly and is about to leave it completely behind. What that means is that our technology is going to leave our critical thinking skills behind.'

    It seems to me that the essential, key idea behind the notion of the singularity hasn't been indicated here. As I understand it, it is crucial to the contemporary notion of the singularity that it occurs at the point when, roughly, we invent an artificial intelligence which is better at designing artificial intelligences than we are. It's not about "mere" exponential growth in technology, or some area of technology.

    If this happens, it doesn't seem obvious to me that we can think of it in terms of technology getting away from 'us'. Couldn't we think of the event as a transformation of, or a major addition to, 'us'? Perhaps these inventions, if they come, will be vastly superior at philosophy as well. So what are we talking about, exactly, when we are talking about philosophy keeping up: philosophy as can be comprehended by some humans today, or whatever philosophy would become in the hands of higher intelligences?

    Reply
  14. ben w

    "Can be modeled by" is an odd expression given the existence of an exact exponential closed formula for the nth Fibonacci number, like saying that the growth of the powers of two can be modeled by an exponential function with 2 as the base. Very well modeled indeed! The Fibonacci series just plain old does exhibit exponential growth, and if philosophy progresses at a similar clip, so does philosophy. Surely the point of saying that philosophy does *not* exhibit exponential growth can't be that philosophy *does* exhibit exponential growth, but not enough.

    The existence of even more rapidly growing exponential functions doesn't alter that, nor, frankly, am I sure what the significance of Moore's law, if it's a stand-in for the equally opaque "technology curve", is. (I'm not sure exactly what the points on the philosophy curve are (nuggets of wisdom? "results", whatever they are? least publishable units published?), but the meaningfulness of comparing the growth of that curve to the number of transistors in a circuit escapes me.)

    Reply
  15. David Wallace

    For an exponential function of time, its "base" isn't a well-defined property. If you don't like the fact that philosophical growth is an exponential function with 1.6 as the base, multiply your unit of time by ln(2)/ln(1.6) and voila, an exponential process with 2 as the base.

    If you want to say that philosophy and technology both exhibit exponential growth but one is faster than another, the right comparison is doubling time: philosophical knowledge doubles ever 30 years but technological knowledge doubles every 10 years, say. (But being a Fibonacci process is neither here nor there: since the Fibonacci process approaches an exponential function, it can be used to model any exponential function you like with an appropriate choice of time unit.)

    Reply
  16. Robert

    Peter,
    I really think you underestimate the problem here. Whereas technology becomes more and more adaptable to the non-technology-oriented (even fostered by the fact that we emphasize the importance of technology for our daily live in school), the same is clearly not true for philosophy (with some exceptions). So even if the growth of „philosophical progress“ and „technological progress“ were on par, they would differ a lot in how fast they could related to the vast majority of people out there. This again leads to serious problems (call it a vicious circle), where funding for philosophy is more and more cut even IF something like true philosophical progress existed. Which then again would lead to the problems of bad distribution of resources..

    Reply
  17. MARK

    Philosophy does not progress because its contemporary proponents have capitulated to empiricism. In the past 150 years philosophers worked on the question of scientific epistemology, not philosophy. Today we pretty much know how science works. Philosophy in terms of natural philosophy, as it was once called, is doing quite well in theoretical physics and cosmology. It does not need philosophers. So long as philosophy remains in the realm of orthodox naturalism; so long as its ordained metaphysics is material, it will continue to be irrelevant.

    Reply
  18. Joe

    But why would these things be of special concerns to philosophers? we are hardly the only ones interested in and capable of answering and thinking about these questions. In fact, we might not be even the best qualified to do so.

    Reply
  19. Anne Jacobson

    Simon Blackburn, in a Times Higher Ed review of Dan Kelly's "Yuck!", says he thinks there is a new genre in philosophy which is making genuine progress. It is/results from the combination of philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary studies (and perhaps a few more).
    I agree, but I think there are lots of people in our profession who think a problem is shown to be uninteresting if it is shown to involve the empirical sciences.

    Reply
  20. DavidRLogan

    Interesting discussion, everyone! I like Joe Hatfield's considerations regarding that which might constitute "our critical thinking." I agree philosophy does not constitute such thinking entirely, but here is maybe a positive for philosophy: perhaps I am very naive, but philosophy is seemingly at least somewhat removed from the financial and reputational spoils of *progress*. Take Kurzweil, for contrast. Kurzweil and the rest of the constantly-laden-with-new-gadgets crowd always argue that progress and change are good, a position that is only semi-defensible in itself, but more importantly a position that (conveniently) doubles as their business strategy and avenue for self-promotion. The truth is Kurzweil MUST argue progress is good…it's the only reason he's publicly necessary.

    Please contrast to philosopher Allen Buchanan, who does very interesting work on genetic enhancement. I personally don't agree with the majority of his arguments, but I would admit that 1)he is rigorous, as professional philosophy tends to be, and 2)his arguments are seemingly removed from this "don't ask the barber if you need a haircut" problem. If Buchanan championed the exact opposite conclusions then his life, reputation, and financial position would seemingly be the same.

    So, my thought is there may be many critical thinkers in other fields, but we need to be careful to cultivate critical thinkers for whom critical thinking is an end in itself. Pouring resources into philosophy strikes me as a good move toward such an objective.

    Reply
  21. David Wallace

    The "base" of an exponential function of time isn't actually well defined. Prefer your exponential function to have base 2 rather than base 1.6? Just scale the unit of time by log 2/log 1.6.

    The right way to make a comparison is by looking at respective doubling times (or e-folding times, or 1.6- folding times). And any such process can be modelled with high accuracy by a Fibonacci series – Moore's law, for instance, is modelled by a Fibonacci series with time step 1.35 years.

    Reply
  22. David Velleman

    There are two distinct questions. First: Does philosophy go around in circles, continually returning to the same place, or does it go to ever new places? Second: If philosophy goes places, are they better, more advanced places or just different?
    I care about the first question. I wouldn't want to be involved in a cultural tradition that went nowhere. But I don't care at all about the second question. So long as our discipline is going places — and so long as they're interesting places — I'm perfectly satisfied.

    Reply
  23. Adam Streed

    There is no reason to worry about the singularity. Where is the energy to power the thing going to come from? We're already at the beginning of global energy decline, where fossil energy sources are harder to get, more expensive to unlock, and have shorter production lives. Alternative energy is in general more intermittent, and far lower energy return on energy investment.

    This isn't to say we shouldn't cultivate philosophical criticism of technologies new and old. But worrying about technology "growing exponentially" (whatever that means) is like worrying about which human cities are next to be struck down by Zeus. They don't call the singularity "the nerd rapture" for nothing.

    Reply
  24. A. Luboff

    When technology develops much faster than philosophy, that is, much faster than our ability to reflect on it and to think carefully about how best to integrate it (or not) into the fabric of our lives, then we suffer at least two very serious negative consequences. First, technology presents our own work and knowledge back to us in a form that we can no longer recognize as originating in ourselves and therefore can no longer consciously and responsibly direct. We find ourselves at the whim of forces that, though they originated in us, rule us (and much of our planet) without reflection or compassion. Second, the presence of ever-changing and augmenting technology in our daily lives disrupts the rhythms, structures and relationships that constitute us as individuals and as a society, without repairing or replacing these with true alternatives. We can barely locate ourselves to take in the experience of alienation in the first place.

    The sort of progress that science and technology exhibit is extensional. They increasingly describe and take control of more and more of the material world and with greater precision. Philosophy over the last so many years may exhibit an analogous sort of progress, analyzing more and more texts, opening up new sub-disciplines, constructing new arguments; I do not feel that I know the discipline well enough to say. Extensional progress, however, means very little if it is not made in relation to our own lives, in the context of consciously acting and reflectively being in the world. Without that direct connection to us, progress produces nothing more than a clutter of information and things. I believe it would be much more meaningful to turn round and round in circles, if in tracing and re-tracing our steps we find ourselves connected back to the center, and can at least sometimes feel in turning there that we catch glimpses of the truth.

    Philosophers can help to address the problem of technology pulling away from us by:
    (1) Identifying and explaining alienation in clear terms. There is no need for Heideggerian language. I used to accomplish this by taking groups of Western tourists to spend some time with the natives of the Ecuadorian rainforest, but the same sorts of lessons can be learned through narratives drawing out the contrasts between our way of life and less alienated ones, and through somewhat less dramatic experiences, like going camping.
    (2) Leading thought into action. We cannot stop with an analysis of alienation; we have to reclaim our alienated work and knowledge. This means taking responsibility for and giving thoughtful stewardship to the development of technology, to the forces driving this change, and to all of their consequences. We have not truly understood alienation if we cannot comprehend the need to overcome it and to take action in our own lives. We must not only encourage our students and society in this process, but be examples of responsible action ourselves.

    Reply

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