Topics Philosophy

Question Why can't philosophers agree? In the natural sciences you seem to find disagreements at the frontiers of new research, but after a sufficient time has elapsed, agreement is reached and the frontiers advance to new areas of enquiry. The research takes place in professional journals, then the final story makes it into textbooks, with undergraduates in the natural sciences reading only the textbooks. In philosophy, undergraduates read journals as much as anything else, and the textbooks are as controversial as the journals. In what does progress in philosophy consist?

Accepted:
April 24, 2006

Comments

Philosophers don't all agree because they won't listen to me! Just kidding! In fact, I would really hate it if everyone's reactions to my views were: Oh, right. Well, that's it, then! That would be the end of philosophy, and I would not want to contribute to that!

There are lots of differences between what science does and what philosophy does, and one of these difference has to do with what I would call the domain of "appropriate responses." In science, the appropriate responses include (but are not entirely limited to): accept the theory and the data offered in its support, or hold the theory in suspence while one seeks to replicate (or fail to replicate) the data offered in support, or reject the theory because one has some other data that are incompatible with the theory.

Much of what happens in philosophy (both where progress is made and where it is stalled) happens because we do not have access to the sort of data that clearly confirm or disconfirm our theories. Our process is far less neat and far less orderly than that--we are still playing by the same rules the ancient philosopher Socrates worked with. One philosopher declares some theory, and then the rest of us, acting like Socrates, try to come up with reasons for thinking the theory is false, flawed, or incomplete. In a way, then, the highest honor and attention one philosopher can give to another's work (though it doesn't always feel this way, mind you!) is to attempt to refute the other's work, because most philosophical attention is critical attention--someone devoting the time and intellectual resources to refuting my work is announcing to the world that he or she finds my work important enough to merit such attention, rather than best forgotten in silence. Best friends in the field are often one another's philosophical critics in the profession--and that is because we understand the ethos of philosophical activity, and philosophical progress: We kind of back into the future, by refuting present theories and then trying to figure out what that shows us for any future theoretical attempt.

So one reason philosophers never seem to agree is that we're not supposed to agree! Our job is to disagree, to a very substantial degree, because in that way, we do our best to test whether the theories before us are true. If the best minds in the field can't find a way to disagree...well, then, maybe that would be The Final Answer. But whole careers in philosophy are made by coming up with new disagreements, and so we are very disinclined to agree with one another's theories--because by agreeing, we are, in effect, acknowledging that we are not clever enough to have found whatever flaws might be there.

But this does not mean we do not make progress. There certainly are philosophical theories that have been given up for good (and for good reasons), and by practicing our critical form of "quality control," it is very plain that our theories now are a great deal more sophisticated (and less easily refuted) than those whose flaws we have studied, and learned by heart in our training.