Question The average American doubtless knows more about subjects like math, history and science than did an average American 200 years ago. Does philosophy also enjoy this kind of broad progress? Is the average person more philosophically able now than in the past? Or are advances in philosophy typically enjoyed only by specialists?

Accepted:
June 3, 2008

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Answering this question isn't altogether easy, for two reasons. The first is that we need to get some sort of a clear fix on what philosophical ability amounts to. And supposing we were able to sort that out, the next problem is that the question is an empirical one -- a matter of what the facts are -- and here philosophers have no special expertise. Compare: suppose we wanted to know whether the average person is more mathematically able than people were say, 50 years ago. There might well be data around that could give us a fix on this; perhaps someone even has some sort of reasonable answer. But while mathematicians will have something to say about what counts as mathematical ability, they aren't likely to have any special insight into the distribution of mathematical ability in the population.

Still, in the mathematical case we might expect to get some sort of broad agreement about what counts as mathematical ability. The ability to come up with solutions to certain sorts of problems would be a pretty good index, one would think. And there would be a clear criterion of what counts as success in solving the problem. But the very question of what counts as a philosophical question, let alone what counts as a good answer, let alone what counts as the best way to approach philosophical questions lands us in philosophical controversy.

All this means that it would be hard even to devise the relevant study. But in spite of this, I'll offer a small thought and a speculation. The small thought is that while criticial thinking skills matter across the board, they are particularly important in philosophy. The ability to make clear distinctions, to assess the quality of arguments, to have a feel for the limits of one's own knowledge and understanding, to be able to see more than one side of a question and related skills are arguably at the core of what almost all philosophers would count as good philosophy. And my sad speculation is that on average, people aren't any better at this than they ever were. Bear in mind that this is just a hunch. But shoddy thinking seems to be as much of a problem as it ever was, the difference being that these days we have the technology to spread bad thinking around the world in ways undreamt of by intellectual knaves of days gone by.