Question Two questions. It seems that no one has figured out good standards for acceptance or rejection of philosophical arguments. In science, observation is king. If evidence contradicts a theory under careful conditions, the theory is false. In math, we justify things formally; we cannot expect more certainty. So would you agree that philosophy, as a field that aims at knowledge and not something else like evoking emotions, suffers from a lack of standards? And since at the moment I suspect it does, I want to ask also, why do philosophers act so certain? To them their arguments are true or correct (or whatever) without empirical evidence or rigorous proof. They should be the most uncertain people of all, even more so than scientists. And they are pretty darn humble. (A better way to ask this might be, aren't proof and evidence the two best ways to knowledge? If so, shouldn't philosophers be much more uncertain than they appear (to me)? I now realize it's dependent on how I see things, so I only hope you can sympathize.)

Accepted:
May 8, 2008

Comments

The kinds of reasons that are given for favoring one scientific theory over its rivals are a good deal more subtle than "observation is king." To begin with, a theory need not be justly rejected merely because it conflicts with a given observation; sometimes, the observation is appropriately doubted, and sometimes, a given theory is rationally retained despite its failure to fit our observations because blame for the mismatch is placed on other theories ("auxiliary hypotheses") that were used to bring the theory to bear on those observations. (The Copernican model of the solar system, for instance, was retained despite 300 years of failure to observe the stellar parallax it apparently predicts.) By the same token, a theory that fits our observations very well may nevertheless be justly and emphatically rejected on the grounds that it is ad hoc, fails to fit nicely with our other theories, lacks unity or fruitfulness or explanatory power, etc.

Once these familiar features of scientific practice are recognized, then I think the choice among theories in philosophy seems not so dissimilar to the choice among competing scientific theories. Admittedly, much of philosophy is a priori, unlike science. However, the virtues of elegance, parsimony, unity, coherence, explanatory power, and so forth play significant roles in both scientific and philosophical theory-choice.

Finally, philosophy has long been and is increasingly brought into contact with empirical results. A philosophical analysis of causal relations, for instance, that fails to do justice to modern physics has a severe deficiency. Of course, philosophers will disagree about the extent to which modern physics (or even classical physics) discovers causal relations, as well as disagreeing about what physics has revealed about them. Nevertheless, philosophical theorizing hardly takes place in isolation from empirical results. Recent literature in the philosophy of mind and perception offers a host of tremendously potent examples of this.

Just a footnote to Marc Lange's response (which seems spot on to me). It is worth adding that in serious analytical philosophy there is actually a good deal more agreement on arguments than there might appear to be at first sight, and there is a good deal of pretty secure knowledge.

For what often emerges from the to and fro of debate is essentially something of the form "If you accept A, B and C, then you'd better accept D too". Then one party might endorse A, B and C and conclude that D; and another party might think D is unacceptable, and conclude that one of A, B, or C must be wrong. And another party again (me, often!) might not know how to respond. [A trite example. If you accept act utilitarianism plus some other things, it seems that you should sanction the sheriff hanging an innocent man if that is the way to stop a riot in which more innocent people are killed. Some bite the bullett, some think so much the worse for utilitarianism.]

Now, there may indeed be a loud disagreement between the first two parties. But a lot of hard thinking may have gone into working out what they agree on, namely that "If you accept A, B and C, then you'd better accept D too". [For example, initially people might have thought, wrongly, that accepting A and B alone forced conclusion D, and it took some subtle argument to show that C was playing a role too. Working out what act utilitarianism really does sanction is like this.] And finding that sort of connection can represent a solid achievement of which we can be tolerably certain, even while there remains vigorous disagreement about what to do with the discovery.