There Is No Progress in Philosophy

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy’s inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy’s future. If we doubt, as many do, that non-scientific fields make progress, that cannot be because individual schools make none. Rather, it must be because there are always competing schools, each of which constantly questions the very foundations of the others. The man who argues that philosophy, for example, has made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristotelianism has failed to progress. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (second edition), pp. 162-163. 1. How Philosophy is like Science I’m a professor in a philosophy department. Most of my philosophical colleagues study ethics of one sort or another. We have in our department several consequentialists, a couple of deontologists and moral essentialists, a couple of virtue ethicists, and a few relativists. It is a commonplace that these views, at least in certain well-known formulations, are incompatible with each other. Certainly, most of my colleagues believe this. Most also believe that he or she _____________________________ Corresponding Author: E. Dietrich Binghamton University email dietrich@binghamton.edu Essays Philos (2011) 12:2 Dietrich | 330 is right. Since they also believe in theory-incompatibalism, they believe that their colleagues are wrong. The consequentialists (a group to which I do not belong) are particularly vociferous (no doubt just by chance). They passionately and earnestly explain to the rest of us that we are wrong, and they give us arguments both old and new to get us to change our views. We never do. This is not to say that their arguments don’t affect us. Like philosophers everywhere and of every stripe, we nonconsequentialists are strongly affected by our colleagues’ arguments for consequentialism: they cause us to draw distinctions and find false premises and errors in our colleagues’ reasoning. Of course, when we point these out, the consequentialists, like us, don’t change their minds; they muster even more resolve and begin afresh. Religion is also important in my department. Here matters are even more pointed, which is obvious from the fact that discussions about religion are far more polite than discussions about ethics. The theists think that the atheists are benighted, and vice versa. The Buddhists think both are sadly confused, and will only lose their confusion after many more cycles of death and rebirth. Since religions carry robust ontological commitments, the disagreements here about who’s right and who’s wrong are disagreements about the actual structure and content of the universe; they are disagreements about what kind of universe we live in. Arguments here are even more inefficacious than the ethical arguments discussed above. These two cases – ethics and religion – are local instantiations of the way philosophers behave and have behaved since philosophy first appeared in humankind, which is probably contemporaneous with the emergence of language. Philosophers strongly disagree with each other, arguments rarely change any philosopher’s mind (though sometimes arguments awaken a philosopher from his or her dogmatic slumbers), and they think the other is wrong and has made mistakes, rather than thinking that each other merely has a different take on the relevant facts. In thus behaving as they do, philosophers are acting almost exactly like scientists (and mathematicians). To see this, compare the situation in my department with the one across campus in the biology department. We have, at Binghamton University, a wellknown biologist – David Sloan Wilson – who has for decades developed and argued for an important addition to the current theory of evolution: group selection theory. In group selection theory, selection pressures act not only on individuals (or genes), but also on groups of similar individuals, called trait groups. Wilson uses group selection to explain such things as the evolution of altruism and cooperation, for which group selection works quite nicely and apparently better than models based on gene selection. Wilson’s view is more complicated than this brief description; for example, group Essays Philos (2011) 12:2 Dietrich | 331 selection is but one part of his larger theory called multilevel selection theory, which posits selection occurring at several different levels: gene, cell, organism, group (see, Sober and Wilson, 1998; Wilson, 1975; Wilson and Sober, 1994; and Wilson and Wilson, 2008). Nevertheless, this will do for our purposes. Group selection is roundly rejected and even savagely attacked by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who reject it as either wrong or at best inconsequential (see, e.g., Dawkins, 1994, and Dennett, 2006). Group selection was banned from evolutionary biology back in the late 1960s mostly due to the late George Williams (Williams, 1972) -the reasons are complex and sociological rather than scientific. But thanks to David Wilson and other biologists like him, group selection is making a comeback and finding a home in evolutionary theory. Dawkins and Dennett remain unpersuaded by Wilson’s arguments. Wilson thinks they’re wrong; they think he’s wrong. For every argument Wilson musters, Dawkins and Dennett gear up their distinction-making and fault-finding in order to refute Wilson, and vice versa. One is strongly reminded of the old saw “Scientific debates are won only when the combatants die and a new generation comes of age adopting the new theories.” If group (and multilevel) selection theory does eventually win, it will be because a new generation of biologists embraces them. It is remarkable how common this is in science. Einstein apparently went to his grave believing that quantum mechanics was wrong (even though he helped create it). Henri Poincare, Leopold Kronecker, L. Brower, and L. Wittgenstein went to theirs believing that Georg Cantor’s theories of transfinite numbers were not just wrong, but “a grave disease,” to quote Poincare. Though few in number, legitimate scientists to this day disbelieve evolutionary theory, preferring instead some sort of creation-by-intelligentagent(s) theory. No doubt they will go to their graves maintaining such beliefs (and vice versa for evolutionists). There are counterexamples, of course. Robert Bakker’s theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, fast, and smart is now (with some variation) the received view, and it has become the received view in his lifetime. There is an appropriate and expiating irony here though: Bakker refuses to accept the asteroid/comet impact theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs, and this despite the 2010 publication in Science of a major paper strongly supporting the theory (Schulte, et al. 2010). So, no one can convince one’s opponent. All one can hope to do is convince the next, younger generation. Good theories, better theories, do just this. This behavior even probably makes sense, in the long run, for if we surrendered our cherished scientific theories too easily, we would not be sufficiently testing and stressing our theories for them to be legitimately awarded the coveted honorific: True. Thus does science lurch forward. Essays Philos (2011) 12:2 Dietrich | 332 But what of philosophy? It clearly does look a lot like science here: no one can convince one’s opponent, etc. etc. Does it also thus lurch forward?