[FOM] Progress in Philosophy

[Timothy Y. Chow]

"Studtmann, Paul" <pastudtmann at davidson.edu> wrote:
> Now, I expect the answer to the question is 'no'.  But if I am wrong, I 
> would like to hear which arguments and which theses are part of the 
> correct philosophical theory.  But is such a question, as Chow suggests 
> (though without any argumentation), seriously misguided?  Well, there 
> are some good reasons to think not.  First, philosophers still try to 
> establish substantive philosophical theses through argumentation.  How 
> do I know?  Because I read and listen to them all the time.  Second, 
> philosophers still put forward theses as if they are correct and should 
> be accepted.  Indeed, Chow's assertion about what is and what is not 
> seriously misguided in philosophy is itself one such assertion.

Depending on what you mean by "accepted," I may or may not agree with your 
assertion about my assertion.  I certainly do *not* put forward my 
statement (about what is or is not misguided in philosophy) with the 
expectation that said statement should be "accepted" in any sense that is 
directly analogous to the way statements in math and science are accepted.

It does nothing for your thesis merely to exhibit assertions by 
philosophers that they support by argument.  I can pick up a magazine at 
the grocery store and show you arguments that such-and-such a person is 
the sexiest celebrity alive, that are put forward with the expectation 
that the conclusion will be "accepted" in some sense.  They are certainly 
not put forward with the expectation that their conclusions will be 
definitive, ending all debate on the matter.

Despite your disavowal of the term "settling debate," it appears that you 
still define a "philosophical optimist" as someone who hopes that major 
philosophical debates will be settled.  For example, it appears that your 
philosophical optimist would not be satisfied with a scenario in which 
there simultaneously existed n > 1 disjoint groups of philosophers, each 
of which had developed a systematic body of argumentation with answers to 
most major philosophical questions, but which were mutually contradictory.  
The optimist would probably not be satisfied even if exactly one of those 
groups were *right*, and he were a member of that privileged group.  The 
optimist would regard the situation as unsatisfactory unless n = 1.

It is unclear to me why you espouse the view of this optimist, or even why 
you use the term "optimism" to describe it.  For example, avoidance of 
bullshit, in yours or Frankfurt's sense, does not require n = 1.  For 
another example, another view of "progress" could be that the goal of 
philosophy is to continually come up with new arguments on philosophical 
questions; the "optimist" would then be the one who believes in the 
inexhaustibility of human ingenuity and who believes that debates will 
*never* be settled (doing so would "kill" philosophy, and what optimist 
favors death?).

Perhaps "philosophical scientist" is a less misleading term than 
"philosophical optimist" for your point of view.  That is, progress in 
philosophy is to be patterned after progress in science, as opposed to 
some other notion of progress.

Tim