Disagreement and Progress in Philosophy and in Empirical Sciences

ABSTRACT

The fact that philosophy has not made much progress in finding answers to its big questions is often demonstrated with a comparison to natural sciences. Some have recently argued that the state of progress in philosophy is not so different than the sciences: there are many unresolved big questions in the sciences too, and philosophy has made progress on its smaller questions just like the sciences. I argue that this comparison is misleading: the situation in the two fields looks similar only if we focus on unresolved scientific questions that have philosophical import. The sciences have made progress on many questions that are significant but that are not ‘big’ in a philosophical sense, while philosophy has made less progress on its own significant questions. Moreover, ‘smaller’ questions in the sciences are significant in themselves, while smaller questions in philosophy do not have much significance beyond their contribution to the bigger debates. I conclude with brief remarks about what underlies the disparity between the two fields: to understand the slow pace of progress in philosophy we should pay attention to factors that are at the intersection of the nature of philosophical questions, current philosophical methodology and the sociology of academic philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer disagreement
• philosophical progress
• philosophical method
• social epistemology of philosophy

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to several anonymous reviewers for their commentary on the manuscript and to the audiences at the Agreement and Disagreement Beyond Ethics and Epistemology conference and at the Third Conference of the East European Network for Philosophy of Science for discussions of earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Gökçe Başar for providing helpful insider views on the issue of unresolved problems in the field of physics.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here and in what follows, I am approaching the issue of science and scientific progress from a philosophy of science perspective. For the purposes of this paper, I remain neutral concerning the questions of whether any of the philosophical conceptions of science and scientific progress overlap with the conceptions that scientists hold regarding science, how such conceptions affect scientific practice and what effect the explication of such conceptions should have on our theorizing about science and scientific progress in a philosophical context.

2. As this paper concerns a dispute between two parties, both of which accept that convergence on correct answers is a type of progress but disagree about how much progress of this sort has been made in philosophy, I will not provide a defense of this common assumption.

3. One might argue, as Shan (2022) does, that the concept of progress is not applicable to philosophy and rather we should think in terms of philosophical success. For the matter at hand, this would merely turn the question into how successful philosophy has been in converging on right answers to its questions in comparison to the sciences.

4. Indeed, Frances warns us of a problem that he takes to be specific to philosophy and that endangers the preservation of progress in the field (2017, p. 55). I will discuss this problem in the final section.

5. Here I am assuming that in order to find out how life began on Earth, that is, how it began on a specific time on a specific planet, we first need to figure out the physical-chemical process or processes regarding how living organisms can arise from non-living matter, and, prior to finding conclusive evidence that life began on Earth as a result of one of these processes, knowledge regarding these processes already enables various developments such as replicating such processes in the lab or forming better hypotheses about where life might be found elsewhere in the universe.

6. It should be noted that this applies to genuine empirical disagreements in science. Some disagreement among scientists, such as various debates surrounding quantum indeterminacy, seem to be more of a philosophical nature: in some such cases, scientists are not debating which theory is supported by the available evidence, but which interpretation of the evidence makes better sense; there are cases where the disagreement results from scientists’ divergent views regarding philosophy of science, scientific methodology or fundamental epistemological commitments. For a discussion of such cases, see Borge and Francisco Lo Guercio (2021), Massimi (2019) and Weinberger and Bradley (2020); for suggested examples of scientific problems that require non-empirical or semantic considerations, see Dawid (2013) and Okun (1989), respectively. One might argue that such non-empirical disagreement is still within the proper domain of science rather than being philosophical offshoots of scientific issues; however, for the purposes of the current discussion, it will suffice to note that in any case such non-empirical disagreements in science are exceptions rather than the rule, given that a large body of scientific knowledge rests on peer agreement on many issues which once constituted disagreements that were eventually resolved by empirical evidence.

7. As an example, Frances (2017, p. 55) mentions that interest in the question of the determinants of belief contents has considerably waned since the late 20^th century, and there is no guarantee that all of the rich literature from that period will be thoroughly studied if the topic is revived in the future.

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Işık Sarıhan

Işık Sarıhan is an independent postdoctoral researcher based in Budapest and Ankara. His work on philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy has been published in Episteme, Social Epistemology, Ratio and European Journal of Analytic Philosophy. He received his doctoral degree from Central European University in 2017 with a thesis that presented an internalist version of the strong representationalist theory of phenomenal consciousness. He has recently presented a strategy of deflating the hard problem of consciousness by multiplying the explanatory gaps in the world with the help of a non-reductive realist view of perceptible qualities and is currently working on an account of consciousness where experiential acquaintance is explained by epistemic relations to abstract entities. In metaphilosophy, he promotes the view that widespread peer agreement on philosophical truths requires substantial reforms in the social structure of academic research and advocates against publishing philosophical claims one does not believe. He is a founding member of the experimental rock band Hayvanlar Alemi and runs the independent music label and concert organization initiative Inverted Spectrum Records.