Julia Smith (Hope College), "Philosophical Agreement and Philosophical Progress”

Episteme, 2024

By Julia Smith

“Philosophy displays increasing ingenuity without an emerging consensus. Progress doesn’t require consensus, of course: some philosophers might have solved a given problem without this being acknowledged across the board. But the degree to which there is, or isn’t, consensus in a given field can be one indicator of how much progress has been achieved.”

That’s Chris Daly, writing in aeon a in a piece titled “Philosophy’s lack of progress.” Daly expresses a popular view about progress: that agreement within a discipline is a sign of progress, whereas disagreement indicates a lack of it. This view is shared both by experts within philosophy and by outsiders who observe that philosophy is worthless or leaves the public unable to learn anything because philosophers cannot agree. If this reasoning is correct, the pervasive and persistent disagreement that characterizes philosophy is a problem, because it is a sign that philosophy has not progressed.

Of course, the view that agreement indicates progress within a discipline (and disagreement indicates a lack of it) is only plausible if agreement is a sign of truth. Physicists, psychologists, and philosophers don’t aim at agreement for agreement’s sake, but at true answers to the central questions of their discipline. Agreement within philosophy would be valuable only if it were an indication that philosophers were getting things right. But this raises a question: Would agreement among philosophers on the discipline’s central questions be an indication that philosophers are converging on the correct answers? My paper argues that the answer to this question is ‘no.’

More precisely, I argue that agreement among philosophers is—or would be, if it existed—epistemically uninformative: it does not supply even a prima facie reason to think the agreed-upon answer is true. Why not? My answer, roughly, is that we shouldn’t expect philosophers to be especially good at getting the right answers to philosophical questions. Therefore, philosophical agreement is just as likely to be explained by non-truth-tracking factors, such as personal bias or intellectual trends, as it is by philosophers identifying the true answers to philosophy’s central questions.

To argue for this claim, I use insights from social choice theory to identify the conditions under which agreement within a group of inquirers is a reliable indicator of the truth. One of these conditions is known as the competence condition. Each individual reasoner has a judgmental competence: a probability of arriving at the correct answer to the question she’s inquiring into that falls somewhere between 0 (no chance) and 1 (certainty). The average judgmental competence of the group is the average of the individual competences of group members. The competence condition says that in order for agreement within a group of inquirers to be epistemically informative, the average judgmental competence of the group must be greater than 0.5. I argue that it is doubtful that the group comprised of philosophical inquirers meets the competence condition. (What’s that, you say? Did I just say that philosophers are incompetent? Not at all. Most philosophers are extremely competent, in the ordinary language sense of the term. They have traits like creativity, logical acumen, critical thinking skills, perseverance, and curiosity—traits that allow them to produce excellent philosophy—in spades. The claim that I argue for is strictly concerned with accuracy. That is, I think philosophers are highly competent in the ordinary language sense but unlikely, as a group, to meet the competency condition that is necessary for their agreement to track truth.)

Why are philosophers unlikely to meet the competence condition? Part of the explanation for this is that philosophers, like everyone else, are prone to engage in motivated reasoning. It is well documented that human reasoners tend to seek out and interpret evidence in a way that strengthens their preexisting beliefs. Philosophers are not immune to this. A significant portion of the paper applies what psychologists have discovered about the circumstances in which motivated reasoning tends to manifest to the context of philosophical inquiry to see if we can draw conclusions about which kinds of philosophical questions are especially likely to elicit motivated reasoning tendencies.

If the fundamental reason that agreement within philosophy isn’t epistemically informative is that philosophers are prone to bias, what about other disciplines? After all, physicists and psychologists are no less prone to motivated reasoning than philosophers. But if the argument applies to other disciplines, it proves too much: surely agreement among scientific experts is a reliable guide to truth! In the paper, I address this objection, arguing that certain features of philosophical inquiry render it more susceptible than other disciplines to the effects of motivated reasoning. These features include disagreement among experts about what would count as evidence for or against a philosophical view and a focus on questions that are not decidable by the accumulation of empirical data (as is often the case in the sciences). These fundamental methodological disputes and empirically intractable questions can render philosophical questions more sensitive to the influence of motivated reasoning.  

My conclusions might initially seem pessimistic. (How will we figure out which philosophical views are true if we can’t use agreement as a proxy?) However, I think scrutinizing the relationship between philosophical agreement and truth helps to defuse the objection to philosophical progress with which we began. The worry that disagreement within philosophy entails a lack of progress assumes that agreement is a necessary condition for progress. But once we recognize that there’s no relationship between philosophical agreement and truth, there will be less motivation to hang onto the idea that agreement is necessary for progress. And there are plenty of ways that philosophy may be progressing that do not require philosophers to agree, such as making connections between disparate areas of inquiry, developing better models, refuting false views, and understanding philosophical problems. These achievements of philosophical inquiry contribute to our understanding of the world and our place in it, even if philosophers are unable to agree on the correct answers to the central questions of philosophy.

To summarize this point more aphoristically, we can turn to the wisdom of internet discussion forums. “What is the point of philosophy if it never solves anything?” asks one Reddit user. A helpful respondent answers the question with another: “What’s the point of weightlifting if the barbells will always come back down?” In other words, solving (and agreeing upon) the central questions of philosophy was never the point.