200 Philosophical Facts: Bryan Frances and Philosophy as Fact-Based Discipline

Books and Papers
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Do philosophers know stuff? Stuff that is not generally known by non-philosophers?

Bryan Frances claims that they do, and provides a list of 200 examples.

The facts range over beliefs, evidence, knowledge, how to deal with disagreement, wisdom, useful rules, and what makes an argument good.

Mind you, Frances himself points to the triviality of many of these philosophical facts, and indeed asks us to use the most trivial interpretation available for the items on his list, since ‘The objection, “But since they are trivial, they are inconsequential” is mistaken’(p.3)

The 200 facts are offered as a counterexample to a common criticism of philosophy, often phrased as that philosophy lacks an independent body of knowledge in the way of other disciplines, such as mathematics or physics; that philosophy consists in disagreement, and as such achieves precious little. The facts given by Frances here are not those generally discussed amongst philosophers, but rather “Basic facts, at least dispositionally… we almost never think about the vast majority of them. They just aren’t on our radar”(p.6), yet they form at least in part the body of knowledge had by philosophers.

…since the Basic facts are more or less invisible to us, when we philosophers talk about philosophical agreement and disagreement, convergence and the lack of convergence, expertise, and progress, the charitable if not exactly accurate way to interpret most authors is that they are talking only about the controversial bits of philosophy. The mistake here is failing to realize that an uncontroversial part exists too, is huge, and is significant.

Further, these non-controversial facts are not widely known, even amongst well educated and intelligent folk:

Consider the philosophizing of public figures such as Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and others. A significant component of it (although not all of it) is cringeworthy, the type of thing that makes philosophy professors roll their eyes. One part of what’s going on here is that those figures don’t have knowledge of the Basic facts.

Philosophy, then, offers us the possibility of improving our ability to think. Frances offers an explication of the benefits of an education in philosophy.

We might proceed here by critiquing the list provided, or by adding to it. Or we might ruminate on the nature of philosophical expertise and progress, given this different perspective on the nature of the philosophical enterprise.

Have a read here:

Philosophy as Fact-Based Discipline: 200 Philosophical Facts

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A Theory of Error?
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So the primary critique I have is in the author’s opaqueness about the kind of facts these are. He starts with

facts directly about philosophical matters that virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know.

The problem is that many of these facts only pertain to specific philosophical classes of thing (such as a ‘belief’, and ‘truth’) where the facts are only the case within those contexts. If facts are only the case within the context of philosophical discourse, then it is entirely trivial that non-philosophers do not know these facts.

Take (9)

We sometimes use the terms “rational”, “justified”, and “reasonable” in such a way that a belief is evidentially rational, reasonable, and justified and when the believer’s overall evidence that she bases her belief on is strongly supportive of the belief. Her belief is evidentially irrational, unjustified, and unreasonable when her overall evidence that she bases her belief on is not strongly supportive of the belief.

This is a ‘fact’ about terms within philosophy (“rational”, “justified”, and “reasonable”). Were it claiming to be a fact about terms in general language, then the author would be remiss for not providing evidence from the psychological or philological literature. Outside of philosophy it is a claim about how language is used and not one that can be derived from the armchair. Certainly not one that philosophers would have the discovery of within their remit.

Likewise (4)

We often don’t consciously believe something but are easily disposed to believe it, if we are just asked and given a short time to consider.

Is again either limited to a claim specific to philosophical discourse (and therefore trivial that non-philosophers do not know it), or it is a claim about the material world (or the social world, or the mental world,…) in which case;

(a) it is not a claim that can be derived from the armchair, and/or

(b) it most certainly is known by psychologists, sociologists, councillors, and probably a majority of normal people one might meet on the street.

Is the author seriously claiming that non-philosophers do not know that we often don’t consciously believe something, but may do so when given time to consider?

I don’t find myself particularly disagreeing with many of the 200, but this is not the central claim of the thesis. The central claim is that philosophers know these things and non-philosophers do not. A claim which, for many of the 200, seems patently absurd.

If we were to interpret ‘charitably’ as the author implores us to do, I think we could elbow every claim into something highly specific such that in this exact meaning of the terms the statement is something non-philosophers don’t know, but then we’re back to the earlier point that if the terms are to be interpreted in a highly technical sense, then the fact that non-philosophers don’t know them becomes trivial.

This seems like a good example of the lamentable recent trend in public discourse towards the deification of a social class (the ‘intellectual’), such that their truth need not be questioned (and certainly not by anyone with the temerity to be of ‘the great unwashed’). This section is particularly telling

It can be difficult for a philosopher to vividly imagine, but there are loads of reasonable, moderately-educated adults (e.g., with associate or bachelor degrees) who often if inconsistently confuse true belief and highly confident belief, for instance. The same holds for being mostly blind to the distinction between true belief and belief based on strong overall evidence, or even just strong evidence. It’s not at all difficult to find educated or high-IQ people saying things like “A fact is information minus emotion”, “An opinion is information plus experience”, “Ignorance is an opinion lacking information”, and “Stupidity is an opinion that ignores fact” (each of which I’ve encountered in intelligent discourse recently).

… as if philosophers alone were the arbiters of the correct use of language. A ‘fact’ is whatever it it used to mean in the context of the discourse it is part of. It doesn’t have some ‘correct’ meaning assigned by a group of academics who can then guffaw at the idiots using it wrong. Nor does it’s meaning even need to be consistent across discourse, we understand one another quite well.

I think, perhaps, far from presenting a position of knowing a set of enlightening facts, the author is presenting as someone tragically bereft of a set of basic linguistic skills by which non-philosophers typically navigate complex conversations involving contextual and shifting meaning, and yet still somehow understand one another.

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Thanks for reading the article.

I’m not sure I follow why you think the facts listed are specifically philosophical. Consider (2), Some beliefs are true while others are false, or (66), Practically useful but false belief is possible, or (125), Reflecting on disagreement can spur one to start thinking for oneself, realizing that one has uncritically adopted the beliefs of others when one probably shouldn’t have. These do not seem to me to be specifically philosophical in content.

I’d also taken Frances as suggesting that philosophy often makes explicit what is otherwise implicitly obvious, and thereby allowing further discussion.

But yes, it’s an open question as to whether these facts constitute a separate body of knowledge that might be seen as having progressed.

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I’m not sure I follow why you think the facts listed are specifically philosophical.

It was an attempt to be charitable. In lay terms, he’s talking about how people think, thousands of academics study how people think outside of philosophy from neuroscience, psychology and sociology to political theory and economics.

Not to mention, the need to know how other people think has been a pressing one for maybe half a million years of human evolution.

So a charitable reading of “here are some facts about how people think that only philosophers know” really couldn’t take these terms to be lay terms

your example

(125), Reflecting on disagreement can spur one to start thinking for oneself, realizing that one has uncritically adopted the beliefs of others when one probably shouldn’t have.

Either this is trivially true, instantly known to anyone, or this is a statement about human thinking that might not be true. If the later, then finding out if it is true or not requires checking with some statistically significant number of humans to see if they are indeed spurred on in the specified manner by such a realisation.

It really would take quite a shocking lack of self-awareness to write 124 ‘facts’ about thinking, most of which are about the role of evidence, and then proceed to pronounce the 125th without any evidence at all that it’s actually the case.

Hence, charitably, the assumption he’s talking about technical philosophical propositions whose truth can be derived without troublesome deference to the actual state of the material world.

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A little more clarity perhaps…

The statement “Reflecting on disagreement can spur one to start thinking for oneself, realizing that one has uncritically adopted the beliefs of others when one probably shouldn’t have”, is one of two things;

  1. a statement about how things must be; derived from some rational analysis
  2. a statement about how things actually happen to be; derived from empirical evidence

if (2) then Frances is remiss, since he’s posited it as a fact without either supplying, nor being in a position to supply, any empirical evidence.
So, we charitably suggest it’s (1).
But here Frances is still remiss, since his claim is that non-philosophers do not know these facts (or at least do not typically know them) which resolves to another empirical claim because this one is definitely about other humans and so cannot be derived by rational analysis.

Basically Frances is making several empirical claims about how people think and what people know, and is doing so without supplying any empirical evidence that this is actually the case. He is clear that ‘evidence’ at least is to read in this ordinary sense.

When I use “evidence” in the list, I am using it as it works in charitably interpreted ordinary discourse—say, in a newspaper article about some trial or criminal investigation

By the authors own ‘fact’ …

A “mere opinion” (or “just his opinion”) is typically a belief, that may or may not be true, but is evidentially unjustified and doesn’t amount to knowledge because it isn’t based on good overall supporting evidence.

… the vast majority of his 200 ‘facts’ turn out to be “mere opinion”

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Perhaps there is more to language than a divide between the empirical and the a priori. But all that is not central to Frances’ argument. His core thesis is not a sociological claim about what non-philosophers know, but a defence of philosophy against the charge that it lacks settled knowledge. The appeal to non-philosophers mainly functions rhetorically — to show that the claims are not trivial platitudes — rather than as a load-bearing premise. It does not undermine the more modest and central thesis: that philosophy contains a substantial body of widely accepted, evidentially supported, non-controversial claims.

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I’ll admit I rushed through it, curious to get to the list, which struck me as mostly what you are supposed to learn in a freshman “critical thinking” class. So far as it goes, I guess there’s nothing wrong with saying that employed philosophers are people who would ace that particular exam. They avoid lots of informal fallacies, and they are very good at making distinctions and sticking by them. An awful lot of “something can be wet without being water” sorts of things.

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Perhaps there is more to language than a divide between the empirical and the a priori.

Maybe. But Frances does not leave us doubting here. He makes it clear

When I use “evidence” in the list, I am using it as it works in charitably interpreted ordinary discourse—say, in a newspaper article about some trial or criminal investigation

So he’s talking about the ordinary empirical sense. Not the a priori sense, nor some yet-to-be-defined third sense. He clearly says ‘evidence’ is to be interpreted in this ordinary way.

But all that is not central to Frances’ argument. His core thesis is not a sociological claim about what non-philosophers know, but a defence of philosophy against the charge that it lacks settled knowledge.

It is his thesis. It’s right there in his theses, section four entitled ‘The Theses’…

The typical moderately-educated adult today who isn’t a philosopher knows only a small percentage of the Basic facts and for most of the others is not consistently disposed to accept them.

… and later that these are…

philosophical truths that are generally known by the philosophical community but not other communities

This is not a claim in some third form of language. It is a direct claim about what the “typical moderately-educated adult today who isn’t a philosopher” knows and accepts presented without a shred of evidence, no research, no polling, no reference to any literature… nothing. Just bald assertion.

Also helpfully, he clarifies in his ‘theses’ section that these are to be seen as ‘results’.

Any significantly accurate conception of philosophy must include the idea that it is, in large part, a factual, results-oriented discipline. [clarified later in the text] … we have a discipline that is rich in discoveries of straightforward facts…

Not merely things philosophers happen to agree on, but thing philosophers are responsible for having “discovered”. This is abject nonsense. Philosophers did not in any sense ‘discover’ that …

We often don’t consciously believe something but are easily disposed to believe it, if we are just asked and given a short time to consider

… I’d be willing to bet a intelligent ten year old could tell you that if interpreted in ordinary language terms, but we won’t know because Frances hasn’t bothered to actually do any of the hard work of actually testing his theories against the real world, but rather has rested on one of the very faleshoods he claims philosophers in posession of these facts are thus immune to, that of confusing “mere opinion” with fact.

The appeal to non-philosophers mainly functions rhetorically — to show that the claims are not trivial platitudes

But that’s the point. They are trivial platitudes outside of philosophy. Interpreted in lay terms, these are by-and-large unsurprising statements one might well expect on the shelves of the self-help section in a book with titles like “Think more critically for super success!”, or “Don’t let your emotions rule you! Rule them!”.

Interpreted in the ordinary manner he implores us to use, his theses fail. All he has is that philosophers (in common with most other people) all agree on some basic definitions in English of words like ‘belief’, ‘fact’, opinion’, and ‘justification’

I’m afraid the whole piece comes across as the very worst caricature of the philosopher as sitting in an ivory tower pontificating on matters that ‘real’ academics are out there actually trying to discover by methodically and diligently checking their theories against the real world.

There’s a lot philosophy can do. Psychology-but-without-the-pesky-experiments isn’t one of them.

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Frances’ response is not too far from that of Mary Midgley’s metaphor of philosophy as plumbing.

Truisms are odd in that they are not obvious until they are set out. Philosophy advances by making explicit the structural features of our epistemic and conceptual practices. Once these are set before us, they are obvious; but prior to that, not so much. These aren’t dramatic discoveries, but they are not trivial either. They are part of the shared framework within which debates occur. The study of that very framework forms a part of the business of philosophy.

This is a a modest conception of what philosophical success looks like. Instead of solving the mind–body problem, or refuting scepticism once and for all, progress consists in mapping the terrain more clearly, ruling out obvious confusions, and identifying constraints on theory.

That resonates with a Wittgensteinian picture of philosophy as clarification rather than discovery, as well as with my own predilection for small details over grand explanations.

Those who seek a grand narrative will disagree.

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Frances’ is a subtle response to the criticism that philosophy never settles anything.

You’re re-framing it. The theses of the paper are set out clearly for us in the section entitled ‘The theses’…

IGNORANCE: The typical moderately-educated adult today who isn’t a philosopher knows only a small percentage of the Basic facts and for most of the others is not consistently disposed to accept them.

EPISTEMIC:…The magnitude of the gap in understanding is akin to the gap in tennis ability between the typical kid who does well on her college tennis team and a professional who occasionally plays in Grand Slam tournaments such as Wimbledon.

EXPERTISE: On most reasonable and useful conceptions of philosophical expertise, knowledge of the Basic facts is a significant component of such expertise

PROGRESS: On some (but perhaps not most) reasonable and useful conceptions of philosophical progress, knowledge of the Basic facts is a significant component of such progress,

In my experience, this objection to IGNORANCE is the main objection to the rest of my project

There is no doubt at all that his central thesis is that philosophers know these facts and non-philosophers do not know them, and that philosophy ‘discovered’ these facts and this constitutes the progress it has made. It’s literally written in big capital letters in a section called ‘The Theses’

While philosophy might not have discovered new particles, utterly eliminated rival theories, or converged on a single metaphysics, it may have stabilised distinctions, clarified inferential relations, and articulated background some constraints that later disputes presuppose.

It may well have done, none of which are Frances’ claim. He hasn’t got ‘Clarification’ written in big capital letters under the heading ‘the theses’ has he? He has, however, got ‘IGNORANCE’.

Philosophy may advance not by discovering new empirical truths but by making explicit the structural features of our epistemic and conceptual practices.

Again, this may well be the case, but Frances’ thesis here is clear

It’s discipline-specific knowledge that is had by members of our profession but not people outside it and we obtained it via studying and doing philosophy. [my emphasis]

The question is not about the nature of the ‘facts’ (are they new information, or old information clarified), the theses is explicitly that philosophers have done this through study and no other discipline has. That’s not only the explicitly stated thesis - several times - but it is also a necessary part of the thesis, otherwise the project becomes “Here are some facts loads of people know and philosophers tend to agree with”

in performing this activity perhaps philosophers develop an awareness of the structured, disciplined understanding of concepts that most people use only loosely.

Perhaps they do. Or perhaps they don’t. That’s why we study the external world, to find out the answer to such questions.

If one wants to know whether philosophers “develop an awareness of the structured, disciplined understanding of concepts that most people use only loosely”, one has to actually study philosophers and non-philosophers and see if there is a difference.

Crucially, Frances does not need to prove that non-philosophers are ignorant,

Again, it’s literally his thesis

IGNORANCE: The typical moderately-educated adult today who isn’t a philosopher knows only a small percentage of the Basic facts and for most of the others is not consistently disposed to accept them.

See the big capitalised word?

philosophy has accumulated a body of widely accepted, defensible, non-trivial claims

That philosophy contains such “widely accepted, defensible, non-trivial claims”, may well be the case, but here even in your more ‘subtle’ reading of Frances, you are implying philosophy is responsible for accumulating them, otherwise your claim becomes “philosophy agrees with a body of widely accepted, defensible, non-trivial claims”

Instead of asking if philosophy has solved its grand problems, we might with Frances ask if philosophy has clarified, stabilised, and deepened our conceptual framework.

Frances is not asking. He’s telling.

the only reason I know that IGNORANCE is true is that I’ve paid close attention to what people outside of philosophy say about, and use, key philosophical notions.

He even admits that his knowledge has been gained by paying ‘close attention’. He’s outright admitted that he had a ‘bit of look’ at some people and is now in a position to judge all of non-philosophical humanity - the “typical moderately-educated adult” he claims to have knowledge of, he has gained by just bumping into a few people and then deciding ‘that’ll do’ as evidence for a theses about the state of knowledge in the remaining 8 billion people he’s yet to meet.

I can certainly see why such a thesis resonates with the lamentable modern trend to declare certain things to be ‘just true’ on account of a clade of middle-class intelligentsia agreeing on it, and certainly the sorts of ‘facts’ here fall squarely into that narrative - ‘belief’, ‘evidence’, ‘judgement’… all very ‘disinformation expert’ stuff. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s angling for a job with the BBC.

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Frances doesn’t get into whether what grounds philosophical facts is the same thing as that which supposedly grounds facts in physics, and what those grounds might consist of. But he clearly wants philosophy to compete with the sciences on the same terrain. One might suggest instead that philosophy constructs the metaphysical ground providing the condition of possibility for a science. One this view, science offers facts, and philosophy offers systems of intelligibility within which facts appear meaningful. What Frances has done is to degrade philosophy to an empirical theory.

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Perhaps rather he is obliged to compete with the sciences for funding. His writing might be more a response to the demands of academia, the “degradation” being forced on philosophy by present circumstances.

So might you agree with his first thesis: “(i) there is tremendous agreement amongst philosophers on the truth-values of many substantive philosophical claims”? Which of the 200 are false?

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It is not surprising that the response of an analytic philosopher to the competition with the sciences for funding is to champion the idea that philosophy is just as much in the game of generating propositional truths as is science. A phenomenologist or post-structuralist would instead reveal philosophy’s strength as grounding propositional truth in a more fundamental basis that is not itself concerned with truth claims.

They would consider Frances’s 200 truth claims to be an expression of the thinking of a certain niche community within philosophy rather than the demonstration of what makes philosophy as a whole valuable.

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Are we reduced to mere chauvinism? Are Frances’ 200 truth claims false? Have we no agreement in philosophy?

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Are we reduced to mere chauvinism?

So internicene disputes become ‘chauvanism’, but claiming all other academic disciplines are ignorant of basic facts about belief is what? ‘Subtle’?

Are Frances’ 200 truth claims false? Have we no agreement in philosophy?

Neither falsity nor agreement are in question. Frances’ claim is not “here are 200 facts with which philosophers happen to all agree”

It is “here are 200 facts which philosophers have discovered in their studies and non-philosophers do not know”

The matter of agreement barely gets a mention

The theses are;
Facts, knowledge, conception, ignorance, epistemic, practical, pedagogy, expertise, progress.

Try as you might to lever this into a more defensible version, Frances does not in any way merely claim that most philosophers agree on these facts.

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Let’s tie the Frances thread back to the peculiar status of hinge truth for Wittgenstein. For Frances, philosophy makes progress by discovering facts about knowledge, morality, mind, modality, causation, and so on. Wittgenstein would ask what kind of “truths” are these? Are they empirical discoveries? Logical clarifications? Grammatical reminders? Normative stipulations? If many of the alleged truths are things like “Knowledge entails truth” or “Contradictions cannot both be true,” he might say these are not discoveries about reality but grammatical rules embedded in our language-games.

They function as norms of use. To call them “truths” risks reifying them into metaphysical findings. If Frances thinks these truths track features of reality independent of our practices, Wittgenstein would respond that many philosophical “facts” are expressions of grammar, of how our language operates within forms of life. They are not descriptions of hidden structures. if philosophers agree on Frances’s 200 claims, that isn’t because they’ve discovered deep truths, but because they share a form of life and a professional grammar.

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I find this an interesting enterprise. He’s definitely right that philosophy is not taken as seriously as other disciplines in regard to knowledge generation.

To engage with the previous discussion, I will say that although whether or not philosophical knowledge should only consist of a priori facts is in itself a debated topic, I think some of the ‘facts’ are really just observations about what some people believe or how people use words and it doesn’t really make sense to classify that as ‘philosophical knowledge’. For example, the claim ‘people sometimes believe in god’ wouldn’t be what I would consider to be knowledge derived from the philosophy of religion. So I do agree with @Pseudonym on that.

I don’t think it matters whether a fact is ‘trivial’ in this discussion. The more accurate criticism would be whether a fact is ‘well-known’ (by the “typical moderately-educated adult”). I don’t see why trivial facts couldn’t be not well-known and derived from philosophy. But if a fact is well-known, it definitely undermines his IGNORANCE thesis.

Although he did include some facts (195 to 200), there was a missed opportunity for including a lot more things from the philosophy of logic, stuff like formal fallacies for example. This might be one of the best subfields of philosophy for this exercise. More generally, I think we could have a better list but it’s a start.

He seems to use ‘not well known by people but well-known by philosophers’ as a proxy for ‘derived from philosophy’ but I don’t think it’s enough. There are many different kinds of ‘facts’ listed, some are definitions of concepts (e.g. 151), some are simply observations (e.g. 127), some are ‘rules’ (e.g. 175). I wouldn’t say it’s always wrong to include them but the question of what can be considered derived from philosophy definitely isn’t answered in a satisfying way.

For the theses, I would agree with CONCEPTION and FACTS although some of the current list is wrong to me (see the 170 below). I suspend judgment for the rest, I do share the pessimistic view that the average adult isn’t that knowledgeable but I am not convinced this means they only know a “small percentage” of the facts of the list.

I am going to present some of the facts I found weird:

  1. In order to separate the true experts from the people who only think they are experts, it’s often helpful to look at their credentials:
  • Do they have a Master’s degree or PhD in the relevant field?
  • Do they do actual research that gets published in professional, peer-reviewed journals?
  • If they don’t, do they often cite and thoroughly discuss research published in professional, peer reviewed journals when making claims they say they have expertise on?

First, this seems too specific for the context, there isn’t academia for everything. I know usually people talk about experts in the context of sciences and what not but ‘experts’ could simply mean people knowledgeable on any topic. And even if we only talk about academia, this really lacks nuance compared to the other facts. Expertise isn’t just a shiny degree and some peer-reviewed papers written.

  1. Although there is no generally accepted definition of what it means to be an intelligent person, there are at least four characteristics often associated with such people: comparatively high degrees or amounts of raw intellectual power or ability (RIP), intellectual curiosity (IC), advanced education (AE), and diversity of intellectual interests (DI), where the latter are things you’re intellectually curious about.

This tries to start defining intelligence for no good reason. This isn’t standard and despite charitable interpretations I don’t think I would find this easy to agree to (for example, education in the definition of intelligence is a controversial thing at best). It’s definitely a choice to try and propose a seemingly novel separation of intelligence full of unspecified terms when listing uncontroversial philosophical truths.

Anyway, I tried to classify the facts while being conservative (so if I was unsure, it goes in the first category). It’s probably a bit sloppy but I find it an interesting thing to share:
119 Actual facts that (I believe) people are ignorant: every fact not mentioned

37 actual facts that (I believe) people would know: 3, 6, 8, 11, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 50, 69, 74, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 108, 129, 130, 145, 146, 147, 169, 198

21 Facts not derived from philosophy: 4, 7, 9, 10, 34, 102, 104, 109, 112, 127, 132, 133, 137, 138, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161

23 not actual facts: 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 (I include them here cause I don’t find them meaningful) and from 175 up to 191

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To discuss the broader point, another way to show that philosophy does generate knowledge (or not) might be to go through the papers and pick up the (relevant) facts laid out in them. At least, this seems doable and somewhat easy in a domain like math, where theorems, lemmas etc. are usually explicit. I don’t know how easy it would be for philosophy. This might be better than his approach as the question of ‘is this derived from philosophy’ might be solved in a more straightforward way. We can also ask what to think of his ‘Basic facts’ if they are not found in philosophy papers.

I would like to see other domains attempt the same (or a similar) challenge. I remember reading a while ago, a (now old) critique on nutrition science stating that the only knowledge to come out of it was that “you shouldn’t eat poisons” and that “there are some chemicals (vitamins, for instance) that you have to get some of, or else you get a deficiency disease”. In my opinion, it is not obvious that other domains even scientific ones are more resistant to the challenge even if it’s for completely different reasons.

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Pretty much.

Perhaps philosophy is not so profound as some would like. That might explain why a little pot boiler thread such as this incites so much passionate objection.

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Not really. It’s there in the first claim: “(i) there is tremendous agreement amongst philosophers on the truth-values of many substantive philosophical claims”