Philosophers build and create, they do not discover. Mental models are built using concepts. Given a question, problem, or investigation, there are innumerable ways to build “correct” conceptual models.
As with any building, there is always latitude in how. In philosophy this latitude is enormous. And so there is a subjective element to evaluation. Is the model pretty? Is it rigorous ? Does it feel right? Does it conflict with my own models?
If the stars align and it is beautiful to you, you become an adherent. But if it seems ugly, slapdash, arbitrary, discordant, you will think of ways to attack it. And given enough cleverness and enough distaste, there are always ways to attack.
In this kind of situation, how can agreement ever be reached?
2. The problem of language
This is probably an even bigger factor.
If philosophy is modeling, philosophical language is modeling models. Terminological ambiguity is just one factor. Reading philosophy is considered “hard” be because it is. The author doesn’t beam their models into the readers head. They translate it to language. For the reader to successfully read it, they have to recapitulate the building of the author’s model in their own head.
This often, maybe essentially always, misfires, so that the reader winds up with a model that at best superficially resembles the author’s. This results in the familiar problem of talking past one another. Each interlocutor has their own version of their model in their head, yet no one knows it. Everyone also has their own version of what the other participants are modeling.
This disconnect is structural to language, and can never be definitely resolved without creating a less ambiguous language. This project has not failed for lack of trying.
Take this own thread as an example. Look at the diversity of replies. Few if any are obviously wrong. Every respondant now has a built in bias towards “their” reply, and will find this one the most agreeable, both because people create to their own taste, and have a natural affinity for their own “baby”.
Consider your understanding of the other replies. Are you really confident it mirrors the author’s. Are you confident at all that respondants really understand your post? Or will you need to correct and clarify, using yet more language?
With this as foundation, is agreement ever possible?
It seems to me you’re seeking criteria by which to resolve or rise above the problems and questions posed by philosophy.
It is true that our world is hyper-fragmented. But this is inevitable, given the historical situation. Every culture is now coming into contact with every other, and we meanwhile have access to knowledge on a massive scale, including knowledge of the history of philosophy. It’s a kaleidoscopic experience in many ways, and quite disorienting and chaotic, exacerbated by the sense that ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Within that, it is natural to try and seek some certainty amidst the chaos.
Which reminds me of one of the better Zen books I have, subtitled ‘seeking truth in a world of chaos.’ Without trying to summarise the whole book, the Buddhist avyākata questions came to mind when reading it. Those are the questions the Buddha declines to answer — whether the world has a beginning or end in time, whether the Tathāgata continues after death, and several more of the same general kind. But his silence in response is not evasion. It is a principled diagnosis: these questions are poorly framed, resting on pre-suppositions that render an answer impossible in their terms. The Buddha’s silence is not one of ‘throwing up one’s hands’ — it is recognising the limits of discursive reason, and genuinely dwelling with that recognition. Another Zen title along similar lines is called ‘Only Don’t Know.’
A crossover East-West text I have points to a structural parallel between those questions and Kant’s antinomies of reason — likewise questions that reason can coherently pose, but for which no rational resolution is possible (‘Central Philosophy of Buddhism’, Murti). What both Kant and the Buddha are pointing out, in their different idioms, is that the lack of resolution is not a failure on the part of the questioner — it is the shortcoming of discursive thought itself when pressed beyond its proper domain.
To quote another Yeats poem, ‘Like a long-legged fly, his mind moves upon silence.’ The image is not paralysis, but a kind of precise, weightless attention resting on what cannot be spelled out. So too with the aporia in Plato’s dialogues — the apparent dead-ends that Socrates reaches are not the frustration of inquiry but its deepening, the point at which real contemplation begins.
All that said, I expect neither agreement nor consensus with the above. The world is too chaotic for that.
Exactly! And we can laugh at the contradiction involved.
Your reply is intriguing because I would have expected you to say that your argument against metaphysical resolution was not metaphysics. But if it is, then what you say about it is right: “My claim is a useful one, if not exactly true.” Usefulness (pragmatism) winds up being the important criterion. I hate to ask but . . Is a question about usefulness also metaphysical? Surely not. At some point we need to hit a Ground Zero where it becomes possible to actually assert a truth claim.
But I think you’re on the right track, as far as a response to my OP goes. If agreement could be reached on the truth (not just the utility) of the statement, “Metaphysical disagreements cannot be resolved,” we’ve gotten somewhere.
Right. The OP was sort of a Part 1, in which I tried to lay out the problem as I saw it, reserving possible answers until others have had a chance to weigh in.
Very good. These are the right questions. Do you think philosophy has carried on perfectly fine without a way to resolve disagreements? If so, what does that say about the peculiar nature of philosophical inquiry?
Yes, if philosophy is more like art, then the notion of “agreement” or “resolution” is either inapposite or else takes on a very different flavor. A key question that would need answering, in that case, is: Why have the majority of philosophers always insisted otherwise? Why are (most) philosophical claims couched in the propositional language of truth?
Good questions. Despite the difficulties you point to, however, I would answer the final question by saying, “Yes, it really ought to be possible. The big phil questions have had, literally, millennia to develop clarity and understanding among discussants. Is it really plausible that we still don’t understand each other?” When I observe a protracted debate in contemporary phil, I often seen people talking past each other, yes, but not in the sense of missing each other’s meaning. It’s rather that they haven’t agreed to accept one or another of the meanings.
Yes, that’s a good version of one of the possibilities I mentioned in the OP: Discursive thought, which is what philosophy usually consists of, can’t handle some of the questions it’s able to pose. And your final thought, “I expect neither agreement nor consensus with the above,” suggests that this is OK, and to be expected. Would you agree that this a resolution after all, simply not a philosophical one?
Why would we want to? Of the rare things there is almost universal agreement on, one is that neither popularity nor consensus is a good measure of what is true or good. Why not the goal of metanioa and conversion?
Plus, in practice I’m not sure if such openness ever works without the implicit assumption of a set of values (and often it just results in beurocratic credentialism).
So, for instance, today I’d argue we have a sort of sham pluralism. A sort of implicit shadow philosophy dictates what is permissible in terms of pedagogy and “how philosophy is actually done.” This is why, although today there are Thomists, Platonists, Ash’aris, Confucians, etc., they all teach and practice like they are post-Enlightenment empiricist liberals (at least in the West), according to that tradition’s methods and criteria (which necessarily assumes their anthropology and ends at least implicitly). Whereas if one truly holds to late-Platonist anthropology, etc., teaching and praxis must be radically reorganized.
You can see this in some of the research. Students who take economics courses show long term changes in relevant ethical behavior, even when you control for selection effects to focus on an “indoctrination effect.” That’s because economics’ descriptive domain still contains a lot of normatively loaded judgements re rationality, efficiency, etc., as well as its own anthropology.
By contrast, research on the effects of education in philosophical ethics shows it doesn’t move the needle on relvant behaviors one iota. But this makes perfect sense if you consider how ethics is taught in philosophy programs, with all theories being equal objects of analysis.
But such a view isn’t “neutral,” it presupposes a particular view of ethics and pedagogy where it is either not important enough (due to a particular assumed anthropology) or not certain enough (due to a particular assumed epistemology) to be taught as an exortation and indeed “training” in a way of life (as in the norm for many traditions).
This has to presuppose quite a bit though because, on the Stoic or Platonist account (or many others), to be wicked is the worst thing that can possibly befall a student, and to assume that nothing is truly good or bad, or that there is no true wisdom, would be seen as a particularly fatal move. But to simply hold these positions and their opposite up as neutral and equally valid objects of speculation is to presuppose that the Platonist and Stoic are simply wrong, or at least so speculative in their judgements that they ought not be taken seriously (or that education ought not benefit students and make them more virtuous and happy). Yet behind this judgement seems to sit a number of broadly Enlightenment assumptions about anthropology and value itself, since they can hardly be justified without assumptions.
This is, to my mind, inevitable. All pedagogy and governance must involve such assumptions. The problem is rather that the dominant shadow philosophy of our era refuses to admit that it actually does so, and so its rule is merely implicit, embedded in institutions and professional norms, and thus far more difficult to challenge (indeed, critiques like the one I am making tend to be neutralized easily by making them just one more object of analysis alongside all others, a sort of hostile translation).
Notably, this leads to a sort of shallow pluralism where pluralism is allowed just so long as nothing challenges the shadow philosophy (although there are also still limits on what is up for discussion, e.g., racism, sexism, etc.). But it’s not like ancient schools didn’t debate or borrow from one another in the absence of this overarching goal of “neutrality” and democratic consensus building. They debated vigorously in the West, India, and China, and borrowed from each other quite a bit. And for long historical periods, particularly in the West and Near East, what you actually see is growing, stable consensus on key points.
Hence, to the point about issues being irresolvable, I’ll agree to a certain extent (although I am not sure how problematic this is for many problems), but I also think that this only seems particularly true today because the hegemonic implicit philosophy upholds assumptions that themselves make fracture far more likely than the development of consensus and consolidation. The fact is, world history does show us broad, continent and century spanning movements of growing consensus and stability on metaphysical, epistemic, and particularly ethical issues, at least at the level of ends and principles.
Sure, or maybe methodological. Or maybe those are the same thing
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I’m not a big fan of truth. I see it as having practical use as a tool, but it’s not a goal in itself. That’s another subject.
Well, you and I have reached some sort of at least tentative resolution here. And I think that’s the story of pragmatism—solutions to philosophical problems, right here, now, and for this particular purpose.
The syllogism isn’t brought to bear on the basic principles of the sciences; it is applied to intermediate axioms, but nothing comes of this because the syllogism is no match for nature’s subtlety. It constrains what you can assent to, but not what can happen.
There’s no way that axioms •established by argumentation could help us in the discovery of new things, because the subtlety of nature is many times greater than the subtlety of argument. But axioms •abstracted from particulars in the proper way often herald the discovery of new particulars and point them out, thereby returning the sciences to their active status.
That’s Francis Bacon in the Novum Organon, 1620, in the version at Early Modern Texts.
Bacon gave us the choice: take the old road of endless argumentation and decorative speech, or the new road of experiment and evidence.
You come into your lab in the morning and your research partner says, “Found something weird in the samples that ran last night.” After she explains a bit, you know right off that doesn’t make any sense, and you say so. She gestures at the microscope and says, “See for yourself.”
This cannot happen in philosophy. There is nothing with the status of hard evidence that can settle a question, at least until conflicting evidence is found.
In all the empirical disciplines, it’s evidence. In mathematics, it’s proof. In philosophy, we don’t settle disputes because we have no means of settling disputes. Whether that’s a feature or a bug, depends on whether you think philosophy is even trying to produce knowledge. If you think it isn’t but that’s what makes it special and cool, you must be a philosopher.
In a sense. In many classical traditions there are texts which are sceptical of philosophers, precisly because of their tendency to towards what the Buddhists call ‘prapañca’, ‘conceptual proliferation’. If there was a hair to be split, then the philosophers would split it, or argue about whether to split it, or whether it was really a hair.
So - I don’t expect consensus here, and generally don’t see much of it. Which is why I pay little attention to the polls @Banno cites about the percentage of philosophers who hold (x) view.
There was a thread titled, 200 Philosophical Facts. It pointed to facts discovered by philosophy and the universal agreement among philosophers on these 200 facts. There’s a downloadable PDF for that paper.
I’m going to call the “why?” question into question.
I’m wondering if the desire for or expectation of resolution is connected with the desire to win, to have one’s own view prevail. To assume that philosophy is best understood as an effort directed towards the production of doctrines that demand agreement is to assume that philosophy should produce winners. But if playing to win is not the best way to philosophize, this might be because philosophy is not this sort of game at all.
The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
When philosophers, who are well known to have difficulty in keeping silent, engage in conversation, they should try always to lose the argument, but in such a way as to convict their opponent of untruth.
— Adorno, Minima Moralia
The idea is that philosophy’s task is negative: to keep open what the ego wants to close down in its wish to be right, and to reveal where theories fail. Resolution, then, is philosophical failure.
So the question has to be, can we actually hold a philosophical view and argue for it passionately, without wanting it to prevail? After all, there must be correct and incorrect views. But I think the point is that the correct view is always only partially correct. The idea of resolution assumes that your concept or set of formulations can exhaust the object of enquiry, and maybe this is not possible—maybe there is always more to say. Science can afford to pass over this “more” in silence, while everything can be made to fit (until the next theory comes along), but philosophy is interested precisely in what doesn’t quite work, and this is why nothing can be resolved.
(Sorry, D, the following comment was meant to be a reply to @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus but I can’t figure out how to fix it!)
Wow, that’s a lot. I’m glad the OP was so thought-provoking for you.
Yes, it is, but a quick comment might be appropriate here. I can agree that most of our uses for “truth” are practical ones. But the reason these uses are so very helpful is that “truth” delineates a concept we recognize to be indispensable. Does that mean we value it also for its own sake, then? That, as you say, is a different subject. But it mirrors, to a degree, one of the themes that’s come up on this thread. There’s a difference between 1) agreeing about something because it’s taken to be true, and using that as the basis for the resolution of a problem, versus 2) reaching consensus on something in order to draw a line under the problem and move along.
Yes. I have other concerns about pragmatism, but this is one feature of it that I appreciate very much. We can look for agreement in the here and now, understanding that we are fallible and temporal thinkers. Peirce’s image of the eventual agreement among a “community of inquirers” is an ideal which we move toward by solving one problem at a time.
Yes. What do you think about that? Or, reverting back to @Joshs 's thought, is producing good questions a type of knowledge production?
I’ll press a little harder on this. In what sense? Again, it’s the “level-up” problem: Can we say “We have resolved the question of whether some metaphysical questions are unresolvable (Our answer is that they are)” and exempt that question from the list of unresolvable ones?
I’d like to see that. Is there a link you can give us?
This connects with another of my “tentative thoughts” about how to understand the lack of resolution within philosophy. The comparison with science is important. Scientists are able to resolve a problem (perhaps not forever) by agreeing to accept a certain answer as correct. That answer has “won,” if you like. Interestingly, theories/histories of art can do the same thing. Who would dispute that Parker, Gillespie, Monk, Davis, and Coltrane were artists of the highest caliber who revolutionized their art? Is this “right”? Well, I think so, but the important point for this discussion is that the question has been resolved within the community qualified to have an educated opinion about it.
Not so with philosophy. Some among us believe there were eras when philosophers did achieve this kind of resolution; I’m not convinced. We certainly didn’t have it in Athens, and we don’t have it today. So if phil is not to be regarded as a rather ludicrous exercise in logomachy, what is it?
Your answer addresses this directly, and is similar to the “philosophy as the crafting of better questions” idea advanced by @Joshs. You also point to important psychological considerations, which we might wish were absent from our practice but of course they aren’t. Yes, wanting to be right, to be perceived as right, can be a powerful motivator. Tempering this desire, putting it in balance with other desires for communication and community, is an ethical goal, which the practice of philosophy can encourage.
I believe doing philosophy can actually be good for you! morally, spiritually. And the good it does isn’t about being the winner with the right answers.
This leads me to wonder, again, if there is a particular type or style of philosophical resolution that is not based on agreement as to what is “right” – which view has “won”.
Of course questions are part of the process of inquiry. But what Bacon is recommending is questions that lead to knowledge which raises new questions that lead to more knowledge.
For that to work, there have to be some questions somewhere in there that get answered. And they have to get answered by us doing things, engaging with the world, not simply taken as known because it’s what Aristotle said (to put it in terms Bacon had to deal with).
Imagine physics or biology or history or economics proceeding entirely by dialogue. Would it be the same?
We know what knowledge production looks like, and philosophy doesn’t look like that. That disputes are never settled in philosophy is a clue that it is a different sort of thing.
Maybe it’s a worthwhile sort of thing, but you have to know what it is before you can judge that.
Imagine physics or biology or history or economics resting on philosophical pre-suppositions, and when those pre-supposing change, so do the questions those science ask. That would undermine the claim that the history of scientific change involves a progress toward answering the same original questions, while the history of philosophy is a matter of changing the questions. That is, it would undermine the assumption that science is not itself a restricted, conventionalized version of philosophy.
I think the disconnect is between discursive or propositional knowledge, and felt or lived know-how. Metaphysics became preserved through written texts and passed down through centuries of pedagogy — but at the cost of being severed from the original intuition or vision within which it was existentially meaningful. Recall the original Academy was devoted to a whole-of-life curriculum. That is something which Pierre Hadot devoted his career to. The modern rejection of metaphysics is largely based on the argument that there is no way to tell what it is really about, and no way to adjuticate intepretive disputes about it, so it is just ‘empty words’. Which is true, in that it has become detached from the insights which made it intelligible in the first place. It’s also not co-incidental that many who coherently defend metaphysics are Catholic, as metaphysics is integrated into their modus vivendi. Although Catholocism was also responsible for making it into dogmatic scholasticism in the first place.
Again, this is where I will fall back on Eastern ideas. There is a saying in Buddhism and other Eastern paths, that philosophy (dialectic and reasoning) are like the stick you use to get the fire going. You poke the fire and ensure that the fuel has enough air to get going. Then you throw in the stick (‘Burn after discussing.’) That’s also anticipated in one of the Buddha’s 'suttas’, about the fact that the teaching itself is like a raft thrown together from sticks and twigs to cross the river (of saṃsāra) — but on having made that crossing, the raft is left behind. (‘You should leave behind dharmas, to say nothing of no-dharmas’.) It is especially emphasized in Zen Buddhism. But then, when I went to my one and only Goenka ten-day retreat 20 years ago, you were encouraged to talk to the retreat director about the obstacles you were experiencing (always numerous) but never to ‘talk philosophy’.
I think what Bacon saw was that science did not need a logical-conceptual foundation at all; what it needed was a practice, and a process, one that leveraged our ongoing transactions with the natural world. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” and all that.
We could continue this dispute—in fact, we could continue it indefinitely, because there’s nothing available to settle it one way or another. In the meantime, science, like daily life, will carry on in its own way, regardless of the stories we tell about it.
Philosophy is about questioning. It’s about looking at reality in a different way. That philosophers disagree with each other’s point of view is not a measure of failure, it is a measure of involvement and engagement. The death of philosophy happens when no one takes investigation seriously anymore and just talk about the weather, current events, material wealth, celebrations of rituals, traditions, anniversaries, and commemorations. It’s when ethics and morality are no longer questioned because actions and practices have been ingrained in us like customs and culture.
I agree completely with this. But with the stick still in my hand, I think the question has to be asked: Which questions within philosophy are resolvable, and which are not? Can we offer an explanation for why (at least according to me) the percentage of the latter is so high? That, more or less, is the OP question. And again, the question is not “Can we be right about certain questions?” It is “Can we reach agreement about what to do with those questions?”
Yes, or perhaps we could say “not necessarily a measure of failure.” After all, sometimes we just fail!
I wonder if you have more to say about what “the different way” would be. We can see that it contrasts with the way of science, for instance, whose goal is agreement and resolution on what is true about the world.
But if I’m right, looking for resolution is almost always wrong, not because wanting to win all the time is a bad attitude, but because it’s the task of philosophy to hold the questions open. In its supposed failure, it does just what it’s meant to do.
Maybe philosophy is the refusal (or inability) to allow questions to be resolved. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a parallel between the practical common sense that dismisses philosopical questions as pointless, and the need for resolution: both are motivated by the desire to close down further thought. Philosophy is the discipline that recognizes there is always more to say, always more to think.
Actually, maybe not always. I do think that certain questions and topics have been abandoned forever, because they turned out not to be interesting enough or universal enough, or empirical evidence showed them to be barking up the wrong tree.
But it’s not so much the musicians who resolved this as the audiences, critics, and jazz historians. There is no such relevant separation in philosophy. I mean, self-appointed non-philosopher judges might issue rulings, but no good philosopher would abide by them.
This is fascinating, and a good “theory of error”, in a way, though it really dissolves the question of error entirely. Would you say more about why holding this kind of question open – as opposed, say, to a scientific or historical question – is salutary and important?
I would include those folks along with the musicians themselves; they together form what I’m calling the “qualified community.” And it seems to be true that just about no one except the philosophers themselves are qualified to weigh in on how, or if, philosophical questions should be resolved.
I’m not quite sure what you’re concluding from that, though. Are you saying that, if left to themselves, the musicians/practitioners would not be able to resolve questions of musical quality? Or that they should not – that their questions should also remain open, like philosophy’s?