I was reading the philo-blogs and today (7 March) Richard Brown has taken issue with Richard Chappell’s Examples of Solved Philosophy. Brown holds that there is no such thing as solved philosophy (or problems are “only solved from a theoretical standpoint” and hence “involve substantial begging the question”), whereas Chappell happily provides examples that “are at least as well-established as most scientific results.”
Now there is something to be said for both sides: Brown is right when he says that all solutions are theory dependent and Chappell is right when says that we used to argue about certain things and now we don’t (don’t take this as my endorsement of his examples). However, this disagreement is just the two sides of one issue within philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigms.
Thomas Kuhn stated that science evolves by scientific paradigm, that science works under one major governing theory until it is overthrown by another. For instance everyone worked within Newton’s version of the universe until Einstein came along, and now we work under Einstein’s relativity theory. Eventually it is possible that there will be a further paradigm shift away from relativity theory.
Now Brown, I think, makes the claim that philosophical problems (of the sort Chappell indicates) are not solved without question begging. Well, if Chappell is going for the sort of consensus that happens in science – which he looks like he is – then this is not a problem: All problems and solutions are determined within and by the overarching theoretical framework, the paradigm. This is to specifically say that there is no such thing as an answer to a question outside of some theoretical framework: some meta-theory always determines what sort of thing counts as a solution. Therefore Brown has conflated being part of a paradigm with begging the question. Begging the question involves assuming what you set out to prove, whereas being part of a paradigm merely assumes the general rules about what determines a solution to a problem when answering.
However, philosophy is not science, and Brown has a point when he says, “all we can mean by ’solved’ is ‘generally agreed to be true by philosophers/philosopher X’”. Now the paradigm cuts the other way: philosophy does not work by paradigms and hence there is no background framework on which Chappell can base his solved philosophy. Even if all the top philosophers of the day agree to an extent about a good number of issues, it only takes a Kant or a Wittgenstein to turn philosophy on its head. Even simple issues, what might be seen as obvious mistakes made only by laymen, can take on new significance. For example, many people believe that everyone’s perceptions of color are their own, that each of us can’t know what other peoples’ perception of color are like. Perhaps this is true, but personally I believe that it makes no sense to say that you have something if you logically exclude other people from having it (Philosophical Investigations #398) and therefore if you have color perceptions then I can have the same color perception. By no means should my view be taken as correct, but it should illustrate that there is nothing so simple as to be considered solved if all it has is a consensus.
So what of solved philosophy? Is it all just us shifting our assumptions around? The logician De Morgan recognized that his logic (the logic of antiquity until the mid 1800s) was too weak to derive the statement “All heads of horses are heads of animals.” With the advent of modern logic, the statement was derivable. This is an example of solved philosophy: At a certain point we had a problem, were unable to do something, and then later we were able to do it. If we want to solve philosophical problems we have to first find problems, phenomena that no theory can explain, and then find a way to explain it using the unique tools available to philosophers. Taking down bad theories and clarifying issues is a worthwhile endeavor, progress is made, but nothing is solved.
If anyone asks me about solved philosophy, I’ll tell them about the life and world-changing ideas that make philosophy amazing, not about all the bunk theories we had to go through to get there.
Hi Noah, thanks for the nice post! You make some interesting points, but I don’t think the point simply boils down to being confused about Kuhn. My point is that there are multiple paradigms, each vying to be ‘the correct one’, and there, as of yet, is no principled way to say which is right. So, any example of ‘progress’ will necessarily assume that some paradigm is correct and that assumes that the paradigm in question is actually THE correct one. But since we have no principled way to tel which is the right one this assumption is no good. You’re right that that’s not technically begging the question (assuming what you want to prove), more like ‘assuming what you need to prove’, so perhaps I’ll call it ‘Ignoring the question’