“In what state do we find the research produced in academic analytic philosophy?… Things are better than they’ve been for eighty years or so.”

[“Tartan Ribbon”. Photo by Thomas Sutton, method by James Clerk Maxwell]

That’s Richard Pettigrew, professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, pushing back against pessimism about philosophy (see here for example, or here) in a recent post at his blog.

Why think, as he does, that philosophical research today is of “very high average quality”? He says:

Partly, that’s because analytic philosophers are more often drawing on, incorporating, and showing proper respect towards the insights of traditions with which they’ve less often interacted in the past, taking their arguments and frameworks into account in the way they’ve long taken scientific findings and arguments and frameworks into account: traditions such as classic Chinese philosophy, critical theory, black feminist thought, and many more. Partly it’s because those who got their doctorates in the past decade or so have brought a slew of new questions to the table. And partly, I would say, it’s because the work done using the methodology the discipline has always used and on the questions it’s always tackled is currently extremely well done.

Pettigrew has some interesting defenses of some of the aspects of philosophical research we tend to hear a lot of complaints about, such as referee-proofed papers and epicyclical papers (“the sort of paper that takes a previous attempt to answer a question, notes that it doesn’t quite work, perhaps because it fails to cover a particular case that’s offered as a counterexample, and then proposes a new answer that is very closely related but incorporates some small amendment that allows it to account for that case”).

What was of particular value in his post, though, were his reflections on what, in the areas in which he’s an expert, strike him as philosophical progress and philosophical novelty.

Consider this an invitation to share your thoughts about progress or novelty in your areas of specialization.

Pettigrew writes:

Progress: is philosophy making any? We certainly aren’t establishing many unconditional facts with certainty, as we might think mathematics is, nor even with high credence, as you might think biology or ecology or linguistics is. But then it’s hard to see how we ever could. What premise that could ground a philosophical argument attracts widespread assent? There are no undisputed foundational premises in our discipline. And yet I think we are making profound and substantial progress in understanding issues.

Take the area I know best, which is epistemic utility theory or accuracy-first epistemology. The idea is that the sole fundamental source of epistemic value is accuracy or proximity to truth, and all norms that govern what we should believe can be derived from this. In the last twenty five years we’ve come to understand a huge amount about which norms might be established in this way and which might not, and that in turn has shed light on these norms, because one comes to look differently at a norm of belief when one sees that it can’t be shown to further the goal of accuracy.

Or take another area about which I’m beginning to learn: welfare ethics. Building on Harsanyi’s groundbreaking theorem, and proceeding by adding what we might call epicycles, we’ve gained remarkable insight into what principles about group decision-making under uncertainty one must reject if one wishes to reject utilitarianism. We now know in much greater detail the costs incurred by egalitarianism and prioritarianism, for instance.

In neither of these cases—accuracy-first epistemology or welfare ethics—have we established any unconditional facts with any degree of certainty. It is always open to people to reject veritism and it is open to them to reject the principles that give utilitarianism, and it’s hard to see how we could ever show they are irrational for doing so. In the former case, though, we’ve learned what we get if we accept it, and in the latter we’ve learned what we must be prepared to sacrifice if we reject utilitarianism. And this is progress. It’s substantial progress, I think. It’s the sort of progress we can make on these questions.

Finally, novelty: is there enough? Perhaps different areas have different amounts, but in epistemology, I’d say there’s a great deal, much of it generated by the very people who are typically taken to be under pressure from the publication system to keep ploughing the same furrows as their predecessors, namely, people who completed their doctorates in the past ten years and don’t yet have tenure, if they’re in the US system. It’s awkward to name names because it sounds like you think those you don’t list aren’t innovative, so let me be clear that this is entirely off the top of my head and reflects more what I’ve been working on myself recently than any judgment about people I don’t list. But let me mention Julia Staffel’s work on degrees of irrationality and transitional attitudes, Rima Basu’s work on the moral dimension of beliefs, Georgi Gardiner’s work on attention, Jane Friedman’s work on inquiry, Kevin Dorst’s work on rationalising apparent irrationalities, Amia Srinivasan’s work on identifying political implications of what seem like purely theoretical epistemological positions, and almost anything Rachel Fraser writes, but particularly her work on narrative testimony. Many of these are opening up whole new research programmes. I can’t think of another ten year period since the 1940s in which epistemology welcomed so many new avenues for research.

Pettigrew’s whole piece is here.

What are some examples of progress and new ideas in the areas of philosophy you work in?

The post Progress & New Ideas in Philosophy first appeared on Daily Nous.