# [6]{.chapterNumber} [Philosophy as the Evocation of Conceptual Landscapes[^1^](#c06.xhtml_c6-note-0001){#c06.xhtml_R_c6-note-0001}]{.chapterTitle} *Massimo Pigliucci* </div> ::: section ## Preamble: The Nature of Progress {#c06.xhtml_head-2-31} I come to philosophy from the natural sciences, where the idea that my former academic field (evolutionary biology) makes progress is taken for granted, and where one would receive amused or puzzled looks by simply asking the question. And yet, philosophers of science have convincingly argued that it is much more difficult than one might think to provide a good account of how, precisely, science makes progress (Niiniluoto 1980, 2011; Laudan 1981; Bird 2007). When it comes to philosophy, however, it is philosophers themselves who often deny that the field makes progress, no matter how one understands "progress." Which is puzzling, because the obvious question, then, is why on earth would they bother spending their lives contributing to an area of inquiry that reliably goes nowhere? Part of the problem is that "progress" is itself not at all easy to define, with the term taking on different meanings in the natural sciences and, for instance, in mathematics -- the latter being a field where practitioners have no trouble saying that they are, indeed, making progress (Crowe 1975, 1988; Brown 2008; Krantz 2010; Cooke 2011). I suggest that a reasonable approach to this issue is to "go Wittgensteinian," so to speak, and argue that "progress" is a family resemblance, or cluster concept. Wittgenstein's own famous example of this type of concept was the idea of "game," which does not admit of a small set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions in order to be defined, and yet this does not seem to preclude us from distinguishing games from not‐games, at least most of the time. Progress, in a sense, could then be thought to be like pornography (to paraphrase the famous quip by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart): "I know it when I see it." Or perhaps we can descend from the high echelons of contemporary philosophy and jurisprudence and simply do the obvious thing: look it up in a dictionary. For instance, from the Merriam‐Webster we get: > 1. ["forward or onward movement toward a destination"]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0001} > > or > > 2. ["advancement toward a better, more complete, or more modern condition"]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0002} with the additional useful information that the term originates from the Latin (via Middle English) *progressus*, which means "an advance." How is this going to help? For one, it allows us to begin to distinguish the different senses in which science and other disciplines may be said to be making progress: I submit that progress in science is a teleonomic (i.e., goal oriented) process along definition (i), where the goal is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the natural world in terms of the simplest possible set of general principles (in physics, laws of nature). Even though there are a lot of complications and nuances that one needs to address, I believe this captures what most scientists and philosophers of science mean when they say that science, unquestionably, makes progress. Definition (ii), however, is more akin to what I think has been going on in the allied fields of mathematics, logic, and (with an important qualification to be made in a bit) philosophy. Consider first mathematics and logic: I do not think it is tenable to understand them as teleonomic disciplines even if one is a Platonist (let alone if one is not, as in my case), because there is an infinite number of logical‐mathematical objects to discover and theorems to prove, so that mathematics and logic look like ever expanding disciplines, not converging toward any "theory of everything," as is (allegedly, since not everyone is convinced of this: Fodor 1974; Cartwright 1983) the case for science.[^2^](#c06.xhtml_c6-note-0003){#c06.xhtml_R_c6-note-0003} Rather, I think of mathematics and logic as advancing "toward a better, more complete" position, "better" in the sense that the process both opens up new lines of internally generated inquiry (the solution of mathematical and logical problems generates new problems, and so forth) and "more complete" in the sense that mathematicians and logicians are best thought of as engaged in the exploration of a space of conceptual (as distinct from empirical) possibilities. ::: ::: section ## Evoking Truths about Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy {#c06.xhtml_head-2-32} How do we cash out this idea of a space of conceptual possibilities, which I argue is also crucial to provide an account of how philosophy makes progress? And is such a space discovered or invented? A possible answer was sketched in a different context by Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin, in their *The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy* (2015). Let me summarize their arguments, since they are crucial to my project as laid out in this essay. In the second part of their tome (which was written by Smolin; Unger wrote the first part), [chapter 5](#c05.xhtml) begins by acknowledging that some version of mathematical Platonism -- the idea that "mathematics is the study of a timeless but real realm of mathematical objects" -- is common among mathematicians (and philosophers of mathematics), though by no means universal, and certainly not uncontroversial. The standard dichotomy here is between mathematical objects being discovered (Platonism) vs. being invented (nominalism and similar positions: Bueno 2013). Smolin immediately proceeds to reject the above choice as an instance of false dichotomy: it is simply not the case that either mathematical objects exist independently of human minds, and are therefore discovered, or they do not exist prior to our making them up and are therefore invented. Smolin sets out four possibilities in a form similar to [Table 6.1](#c06.xhtml_c6-tbl-0001){#c06.xhtml_R_c6-tbl-0001}. <figure> <table data-border="1"> <thead> <tr class="header"> <th><strong></strong></th> <th><strong>Existed prior? Yes</strong></th> <th><strong>Existed prior? No</strong></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr class="odd"> <td><strong>Has rigid properties? yes</strong></td> <td>discovered</td> <td>evoked</td> </tr> <tr class="even"> <td><strong>Has rigid properties? no</strong></td> <td>fictional</td> <td>invented</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p>(Adapted from Unger and Smolin 2015, 423)</p> <figcaption><p><span class="figureLabel"> <a href="#c06.xhtml_R_c6-tbl-0001" id="c06.xhtml_c6-tbl-0001"><strong>Table 6.1</strong></a> </span></p></figcaption> </figure> By "rigid properties" here Smolin means that the objects in question, once we become aware of them, present us with "highly constrained" choices about their properties. Let us begin with the obvious entry in the table: when objects exist prior to humans thinking about them, and they have rigid properties. Scientific discoveries fall into this category: planets, say, exist "out there" independently of anyone being able to verify this fact, so when we become capable of registering their existence and of studying their properties we discover them. Objects that had no prior existence, and are also characterized by no rigid properties include, for instance, fictional characters (Smolin calls them "invented"). Sherlock Holmes did not exist until Arthur Conan Doyle invented him, and his characteristics are not rigid, as has been (sometimes painfully) obvious once Holmes got into the public domain and different authors could pretty much do what they wanted with him. Smolin, unfortunately, doesn't talk about the "fictional" category of his classification, which comprises objects that had prior existence and yet are not characterized by rigid properties. Perhaps some scientific concepts, such as that of biological species, fall into this class: "species," however one conceives of them, certainly exist in the outside world; but *how* one conceives of them (i.e., what properties they are assigned) may depend on a given biologist's interests (this is referred to in the philosophy of biology as pluralism about species concepts: Mishler and Donoghue 1982). The crucial entry in the table, for my purposes here, is that of "evoked" objects: "Why could something come to exist, which did not exist before, and, nonetheless, once it comes to exist, there is no choice about how its properties come out? Let us call this possibility *evoked*. Maybe mathematics is evoked" (Unger and Smolin 2015, 422). Smolin goes on to provide an uncontroversial class of evocation, and just like Wittgenstein when he was talking about his family resemblance concepts, he chooses games: > For example, there are an infinite number of games we might invent. We invent the rules but, once invented, there is a set of possible plays of the game which the rules allow. We can explore the space of possible games by playing them, and we can also in some cases deduce general theorems about the outcomes of games. It feels like we are exploring a pre‐existing territory as we often have little or no choice, because there are often surprises and incredibly beautiful insights into the structure of the game we created. But there is no reason to think that game existed before we invented the rules. What could that even mean? > > *(Unger and Smolin 2015, 422)* Interestingly, Smolin includes *forms* of poetry and music in the evoked category: once someone invented haiku, or the blues, then others were constrained by certain rules if they wanted to produce something that could reasonably be called haiku poetry, or blues music. An obvious example that is very close to mathematics and logic is provided by board games: > When a game like chess is invented a whole bundle of facts become demonstrable, some of which indeed are theorems that become provable through straightforward mathematical reasoning. As we do not believe in timeless Platonic realities, we do not want to say that chess always existed -- in our view of the world, chess came into existence at the moment the rules were codified. This means we have to say that all the facts about it became not only demonstrable, but true, at that moment as well ... Once evoked, the facts about chess are objective, in that if any one person can demonstrate one, anyone can. And they are independent of time or particular context: they will be the same facts no matter who considers them or when they are considered. > > *(Unger and Smolin 2015, 423)* This strikes me as very powerful and widely applicable. Smolin isn't simply taking sides in the old Platonist/nominalist debate about the nature of mathematics. He is significantly advancing that debate by showing that there are two other cases missing from the pertinent taxonomy, and that, moreover, one of those cases provides a positive account of mathematical (and similar) objects, rather than just a rejection of Platonism. But in what sense is mathematics analogous to chess? Here is Smolin again: > There is a potential infinity of formal axiomatic systems (FASs). Once one is evoked it can be explored and there are many discoveries to be made about it. But that statement does not imply that it, or all the infinite number of possible formal axiomatic systems, existed before they were evoked. > > Indeed, it's hard to think what belief in the prior existence of an FAS would add. Once evoked, an FAS has many properties which can be proved about which there is no choice -- that itself is a property that can be established. This implies there are many discoveries to be made about it. In fact, many FASs once evoked imply a countably infinite number of true properties, which can be proved. > > *(Unger and Smolin 2015, 425--26)* Reflecting on the category of evoked objective truths provides me with a reading key to make fuller sense of what I am attempting to articulate: my suggestion here, then, is that Smolin's account of mathematics applies, *mutatis mutandis*, to logic and, with an important caveat, to philosophy. All these disciplines -- but, crucially, not science -- are in the business of ascertaining "evoked," objective truths about their subject matters, even though these truths are neither discovered (in the sense of corresponding to mind independent states of affairs in the outside world) nor invented (in the sense of being (entirely) arbitrary constructs of the human mind). I have referred twice already to the idea that philosophy is closer to mathematics and logic (and a bit further from science) via a qualification. The qualification is that philosophy is, in fact, inherently concerned with the state of the world (unlike mathematics and logic, which while useful to scientists, could be, and largely are, pursued without any reference whatsoever to how the world actually is). If you are doing ethics, or political philosophy, for instance, you are very much concerned with those aspects of the world that deal with interactions among humans within the context of their societies. If you are doing philosophy of mind you are ultimately concerned with how actual human (and perhaps artificial) brains work and generate consciousness and intelligence. Even if you are a metaphysician -- engaging in what is arguably the most abstract field of philosophical inquiry -- you are still trying to provide an account of how things hang together, so to speak, in the real cosmos. This means that the basic parameters that philosophers use as their inputs, the starting points of their philosophizing, their equivalent of axioms in mathematics and assumptions in logic (or rules in chess) are *empirical* data about the world. This data comes from both everyday experience (since the time of the pre‐Socratics) and of course increasingly from the world of science itself. Philosophy, I maintain, is in the business of exploring the sort of conceptually evoked spaces that Smolin is talking about, where the evocation is the result of whatever starting assumptions are made by individual philosophers working within a particular field and, crucially, of the constraints that are imposed by our best understanding of how the world actually is. I am *not* suggesting that every field that can be construed as somehow exploring a conceptual space *ipso facto* makes progress. If that were the case, we would be forced to say that pretty much everything humans do makes progress. Consider, for instance, fiction writing. Specifically, imagine a science fiction author who writes three books about the same planet existing in three different "time lines." In each book, the geography of the planet is different, which leads to different evolutionary paths for its inhabitants. However, each description is constrained by the laws of physics (he wants to keep things in accordance with those laws) and by some rational principles (the same macroscopic object can't be in two places at once, as that would violate the principle of non‐contradiction). Each book tells a different story, constrained both empirically (laws of physics), and logically. In a sense, this writer would be exploring different conceptual spaces, by describing different possibilities unfolding on the fictitious planet. However, I do not think that we want to say that he is making progress. He is just exploring various imaginary worlds. The difference with philosophy, then, is twofold. First, our writer is doing what Smolin calls "inventing": not only did his worlds not have prior existence to his imagining them, but they also have no rigid properties. Even the constraints he imposes from the outset, both empirical and logical, could have been otherwise. He could easily have imagined planets where both the laws of physics and those of logic are different. Philosophy, I maintain, is in the business of doing empirically informed evoking, not inventing, which means that its objects of study have rigid properties. Second, philosophy is, again, very much concerned with the world as it is, not with arbitrarily invented ones. Even when philosophers venture into thought experiments (Norton 2004), or explore "possible worlds" (Brown 2002; Copeland 2002) they do so with an interest in figuring things out as far as *this* world is concerned. So, no, I am not suggesting that every human activity makes progress, nor that philosophy is like literature. ::: ::: section ## The Business of Philosophy, and its Limits {#c06.xhtml_head-2-33} There are two issues I want to consider before further exploring the idea of philosophy moving in conceptual spaces. They both, I think, contribute to much confusion and perplexity whenever the topic of progress in philosophy comes up for discussion. The first issue is that philosophers too often use the word "theory" to refer to what they are doing, while in fact our discipline is not in the business of producing theories -- if by that one means complex and testable explanations of how the world works. The word "theory" immediately leads one to think of science. In light of what I have just argued about the teleonomic nature of scientific progress contrasted with the exploratory/qualificatory nature of philosophical inquiry, one can see how talking about philosophical "theories" may not be productive. Philosophers do have an alternative term, which gets used quite often interchangeably with "theory": *account*. "Account" seems a more appropriate term because philosophy -- the way I see it -- attempts to clarify things, or to analyze in order to bring about understanding, not really to discover new facts, but rather to evoke rational conclusions arising from certain ways of looking at a given problem or set of facts. The second issue is a way to concede an important point to critics of philosophy. I am proposing a model of philosophical inquiry conceived as providing accounts of evoked truths by exploring and refining our understanding of a series of conceptual landscapes. But it is true that at some point such refinement can yield increasingly diminishing returns, so that certain discussion threads become more and more limited in scope, ever more the result of clever logical hair splitting, and of less and less use or interest to anyone but a vanishingly small group of professionals who, for whatever reason, have become passionate about it. A good (but certainly not the only) example of this, I think, is the field of "gettierology," which has arisen from discussions of the implications of a landmark paper published by Edmund Gettier in 1963, a paper that for the first time questioned the famous concept of knowledge as justified true belief often attributed (with some scholarly disagreement) to Plato. While it is true that Gettier‐style cases present an interesting problem for epistemologists, and it is further true that the initial debate did move epistemology forward, it also has to be admitted that more than half a century later pretty much all of the interesting things that could possibly have been said in response to Gettier are likely to have been said, and that ongoing controversies on the topic lack relevance and look increasingly self‐involved. However, this problem is not the sole province of philosophy: pretty much every academic field -- from literary criticism to history, from the social sciences to, yes, even the natural sciences -- suffers from the same malaise, and examples are not hard to find. I spent much of my academic career as an evolutionary biologist, and I cannot vividly enough convey the sheer boredom of sitting through yet another research seminar during which someone presented lots of data that simply confirmed once again what everyone already knew, except that the work had been carried out on a species of organisms for which it hadn't been done before. Since there are (conservatively) close to nine million species on our planet, you can see the potential for endless funding and boundless irrelevancy. In its favor, philosophical scholarship is at the least very cheap by comparison with even the least expensive research program in the natural sciences! ::: ::: section ## Philosophy Studies the (Evoked) Structure of Aporetic Clusters {#c06.xhtml_head-2-34} Current discussions on progress in philosophy have, of course, a number of precedents, although it is actually surprising how few scholarly papers have been devoted to the topic. (Then again, you don't see a lot of scientists, mathematicians, or logicians doing much soul searching about whether their disciplines make progress.) One that I think is particularly important to discuss here, because in some sense it makes for a good contrast with (as well as complement to) my own thoughts, is Moody's (1986) distinction among three conceptions of progress. What he calls progress~1~ takes place when there is a specifiable goal about which people can agree that it has been achieved, or what counts towards achieving it. If you are on a diet, for instance, and decide to lose ten pounds, you have a measurable specific goal, and you can be said to make progress insofar your weight goes down and approaches the specific target (and, of course, you can also measure your regress, should your weight go further up!). Progress~2~ occurs when one cannot so clearly specify a goal to be reached, and yet an individual or an external observer can competently judge that progress (or regress) has occurred when comparing the situation at time *t* vs. the situation at time *t + 1*, even though the criteria by which to make that judgment are subjective. Moody thinks, for example, that composers guided by an inner sense of when they are "getting it right" would be making this sort of progress while composing. Finally, progress~3~ is a hybrid animal, instantiated by situations where there are intermediate but not overarching goals. Interestingly, Moody says that mathematics makes progress~3~, insofar as there is no overall goal of mathematical scholarship, and yet mathematicians do set intermediate goals for themselves, and the achievement of these goals (like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem) is recognized as such by the mathematical community. (Moody says that science too makes progress~3~, although as discussed above, science actually does have an ultimate, specifiable goal: understanding and explaining the natural world. So I would be inclined to say that science makes progress~1~, within Moody's scheme.) Moody's next step is to assume provisionally that philosophy is a type of inquiry, and then ask whether any of his three categories of progress applies to it. The first obstacle is that philosophy does not appear to have consensus‐generating procedures such as those found in the natural sciences or in technological fields like engineering. Moody then claims (1986, 37) that "the only thing that philosophers are likely to agree about with enthusiasm is the abysmal *inadequacy* of a particular theory" (italics in the original). While I think that is actually a bit of a caricature, I do not share Moody's pessimistic assessment of that observation even if true: negative progress, that is, the elimination of bad ideas, is progress nonetheless. Interestingly, Moody remarks (again, with pessimism that to my mind is not warranted) that in philosophy people talk about "issues" and "positions," not of the scientific equivalents: "hypotheses" and "results." I think that is because philosophy is not sufficiently akin to science for the latter terms to make sense within discussions of philosophical inquiry. Moody concludes that philosophy does not make progress~1~ or progress~3~, because its history has not yielded a trail of solved problems. What about progress~2~? He takes up the possibility that perhaps philosophy is not a type of inquiry after all, and analyzes in some detail two alternative conceptions: Wittgenstein's (1965) idea of philosophy as "therapy" and Richard Rorty's (1980) so‐called "conversational model" of philosophy. As Moody (1986, 38) summarizes it: "Wittgenstein believed that philosophical problems are somehow spurious and that the activity of philosophy ... should terminate with the withdrawal, or deconstruction, of philosophical questions." On this view, then, there is progress, of sorts, in philosophy, but it is the sort of "terminus" brought about by committing *seppuku*. As Moody rather drily comments, while nobody can argue that Wittgenstein's ideas have not been taken seriously, it is equally undeniable that philosophy has gone forward largely as if the therapeutic approach had never been articulated. If a proposed account of the nature of philosophy has so blatantly been ignored by the relevant epistemic community, we can safely file it away. Rorty's starting point is what he took to be the (disputable, in my opinion) observation that philosophy has failed at its self‐appointed task of analysis and criticism. Moody quotes him as saying (1986, 39): "The attempts of both analytic philosophers and phenomenologists to 'ground' this and 'criticize' that were shrugged off by those whose activities were purportedly being grounded and criticized." Rorty arrived at this because of his rejection of what he sees as philosophy's "hangover" from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when philosophers were attempting to set their inquiry within a framework that allowed a priori truths to be discovered (think Descartes and Kant), even though David Hume dealt that framework a fatal blow during the eighteenth century. While Moody finds much of Rorty's analysis on target, I must confess that I don't. For instance, the fact that other disciplines (like science) marched on while refusing to be grounded or criticized by philosophy is neither entirely true (lots of scientists have paid and still pay attention to philosophy of science, for example) nor necessarily apt as the ultimate test of the value of philosophy even if true: creationists and climate change deniers, after all, shrug off any criticism of their positions, but that doesn't make such criticism invalid, or futile for that matter (since others are responding to it). Yet there is something to be said for thinking of philosophy as a "conversation" more than an inquiry, as Rorty did. The problem is that this and other dichotomies presented to us by Rorty are, as Moody himself comments (1986, 40), false: "we do not have to choose between 'saying something,' itself a rather empty notion that manages to say virtually nothing, and inquiring, or between 'conversing' and 'interacting with nonhuman reality.'" Indeed we don't. What account, then, can we turn to in order to make sense of progress in philosophy, according to Moody? I recommend that the interested reader check Moody's discussion of Robert Nozick's (1981) "explanational model" of philosophy, as well as John Kekes's (1980) "perennial problems" approach, but my own treatment here will jump to Nicholas Rescher (1978) and the concept of "aporetic clusters," which is one path that supports the conclusion -- according to Moody -- that philosophy does make progress, and it is a type‐2 progress. Rescher thinks that it is unrealistic to expect consensus in philosophy, and yet does not see this as a problem, but rather as an organic outcome of the nature of philosophical inquiry: > in philosophy, supportive argumentation is never alternative‐precluding. Thus the fact that a good case can be made out for giving one particular answer to a philosophical question is never considered as constituting a valid reason for denying that an equally good case can be produced for some other incompatible answers to this question. > > *(quoted in Moody 1986, 44)* In fact, Rescher thinks that philosophers come up with "families" of alternative solutions to any given philosophical problem, which he labels aporetic clusters.[^3^](#c06.xhtml_c6-note-0004){#c06.xhtml_R_c6-note-0004} According to this view, some philosophical accounts are eliminated, while others are retained and refined. The keepers become philosophical classics, like "virtue ethics," "utilitarianism," or "Kantian deontology" in ethics, or "constructive empiricism" and "structural realism" in philosophy of science (Ladyman 1988). Rescher's view is not at all incompatible with my idea of philosophy as evoking, and then exploring and refining, peaks in conceptual landscapes. As Moody (1986, 45) aptly summarizes it: "that there are 'aporetic clusters' is evidence of a kind of progress. That the necrology of failed arguments is so long is further evidence." ::: ::: section ## Empirical Examples of Aporetic Clusters in Philosophy {#c06.xhtml_head-2-35} I am a scientist as well as a philosopher, and I have put forth the empirical suggestion that philosophy makes progress through the exploration of evoked conceptual landscapes that are nonetheless anchored by empirical constraints. Is there any evidence that this is, indeed, the way philosophy proceeds? I think so, and it comes at the least in part from a landmark paper by Bourget and Chalmers (2013), in which they quantitatively explore what professional philosophers think of a number of prominent issues and positions within their own discipline. Even though Bourget and Chalmers did not carry out their study while informed by the ideas of aporetic clusters and progress, their data is suitable for the current discussion, despite a number of possible reservations about its methodology (e.g., concerning the sampling protocol, or the fact that the multivariate analyses presented in it are rather preliminary). It also represents a rare opportunity to systematically assess the views of an entire profession, the sort of thing that would probably be useful also in other disciplines, from the humanities to the natural sciences, but is all too seldom actually done. I focus here on a subset of interesting findings that bear directly or indirectly on my overall project as laid out so far, even though the Bourget‐Chalmers paper contains a number of additional stimulating bits of information for anyone interested in the current state of philosophical inquiry. To begin with, apparently the common adage that if there are X philosophers in a room, they are bound to have X + 1 opinions does not appear to be the case at all. Consider some of the main findings of the survey: - [A total of 71% of respondents thought that a priori knowledge is possible, while only 18% didn't think so (the remainder, here and in the other cases, falls under the heterogeneous category of "other"). There is a clear majority here, and only two major aporetic clusters.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0003} - [Things are more equally divided when it comes to views on the nature of abstract objects: Platonism gets 39% while nominalism is barely behind, at 38%. Superficially, this may seem an instance of precisely what's wrong with philosophy, but is in fact perfectly congruent with my model of multiple peaks in conceptual space. Philosophers seem to have settled on two of Rescher's aporetic clusters here, having eliminated a number of unacceptable alternatives. There may very well not be an ascertainable fact of the matter about whether Platonism or nominalism are "true." They are both reasonable ways of thinking about the ontology of abstract objects, with each position subject to further criticism and refinement.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0004} - [Every practicing philosopher knows that W.V.O. Quine thought he had demolished once and for all the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, but the bad news for him is that about 65% of philosophers disagree, and only 27% agree that such demise has in fact taken place. The latter may be an example of an aporetic cluster that gained more prominence immediately post‐evocation by Quine, but may have eroded somewhat since, to use a geological analogy.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0005} - [One of the most lopsided outcomes of the survey concerns what epistemic attitude is more reasonable to hold about the existence and characteristics of the external world: 82% of respondents qualified themselves as realists, followed by only 5% skeptics and 4% idealists. This may be as close as it gets for philosophers to actually settle a dispute.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0006} - [In terms of ethical frameworks, things are pretty evenly split, with deontology barely leading at 26%, followed by consequentialism at 24% and virtue ethics at 18%. Here too, as in the case of Platonism vs. nominalism, the result makes sense to me, as it is hard to imagine what it would *mean* to say that deontology, for instance, is the "true" approach to ethics. These three (and a number of others) are reasonable, alternative ways of approaching ethics -- and there are a number of unreasonable ones that have been considered and discarded over time.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0007} Even more fascinating -- and congruent with my general thesis -- are the pairwise correlations that the authors uncovered between philosophical views, hinting at the conclusion that philosophers tend to develop fairly internally coherent positions across fields. For instance: - [If one thinks that the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is solid, then one also tends to accept the idea of a priori knowledge -- naturally enough.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0008} - [If a philosopher is a moral realist, she is also likely to be an objectivist about aesthetic value. Interestingly, moral realists also tend to be realists in philosophy of science, and Platonists about abstract objects.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0009} - [If one thinks that *Star Trek*'s Kirk survives teleportation (rather than being killed and replaced by a copy), one also -- coherently -- often adopts a psychological view of personal identity.]{#c06.xhtml_c6-li-0010} Perhaps the most interesting and nuanced approach that Bourget and Chalmers take to their data unfolds when they move from univariate and bivariate to multivariate statistics, in this case principal components analyses. This allows them to examine the many‐to‐many relationships among variables in their data set. The first principal component they identify, that is, the one that explains most of the variance in the sample, they label "Anti‐naturalism," as it groups a number of responses that coherently fall under that position: libertarianism concerning free will, non‐physicalism about the mind, theism, non‐naturalism as a metaphilosophy, and the so‐called "further fact" view of personal identity. If one were to plot individual responses along this dimension (which Bourget and Chalmers don't do, unfortunately), one would see anti‐naturalist philosophers clustering at the positive end of it, and naturalist philosophers clustering at the negative end. The second‐ranked principal component is labeled "Objectivism/Platonism" by the authors, and features positive loadings (i.e., multivariate correlations) of cognitivism in moral judgment, realism in metaethics, objectivism about aesthetic value, and of course Platonism about abstract objects. The third component is about Rationalism, with positive loadings for the possibility of a priori knowledge, the analytic‐synthetic distinction, and rationalism about knowledge. The overall picture that emerges, then, is very much that of a conceptual landscape with a number of alternative peaks, or aporetic clusters, which are internally coherent and well refined by centuries of philosophical inquiry. I suspect that historically many more "peaks" have been explored and eventually discarded, and that the height of the current peaks (as reflected by the consensus gathered within the relevant epistemic communities) is itself heterogeneous and dynamic, with some in the process of becoming more prominent in the landscape and others on their way to secondary status or destined to disappear altogether. ::: ::: section ## The Evolution of Philosophy {#c06.xhtml_head-2-36} If I am right and philosophy makes progress by evoking and refining aporetic clusters that are constrained by empirical evidence about the world, it makes sense to ask one last question: where is philosophy going, considering its continuous tension with the sciences, themselves making progress in what may be more of a teleonomic fashion? Philosophers have often advanced a model of their discipline as a "placeholder" for the development of eventually independent fields of inquiry, presenting philosophy as the business of conducting the initial conceptual exploration (and, hopefully, clarification) of a given set of problems, handing it then to a special science as soon as those problems become empirically tractable. There are quite a few historical examples to back up this view, from the emergence of the natural sciences to that of psychology and linguistics. Philosophy of mind is arguably now in the midst of this very process, interfacing with the nascent cognitive sciences. Predictably, this model is often twisted by detractors of philosophy to show that the field has been in a slow process of disintegrating itself, with a hard core (represented by metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, logic, aesthetics, and the like) that is the last holdout, and which has shown increasing signs of itself yielding to the triumphal march of Science (with a capital "S"). If that is the case, of course, so be it. But I seriously doubt it. What we have seen over the last few centuries, and especially the last century or so, is simply a transformation of what it means to do philosophy, a transformation that I think is part of the continuous rejuvenation of the field. This should be neither surprising nor assumed to be unique to philosophy. Although we use the general word "science" to indicate everything from Aristotle's forays into biology to what modern physicists are doing with the Large Hadron Collider, the very nature of science has evolved throughout the centuries, and keeps evolving still. What counts as good scientific methodology, sound scientific theorizing, or interesting scientific problems has changed dramatically from Aristotle to Bacon to Darwin to Stephen Hawking. Why should it be any different for philosophy? One of the most obvious indications that philosophy has been reinventing itself over the past century or so is the stark onset of a panoply of "philosophies of." "Philosophies of" are the way the field has been responding to the progressive emancipation of some of its former branches: science is no longer natural philosophy, but that simply means that now philosophers are free to philosophize *about* science (and, more specifically, about biology, quantum mechanics, etc.) without *doing* science. The same idea applies to linguistics (and philosophy of language), psychology (and philosophy of the social sciences), economics (and philosophy of economics), and so on. Is this sort of transformation also about to affect philosophy's core areas of metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, logic, and aesthetics? It depends on how one looks at things. On the one hand, to a larger or lesser extent it certainly has become increasingly difficult to engage in any of the above without also taking on board results from the natural and social sciences. While logic is perhaps the most shielded of all core philosophical areas in this respect (indeed, arguably it has contributed to the sciences broadly construed much more than it has received), it is certainly a good idea to do metaphysics while knowing something about physics (and biology); ethics while interfacing with political and social sciences, and even biology and neuroscience; epistemology while being aware of the findings of the cognitive sciences; and aesthetics with an eye toward biology and the cognitive and social sciences. Nonetheless, all the core areas of philosophy remain still very much recognizable as philosophy. Should they finally spawn their own independent disciplines, there will immediately arise in turn a need for more "philosophies of," and the process will keep going, the field adapting and regenerating. Ultimately, philosophy is here to stay for the same reason that other humanities (and the arts) will stay, regardless of how much science improves and expands, or how much narrow‐minded politicians and administrators keep cutting humanities' funding in universities. Human beings need more than facts and formulas, more than experiment and observation. They need to experience in the first person, and they need to reflect critically on all aspects of their existence. They need to *understand*, in the broadest possible terms, which means they need to philosophize. ::: ::: {.section .bibliography} ## References {#c06.xhtml_head-2-37} 1. Bird, A. 2007. "What is Scientific Progress?" `<cite>`{=html}*Nous*`</cite>`{=html} 41: 64--89. 2. Bourget, D., and D.J. Chalmers. 2013. "What do Philosophers Believe?" `<cite>`{=html}*Philosophical Studies*`</cite>`{=html} 3: 1--36. 3. Brown, J.R. 2002. "Thought Experiments." *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*. Accessed 27 November 2015. 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