Public Philosophy and Philosophical Progress

There is a widely held belief, among professional philosophers and the world at large, that philosophy doesn’t make progress. This belief isn’t idle; philosophy’s failure to make progress is a source of some embarrassment for philosophers, or at least regarded as something for which we need a good excuse.

But my work in public philosophy has made me more optimistic about the prospects for philosophical progress. (I understand “public philosophy” very broadly. It includes, at least, writing, speaking, and multimedia for a general audience, collaborations with community groups, activists, NGOs, and policymakers, industry consulting, philosophical counseling, philosophical events planning, and teaching non-traditional populations.)

There are at least three ways in which doing public philosophy might constitute philosophical progress. One has to do with our philosophical aims, another with the agents of philosophical progress, and a third with some obstacles to progress in philosophy, which some forms of public philosophy might help us overcome.

The Aims of Philosophy

There’s a funny tendency to treat philosophy itself as an agent in discussions of philosophical progress. This is reflected most clearly in the use of “philosophy” as the subject of agential verb phrases (“philosophy makes progress”). But this tendency, or something like it, is also reflected in a frequent resort to the passive voice (“questions have been solved,” “progress has been made”) and other phrases that decline to specify a relevant agent (“progress in philosophy,” “philosophical progress”).

This might seem like a pedantic point. Certainly there are plenty of contexts in which loose or metonymic uses of “philosophy” are harmless conveniences. And if by “philosophy,” we mean the community of professional philosophers, arguably we really do have some collective agency as a field. But it seems to me that the treatment of philosophy as an agent has muddied the discussion of philosophical progress. It has both encouraged us to attend only to more or less global consensus among professional philosophers, to the exclusion of more or less local consensus among everyone else, and it has obscured the aims relative to which philosophical progress is understood – what I will call philosophical aims.

Consider this passage from Daniel Stoljar’s 2017 book Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism:

There is no point arguing about what ‘the’ aim of philosophy is; no doubt many things could legitimately meet that description. Still, when we are talking about philosophical progress, it is reasonable to focus on the aim of answering big philosophical questions, just as I am doing here. That is the aim, I think, that people are worried about when they worry about philosophical progress; at any rate that is the aim we will worry about.

There’s much to agree with here. Certainly many philosophers do aim to answer big philosophical questions. And asking about “the” aim of philosophy is unlikely to yield fruitful results. But this is, roughly, because philosophy is not an agent – it’s not the sort of thing that has aims. (Or if philosophy is an agent, its aims are largely inscrutable or ill-defined, because philosophers’ aims differ so dramatically from one another.) The concrete, embodied things that have aims here, of course, are people. Stoljar focuses on the aim of answering big philosophical questions because that is a consensus aim among a broad spectrum of professional philosophers. But there are other possible philosophical aims worth considering.

If philosophical aims are goals that individual people have, which individual people are we talking about? Two obvious answers are: professional philosophers and everyone. More precisely, we might conceive of a philosophical aim as either (a) a legitimate aim that a professional philosopher has in their philosophical research, or (b) a legitimate aim that anyone has, insofar as that aim is advanced using philosophers’ characteristic knowledge and skills. (I include the qualification “legitimate” because if a philosopher aimed, say, to provide the intellectual foundations for Nazism, and succeeded in doing so, I wouldn’t want to regard this as philosophical progress.)

Conception (a) is already pretty broad. Ethicists might pursue the moral improvement of their readers; philosophers of art might seek to enrich readers’ appreciation of aesthetic value; political philosophers might aim to bring about a more just society. But conception (b) is even broader. To take one example, Zach Pirtle, an in-house philosopher at NASA, has done philosophical work on the agency’s research priorities, and has argued that certain engineering projects have been underfunded because of a misunderstanding about what engineers know and do. NASA has certain legitimate goals, and philosophers can play a distinctive role in furthering them. On this conception of a philosophical aim, public philosophers like Pirtle contribute directly to philosophical progress.

But why opt for conception (b) rather than conception (a)?

I can think of five reasons. First, it would create more opportunities for progress. There are a lot of philosophers out there, and more every year; we need to find philosophical work for them to do. We can solve this problem, in part, by adopting a broader conception of a philosophical aim, and orienting our institutions towards a correspondingly broad conception of philosophical progress. Second, it would make philosophical progress matter more. After all, most people aren’t professional philosophers. Third, it offers one way through the crisis of the humanities. If we can show that our work matters to people other than ourselves, it will be easier for us to defend our existence to university administrators and the public at large. Fourth, it addresses the growing dissatisfaction (in some circles, at least) with the perceived narrowness of mainstream philosophy. Fifth, many academic philosophers explicitly aim, in their scholarly work, to help non-philosophers with their philosophical problems. (I’m thinking of John Dewey, but examples abound.) The broader conception of a philosophical aim is, so to speak, a natural extension of this sort of thing.

The Agents of Philosophical Progress

“But,” someone might object, “This might be progress of some kind, but it’s not philosophical progress. It’s great if philosophers can help NASA figure out how to spend their money or whatever, but that’s not really philosophy.”

I’ve already offered some reasons to reject this response, but I understand its appeal. But even if we stick to a relatively conservative conception of a philosophical aim, there is another way that public philosophy might constitute philosophical progress – namely, through a relatively expansive conception of the agents of philosophical progress.

To see this, we can adapt an existing account of progress in some other field, and show how non-professional (and professional) philosophers can make progress on that account. Take, for example, Philip Kitcher’s 1993 book The Advancement of Science. There he describes several varieties of scientific progress in terms of the components of what he calls a scientific practice – roughly, the scientific language, questions, beliefs, and methodology of some scientist or scientists. Importantly, each component of a scientific practice, and each corresponding variety of scientific progress, has some philosophical analogue. But equally importantly, professional philosophers aren’t the only people with philosophical practices.

Linguistic progress, for Kitcher, consists in disentangling different senses associated with some piece of professional language which are wrongly supposed to be extensionally equivalent. For example, prior to the Copernican Revolution, an astronomer might have explained what “planet” means in a few different ways. A planet is an object which moves nightly with respect to the fixed stars; a planet is something that orbits the Earth other than the moon, sun, comets, and stars; a planet is one of those things (pointing at Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). After the Copernican Revolution, astronomers realized that these different senses associated with “planet” pick out different sets of objects.

Some readers will, I imagine, recognize what I mean when I say that many non-professional philosophers are in a pre-Copernican situation with respect to some of their philosophical vocabulary. Take “objective.” Some people associate a number of non-equivalent senses with the expression: a belief is objective if it’s formed on the basis of evidence every rational person would accept; if it’s held dispassionately; if it’s about an absolute, non-relational matter of fact; if the believer has no stake in whether it’s true. Some of these people, at least, don’t realize that these senses pick out different sets of beliefs. But of course, they might come to realize this by taking a philosophy class, or reading a piece of philosophy written for a general audience, or through some other sort of engagement with public philosophy.

The crucial point is that we are apt to think of philosophical progress in terms of the philosophical practices of professional philosophers. But non-professionals have philosophical practices, too, and it’s often easier for us to identify ways in which those practices might progress than it is for us to identify areas of progress in our own practices. (And I’d add that public philosophy is a two-way street. Professional philosophers can make progress from public engagement.)

Two Obstacles to Philosophical Progress

Putting aside the practices of non-professionals, we should also consider how our own scholarly practices hamper progress. I see at least two such obstacles to philosophical progress, and public philosophy has a role to play in overcoming both.

The first obstacle is a high tolerance for ad hoc theorizing, by which I mean the rejection of an auxiliary hypothesis or the rewording of a central claim in order to insulate such a claim from contradictory evidence. A high tolerance for ad hoc theorizing allows us to insulate such claims indefinitely. Karen Bennett’s 2009 discussion of what she calls “difference-minimizing” highlights the dangers of one form of ad hoc theorizing in philosophy.

The second obstacle is what I have come to call colonialism about logical space – the set of disciplinary incentives that encourage philosophers to believe or defend regions of logical space that have never been believed before, especially regions of logical space previously thought not to exist. (Think of the conjunction of two theoretical views that appear to be contradictory, which, when stated just so, aren’t.) I take colonialism about logical space to be an obstacle to philosophical progress, roughly, because the mere fact that some point in logical space has never been believed before is not a reason to think that it’s actually true, and is often a reason to think the opposite.

What does public philosophy have to do with these two obstacles? First, consider that ad hoc theorizing depends on two features which are absent in some (though not all) forms of public philosophy—namely, a sustained dialectic and a commitment to entrenchment in the face of disagreement. If a public philosophy project engages with its audience in a brief or monological way, or if it encourages philosophers to take up a conciliatory, agreement-seeking attitude, it is not hospitable to ad hoc theorizing. And if the norms that govern these sorts of philosophical spaces can be made to spread to our scholarly interactions, our tolerance for ad hoc theorizing might wane.

Second, colonialism about logical space is made possible, among other things, by a rich shared understanding of what points have or have not been occupied by philosophers past, and by a sense of theoretical novelty or interest which is, I think, peculiar to professional philosophers. When philosophers present their views to non-professionals, they have to motivate those views without recourse to this shared understanding or this shared sense of what’s new and exciting; the colonialist incentives are out of the picture. Again, if the norms that govern the spaces where we do public philosophy can spread to our scholarly interactions, it’s all for the best.

Ian Olasov

Ian Olasov is a graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center and the founder of Brooklyn Public Philosophers.