Philosophy: What’s the Point? (Hint: It’s Not Discovering Truth). Part 1 of a Series.

Photo of me by Skye Horgan

March 19, 2023. Once upon a time, in the pre-pandemic era, I belonged to a philosophy salon. Seven or eight of us met every month or two to tear apart a philosophical paper. Just for fun! Everyone except me had training in philosophy, and some were honest-to-god professional philosophers. I felt lucky to be included--although now and then, when I chimed in, the pros exchanged glances with the subtext, Who let this guy in?

Like the humanities in general, philosophy seems increasingly anachronistic, at odds with our materialistic, hyper-competitive world. And in fact only 0.31 percent of all U.S. college graduates got degrees in philosophy in 2020, according to a recent analysis by Eric Schwitzgebel. [1] And yet philosophy strikes me as more relevant, even necessary, than ever. I love philosophy, even when it’s bad. [2]

Okay, but what good is philosophy? What is its purpose? Its point? I explored this old philosophical conundrum in a series of columns for Scientific American in 2017. Those five columns are behind a paywall, so I’m reposting edited, updated versions of them here where anyone can read them.

The ostensible point of philosophy is to seek and presumably find truth. But uppity physicists, notably Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, have declared that modern philosophy is pointless, because science, a far more effective method of discovering truth, has rendered it obsolete.

Philosophers tie themselves into knots defending their record. Take for example David Chalmers’s paper “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”, to which my philosophy salon devoted a session. Chalmers is almost comically passive-aggressive, veering between defiance and doubt. He insists that “obviously” philosophy achieves some progress, but the rest of his paper undercuts that modest assertion.

Chalmers concedes that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy.” A survey of philosophers carried out by Chalmers and a colleague revealed divisions on big questions: What is the relationship between mind and body? How do we know about the external world? Does God exist? Do we have free will?

Philosophers’ attempts to answer such questions, Chalmers remarks, “typically lead not to agreement but to sophisticated disagreement.” That is, progress consists less in defending truth claims than in casting doubt on them. Chalmers calls this “negative progress.” [3]

Chalmers suggests that philosophers’ methods keep improving, and that these refinements constitute progress of a kind. But if improved methods of argumentation still aren’t yielding truth, do they really count as progress? That’s like equating scientific progress with advances in telescopes and microscopes, regardless of whether these instruments discover viruses or pulsars. If philosophers can’t reach agreement on anything, why keep arguing? [4]

Chalmers resists the claim, sometimes called mysterianism, that the mind-body problem and related philosophical riddles are intractable. [5] Philosophers, Chalmers insists, must keep “doing our best to come up with those new insights, methods and concepts that might finally lead us to answering the questions.” This is less a reasoned position than an expression of faith. Chalmers resembles an officer exhorting his weary troops to keep charging forward, when even he suspects the battle is unwinnable.

After mulling over Chalmers’s paper and listening to the pros in my salon bicker about it, I reached several conclusions: First: Philosophers aren’t necessarily the best judges of what they do. Second: Philosophers could use advice from a friendly outsider (although some philosophers will surely think, With friends like this jerk…). Third: Philosophers should consider the possibility that discovering truth is not their strength and focus on other goals.

In subsequent posts, I’ll spell out ways in which philosophy—even if it can’t yield insights into reality as deep and durable as, say, evolution by natural selection, can make itself useful. Philosophy can serve as an art form, moral guide, spiritual path or even—as I will argue in my next column--a competitive sport.

Footnotes:

1.  The good news in Eric Schwitzgebel’s analysis is that more women and people of color are getting degrees in philosophy, which has historically been almost exclusively white and male.

2.  Re bad philosophy: Touring Italy in 1982, I stumbled on a tiny, decrepit museum crammed with Renaissance paintings of religious figures: God, angels, the Virgin Mary, Christ and so on. There was something odd about the faded, cracked paintings. Finally it hit me: The paintings were bad, and yet they had somehow been preserved for half a millennium. How often do you see crappy 500-year-old paintings hanging in museums? These were rarities! I studied the paintings more carefully than if they were da Vincis or Michelangelos, trying to figure out what, precisely, made them bad. Was it the unpersuasive faces? The cartoonish landscapes? Or some ineffable holistic quality? That little museum left me with a memorable aesthetic experience and lesson: pondering the bad—whether art or philosophy—can help us grok the good.

3.   Chalmers’s phrase “negative progress” reminds me of comments that anthropologist Clifford Geertz makes about his field. Geertz says “progress” in anthropology “is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.”

4.  Members of my philosophy salon disagreed over whether methods of argumentation have improved. One philosopher said he was struck, reading papers from the 1960s and 1970s, by how poorly reasoned they are. Another mused that he had precisely the opposite reaction; older papers seem smarter than newer ones.

5.  The term “mysterian” was coined by philosopher Owen Flanagan, whom I profile in my book Mind-Body Problems.