Does philosophy progress?
We examined commensurability in the previous section as necessary for progress. To answer the present question, however, I examine some other marks of progress as well. Another mark is that new schools of thought come about and old schools become obsolete. The obsolete schools are the ones that are "worse" than the new schools. Are there any obsolete schools of philosophy?
Well, you won't find anyone talking about "obsolete schools of philosophy". But I don't think that philosophical progress is as straightforward as scientific progress. Science progresses first by accumulation, and second by revolution. But philosophy is far more fluid than that. There may still be Aristotelians around today, but their views will have still progressed from what Aristotle himself claimed. Also, logical positivism may not be the dominant philosophy of science anymore. But its influence still persists, "especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention given to the analysis of scientific thought and in the definitely acquired results of the technical research on formal logic and the theory of probability."1 Each school of thought leaves its mark and contributes to the next generation. That is not something that can necessarily be said of science.
Why should there be this discrepancy between science and philosophy?
First, I think that there is a difference in the units of commensuration. To begin, science has one very clear set of units of commensuration that philosophy does not have. It is observations, which only accumulate over time. These observations place severe limitations on the kinds of theories that can be accepted at any one time. Second, only one theory at a time can be accepted generally by scientists. Philosophy typically tolerates many schools of thought at once. This places an obvious limitation on the kinds of theories that scientists can accept. Often the new theory that replaces the old cannot show much influence from the old theory. Relativity theory, for example, is based on a very different conception of the universe from Newtonian physics. Quantum mechanics is even more different. Philosophical schools seem to show a much clearer trail of influence from one school of thought to another. And when there are marked differences, they are generally mirrored by marked social changes elsewhere.
That is a reason why science would show such a marked difference theory for theory. New facts are always coming to light in scientific research. We would expect change to be fluid where new facts could be smoothly assimilated by the old theory. This is to be reflected in the progress of normal science. But we would expect the change to be marked and discontinuous when the facts cannot be so assimilated. This is what necessitates the rejection of the old theory and the acceptance of a new one. The new one will, almost by definition, be quite unlike the old theory. For if it were like the old theory, then the old theory could have assimilated the new facts quite well enough all by itself. Hence, that is another unit of commensuration between scientific paradigms. It is the smoothness with which a theory assimilates new facts. Of course, the notion of "smoothness" would require a large amount of unpacking. But this is simply why it is so difficult to adjudicate between paradigms during a period of scientific revolution.
Are there any comparable periods of philosophical revolution? Yes, there are, and they coincide with periods of great social change as well. They do not occur with nearly as much regularity as periods of scientific revolution, but they do occur. The last two were the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, in reverse historical order.
But you can't equate philosophical progress with great social change. There was a period of great social change between the period of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It does not follow that philosophy progressed in that time. That was why they called the Renaissance the "rebirth". It was the rebirth of knowledge and wisdom, as rediscovered from antiquity.
Did philosophy regress during the Middle Ages? Or even more basically than that, how would you characterise philosophical progression or regression? For example, you might think that philosophical traditions wax and wane in a way that is cyclical2. Is philosophy cyclical?
I don't think that there is any hard evidence that it is. I think that there is a lot more evidence that philosophy progresses than that it is cyclical. Look at the kinds of views to which a first-year student is exposed, such as Descartes'. Is anybody still a Cartesian? Look at Anselm's argument for the existence of God, and Kant's decisive refutation of it. It seems clear enough that the problems with a philosophical view become better understood with time. People who want to hold that basic view have to do so in a modified way, which overcomes its original problems. Every work of philosophy builds on what has come before. But there are two important differences between philosophy and science3. First, philosophy tolerates many schools of thought at once, while science insists on a unified worldview, or "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it. Second, philosophical theories have far greater longevity than scientific theories. Philosophy can work with modified versions of theories that are thousands of years old. Science often has to completely scrap old theories in favour of new ones. This is because science has to deal with a constantly increasing body of data. Philosophers, on the other hand, deal with common experience, by definition. Common experience, again by definition, stays the same, at every time and in every place. That can make the basic insight of Aristotle every bit as relevant as that by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
1"Logical Positivism", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2This is suggested in the article "Progress (Philosophy)" in TheFreeDictionary.com, in the final paragraph of the section titled, "Optimism, Pessimism and Paradigms".
3I am drawing here on insights from Chapter 7 of The Four Dimensions of Philosophy, by Mortimer J. Adler.
Well, you won't find anyone talking about "obsolete schools of philosophy". But I don't think that philosophical progress is as straightforward as scientific progress. Science progresses first by accumulation, and second by revolution. But philosophy is far more fluid than that. There may still be Aristotelians around today, but their views will have still progressed from what Aristotle himself claimed. Also, logical positivism may not be the dominant philosophy of science anymore. But its influence still persists, "especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention given to the analysis of scientific thought and in the definitely acquired results of the technical research on formal logic and the theory of probability."1 Each school of thought leaves its mark and contributes to the next generation. That is not something that can necessarily be said of science.
Why should there be this discrepancy between science and philosophy?
First, I think that there is a difference in the units of commensuration. To begin, science has one very clear set of units of commensuration that philosophy does not have. It is observations, which only accumulate over time. These observations place severe limitations on the kinds of theories that can be accepted at any one time. Second, only one theory at a time can be accepted generally by scientists. Philosophy typically tolerates many schools of thought at once. This places an obvious limitation on the kinds of theories that scientists can accept. Often the new theory that replaces the old cannot show much influence from the old theory. Relativity theory, for example, is based on a very different conception of the universe from Newtonian physics. Quantum mechanics is even more different. Philosophical schools seem to show a much clearer trail of influence from one school of thought to another. And when there are marked differences, they are generally mirrored by marked social changes elsewhere.
That is a reason why science would show such a marked difference theory for theory. New facts are always coming to light in scientific research. We would expect change to be fluid where new facts could be smoothly assimilated by the old theory. This is to be reflected in the progress of normal science. But we would expect the change to be marked and discontinuous when the facts cannot be so assimilated. This is what necessitates the rejection of the old theory and the acceptance of a new one. The new one will, almost by definition, be quite unlike the old theory. For if it were like the old theory, then the old theory could have assimilated the new facts quite well enough all by itself. Hence, that is another unit of commensuration between scientific paradigms. It is the smoothness with which a theory assimilates new facts. Of course, the notion of "smoothness" would require a large amount of unpacking. But this is simply why it is so difficult to adjudicate between paradigms during a period of scientific revolution.
Are there any comparable periods of philosophical revolution? Yes, there are, and they coincide with periods of great social change as well. They do not occur with nearly as much regularity as periods of scientific revolution, but they do occur. The last two were the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, in reverse historical order.
But you can't equate philosophical progress with great social change. There was a period of great social change between the period of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It does not follow that philosophy progressed in that time. That was why they called the Renaissance the "rebirth". It was the rebirth of knowledge and wisdom, as rediscovered from antiquity.
Did philosophy regress during the Middle Ages? Or even more basically than that, how would you characterise philosophical progression or regression? For example, you might think that philosophical traditions wax and wane in a way that is cyclical2. Is philosophy cyclical?
I don't think that there is any hard evidence that it is. I think that there is a lot more evidence that philosophy progresses than that it is cyclical. Look at the kinds of views to which a first-year student is exposed, such as Descartes'. Is anybody still a Cartesian? Look at Anselm's argument for the existence of God, and Kant's decisive refutation of it. It seems clear enough that the problems with a philosophical view become better understood with time. People who want to hold that basic view have to do so in a modified way, which overcomes its original problems. Every work of philosophy builds on what has come before. But there are two important differences between philosophy and science3. First, philosophy tolerates many schools of thought at once, while science insists on a unified worldview, or "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it. Second, philosophical theories have far greater longevity than scientific theories. Philosophy can work with modified versions of theories that are thousands of years old. Science often has to completely scrap old theories in favour of new ones. This is because science has to deal with a constantly increasing body of data. Philosophers, on the other hand, deal with common experience, by definition. Common experience, again by definition, stays the same, at every time and in every place. That can make the basic insight of Aristotle every bit as relevant as that by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
1"Logical Positivism", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2This is suggested in the article "Progress (Philosophy)" in TheFreeDictionary.com, in the final paragraph of the section titled, "Optimism, Pessimism and Paradigms".
3I am drawing here on insights from Chapter 7 of The Four Dimensions of Philosophy, by Mortimer J. Adler.
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