Would Disagreement Undermine Progress?
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Insa Lawler, Assistant Professor (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: In recent years, several philosophers have voiced concerns about philosophical progress, worrying that their discipline makes no progress, or not enough compared to the “hard” sciences.1 The most prominent line of argument for this pessimistic position appeals to the empirical claim that philosophers widely and systematically disagree on most major philosophical questions.2 Some more optimistic philosophers have responded by disputing the extent to which philosophers disagree,3 or by emphasizing that widespread disagreement on some questions is accompanied by widespread agreement on others.4 Nearly all parties to these debates, however, seem to agree on the conditional claim that if there is widespread disagreement on philosophical questions, then this would undermine philosophical progress.In this paper, our aim is to place this conditional claim under scrutiny. We address whether disagreement is incompatible with progress, merely a causal impediment to progress, or even just something that makes progress epistemically elusive. Our approach is to take a step back from the debate about philosophical progress and ask the more general question: How (if at all) would disagreement with respect to some question, within any given discipline, undermine that discipline’s progress on that question?5 Addressing this issue sheds light on broader concerns about progress and disagreement, since philosophy is far from being the only academic discipline in which there are unresolved disagreements. Indeed, even within the “hard” sciences, disagreements regularly occur and sometimes persist. Our discussion therefore explores general issues about disagreement and progress that have thus far received insufficient attention.We reconstruct two distinct arguments from disagreement to a lack of progress, and argue that each rests upon assumptions that ought to be rejected. Our discussion paints a more nuanced picture of the interaction between disagreement on a given question and progress on that question, both in general and in philosophy in particular. We argue that on a plausible understanding of what progress (in philosophy or elsewhere) consists in, disagreement need not undermine progress, even when it is widespread and persistent. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, we make the case that progress can occur even as disagreement increases. With that said, we also illustrate how in the presence of certain patterns of disagreement we will often be unable totell which developments are progressive (and to what degree). In addition, we suggest that while disagreement can play a causal role in impeding progress, it can also causally promote progress. We thus conclude that the extent to which disagreement threatens the possibility of progress has been overstated, while the extent to which it threatens our ability to identify progressive episodes has been underappreciated.
Would Disagreement Undermine Progress?
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Created on 5/10/2023
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dellsén, F., Lawler, I., & Norton, J. (2023). Would Disagreement Undermine Progress? The Journal of Philosophy, 120(3), 139-172.
- Language: English
- Date: 2023
- Keywords
- philosophy, progress, disagreements