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This is just a very random idea that came across my mind. I wish to have this unlearned opinion judged by a more academically rigorous community.

I was thinking the other day that, since very little philosophical consensus could be reached (It seems that all the once-philosophical problems that have been settled have been re-categorised as natural science or mathematical science), we study philosophy mainly to be able to distinguish the 'lesser of two evils', i.e. to be able to critically analyse arguments to spot their merits and deficiencies, or to be 'less wrong'.

But remember that philosophy, by definition, concerns itself with truth. Critiquing other's arguments does not sound like an ultimate goal of philosophy. At least this is unlikely what some great philosophers would have envisaged.

Therefore I hereafter propose this (very random, coming from an untrained mind) view on philosophy: that philosophy, albeit the ultimate truth is unknowable by philosophical methods, pursues truth by negating what, within the boundaries of reason, could be effectively negated. Thus it characterises truth negatively.

E.g. That mind and body are the same identical being is not sufficiently true as Descartes's arguments refuted it. Yet that mind and body are different might still be not sufficiently true.

I think this problem reduces to asking about why little philosophical consensus could be reached.

Zhipu 'Wilson' Zhao
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  • I don't think so. There's always the fact that once a major philosophical issue gets resolved it leaves philosophy and becomes its own standalone discipline. – Alexander S King Jan 30 '17 at 17:22
  • Philosophy presumably concerns itself with wisdom rather than truth, many philosophers [deflate "truth"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflationary_theory_of_truth) altogether. We had long discussions on ["ultimate" goals/functions of philosophy](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/38818/what-have-been-the-major-achievements-in-the-debate-regarding-platonism-and-nomi) before. You may also want to look at [negative theology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology). – Conifold Jan 31 '17 at 02:48
  • @Conifold How would you define a "wise" statement without requiring that it be more *true* than alternative statements? You're just moving the goal posts in order to deal with the fact that philosophy is judged no differently than art but to try and maintain the high-brow sense of objectivity with which philosophers were traditionally endowed. –  Jan 31 '17 at 08:26
  • @Alexander Isn't that a problem of unjustified induction? Just because some older branches of philosophy have been resolved into science, that does not in any way show that the remaining branches are either un-resolvable, or will be resolved as soon as they can be. Society changes and it's attitudes to the value of truth change, I see no reason why the way philosophical investigation is dealt with would not also change. –  Jan 31 '17 at 08:29
  • @Isaacson: Sometimes it is wiser to stick to agnosticism, which means rejecting the assignment of truth-value altogether by acknowledging the impossibility to reliably do so. – Philip Klöcking Jan 31 '17 at 09:36
  • @Philip But how do we know that course of action is "wiser" unless there is some truth value attached to it? Unless we can draw some empirical evidence to say that people who are agnostic benefit in some way then we are just speculating that it is wise, it may not be at all. –  Jan 31 '17 at 10:56
  • What you suggest about philosophy can also be said about science. Science is constantly negating what, within the boundaries of empirical reason, could be effectively negated. It builds upon the falisification of old theories. Are you comfortable with this definition of "positive" vs "negative" being applied to science in this way? – Cort Ammon Jan 31 '17 at 20:16
  • @Isaacson I do not see the notion of "truth" as unifying across philosophy the way it is across science. Obviously, it is central to philosophies with realist leanings, but skepticism too has a long tradition, and the current popularity of anti-realism and deflationism shows its viability. Philosophies even of science can be built around practical/empirical success rather than "truth" (to what, if one is not a realist?). Inferential semantics also works without truth conditions. I am afraid I do not follow the goal posts remark. – Conifold Jan 31 '17 at 23:14
  • @Conifold What I meant was that replacing "truth" with "wisdom" is just moving the goalposts, both must be verified in some way in order to be of any utility. Once verified by whatever means (accepting that all forms of verification can only *approach* truth, never achieve it) then "truth" and "wisdom" are synonymous, until verified both claims are nothing but guesswork and of no more use than anyone else's guess. The only way out of this I see is for some branches of philosophy to see themselves as more of an art form, but this is most certainly not currently the case. –  Feb 01 '17 at 07:45
  • @CortAmmon The difference I think the OP is getting at between philosophy and science is not solely the means but the result of that process. They state "I think this problem reduces to asking about why little philosophical consensus could be reached". Science has made huge progress on which there is almost total agreement because its results are testable. There are very few examples in philosophy where such agreement has been reached other than rejecting the completely unreasonable, hence (I think) the OP's differentiation. –  Feb 01 '17 at 07:51
  • you could read adorno's negative dialectics, i imagine that, as with many 20th century texts. its author considers its method definitive to its time..? –  Feb 01 '17 at 16:37
  • @Isaacson Large parts of philosophy (ethics, aesthetics) are not even truth-apt on most accounts, and even in epistemology "approaching truth" and verificationism are broadly disputed. Arguably, "verified somehow" redefinition of truth stretches the notion beyond its usefulness. To become meaningful true/false require some paradigmatic pieces to be in place, what old school called the a priori, and those are biologically, culturally and historically conditioned. Within a paradigm, as in science, "true" is distinguished from "wise" or "useful", but philosophy thematizes paradigms themselves. – Conifold Feb 01 '17 at 20:52
  • @Conifold "... even in epistemology "approaching truth" and verificationism are broadly disputed", How can one dispute something without making a claim that it is somehow less true or useful yet without the claim being of no value? I could "dispute" the treatment of the earth as if it were round, but that would be of no use to anyone because presuming it's round works fine at the moment, and not doing so would be of no use to anyone. The fact that in some possible world it might not be round is trivially true but uninteresting. –  Feb 02 '17 at 08:07
  • A dispute is only of some use if it might present a way of looking at things which works better, if it works better then it has been verified (in a pragmatic sense), if it can't be demonstrated to work better, then is it nothing but idle speculation, a fine work of art maybe, but not one of intellectual progress. –  Feb 02 '17 at 08:07
  • I would also take issue with the idea that "... "verified somehow" ... stretches the notion beyond its usefulness". Rather this is exactly how the definition of truth can have any usefulness at all in a human sense where the actual truth is almost impossible to attain. It is not that it simply "thematizes" paradigms. Most philosophical critique is attempting to contrast paradigms to show which one is best in some way, it is not presenting them as a range of equally possible options like choosing a painting, yet without any measure of utility, that's all it can justifiably do. –  Feb 02 '17 at 08:18
  • @Isaacson My point was that the diversity of opinion itself makes truth unsuitable as a philosophical banner. Personally, I'd also rather have a clean notion of scientific truth and accept the limitation than sink into the formless goo of postmodernism, where the stretched notion is discredited to paint everything into "post-truth". Practical success is not truth, truth has specific connotations of unicity, objectivity, etc., that are misleading beyond paradigmatic science, including the neo-Kantian metaphor of "convergence". – Conifold Feb 02 '17 at 21:32
  • Scientific claim is true or false under a paradigm, but paradigms themselves are neither true nor false, nor approach anything. They are successful or not. Ethics and aesthetics do not admit even paradigmatic truth. But what is beyond truth is not beyond judgement. It is, however, multicriterial, with criteria (fruitfulness, elegance, utility, simplicity...) that do not have to be truth related, and with plural successful outcomes. Wisdom can be a loose label for that without misleading connotations. Paraphrasing Kant, it is better to limit truth to make room for wisdom. – Conifold Feb 02 '17 at 21:40
  • @Conifold Yes, but as your initial response reveals, that's not the way people see philosophy. You said "Philosophy ... concerns itself with wisdom rather than truth". What is wise about elegance, simplicity or reference to earlier works on the subject (as you mention in your linked discussion). These are all perfectly reasonable criteria on which to judge a work of art, or philosophy if that's what people want, but none of them have anything to do with wisdom, such judgements are subjective. It is not "wise" to prefer Shakespeare to Dan Brown, it might show better taste, but not wisdom. –  Feb 03 '17 at 07:59
  • Your other criteria, fruitfulness and utility are exactly the criteria on which "wisdom" is generally based. The wise advice is the advice that works, the wise prediction is the one that comes true, but I don't see any of this happening in philosophy. Where are the ethics of Kant being tested in society and judged on their utility or fruitfulness? Who's examined new language acquisition before and after reading Kripke to see if it helps? There's hardly any measure of utility or fruitfulness in modern philosophy, certainly not enough to claim that's what it's about. –  Feb 03 '17 at 08:05
  • @Isaacson Special relativity was adopted over Lorentz's theory of ether largely on simplicity and elegance, wisely so. A major difference between philosophy and science is that while truth of scientific claims is mostly judged within science itself, philosophies (and paradigms they germinate) are judged out there at large, through know-it-when-see-it and vote-with-feet. E.g. Kant's fruitful influence on mathematics and physics of 19th century is well-documented, Helmholtz, Riemann, Poincare, Hilbert cite him as inspiration. Transcendental idealism had much wisdom to offer, but was it "true"? – Conifold Feb 03 '17 at 23:38
  • @Isaacson Lorentz did turn out to be "right", at least as right as Einstein, their theories are mathematically equivalent and make identical predictions. Scientific paradigms appeared later than philosophy, in ancient Greece, and under its direct influence. I chose transcendental idealism as example because its input was substantive rather than psychological a la the night sky, Riemann, Helmholtz, Mach and Poincare clearly borrow modes of reasoning about space from Kant. And it is the role of reasoning that makes reduction to art implausible, philosophy is distinct from both art and science. – Conifold Feb 07 '17 at 01:11
  • @Isaacson That was my point, even scientific process requires philosophical ingredients not testable in the narrow sense, but through diffused practice (btw, Lorentz did not try to detect ether, and under his theory it can not be detected). I certainly agree on the value of Herbart's mediation, but he again was a philosopher, and Riemann, Poincare and Helmholtz reason about geometry in the framework of Kant, they only draw the a priori/empirical line differently. What is a unicorn today may become a quark tomorrow, someone has to do the preparatory work, and art lacks the reasoned side of it. – Conifold Feb 07 '17 at 20:43
  • Poets dream up unicorns, philosophers speculate about atoms, or possible worlds, or semiotics, germination periods can be long. Mill and others imagined that scientists generate hypotheses just by gazing at the night sky and listening to Mozart, and Peirce mocked them, and his younger self, for it after exploring abduction. Moreover, most of brimming ideas can be dismissed a priori as incoherent, incongruous, fruitless, too cumbersome, or contradicting the well-known, but detecting that requires refinement and analysis. It is this pre-sieving that makes abduction and testing proper practical. – Conifold Feb 10 '17 at 04:12
  • There is no "testing" behaviorism or type identity, but they influenced research, and abandoning them boosted cognitive psychology and AI. Developed structured speculations are a rare commodity. Only few can be done in mathematics, mostly for hard sciences. But it is they that shape theories and concepts, testing merely selects from a few alternatives that made it to the lab. "There is no deducing science from observations" even with added ingredients of artistic inspiration and sporadic guesses. And science is only one of philosophy's "clients". – Conifold Feb 10 '17 at 04:22
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/53434/discussion-between-conifold-and-isaacson). – Conifold Feb 10 '17 at 22:19

3 Answers3

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Pythagoras was interested in the application of mathematics to problems of cosmology; this is a discipline now called cosmology.

Aristotle was interested in questions of space, time, place, matter and continuity; this discipline is now called physics.

Plato was interested in questions of what constituted good governance, this is the discipline that is called political philosophy and ethics.

As for the negative in philosophy, one might usefully think on the following remarks by Chantal Mouffe, the Belgian political theorist, in her book Agonistic Poltics:

To think politically is to recognise the ontological dimension of negativity...

Meaning

Full objectivity cannot be reached

Thus

Society is permeated by contingency...and any order is hegemonic - an expression of power

We can rephrase and refit this to philosophy:

To think philosophically is to recognise the ontological dimension of negativity; hence full objectivity cannot be reached; thus philosophy is permeated by contingency; and any philosophical order is hegemonic - an expression of power

Mozibur Ullah
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One part of your argument seems to be: Premise 1: There has been little consensus among philosophers at any given time in the last few thousand years. (Implicit) premise 2: If there is little consensus at any given time, then the objective truth hasn’t yet been discovered. (Inductive) premise 3: If the objective truth, despite thousands of years, hasn’t yet been discovered by philosophy, then the objective truth can’t be discovered by means of philosophy. Conclusion: The objective truth can’t be discovered by means of philosophy. (Note: I doubt that Premise 1 is truer of philosophy than of many other disciplines (history, literary criticism, anthropology etc.); European and Near Eastern philosophers from c. 600 to c. 1600 AD had a consensus that God existed; contemporary analytic philosophers have a consensus that there are no such things as Platonic forms.)

To say some proposition P is true is to say (unless you're a paraconsistent logician or some other strange beast) that any set of propositions including a proposition equivalent to not-P is false. So any discipline that makes statements can be characterised as 'negative', as you say, in a sense. But you seem to mean (sometimes) the stronger thesis that philosophy is only ever negative – that the propositions with which philosophy is concerned are all members of exactly one of two sets, one non-empty set containing propositions whose truth-value we can't determine (if this set were empty then we'd be able to know the objective truth, contradicting your premise), and another set containing propositions whose truth-values we can determine, and which all happen to be false. But this isn’t possible. To say that a proposition P is false is to rule out certain possibilities. But it is also to affirm the truth of certain others (such as P’s negation). If we rule out restricted composition and mereological nihilism, then we'd have to go with mereological universalism.

But you also sometimes seem to mean neither thesis above, and instead that philosophy is just about finding better and worse arguments, where better and worse admit of degrees, rather than merely sound or unsound arguments, where soundness doesn’t admit of degrees. Whether this is true or not is empirical – depending on what philosophers actually do or have done. If it is true, we might explain it in two ways. We might, as you suggest, say that philosophy is a sort of holding basket discipline from which other fields emerge when the foundational questions are resolved – quite a popular view these days. We might also (and not in contradiction with the first way) say that philosophy is the discipline concerned with fundamental beliefs, emotions, intuitions, perceptions etc., which are often radically incoherent (I have a feeling this can also be turned into an argument against intelligent design). Like any rational discipline, philosophy is also concerned with achieving rational consistency. We might think, then, that it is a peculiar feature of philosophy (or maybe the humanities in general) that we do want to be more coherent but we don't want to be 'most' coherent, or more coherent or 'right' beyond a certain extent, because that would require us to abandon too much of what we care about. (As an example, moral nihilism is the most coherent meta-ethical theory; but we'd rather have the inconsistencies and complexities and consequently inevitable lack of rational consensus of non-nihilist ethics than the simple coherence of nihilism.)

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Your question revolves, in essence, around hypothesis testing. In natural science, hypotheses are never affirmed as true "facts", only accepted or rejected. It is logically simple to prove that something is false, given any instance of falsehood, with greater levels and amounts providing greater evidence. Indeed, no matter how surmountable evidence supporting a theory may be, evidence against the theory may always be damning. On the flip-side, as there always may be evidence that has not yet been considered, a theory cannot be fully affirmed, only accepted and used until disproved.

Philosophy is no different - true proof cannot be obtained, as true fact cannot be affirmed, but disproof can be obtained quite easily. In this sense, philosophy and natural science are negative.

The reasons why philosophical consensus cannot be reached are thus: philosophical ideas are proposed and popularized without much evidence, and people have vastly different mindsets as a result of previous experience.

Many philosophical ideas are difficult to disprove, lying as they do outside the realm of natural science. An idea from pop culture, "we all are part of a computer program", is potentially falsifiable, yet currently cannot be disproven. Evidence for this theory may exist, such as the way universal expansion from a point (Big Bang Theory) parallels common procedural generation algorithms, but as it cannot be disproven yet (or possibly ever), it is not considered natural science.

Having addressed the diversity of philosophical rhetoric, I shall touch on the lack of consensus: given enough data, scientists often reach majority consensus. This typically follows the disproving of multiple hypotheses, and the refinement of the remaining. But given low levels of evidence with no current method of disproving a hypothesis, these hypotheses are only refined through disagreement and data/beliefs of individuals. Most of this disagreement arises from the experiences that shaped the minds of philosophers before their grasp of the subject. Example: put ten Democrat scientists in one room, and ten Republican scientists in another, and give them both all available data on climate change - they will likely reach no joint consensus.

The only ways to minimize the divergent impacts of previous experiences are to 1. accept all logic, hypotheses, etc. with an unbiased weight and consider them all equally (which most scientists/philosophers strive to do) or 2. share all previous events with every member debating the subject. (Example: in an ideal situation, everybody's experiences would be uploaded to a "cloud", all data in which would influence a person's thoughts)

I will try to answer any questions to the best of my ability.

SaveThe FlyingWhales
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