In the absence of feedback, how is a community supposed to know when one of its members has made progress?
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this. The mechanism seems to be that it is easier to check an argument for correctness than to generate it. And it is easier to check whether a claimed flaw in an argument really is a flaw, and so on.
In this case, a mechanism where everyone in the community tries to think of arguments, and tries to think of flaws in others’ arguments, and tries to think of flaws in the criticisms of arguments, etc, means that as the community size --> infinity, the field converges on the truth.
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this.
With some of my engagements with academic philosophers in mind I have at times been tempted to lament that that ‘extent’ wasn’t rather a lot greater. Of course, that may be ‘the glass is half empty’ thinking. I intuit that there is potential for a larger body of contributers to have even more of a correcting influence of the kind that you mention than what we see in practice!
Philosophy has made some pretty significant progress in many areas. However, sometimes disciplines of that form can get “stuck” in an inescapable pit of nonsense, e.g. postmodernism or theology. In a sense, the philosophy community is trying to re-do what the theologians have failed at: answering questions such as “how should I live”, etc.
Good question. It seems that academic philosophy does, to an extent, achieve this. The mechanism seems to be that it is easier to check an argument for correctness than to generate it. And it is easier to check whether a claimed flaw in an argument really is a flaw, and so on.
In this case, a mechanism where everyone in the community tries to think of arguments, and tries to think of flaws in others’ arguments, and tries to think of flaws in the criticisms of arguments, etc, means that as the community size --> infinity, the field converges on the truth.
With some of my engagements with academic philosophers in mind I have at times been tempted to lament that that ‘extent’ wasn’t rather a lot greater. Of course, that may be ‘the glass is half empty’ thinking. I intuit that there is potential for a larger body of contributers to have even more of a correcting influence of the kind that you mention than what we see in practice!
Philosophy has made some pretty significant progress in many areas. However, sometimes disciplines of that form can get “stuck” in an inescapable pit of nonsense, e.g. postmodernism or theology. In a sense, the philosophy community is trying to re-do what the theologians have failed at: answering questions such as “how should I live”, etc.