 Well, hello, I'm JJ Wachin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for today is philosophical progress. Our mind's brains, we have free will, as happiness just a state of mind. These are just some of the questions that philosophers have asked since there were philosophers. But has any progress been made on any of these topics? Have philosophers of the day more or less answered the questions that philosophers of the past have raised? And why does progress and philosophy matter in the first place? To share his thoughts on these questions, we have our dear old friend, Daniel Stolge, our professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He's also the author of this book, Philosophical Progress in Defense of a Reasonable Optimism. So, hello Dan, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hello JJ, great to be here. Okay, so before we get into the question about philosophical progress, let's go back to basics and define our target concept, which in this case is the concept of philosophy. So how should we understand philosophy in this context? Well, I think of philosophy in this context as a subject matter or a series of topics, not dissimilar to the topics that you just mentioned. So, you know, I think of the mind-body problem or the free will problem or the problem of induction. I think of these as topics or subject matters that one can investigate and ask questions about. And it's a little bit open-ended what the collection of the topics are that philosophy is interested in, but it certainly includes the topics that you discussed in an intro philosophy class, for example. And I think of these topics as things that lots of different people can take an interest in, people from different eras, different cultures and so forth, different people with different professional backgrounds and so forth. So that's what I think of philosophy as being. You might think of it as a sort of social object, for example, as a discipline or something like that. And it is interesting to think of it that way, but in this context I'm thinking of it as just a big subject matter or a collection of subject matters that you can investigate. So let me get this right. So you're understanding philosophy here as a set of questions, a bunch of questions about, well, about metaphysics, about philosophy of mind, about those things. So it's not really a professional discipline. So you're not treating philosophy here as the academic discipline of philosophy. Yeah, I think a word like philosophy, similar to a word like history or economics or chemistry, can mean several different things. Sometimes it means a certain sort of subject matter that people can be interested in and investigate. Sometimes it means a discipline, a social thing like a group of people organized in a certain way that are interested in this question. And you can go back and forth between those two things. But in the context of this book and in questions about philosophical progress, I take philosophy here to be the question of the subject matter, not so much the discipline. As I said, I think they're interesting things about the discipline to discuss and the interaction between philosophy and the disciplinary sense and in the subject matter sense is quite interesting. But in the first instance, I'm thinking of it as a subject matter. Okay. So how should we understand the question about progress? So you're talking about philosophical progress. So what does progress here mean? Are you concerned about the products of philosophy? That philosophers have somehow given us the solution to the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Right. Well, progress by progress here, I mean what is sometimes thought of as epistemic progress. And by that I mean progress in coming to know certain things. So the question intuitively is, do we know more about philosophical topics now than we did in the past? Or to put it slightly differently, there's a bunch of questions that we ask about this subject matter. Is it the case that we in the past have come to know answers to this question, these questions or questions of this type? And is it reasonable for us to assume that we're going to come to know answers to the questions of that type in the future? That's what it would mean to make progress. So it's really tied to a notion of coming to know something or sort of increase and increase in our knowledge of these sorts of subject matters. I should say that the notion of progress is a somewhat tricky one. The first thing to say about it is that you don't make progress as such. It doesn't really make any sense to just talk about progress as such. Progress is always relative to an aim. So if you just say I'm walking in the direction of somebody's house, have I made progress? There's no real answer to that question. You need to specify what aim I have. And another thing is that you can make progress on very trivial things. You can make progress on doing the dishes. For example, if you're doing the dishes, I can ask you, have you made progress? That's a perfectly reasonable question. It means relative to an aim that you have. How close are you to achieving that aim? And I think of epistemic progress is roughly like that. We're aiming it. In the background is an assumption about what our aim is, namely to come to know the answer to certain questions. And the question is how have we achieved that aim or not? And that's what's an issue for me. That's really epistemic progress. The further point is that the sort of rhetoric of progress in, especially in intellectual contexts, is not terribly pleasant historically. A lot of it involves sort of, you know, often, it's often connected to sort of colonialism and so forth. And people lecturing people about what kinds of technological advances, for example, they ought to pursue in certain cases or perhaps what kinds of moral views they ought to adopt. Notice that that's a notion of progress where the aims are sort of slightly hidden and moralized in certain ways and probably quite objectionable. But that's not the notion of progress that I have in mind here at all. It's just progress on coming to know the answers to certain kinds of questions. Okay, so the idea of progress for you is epistemic. That is, we have progressed in philosophy if we have knowledge or more knowledge than we have in the past about these topics in philosophy. Yes. But is philosophical progress like progress in science where a consensus of the academic community is necessary? Well, it's an interesting question. The contrast between philosophy and science, especially about progress is certainly extremely interesting. I wouldn't quite say that in science agreement is necessary. That sounds as if you don't get progress unless you have agreement. I think that in science, it's true that you get agreement, but I tend to think of agreement as simply evidence of epistemic progress. It's not sort of required for it or something of a kind. You could in principle make progress in science without having agreement because in science, I think one makes progress in exactly the same way I just mentioned. Namely, if you come to know the answers to certain topics that you're interested in in a way that you didn't in the past, that would be progress in science. Whether or not one has agreement is a further question. Logically speaking, you could know more in the present than you do in the past without being able to convince anybody else. And it's also true that there could be agreement in certain cases where we don't actually know the truth of the situation. So I don't think that while it's true that people emphasize agreement in the case of science, I don't think that's sort of necessary for it. I mean, in general, the contrast between philosophy and science on this topic, I think needs to be treated with some caution. There's a sort of an older notion of science where it means something like a systematic inquiry into pretty much any topic at all. And the, you know, the German word, Visenschaft is sometimes used for that, that sort of general notion of science. And by that standard, I think if you ask what does progress mean in using science in that very general sense, I think it means epistemic progress of the kind that I've been describing. And it's also true that philosophy is by that standard a kind of science because it too is a kind of systematic inquiry into a bunch of topics. What we call science typically is a sort of restriction on that general notion. It's systematic inquiry that has certain other properties like perhaps it's highly mathematics or highly experimental or perhaps focused on particular topics like the biological world or the physical world in a certain sense. Those are restrictions on that notion, that very general notion of science, but I think that actually the notion of progress that applies to them is logically speaking just the one that applies in systematic inquiry in general. Namely, you're just trying to come to know the answer to certain things and you make progress if you have and you don't make progress if you haven't basically. Okay, so the idea of progress here, is it something cumulative or is it something like Kuhn has said about paradigm shifts? Yeah, I'm thinking of it more. I'm not thinking of it in terms of paradigm shifts partly because it's very hard to know what how many paradigm shifts have happened and, you know, some people say yes, there are paradigm shifts but there's only ever been one, you know, and I'm not sure that's true, the history of science is a very complicated matter. So I guess I'm thinking of it more in a cumulative way, yes, that it's just a matter of whether it's true that we know more now than we did in the past on these questions. I don't think that philosophy is different from science in the matter of paradigm shifts. I mean if there really were a paradigm shift, then science is going to look very different, but I think philosophy is probably going to look pretty different too. Well, let's think about the history of philosophy for a bit. So some say that in the 20th century there's a real paradigm shift when we shifted to a kind of more analytic way of doing philosophy. Isn't that a kind of progress in doing philosophy as well? Yeah, it's a kind of progress. I mean, it's certainly a kind of progress, whether it's a paradigm shift is an interesting question. I mean, philosophy in the 20th century is interesting in many, many ways. For one thing, it becomes part of a sort of professionalized discipline which it hadn't ever done before. Also, related to that, it becomes a sort of basically a secular way of investigating these questions. The sort of basic topics of philosophy historically, at least in the European tradition, are religious questions or at least were completely discussed in a religious context. And that isn't surprising because the institutions that, you know, like institutions like universities were historically religious institutions. So what happens in the 20th century is that all of this becomes secularized and you investigate questions like the foundations of morality, for example, in a completely secular way. That doesn't mean that people aren't interested in religious questions. It means that they don't take religious premises for granted in their investigations of these questions, just as they don't take religious premises for granted in their investigations of other scientific questions, for example. So I do think that's a big, very big change. In analytic philosophy, it's true that there was a massive change in the logic, the underlying logic, and the idea that you could apply logic and mathematics techniques to these questions. That was certainly a very big change. Whether it's a paradigm shift, I don't really know partly because I don't fully know how to use that word in these sorts of contexts. I do know that it tends to get thrown around a lot. And I tend not to want to throw it around, I suppose. Okay, so that's fair enough. Should we judge progress in philosophy wholesale, or is it more of a specific area specific? That is, is our judgment about the whole philosophy, or is it more of like, here's some progress in the philosophy of mind, here's some progress in metaphysics. So is it a wholesale thing, or is it a more area specific thing? Well, I think it's both. I mean, you can ask both sorts of questions. You can focus on a particular area and ask whether you know more about this area than you did in the past. You can put those, all of those answers together, and then you get a kind of wholesale. You can also ask wholesale about whether this, whether there's anything special about these areas that somehow mean that they couldn't possibly, you know, a notion of how to apply or that this, the investigation, for some reason, doesn't assume the form that investigation into some other areas assume. So I think that, you know, both of those things are true. Sometimes people who are concerned about philosophical progress make exceptions, like they sometimes say, well, apart from logic, you know, logic is somehow perhaps because of its connection to mathematics or something. It's sort of an exception, but, you know, philosophy of mind or something that's hopeless. So they do make exceptions and so they don't want to make judgments wholesale. I guess I tend to think both sorts of questions are of interest and should be pursued. I'm somewhat more confident in certain areas than in others, I suppose, because I know more about certain areas than others. But beyond that, I don't actually see any principled reason why questions of progress should be different in any particular area. Okay. Now let's go through the spectrum of views here about philosophical progress. So among philosophers themselves, there are pessimists about philosophical progress. And that calls them the glass half empty folks. On the other hand of the spectrum you have the optimist glass half full of folks. So could you describe this attitudes about progress and philosophy? Yeah, so I mean, maybe the first thing to say is that I don't don't much like the framing of the issue in terms of glass half full and glass half empty. And that's partly because it's it's sort of you can kind of see what I mean it's partly because if you've got a glass and it's half full, then it's a kind of kind of up to you as to whether you describe it as half full or half empty. There's no sort of factor the matter really. So it's it looks as if you frame the issue in that way that you've already it's already kind of you know, maybe it's matter. I don't think that's the right way to think about it at all. So I would, I would strongly resist that way of thinking about the issue. For me the, the optimistic view is a sort of, it's like a, it's roughly like a scientific realist view applied to philosophy. So what does that mean it means intuitively that at least two things one is that in philosophy as in other fields one is aiming to come to know things. That's what we're aiming to do. And moreover that we've achieved that in some way in in the past and therefore have reasonable expectation of doing that in the future. Notice that in the case of scientific realism, suppose we were discussing whether to be a scientific realist about, you know, physics or maths or something. You wouldn't say hey it's, you know, glass half full glass half empty. That's sort of not the way you think about it. You think well the scientific realist is making a claim about what the aims of these enterprises are and whether whether the historical facts and out in a particular way and it doesn't seem it's not just a matter of taste as to whether that's the case. So likewise I think in philosophy, the optimistic view is really that that we're sort of aiming to come to know things and that moreover we have done. So then what's the pessimistic view. Well the pessimistic view is you can think of it initially at any rate is just the straight denial of that. So what does that mean it means well either you think that either you grant the aim either you say yeah our aim is to come to know things. But we just haven't done it for whatever reason and we've got no prospect of doing so perhaps because perhaps because we've got no methods for doing so or perhaps because it's too difficult or perhaps because the level of disagreement is too high or something at any rate that there's something that blocks us achieving this in a way that we may have achieved it in the past. The other thing you can do is sort of deny that that's our aim in the first place that we're just not aiming at coming to know things and that's actually a. So you might say what what could it be apart from that well it might be instead of coming to know the truth of these matters, you might be aiming at a certain kind of coherence, for example of your views. Helen baby has a recent paper defending a view like this and she refers to this as equilibrium, equilibrium is the theory that we're trying to what you're trying to do in philosophy is not so much come to know things or come to the truth about things but but come to put your views into an equilibrium with other things as to kind of like a coherent view and if you did hold a view like that, then you, you, you would basically deny that you're aiming to come to know the truth of certain things so that would be that would be a kind of pessimism in the relevant sense. And then of course in the background are questions about whether you hold these views in general or not like sometimes sometimes people might say. Well, sometimes people might say well I'm you know I'm a scientific anti realist in general so therefore I'm a scientific I'm an anti realist about philosophy that that's a kind of position you can hold I'm mostly interested in versions of these positions which apply to philosophy in in particular not in general so the question is roughly whether suppose you were a realist about physics and archaeology and linguistics. Should you be a realist or not about philosophy. That's really the sort of issue. So, but that way of setting up the debate between the optimists and the pessimists seems to presuppose that philosophical questions have real answers, and there are facts of the matter that could sway one way or the other. Yeah, do you hold that view obviously you hold that view but what do you say to those people that don't hold that view that there's simply no fact of the matter in our in philosophical questions. Well, it's hard to see what. I mean, you could argue in specific cases that there that there's no fact of the matter but on the face of it the argument seemed to be factual questions like you know what what's the relation between the mind and the body. Is the mind identical to the body or not well that just looks like a straightforward factual question. It may be that it's impossible for us to come to know it, but nevertheless just from a logical point of view it looks like a factual question. And, and, you know, it, you could have an argument that it somehow isn't or it's somehow got a false presupposition or it's somehow indeterminate, we'd have to look at that argument. But that's, that's, that's something that could pan out but it's not on the face of it a, you don't want to begin by assuming that it's somehow indeterminate, nor do you want to begin by assuming that philosophical questions are in general. Indeterminate and it's a bit hard to see how that can be the case. I mean, in, in, in cases of, you know, people think about the normative realm so they ask about, you know, what whether morality or rationality or something that are objective. There people might be worried again about a certain kind of indeterminacy and it's possible that some questions turn out to be indeterminate. But the topics themselves look as if they're factual topics not dissimilar to questions like, you know, what, what happened in the reformation. Or, you know, these are, these are topics that we can then investigate. So likewise, the mind body problem or the objectivity of morality are kind of topics that we can investigate from a, from a kind of a scientific realist point of view, you're sort of assuming that there's some, some truth about these topics. Maybe they're, maybe, maybe the truth turns out to be wildly different from what we imagined that's possible. But nevertheless, that's what we're assuming. We wouldn't begin by assuming that it's a kind of indeterminate matter. It may be that some questions are indeterminate for one reason or another, but that would have to be that, you know, they would have to be shown. Yeah, actually a negative answer to a philosophical question is progress as well. Don't you think that is true. That is true. So a lot of people who that is true. So an interesting feature of this discussion is a lot of people who are pessimists often make an exception in the case of negative answers. So they say, ah, yes, we've established negative things. You know, knowledge, knowledge is not justified, true belief, something like that. And that's, that's the limit. That's the only kind of progress that you can make. I, I try to deal with this in a number of ways. One thing I say is that a lot of philosophical questions have the form of sort of paradoxes. So what we what you when you end up formulating, then you have sort of a bunch of inconsistent is a bunch of claims which take an individually plausible, but then together form an inconsistency. And if you if if you ask me to solve a question like that, but you tell me that I'm not allowed to say anything negative or saying something negative isn't real progress or something. Then what you've effectively told me is that I can't possibly solve the question. Of course, if you've got an inconsistency, you got to say something negative in order to solve the question. So it can't be that saying something negative is somehow to be poo pooed or not to be thought of as a genuine kind of progress or something. Because lots of questions require you to say that in solving them. And another thing to say is that often when you make a negative claim, there's a positive claim that's just in the background. So that you you say You know, for example, a topic that is actually quite closely connected to the topic of pessimism and optimism and philosophy is the question of what what kinds of patterns of explanation can be offer for certain kinds of questions and David Lewis has a has a paper where he points out negatively that you don't need to when you answer a why question and so provide an explanation. You don't need to provide an answer of the kind that that Hempel thought you did. Hind that involves a premise which articulates an empirical law or something like that. And what you and the idea is that that's a negative claim, but then there's a positive claim that's closely closely allied to that, which is roughly, well, what you really need to do is to provide some information about explanatory structures. And that's, that's a positive claim, but the negative so the negative claim and the positive claims sort of come together in that proposal and I think that's very often a pattern that you get a negative claim in philosophy but you get a positive claim about what the possibilities might be. So it's like saying that that way. Yeah, so it's, it's like saying that this is not the case but this could be the case. Exactly. So if you say this isn't the case then you've, you've said well it could be that this is the case or you've right you've, you've sort of raised all these other possibilities about how to investigate this question and those are those that's a positive move so the whole the whole thing about oh it's only negative. I'm resistant to that as well. Okay, so your view is reasonable optimism. So how do you distinguish your view from other sorts of optimism, like an unreasonable optimism. Yeah, so I've, I'm a, I'm an optimist and I'm a reasonable optimist so what does reasonable mean. I guess it means two main things. One is that if often that people who are defending a kind of optimistic position I think they'll give you, they'll give you the following kind of speech or some version of the following kind of speech. They'll say philosophy philosophy up till now has just been a history of failure, but, but now I, I have discovered a method which is going to put it on the shore path to science, or something like that, some version of that speech that you know up till now things have been terrible, but I have this brilliant idea which, which will change everything. And that's a kind of optimistic view, right, because it's, it's not an optimistic view based on the history of the subject but it's a sort of an optimistic view in the sense that you have built this amazing methodology which is now going to just solve all the questions. I think you can find versions of that idea in different parts of history philosophy. Now I'm. So that's a version of what I call an unreasonable kind of optimism and why do I disagree with that well for two reasons. One is, I don't I'm kind of a like a lot of other philosophers I don't think that philosophy has a special methodology, distinctive from other sort of areas of inquiry. So therefore I don't think it has a special one that that I have discovered couldn't possibly be true it just there's not it's not as if I haven't, I just haven't been smart enough to come up with it it doesn't have one so I couldn't possibly discover it. So it's not as if somebody claims to have discovered a new methodology for philosophy then I think the appropriate attitude is extreme skepticism because it's not the kind of thing that that you could discover because it doesn't exist. That's one reason why I don't like that view. Another reason why I don't like that view is that I don't agree with the historical claim that that philosophy has been a history of failure up until now. I think that if you think about it correctly if you clearly formulate what the questions and issue are, then it's not the case that it's a history of failure. And so that's, that's the sort of sense in which I want to advance a kind of reasonable optimism that it's, it's optimistic but it's not. It doesn't say that you know up until now it's been a failure and now we have this incredible new methodology none of that is certainly, certainly true so those that's that's one way in which it's reasonable. I hope at any rate. Another way is that it's not when I say that you know, we know more now than we did in the past. I don't mean to sort of tip over into sort of triumphalism. I don't want to say, ah, there's the grand march where it's always forward, you know, ever upward and onward and so forth. I don't think that's true. I think, I think that roughly the idea of reasonable optimism is to try to portray philosophy as not dissimilar to other forms of inquiry. It's not exactly like physics or mathematics but the progress in those areas is sort of off the charts. It's sort of unbelievable. The interesting question about progress in those areas is why it's so extreme. The idea that philosophy doesn't approximate those, those theories, those, those sorts of areas of inquiries, not a good reason at all to believe that it's, it doesn't make any progress in the book I call this the Babe Ruth point. Babe Ruth point is that the mere fact that you're not as good at baseball player as Babe Ruth. It doesn't mean you're not a good baseball player. Alright, so physics, physics and maths are kind of the Babe Ruth's of, of, of intellectual endeavor or scientific endeavor. And there's loads of fields that aren't like them, but that doesn't mean that those fields don't make progress. That would be a very bad inference. So I don't want to, I don't want to be a sort of triumphalist about philosophy either. I don't want to think that it's sort of, you know, really this amazing field. I think it's roughly like lots of other fields. Okay. So that's the other sense in which it's reasonable, I hope. Your main argument for your position is premise on the idea that philosophical problems are either boundary problems or constitutive problems. So what do you mean by a boundary problem here? And can you give an example? Let me just back up a little bit. So any arguments in metaphilosophy, which we're now talking about, we're talking about an area of metaphilosophy are going to confront this sort of problem, which is that you need to theorize about philosophical problems. And it's difficult to do that partly because your philosophy already is pitched at a very abstract level. And so if you go even higher it's difficult. But it's also difficult because you want to make claims about philosophical problems, but you don't want to kind of get mired into the detail of particular philosophical problems because then you just start doing first order philosophy rather than metaphilosophy. And so both of these arguments are sort of attempts to evade this kind of problem. And the way that I try to evade it is by focusing on what you might, focusing on the idea that philosophical problems come in certain typical forms, which is a kind of relatively well known idea in philosophy. I certainly claim no originality in thinking of it, but it's, I don't think it's been quite used to argue for progress and quite this way. So the idea of a, so one form is what I call in the book a boundary problem. And the rough idea of a problem like that is first of all, that you distinguish between certain different classes of facts like, you know, a facts and b facts and they could be any sorts of facts like in the mind body case they're psychological facts and physical facts or in the free will and determinism case, there are facts about free will and facts that are determined in a certain kind of way, or in, you know, in questions about morality, they might be moral facts and natural facts, something like that. So this is a very typical thing that happens. You divide things between you divide facts or putative facts at any rate between, you know, the A's and the B's. And then what you do is you set up effectively a kind of how possible question. So you want to say, okay, so on the one hand there are a facts there are psychological facts. There are facts about freedom. There are facts about morality. But then you articulate inconsistent claims on those facts. So you say, well, there are these facts but they're on the one hand they must bear a certain relation to the contrastive set of facts, the b facts. And on the one hand, and on the other hand, it's impossible that they bear that relation to it. So you end up with an inconsistency. Basically. So in the mind body case, for example, we have the idea that there are psychological facts. You know, I do feel the pain in my foot or something. That's the first claim. The second claim is something like, well, if there are such facts, then they must be physical facts, let's say, or bear a certain relation to physical facts. And then thirdly, the is the idea that if there are these facts, then they can't bear that relation. And so those three things are inconsistent with each other because the each one will entail the negation of the third. And that's what I mean by a boundary problem. And what I do in the book is I give lots of different examples of problems of this kind that fit this general structure. And now what has this got to do with progress and philosophy? Well, the idea is roughly that we can think of, well, we begin with the premise that many philosophical problems assume this form, not all, of course, but many do. And then we can make the claim that if that's the case, then if we look back over the history of the subject, we can see that we've solved problems of that kind. And that gives us a reason to believe that certain kind of reasonable optimism is true. And why is that? Why is it the case that if we have the problems in this form, then we can see that we've solved them? Well, one thing is that if you squarely focus on problems of this form, then it's relatively clear how you might solve them. To solve them would be to reject one or other of the premises that lead to the contradiction. You don't, for example, need to give some, take again the mind-body case to reject a problem like that. You could reject the idea that if there are psychological facts, then they must bear a certain relation to these sorts of physical facts. You could reject that. And then you would have solved that problem without giving some general account of the psychological facts. That's a further issue entirely. So the point is that if you focus on problems of this form, it becomes clearer what it would be to solve questions. And that means that when you go back and look at the historical record, you can see whether problems of that kind have been solved or not. If you just sort of ask yourself in the abstract whether people have solved philosophical questions, the issue is sort of almost impossible to deal with. But if you would have it in this form, then I think you've got something to look for when you look at the historical record. And so what I want to do is to say that we've solved problems of this form in the past and therefore should have reasons to solve them again. I should say that this way of thinking about philosophical problems has a connection to the thing that we started with. We started with by saying what's philosophy? My answer was it's a bunch of topics. But I think it's very important to distinguish the topics from the questions that we ask about the topics. And so what I'm claiming here is that the questions that we ask about the topics often have this form in the boundary. There are boundary problems to use the terminology in the book. And if they have that form, then the historical record speaks in favor of a certain kind of progress. And so that's the structure of the argument in the case of boundary problems. The structure of the argument in the case of constitutive problems is rather similar. It just says, well, some problems certainly have the, certainly boundary problems. Other problems are constitutive problems in the sense that we're trying to give information about what I call in the book constitutive structures, structures of in virtue of what something is a conscious state. Or in virtue of what some act as a moral act or something like that. You assume to begin with that there are structures of that kind. And then you, what a philosophical theory would be would be a theory that provides information about those constitutive structures. And the question is only whether we've got better information now than we had in the past. And if we have, then we can assert that we have made progress. And so it's sort of somewhat similar in the sense that it focuses on, well, in the constitutive case, again, we're asking what exactly is the form of these questions and what would constitute an answer to these questions. And if you're clear about that, and I think the, as I say, I think progress becomes claims about progress become quite reasonable. Okay, so let me try to understand this two types of problems in philosophy. So you have the boundary problem, which specifies here are some facts that we know fat pay and here are other facts that we know fat be and there's some inconsistency if we assert both of those facts. So this progress, or we have solved a particular particular problem of that time if we reject either there are facts or which are a facts or defects or the relationship between a and b. Is that the boundary kind stuff. Yeah, that's right. So the problem will be presented as an inconsistency between the claim that there are a facts. And the claim that if there are such facts, they must bear a certain relation to be facts. And if there are these facts, then they can't be that relation to be facts. And so if you reject any of those, you solve the problem. Okay, so the constitutive set of problems are problems where it's one of an explanatory problem, right. So how do I explain a facts in terms of or in virtue of b facts, or does b fact, sorry, there's an a fact necessitate the b fact and so on and so forth. So that's a kind of explanation. Yeah, right. It's a good question. Actually, I start off my in the book I start off my discussion of the constitutive issues about the idea that philosophical problems are constitutive problems by notice noticing that at least some ways of. Of focusing on constitutive problems makes them look awfully like boundary problems. So it doesn't seem to be much of a difference between the two of them. What I do is I try to argue that in the con that what I'm imagining I suppose is somebody saying to me when I've argued about the boundary problems somebody could come back and say, well, yeah, you've sort of shown that there's progress with respect to these logical puzzles, but I want to know the, I want to, I want, I want to know what consciousness is or what morality is or something like that. What knowledge is what it consists in. And so what I'm trying to do in that part of the discussion is to deal with that sort of person who I take quite seriously that is it I think you could easily have that attitude with respect to the discussion of the boundary problems and emphasize that even if what I said about that is true it doesn't seem to scratch the itch that you want to scratch. And so what I try to do there is I say well what is it to give an explanation of these things what would that even mean. And as I say I, I, I tend to think what it would mean is to give information about constitutive structures relevant to these things. That's what it would be to do to give more accurate information better information and so forth, just like in a, in a historical case. If you know more about, you know, the reformation than, than we do now what does that mean it means that you've provided more information about the enormous causal histories that lead up to the information to the reformation, or more over the subsequent causal histories of that. So there is this massive causal system. The reformation picks out some sort of rough area in that big causal system. And we know more about it if we know more, more information about it. Likewise, I'm thinking there's a huge constitutive system. The world contains or consists in some enormous system of facts that are constituted by each other when we're interested in about when we're interested in the constitution of moral facts we're targeting a particular area there and we want information about that. We make progress if we have got better information about that than we had in the past. It's not logically that different from someone looking at the reformation. So that's, that's the sort of attitude. That's the way that I would try to deal with that question. Okay, so you've defended your optimism against critics like Dave Shalmers and Peter van and wagon. So Dave, I take it has a more empirical argument premise on the idea that there is no collective convergence to the big questions of philosophy. Now van and wagon on the other hand has some more I think a priori argument about the insoluble nature of philosophical questions. So could you expound on these two arguments in your reply to them. Sure. Yeah, both both the charmers argument and the van and wagon argument as I think charmers endorses his argument I think van and wagon doesn't quite endorse the argument but he's certainly interested in it and is very worried by the fact that at least that's how I read him. Both of those philosophers are interested in broadly speaking arguments from disagreement. So they want to take as a premise that there's disagreement in philosophy and draw somehow a conclusion from this that there isn't any progress in philosophy that's the way that I'm understanding understanding them. And the crucial question. Well, the issues are basically how do you get from a premise about disagreement to a conclusion about pessimism. And the reason that's interesting is because nobody can deny that there is that the premise about disagreement is true. And that is that there clearly has got to be disagreement. Because they clearly is so that's true but the question is how do we go from that to to pessimism about for about progress in philosophy and one way to see that there needs to be an argument here is to notice that claims about disagreement to true are all over the intellectual world all over science and history and, you know, other areas. There's of course disagreement, all over the place. We don't conclude from that that there's no progress in these other areas, or at any rate, if you did, if you did conclude from that then there's a sense in which I tend to lose interest because what I'm interested in is whether, whether philosophy is somehow special. So the question is, how do you go from a premise about disagreement to a conclusion about pessimism. Well, and the charmers argument and the van den Wagen argument offer alternative roots from the premise to the conclusion. The way in which charmers argues is he says you're right. The, the, I think actually in both arguments there's a kind of mix of empirical and a priori considerations but it is true that for in the charmers argument the empirical considerations are sort of prominent. So he says that that we just know from surveys like the Phil papers. An enormous amount of disagreement in philosophy. And then he has so that's his empirical premise. He also thinks that's obvious just from straightforward observation about philosophy anybody who knows anything about it will assert that there's a lot of disagreement and of course in a sense he's right. And then he has what he calls a bridge premise which says well if there's a lot of if there's not he doesn't put it in terms of disagreement actually he puts it in terms of no large scale convergence to the in philosophy to. And then the bridge premise is there's no large scale convergence. It's not just large scale. It's something else that's alerting me at the moment but it's something like that. There's no, there's no convergence of a certain kind then there's no convergence to the truth. So there's no convergence to the truth. Okay. Now, the way in which I try to deal with this is by asking the question about what happens with charmers as argument if you rub out the word philosophy and write in the word physics. So formally speaking the argument would then establish that there's no progress in physics. Now, of course, that is not part of the bargain charmers himself when he discusses this assumes just as I do that there is progress in physics the question is where the philosophy is special so he's interested in it in exactly the same sort of way as I am so he doesn't think that's true. His bridge premise would be true in both cases there's nothing in the bridge premise that makes any difference as to whether philosophies at issue or physics is an issue. What about the first premise that there's there isn't much convergence in philosophy. Is that true well there's a sense in which that's true in physics to because if you just look at physics. You look at contemporary physics there's an enormous amount of disagreement in physics. Just as there is in philosophy so so far we haven't seen any reason to think that philosophy is some sort of special case now of course they've won't be moved by this he will say yes but in in the case of philosophy the problems are sort of perennial the idea is that we've had this disagreement forever or at any rate for a very long time it doesn't matter how long but that's the whole idea of there being perennial problems. Whereas that isn't true in physics in physics what's happened is that you've solved certain questions and then moved on to other questions. And while it's of course true that in contemporary physics there's a lot of disagreement. We don't have this sort of same kind of history that we have in in philosophy. Well at that at that point I will say in response to him. Two things first, actually the argument the empirical argument from fill papers that he gets from the study doesn't in any way support that. How so because it only supports the claim that contemporary philosophers disagree about certain questions like what they mean by you know is morality objective on is physicalism true or something and of course that's true of course they disagree. But that's not the issue the issue is whether the very same disagreements have been at issue in the history of the subject. And the fill papers survey couldn't in principle tell us that because it. It just tells us in fact about how things are in contemporary philosophy. And in fact as as as charmers and bourgeois point out in their original paper on this they are focusing just on labels without even explaining the labels. Because they think it's kind of impossible to do the test if you if you explain the labels and they may well be right I'm not criticizing the way that they've set up. I'm just pointing out that if once you realize that in order to get a conclusion about pessimism out of this argument you need the premise to be about what you need a premise to be about the history of the subject not just about what's going on now and not just about how people use labels now it's obvious that people use labels now to disagree with each other. So that's one reason to resist the premise in the sense that it would yield the interesting conclusion. Another one is that I don't think it's true that philosophical problems are perennial. So an issue that I didn't we didn't really look at when I was telling you about the boundary problems or the constituent problems is that an important feature of the way in which I try to develop those arguments is by pointing out that while it's true. If we look at the history of the subject that different people in different epochs or eras would discussing the same kind of topic that is the summit they're discussing the relation between the mind and the body. They often ask very different questions about that about that question so the example I use a lot is just you know contrasting Descartes on the real distinction between mind and body the kind of argument he gives in in Meditation 6 versus Frank Jackson's argument about Mary in in Epiphenomenal Aqualia and other papers. So you might say well they're really just discussing the same topic you know Jackson in a certain sense is just banging on about the same thing that Descartes was talking about. And if you think that if you think that they're really talking about exactly the same question perhaps just with slightly different outer clothing or something but underneath it's the same question. If you think that then it is very difficult to not be a pessimist actually. It doesn't quite follow that you're a pessimist but it's very difficult not to be a pessimist and the reason is sort of straightforward because you could sort of think well the problem that the Jackson is talking about. It's sort of an open question in obvious sense because people are discussing it now you know there are people debating it back and forth and so forth. So it's an open question now and if Descartes was asking the very same question. Well just by logic is that question would have to be open as well. So in other words what you think what you think is that you've got the history of this problem or the discussion of this problem where it's just open all the way. And it just doesn't seem to be any progress at all. But actually when you look at the problem that Descartes was raising and the problem that that Jackson is raising while it is true that they're on the same topic. It's not at all clear that they're the same problem before one thing they understand the relevant notions in completely different ways. So you know for Descartes it's crucial that matter is just extension in space. His argument won't work as he himself sets out quite clearly his argument won't work unless that is true. Whereas for Jackson the physical what Mary can know in her room has got nothing to do with extension. It's got to do with all of the all of the information that's in contemporary what he thinks it was the contemporary physical sign that's very follows from that was just completely different from extension. And likewise actually when they're thinking about the mind aspect of it. So that's the difference on the matter aspect. If you look at the mind aspect they're talking about something completely different as well because for Descartes what was important was, you know, what he thought of a sort of higher cognitive faculties reasoning language and so forth. For Jackson those those questions pose no particular problem, at least as far as physicalism goes what's really difficult aspects about sensation or perception or something aspects which incidentally Descartes thought pose no particular problem. So, so the, the issue, the actual topic that they're talking about a really quite different, even though there's a sense in which of course they're both talking about the mind body problem, considered as a topic. So it isn't true that the same problem that there isn't really some perennial problem. What's true is that there's a that Jackson is raising a certain question which in perhaps as a successor or there's some relation to the Cartesian problem but it's not the same problem. And moreover, if once you realize that the problems are distinct. Then you can go back and look at the Cartesian problem and ask what happened to it. And the answer is, it basically was solved. It's not solved in exactly the way that Descartes anticipated that's true, but it's solved in the sense that nobody, nobody accepts his idea that matter is extension. Controversial. That is uncontroversial. Everybody rejects that. And if you reject that you just don't have his reasoning for the distinction between mind and body, because you can't say that you know a lot you have a clear and distinct idea of matter, then you can see that it doesn't. It's distinct from, from mind, because you don't have a clear and distinct idea of matter. So, so that problem has been solved. So basically, what we then have is we've got a series of problems and admittedly here we've just got a series of two but let's just work with that, where the earlier problem has been solved. And now we have a contemporary problem that hasn't been solved. Let's say the Jackson problem. Well, that pattern is very similar to what you might think of in physics in physics you've got a series of problems on similar topics, like what the origin of the universe is or something. And, you know, earlier people made certain proposals those proposals turn out to be wrong or they raise certain problems those problems were solved. Now we have contemporary problems that we're discussing. So the idea is that if you think about the issues in these ways, then the idea that the problems are perennial just doesn't seem to be true. So that's the sort of in a way the more substantive objection I have to the to the Chalmers style argument there that it just isn't true that the problems are perennial in the way that he assumes. And as I said he doesn't have any empirical evidence that they are either. So that's the Chalmers argument. The van Inwagen argument is another kind of disagreement argument. As you said the sort of a priori, there's an empirical element here too though the a priori element is certainly more prominent. What he what van Inwagen does is some, at least the way that I understand it is that you begin by imagining a somewhat idealized situation where you have what are usually called epistemic peers. We have two people disagreeing on a topic where it's assumed that perhaps they have exactly the same evidence available to them. Perhaps they're equally good or both perhaps even perfectly rational in some versions. They're equally good and very very good in other words at responding to that evidence and so forth. And yet they disagree on some claim. So maybe one one is a materialist let's say and the other one is a dualist something like that. So you begin by that and then you then you, there's a lot of discussion in epistemology about what to say about such a case. And some people think that in that sort of situation. The, the two people involved in this disagreement should withhold judgment. And to situate basically because you're in a situation in which you're confronted with someone who's got the same evidence as you have. And it's just as good at responding to that evidence as you have who holds a different view under those circumstances the idea is the issue. You should withhold judgment. Okay, so all of that is just about this idealized situation and an epistemological theory about what, what should, what is true about that idealized situation. What's that got to do with philosophical progress? Well, the answer is that for the, the pessimist. That is a sort of microcosm of our contemporary situation or perhaps any discussion in philosophy any discussion in philosophy is a bit like that. Where you've got this these disagreements between people who are epistemic peers. And in that case you ought to withhold judgment which means that while there might be a truth to the situation. We're never going to be able to articulate that. That's a kind of cartoonish rather simplified version of the, of the Van Inwaken style argument. And again, I try to. Well, I actually engage with this argument in a slightly different way for the first thing I say is just a version of what I just said in response to the charmers argument and that is, well let's have a look at this argument if again we rub out the word philosophy and write in the word physics. Because once again you can stipulate that we've got a situation among epistemic peers. They can be in the same evidential situation. They can be very, very good and equally good at responding to the evidence and yet they have a disagreement. What should one say in that say in that case. Well, if you really do believe that you should withhold judgment well you should say the same thing about in in the physical case as you would in the philosophy case. Because there isn't any, the idea that you should withhold judgment has got nothing to do with the subject matter and to discussion it just got to do with this idealized situation. And then the question as well is it true that in in you know in real physics as it were real physical disputes are a kind of properly modeled by this abstract situation. If it were true then we would get a kind of claim that progress in physics is also impossible. Well, I think in response to that the one response would be well, the, you know, actual disagreements in physics aren't like this idealized case, because they're, we're not really epistemic peers in the same way we don't have exactly the same evidence available to us. We're not equally good at responding and so forth but then of course you could say exactly the same thing in the philosophy case. It's just not clear that this idealized situation is, is true of any actual philosophical dispute. I mean, there's lots of further issues in the background which, you know, if I'm, I'm not much of an epistemologist in the sense that people who discuss this seriously. So there's lots of issues about whether it's even correct to think in the idealized case that you should withhold judgment. Some people think you shouldn't. They think, no, no, you should still hold your view even if you meet someone like this. And then there's lots of arguments about whether whether in general, regardless of the distinction between philosophy and physics, we are actual epistemic peers because to be epistemic peers means you have to agree on more or less everything except for the thing that you disagree. And that in practice, that is almost never true. You disagree about lots of things that one thing, which means you're just not an epistemic peer in the technical sense, which means this, this style of argument just doesn't apply. So, so those are those are the lines of argument I take with response to the in response to the, the both the charmers argument in the band and argument both are disagreement arguments. Both try to show that there's something special about disagreements in philosophy that mean that you can move from a premise about disagreement to a conclusion about pessimism and in both cases I want to respond by saying it's not clear at all that there's anything special about philosophy. And if that's true, then either you think that progress is impossible in both philosophy and physics, which in the context is a position which I at least set aside and Dave and other people set aside to or or all the arguments fail. Okay, that was interesting. So let's go back to the Cartesian plus the Jackson case. So you're saying that in the Descartes case, he uses a premise that's questionable now. That's why we made progress. And in the Jackson case, he's talking about a different set of questions from Descartes, almost the same topic. It's in the same topic, but they have different questions. So you're saying that in the future, we could solve the Jackson case. Yeah, I am saying that I'm not saying that they think about the Descartes case for a minute. I'm claiming that the problem that he in fact raised, which is at roughly about the relationship between thought and extension. That has been solved. But it is true that we have a problem now, which is a successor of that problem, which is on the same topic, and is formulated slightly differently. It seems to me quite possible that we would solve that problem. And we might have a successor, we might not depends how things go. But if if we solve the problem, the Jackson problem, we might end up with a successor problem. But if we did, then that would be a pattern that's typical in, throughout the sciences roughly speaking, it's quite common that you you raise a certain problem in a certain topic you solve it, and you get a successor problem. That's a very typical kind of the idea is that in there's no reason at all why philosophy couldn't be thought of in exactly the same sort of way. Now I understand why you are really a reasonable optimist. Now, so finally, you've been in the trenches of philosophical debate so to speak. So you have been in philosophy of mind epistemology metaphysics. But what's your advice for those who want to join our ranks as professional academic philosophers. Yeah, I certainly have been in the trenches, I can show the scars, if you like. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think about this question, not so much from the point of view of people wanting to get into academic philosophy. I mean, my advice to them is to, you know, to pursue their interests to not be discouraged, not to quit, keep going so far. But I also think that we should think about this question from, from the point of view of academic philosophers because it's really our job to sort of encourage people like this into our discipline. Now I'm thinking of the philosophy as a discipline as a social thing, not so much as a subject matter. And I do think that it's, while I'm, while I've defended progress and philosophy, I don't think all is well in our discipline. Okay. And partly because as I say I'm interested in it. The thesis about progress I'm interested in is a kind of epistemological thesis but it's, that's nothing to do with the the discipline itself and I do think it's a you know, somewhat exclusionary discipline, somewhat unwelcoming discipline for people getting into it or wanting to get into it. That's not just because as a lot of people have pointed out it's, you know, very focused on kind of European thinkers and male thinkers and so forth, not just for that reason but even, even with that is all true I think mostly. I also think that even within the areas that, you know, the areas that the sometimes called mainstream or core philosophy or something as all of those words are problematic to some degree but we just think of those those areas. It's not as if those areas are monolithic. I mean on the, on the contrary, they, they tend to be sort of full of, you know, driven by factions and, and there's a lot of fiefdoms and work in certain areas and there's a tendency, it's not a universal tendency but there's a sort of tendency to, for people to, you know, to, to want to work on their areas and not only that but they sort of extremely dismissive about other, other, other people who work on different areas and, you know, don't don't just sort of emphasize what they, what they do themselves but emphasize negatively that other things are somehow, you know, crazy or ridiculous or, you know, unfounded. It's a very common thing for people to do that. I think it's probably very difficult to get into a field if you do that because you talk to one person and they sort of, you know, they talk about their topics and that's fine but then if you ask them about something else they say, ah, ah, ah. And, you know, we've all had experiences like that and I think it's, and especially for people sort of students getting into the field I think it can be extremely bewildering and kind of upsetting that this happens. So I guess what I would do is, I mean, one of the things I was trying to do in the case of thinking about progress and philosophy is to think of philosophy as is a, just as an ordinary kind of subject, not a kind of peculiar subject as Wittgenstein said which is means that it's a really strange subject to which normal epistemic standards don't apply. I don't think that's true about it at all. I do think it's somewhat peculiar socially, culturally and I guess I would think it would be good if we could be somewhat more cosmopolitan in our general attitude and it's fine to work on whatever areas you'd like to work on but you don't need to poo-poo other people and encourage students to poo-poo other people and so forth. So I think if we could be, as I say, more cosmopolitan in our culture that would be very good for attracting people and getting them into the subject better than we've certainly done in the past. Okay, is the career worth it? Getting into philosophy? Is it worth it? Oh yeah, the career is definitely worth it. It's a marvelous career. I mean, it's hard, it's now very difficult to get into it and of course any, you know, I, one of the jobs I have here in philosophy at ANU is to run the honors program which is the senior undergraduate program and so students at that level are beginning to think about whether they should go off and do a PhD or not and often, you know, if you've started to, as you know, if you've started to do a PhD in philosophy then you're sort of on the rollercoaster that inevitably tries to get you into an academic job just the way things go, that sort of seems to be what, but not all students of course, but many, many students are like that and most graduate programs are sort of geared for that. So that the honors students are sort of looking at this, wondering whether it's for them and I always try to say that it's a wonderful thing to do and they should do it but they also should have their eyes open as to what the, you know, what the problems are and what the possibilities are and all that. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful thing to do and I'm always, you know, amazingly thankful that I get a salary for doing it. When I first got a salary for doing it I couldn't quite believe it. I said in my office thinking it's unbelievable. But there it is. Okay, so on that note, thanks again Dan for sharing your time with us and your thoughts. So join me again, join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point. See you. Thank you. Thanks very much.