Has any philosophical problem been solved? Why or why not?
Posted Jan 22, 2020, 8:40 AM UTC
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I think navigating around this question can be pretty tricky. I think Chalmers's insight here really does reveal something. People who talk about progress and solutions and dissolutions in philosophy often talk past each other.
Chalmers notes that when questions like this are interpreted literally, the answer becomes pretty obvious. Of course! Who could deny it? But it seems charitable to infer that someone means something else when they ask questions like this, like "Have any of the big, looming, persistent problems been solved?"
I think it's natural to read you, charitably, as asking the latter question. But it's worthwhile to answer the former question as well. Many problems have been solved, and the paper discusses in what sense we can say that that's true. u/american_spacey mentions knowledge, Chalmers mentions a few others, like problems regarding conditional probabilities, and there are also many, many negative theses (I could list a bunch just from my own experience) we take to be solutions, etc.
For stuff on the latter question, you may be interested in the literature on progress.
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Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems definitively put to rest a whole philosophical project to provide a robust and comprehensive logical foundation for mathematics. He showed that what they wanted was logically impossible in a way that had ramifications not only for math but for epistemology and metaphysics.
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Just off the top of my head, I believe most contemporary epistemologists would say "is knowledge justified true belief?" is a settled question. See SEP for an overview.
That's how a lot of philosophy works, in my opinion / experience. As philosophers we tend to study problems that are difficult to answer in ways that don't admit of any response. So a particular area of study in philosophy is often characterized by philosophers working very hard to map out the various possible ways you could go. Some answers to questions turn out to be dead ends. Others lead to promising theories.
Are there any definitive positive philosophical result?
Can you be more precise about what you mean by a "definitive" "positive" result? Philosophical theories are all about coming up with a plausible answer to a question using argumentation. If by "definitive" you mean there's absolutely no way anyone could ever argue against it, that's a pretty strong (one might say unreasonable) requirement. For example, any argument no matter how strong fails against someone who rejects one of the premises, and (for a comparison) by some accounts of "definitive" science never comes up with definitive results, since all scientific claims are ultimately probabilistic. But despite this, philosophy and science are both useful fields of study.
On the other hand, if any positive, relatively certain result will do for you, then trivially there's "knowledge requires a true belief".
By "definitive", I mean a result supported by a knockdown argument.
By "positive", I mean one that asserts something rather than just denies something; non-examples might be Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction or Gettier's rejection of the traditional knowledge analysis.
Also, of course, preferably an interesting, significant one, thus ruling out that trivial result you mentioned.
I only just now stumbled upon this other conversation in this thread.
On top of u/american_spacey's suggestions, here are some positions with near unanimous, if not unanimous, consensus that seem to meet your criteria:
Some things that damn near everyone believes, though the stragglers are significant enough to avoid calling these unanimous:
These seem to satisfy your criteria. These are obviously interesting, it took a lot of evidence to come to these conclusions and that would be weird if they were trivial. Some of these are still plausibly disjunctive in some sense or another, but not significantly.
OK, sure, let me give you an example from moral philosophy. In my estimation there's a broad philosophical consensus that the treatment of animals in factory farms is morally unjustifiable. There is some disagreement about the theoretical basis for this claim (depending, obviously, on what you take to be the correct basis for moral reasoning), but broad agreement that it is true. There are some philosophers who do reject it, but likewise you can find someone who will deny just about any scientific theory.
I think a lot of work is happening in your "interesting, significant" requirement, so let me comment on that. The theories of a century ago in any field tends to lose their "interestingness", but also if they're successful fewer and fewer people reject them. Evolution is this way in Biology, Special and General relativity are in Physics, and acceptance of the proofs that Knowledge can't be merely JTB seems headed that way in Philosophy. I think when you say you're looking for "positive" results, that's in part because you think they're more interesting, and so this paragraph speaks to that idea.
Of course, the fact that there isn't universal consensus maybe means this doesn't meet your requirement for a "definitive" result, but I would say the claim is so significant that it probably makes up for that. For example, quite a few moral philosophers would say that this fact entails some form of moral vegetarianism. Others disagree on that point.
Getting universal consensus is hard in any field; part of the problem in philosophy is that what we take to be a worthwhile problem shifts over time, while this is less the case in science. If you want an example of long-term coming-to-consensus, I guess I'd point to the external world: there's a pretty good degree of consensus on non-skepticism, although this leaves lots of questions unanswered.
I'd also suggest checking out the paper u/justanediblefriend recommends. Been a few years since I read it, but it's a good one.