Abstract
Throughout the history of philosophy, several skeptics have denied (and many still do) that philosophy has to be or even could be considered a scientific discipline. Recently, the X-Phi movement has added another twist to the discussion about philosophy’s scientific status by challenging philosophy’s reliance on intuitions in the context of philosophical reasoning. Ernest Sosa has prominently responded to some of the challenges raised by X-Phi in order to vindicate philosophy’s scientific potential. Sosa discusses two troubling arguments against philosophy’s status as a scientific discipline, namely the Argument from Insufficient Testability and the Missing Consensus Argument. Our paper aims at pointing out in how far Sosa’s responses to both arguments strike us as problematic and at providing solutions to the respective problems. First, we give an outline of the Argument from Insufficient Testability, provide a reconstruction of Sosa’s reply to the argument and present our reasons for rejecting Sosa’s way of assailing it. Secondly, we present an outline of the Missing Consensus Argument, give a reconstruction of Sosa’s reply and substantiate our doubts as to the plausibility of the reply. Thirdly, we suggest routes to the rehabilitation of philosophy and show why and in how far we regard these as viable. We invite Sosa to consider our critique and our suggestions and to check whether or not he deems them helpful in amending his defense of philosophy’s status as a scientific discipline.
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- 1.
Here and in the following, we use the term “science” and its related expressions in a broad sense that is not confined to natural sciences. “Science” in this broad sense is synonymous with the German term “Wissenschaft” which also includes disciplines apart from the natural sciences, e.g. the humanities.
- 2.
- 3.
In what follows, we will confine ourselves to intuition-based philosophy only, as Sosa’s concern that is relevant here is to give an answer to the question whether or not there can be a discipline of philosophy based on intuitions. Hence, hereafter with “philosophy” we refer to intuition-based philosophy unless stated otherwise.
- 4.
The domain of intuitions is of course a very broad one; it includes a variety of phenomena. Here, we will restrict ourselves to those intuitions involved in a certain philosophical practice of appeal to intuitions, namely the practice that Weinberg refers to with the abbreviation “PAI” (cf. Weinberg 2007, 321).
- 5.
It should be noted that as Sosa himself does not give a semi-formal outline of the argument in his CDP, our semi-formal suggestion to put the argument is a result of our interpretation of certain passages of Sosa’s CDP, which of course is one among other possible interpretations, but to our mind the most plausible that there is. We will subsequently provide proofs from CDP for the plausibility of our interpretation. Also, our interpretation is consistent with the argument as presented by Weinberg (2007).
- 6.
Nevertheless, in CDP there also seem to be some instances of “reliable” that are to be understood in the objective sense (cf. for example Sosa 2011, 460).
- 7.
This is what Weinberg extensively argues for (cf. Weinberg 2007).
- 8.
Of course, we could be wrong here and Sosa could also have in mind reliability in the subjective sense. But in this case, he and Weinberg would somehow talk past each other: It is Weinberg’s concern to show that intuitions are not a trustworthy source because they lack hopefulness or, in Sosa’s terminology, sufficient testability. If it was Sosa’s point that intuitions could deliver perfectly right outcomes without being testable, that would not only be a fairly trivial point, but would also miss Weinberg’s argument.
- 9.
As regards the relationship between reliabilityo and reliabilitys, we suggest that if a source is presumably reliableo, it is reasonable to regard it as reliables as well.
- 10.
With regard to premise (4), we are not altogether sure whether or not Sosa accepts it, as he seems to have two standards of testability and considers one of them to be met – see Sect. 5.3.3 for a detailed explanation of this difficulty.
- 11.
This is further elaborated by suggesting that through recourse to intuitions in philosophy, only animal knowledge can be acquired and that we would hope to surpass the animal level in a mature scientific discipline (cf. Sosa 2011, 459).
- 12.
This requirement is one among others necessary for sufficient testability, apart from tight coherence, high-quality deliverances and theoretical understanding of our sources (cf. Sosa 2011, 459).
- 13.
Nicholas Rescher argues in his book Pluralism against the demand for consensus that a sufficient consensus cannot be reached at all in any scientific discipline, and here he includes natural sciences (cf. Rescher 1995, 37ff.).
- 14.
Since even natural sciences have (at least some) normative basic principles, they are not in every case immune against dissent. The discussion of the string theory in physics might count as an example (cf. Dawid 2009).
- 15.
Tetens argues for this view. He states that philosophers are willing to give up many of their assumptions, but not those about the “good life”. Because in philosophy, many different ideas of happiness and morality have been developed and will be defended against every strong criticism, disagreement in the philosophical discipline is indispensable, Tetens claims (cf. Tetens 2001, 362).
- 16.
Here we advocate the implicit premise that progress is at least a good indication for scientificity (cf. in place of many Thagard 1978, 17).
- 17.
Cf., for example, Hoyningen-Huene. In his Systematicity (2013) he claims systematicity to be inherent in all scientific disciplines. He then describes nine dimensions of science, e.g. explanation and knowledge generation. Not all of these dimensions must be part of a scientific discipline, exceptions are permitted. But together they form an appropriate picture of what we have in mind when we think of sciences.
- 18.
Again, see Tetensʼ arguments for productive dissent in philosophy (cf. Tetens 2001).
- 19.
Spohn admits that he does not subscribe to the term “normal science”, but that it would be interesting to see if and how Kuhn’s terms could be applicable to philosophy (cf. Spohn 2005, 6).
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Bahr, A., Becker, C., Trüper, C. (2016). Yes There Can! Rehabilitating Philosophy as a Scientific Discipline. In: Bahr, A., Seidel, M. (eds) Ernest Sosa. Münster Lectures in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32519-4_5
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