Abstract
Philosophers disagree. A lot. Pervasive disagreement is part of the territory; consensus is hard to find. Some think this should lead us to embrace philosophical skepticism: skepticism about the extent to which we can know, or justifiably believe, the philosophical views we defend and advance. Most philosophers in the literature fall into one camp or the other: philosophical skepticism or philosophical anti-skepticism. Drawing on the insights of hinge epistemology, this paper proposes another way forward, an intermediate position that appeals both to skeptical and anti-skeptical intuitions concerning the possibility and scope of philosophical knowledge. The main advantage of our account is that it’s able to recover some philosophical knowledge while also being compatible with philosophical skepticism.
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Notes
The first and second premise are obviously controversial. Here, we simply take their plausibility for granted. For discussion of the conciliationist principle underlying the first premise, see Christensen and Lackey (2013). For discussion of the applicability principle underlying the second premise, see Christensen (2014) and Kornblith (2010).
For discussion and defense of disagreement-based philosophical skepticism, see Beebee (2018, Sect. 3), Brennan (2010), Christensen (2014), Fumerton (2010), Goldberg (2009, 2013), Kornblith (2010, 2013), and Licon (2012). Barnett (2019) also seems sympathetic to philosophical skepticism but doesn’t focus on defending it. The road to philosophical skepticism isn’t paved exclusively by peer disagreement. Chalmers (2015), Beebee (2018, Sect. 2), and Lycan (2019), for example, defend a kind of philosophical skepticism motivated by methodological concerns. See Stoljar (2017) for an optimistic rebuttal to both disagreement- and methodological-based philosophical skepticism. We discuss such a kind of philosophical skepticism in Coliva and Doulas (2022).
We remain neutral here on how to think of justification given that it’s largely irrelevant with respect to the arguments put forward in this paper.
By belief we mean an attitude of acceptance of holding true a proposition and having epistemic reasons in favor of it. See Sect. 2 for a contrast between belief and acceptance.
A weaker version of the self-defeat problem would go as follows. Let it be that at first philosophers disagree—that is, hold incompatible beliefs. When disagreement comes to light and impresses one as intractable, they retreat to a different attitude with respect to their philosophical views. Yet, if disagreement necessarily involves belief, then, at that stage, they seem no longer able to disagree with one another, even if they hold incompatible philosophical positions. This weaker reading of the disagreement argument for philosophical skepticism would make disagreement disappear, contrary to what would intuitively seem to be the case. As we will see in Sect. 2, this is a version of the “lost disagreement” problem. Thus, to counter either the self-defeat problem or the lost disagreement one, we need an account of disagreement that does not necessarily require parties to the dispute to hold incompatible beliefs.
Broadly construed. Those who have embraced hinge epistemology explicitly under that label, or under a slightly different one, include: Strawson (1985), Wright (1985, 2004, 2014), Moyal-Sharrock (2005), Kusch (2013, 2016a, 2016b, 2017), Schönbaumsfeld (2016), Pritchard (2015, 2019), and Coliva (2010, 2015). Though Michael Williams rejects the label, we tentatively include Williams (1991) here as well. Note too that while we sometimes use the terms “hinge epistemology” and “hinge epistemologist” in a generic sense, the hinge approach we assume here is that of Coliva (2015).
See, for example, Wittgenstein (1969, OC §§196–206, 110, 130, 166, 121, 559).
Although see footnote 1.
Again though, for the hinge epistemologist, disagreement seems impossible only for a narrow class of disagreements (i.e., hinge disagreements). Likewise for the philosophical skeptic, i.e., those disagreements that are philosophical in kind.
This view certainly isn’t shared by all hinge epistemologists. And while a natural reading of Wittgenstein’s OC seems to support the idea that hinges aren’t truth-apt (given that Wittgenstein maintained that hinges play a rule-like role and thereby lack descriptive content), in fact, certain passages can be used to support a reading in which he does think hinges are truth-apt in a certain minimal sense. See Williams (2004) and Coliva (2010, 2015, 2020) for such a reading.
Hinge epistemology therefore differs from Quinean holism at least in the following important respects. First, there is a discontinuity between hinges and ordinary empirical propositions regarding their level of generality and normative import. Second, while there may be more than one hinge at play in the structure of empirical justifications (e.g., “There is an external world,” “Our sense organs are mostly reliable,” “We are not victims of massive and lucid dreams”), that does not mean that the justification of a specific empirical claim will depend on one’s overall belief framework.
Arguably, in this sense we accept many things: that God exists (or doesn’t); that there is a self (or there isn’t); that there will be life after death (or there won’t be); and, for some philosophers of science like van Fraassen, our fundamental scientific theories. If the latter claim were correct, it would speak in favor of at least the structural similarity between science and philosophy. We hope to be able to take up the latter issue in another paper.
Here it is crucial to keep in mind that for Coliva, contrary to Wittgenstein, only very general propositions like “There are physical objects” or “There is an external world” are hinges. As argued in Coliva (2010, 2020), propositions such as “Nobody has ever been on the Moon,” which are considered hinges by Wittgenstein in OC, are actually not so. Coliva and Palmira (2021, pp. 407–409) propose a test for “hinginess” based on whether a disagreement over a target proposition can be resolved on the basis of empirical or a priori evidence. If it can’t be resolved on either basis, then the proposition in question is a hinge (as opposed to a deeply entrenched belief).
Not just this. Importantly, philosophical hinges serve as conditions of possibility of our epistemic practices themselves. That is, they make possible our less basic philosophical beliefs (or what we will later on call “intra-theoretical” philosophical beliefs) such as, for example, that epistemic externalism or internalism is true, or that direct realism or indirect realism is true, and so on. See also footnote 17. Thanks to an anonymous referee for inviting us to further clarify this.
As mentioned in footnote 15, similar stalemates could be reached over philosophical claims such as the existence of God or the self.
Similarly, the non-existence of God, or of a self, understood as a mental substance capable of existence independently of the existence of the body, accord better with a naturalistic worldview.
This is only a first pass. A modified definition will be introduced in Sect. 4.
Notoriously, Carnap (1950) distinguished between “internal” and “external” questions. While he gave a metalinguistic reading of the latter, he proposed a factual reading of the former. Our hinge account of philosophical disagreement and its consequences is advanced in a similar spirit, save for the metalinguistic reading of external questions, or, in our terminology, of philosophical hinge disagreement.
For a survey of some of these issues here concerning philosophical progress and disagreement see Coliva and Doulas (2022).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Adam Carter, Chris Kelp, Oscar Piedrahita, Mona Simion and audiences at the COGITO Epistemology Workshop (Glasgow, March 17th, 2021), and three anonymous referees at Synthese for helpful comments and discussion. While this paper has been conceived and written together, Coliva is the main responsible for Sects. 2, 4 and Doulas for Sects. 1, 3. The Introduction and the Conclusion (Sect. 5) were jointly coauthored.
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Coliva, A., Doulas, L. What philosophical disagreement and philosophical skepticism hinge on. Synthese 200, 251 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03735-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03735-6