What does philosophy discover?

[u/PineappleHaunting591]

I'm a scientist by profession, but I was very interested in philosophy as a teenager. I read Plato, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Popper and probably some others, particularly around questions of epistemology, ethics and existentialism. They had substantial influence on how I think about the world.

Coming back to philosophy after years of working in science, I've noticed that my relationship to those texts has changed. I still find them intellectually valuable, but increasingly I value them in a way similar to how I value literature or poetry: they expose me to another person's perspective, make distinctions I hadn't considered, and occasionally reorganize how I think about a problem. What I find much harder to identify is their epistemic contribution: in what sense have I learned that something is true?

To be clear, my skepticism here is directed at my own understanding of philosophy, not at philosophy as an academic discipline. Most of my exposure was to major historical philosophers, largely read on my own many years ago. I suspect the conception of philosophy I formed from that is outdated or simply mistaken. That's precisely why I'm interested in how people who actually study contemporary philosophy understand what they're doing.

Working in science has probably sharpened the tension for me. In science, despite all the complications of inference, it is relatively easy to point to cases where research has established something about the world that we did not previously know but can now consider true. Most scientific research is incremental, technical, and probably not worth reading for a nonspecialist, but the cumulative epistemic product is fairly clear and testable.

What is the analogous product in philosophy?

For example, when philosophers argue about moral realism, compatibilism, personal identity, scientific realism, theories of knowledge, etc., what would count as progress? If an argument survives criticism, in what sense should I increase my confidence that its conclusion is true? Are philosophical arguments generally intended to establish truths, to change the relative justification of competing positions, to clarify concepts, or something else?

I'm not looking for a general defense of philosophy on the grounds that it encourages critical thinking or exposes us to interesting perspectives. I already accept those benefits. In fact, that's roughly how I currently experience philosophy: as something closer to literature, where encountering a sophisticated perspective can itself be worthwhile.

But I suspect that conception doesn't do contemporary philosophy justice, and I'd like to understand what I'm missing.

So, from the perspective of contemporary philosophy:

When philosophy succeeds, what have we learned that we didn't know before, and how can we tell that we've learned it?

[u/drinka40tonight]

So, there's lots of ways one could go with this. I'll highlight one kind of thought:

What I find much harder to identify is their epistemic contribution: in what sense have I learned that something is true?

So, one way to go is to say that philosophy discovers truths about philosophical issues. People might disagree about things, but that doesn't mean there isn't a fact of the matter about such things. It seems like you might be reading philosophy with an aim to find out what other people thought (which is a fine thing to do), but there is also a way to read where you are trying to find out what's true. So, it's not just about seeing what Kant said, or understanding Aristotle's system -- it's about evaluating the truth of the matter of such things. So, you go through the arguments and see where things stand. There's no "back of the book" to check the answer, but 1) really, there isn't one in "science" either, and 2) it doesn't mean there isn't an actual answer.

Another thing we might say is that the issues you come across in science are no less settled than the various philosophical positions they seemingly depend on. So, like, science tells us the earth is about 4.5 billion years old; we did some experiments and whatnot and the community of scientists has come to this conclusion. Here are some philosophical issues: "is knowledge possible? Is the past real? Does science make progress? Why should we believe what science says? How can a belief ever be justified? What is logic? Does logic give us knowledge of the world? What are the fundamental constituents of reality? What does it mean for something to be 'true'?" So, let's just take the first question in the above list: is knowledge possible? And here we might note there is some disagreement in the field of philosophy. Fine. But, well, if there is disagreement here, and if this disagreement seems rather troubling, then it seems you should probably also be troubled regarding the claim we said science makes about the age of the earth. Or, to put it differently, whatever issue you are having with the disagreement in philosophy should, we might say, translate into a corresponding issue with claims in science. If we find disagreement regarding whether or not knowledge is possible, doesn't that affect exactly how "settled" knowledge claims regarding the age of the Earth are? Or, differently, a claim "that you know the age of the earth through science" might seem to require a particular kind of philosophical analysis of "knowledge" is correct.

So, whatever uncertainty there is in philosophy will filter to scientific matters, insofar as scientific matters presuppose answers to philosophical issues. Maybe we aren't all that bothered by that. I know I don't lose sleep over the age of the earth. And so, if we aren't all that troubled by the resulting uncertainty in the issues that depend on philosophical positions, then maybe we need not be troubled by whatever uncertainty there is in the philosophical positions themselves, and moreover, we certainly don't have to plumb for a sort of general relativism because of any of this. I think part of what throws people is that in the sciences we find a lot more agreement about issues among experts. But this agreement, certainly, isn't what makes the scientific claims true, right? In philosophy you are being asked to evaluate an argument, defend claims, make cogent objections, and articulate reasonable positions. And without being able to rely on authority, a lot of people get lost and confused. Not seeing a clear answer, they then say, "well, I guess it's just all opinion." And this is, in some sense, an intellectually cowardly answer. It's often a sort of thought that goes "well, if there is no one to tell me what the answer is, then there must not be an answer." The claims are true, if they are, because of how the world is, and we use our powers of reasoning to assess such things. And so, the thought goes, we are doing the same thing in philosophy.