In Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.),
Philosophy's Future. Wiley. pp. 75–90 (
2017-04-27)
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Abstract
I submit that philosophy makes progress, but it does so in a way that is distinct from the sense in which the word applies to science, and is more akin to what happens in allied fields such as mathematics and logic. I develop a model of philosophy as “evoking” (to use L. Smolin's term) a series of peaks in conceptually defined but empirically constrained, landscapes, or what N. Rescher calls “aporetic clusters.” I also discuss empirical evidence for the existence of such clusters, following a statistical survey of philosophers’ views about their own field, carried out by D. Bourget and D.J. Chalmers.