Method in the Service of Progress

There is a powerful three-step argument that philosophy has made no progress. The first step maintains that a field makes genuine progress to the extent that, over time, it provides true answers to its central questions. The second step observes that the central questions of philosophy are among life’s “big questions”—concerning, inter alia, free will, personal identity, skepticism, universals, the mind–body relation, God, and morality. Step three delivers the bad news: we lack the answers to any of these questions. While there are a variety of responses to this argument, ours begins (in §1) by challenging its first step: true answers, even ones that yield collective convergence on the truth, do not capture what we ultimately want from our best philosophical views or theories (we will use these terms interchangeably). What we need are not simply widely accepted lists of individual truths, even those that are justifiedly believed or known, but theories poised to furnish a broad and systematic theoretical understanding (or simply ‘understanding’) with respect to the questions they address. At the same time, we acknowledge that shifting to understanding simply moves the bump in the rug: to promote understanding as a proper goal of philosophical inquiry does not suffice to establish philosophical progress, or even its possibility, for it provides no assurance that philosophers’ efforts, and in particular the methods they employ, are on track to realize this goal. In a variety of philosophical subfields, including metaethics (our primary case study), there have at various points been hints of recognition that lack of progress is due at least in part to the failure to develop and