A note on patience
Sometimes philosophy is criticized for failing to make
progress. This criticism may come from
scientists or it may come from other philosophers. For example, some scientists claim that
physics has taken over from philosophy because only the former makes progress,
i.e. advances our knowledge and understanding.
Here is Neil Degrasse Tyson on philosophy:
“Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions
so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to
our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the
question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our
progress.”
On the other hand, philosophers who are suspicious of
grandiose claims to truth and knowledge often argue that philosophy is best
conceived as a form of conversation or literature and so should be forgiven for
failing to make progress because it isn’t in the business of discovery. Either way, philosophical progress is rejected.
Aristotle developed the fundamentals of logic that dominated
for some 2000 years, to the point that Kant commented in the preface to his Critique of Pure Reason that it “is remarkable also that to the
present day this logic has not been able to advance a single step, and is thus
to all appearance a closed and completed body of doctrine” (B viii). Not long after Kant wrote this, Boole
published The Laws of Thought; soon
thereafter, Frege’s Begriffsschrift appeared, and an explosive
advancement in logic followed, leading to groundbreaking work by Russell and
Whitehead, Turing, Shannon, Gödel, Tarski, and others.
So, even
2000 years of stalled progress does not entail that a discipline has
stalled. Logic, in the past 150 years,
has been as fruitful a discipline as there is, without which computing as we
know it would never have developed.
Even if it
is true that philosophy has failed to
make progress in a very long time – which I don’t concede except for the sake
of argument – it simply does not follow that philosophy fails to make progress. At
any time in the period 322 BC (Aristotle’s death) to 1854 (the publication of The Laws of Thought) one might have felt
justified in decrying formal logic as a discipline that fails to make
progress. One would have been
wrong. One might – again, I concede this just for the sake of argument; I suspect
that the medieval logicians made progress – have been justified in claiming
that logic has failed to make
progress in a long time. Nevertheless,
the timeless ‘logic fails to make
progress’ would have been untrue.
Why, then,
would we want to license such a move in the case of philosophy itself? Whether or not philosophy has been mired in a
stalled period, it will take much more than that to support the conclusion that
the stall is permanent or inherent to the discipline. I am aware of principled arguments out there
(e.g. from Rorty), but the ‘argument from time’ should, I think, be rejected.
This note
was prompted by ‘How Aristotle Created the Computer’ by Chris Dixon, which I
greatly enjoyed; check it out:
