Philosophy, since its inception, has been characterized by persistent disagreements. The situation in philosophy is perhaps worse than in other formalized disciplines, such as scientific or mathematical practice. Peter van Inwagen argued that it would indeed be "hard to find an important philosophical thesis that, say, ninety-five percent of, say, American analytical philosophers born between 1930 and 1950 agreed about in, say, 1987."
I do not have a clear view of the situation in 1987, but the PhilPaper survey suggests that van Inwagen may be on the right track--the strongest inclinations are towards non-skeptical realism (81 %), scientific realism (75 %) atheism (72.8%). In how far is disagreement in philosophy cause for concern? Suppose, say, that 95% or even 100 % of philosophers had been atheists or scientific realists, would this count as compelling proof against the existence of God or in favor of the existence of unobservable scientific entities? As long as we don't really have a good account of what philosophical intuitions are, it is hard to make sense of this.
An extensive part of the disagreement in philosophy stems from people having differing intuitions, for example, on whether or not free will is incompatible with determinism. Despite their variability, philosophical intuitions are often tremendously compelling to those who hold them: to explain his difference in opinion on compatibilism with Lewis, van Inwagen writes "I suppose my best guess is that I enjoy some sort of philosophical insight (I mean in relation to these three particular theses) that, for all his merits, is somehow denied to Lewis. And this would have to be an insight that is incommunicable- -at least I don't know how to communicate it--, for I have done all I can to communicate it to Lewis, and he has understood perfectly everything I have said, and he has not come to share my conclusions." Experimental psychologists suggest that philosophical intuitions not only show individual variation, but might also be correlated with factors like gender or ethnicity, cause for additional concern about their reliability.
There are several approaches to the problem of the instability of philosophical intuitions. To give a recent example, Jennifer Nagel has a recent interesting paper where she shows that the types of instability found in epistemic intuitions (e.g., Gettier cases) are also found in perceptual judgments, such as susceptibility to perceptual illusions. She also argues that some of the earlier studies on purported effects of ethnicity in intuitions about what knowledge is are methodologically faulty. She refers to an ongoing study by herself and others that indicates, pace the original studies on Getter cases, that East Asians and westerners have similar intuitions.
What I find truly fascinating is that, despite extensive research on philosophical intuitions in experimental philosophy or metaphilosophy, we have little idea what the psychological basis of philosophical intuitions might be. Jennifer Nagel argues they are akin to perception. But whereas we have a good psychological account of perception, we lack a good psychological account of philosophical intuition. This makes philosophical disagreement all the more puzzling and hard to make sense of.
Recent Comments