Metaphilosophy

What it asks

Physics has answers now that it did not have in 1600. Philosophy is still arguing about free will, about what makes an act right, about the relation of mind to body.

There are three ways to take that. Philosophy is failing. Philosophy is doing something else, and progress in it looks different - clearer questions, better arguments, positions properly mapped and known costs. Or philosophy is a holding operation: it takes questions before they are tractable and hands them to a science when they become so, which would explain why its residue is always the hard part.

The third answer has real evidence for it. Physics, psychology, linguistics and computer science all began inside philosophy and left when they acquired methods.

The recurring problems

What the evidence is. Much philosophy tests theories against intuitions about cases. Experimental work has found that such intuitions vary with framing, order and background, which if true undermines a great deal of standard method - and the findings are themselves contested.

Thought experiments. Trolley cases, brains in vats and zombies do work no observation could do. What kind of evidence a made-up case provides is a serious question that the practice mostly proceeds without answering.

Whether philosophy is continuous with science. Naturalists hold that it should defer to empirical findings and has no distinctive method. Others hold that philosophy addresses questions no experiment could settle, including the question of what an experiment establishes.

Whether the disagreement is a scandal. Philosophers disagree persistently, and so do experts in a field where the questions are genuinely hard. Deciding which is happening is not easy from inside.

How it developed

Reflection on what philosophy is has always been part of it. Plato distinguished it from sophistry; Kant asked what reason can establish and set limits accordingly; the logical positivists redefined it as the analysis of language and pronounced most of its history meaningless.

Wittgenstein went further in both his periods, holding that philosophical problems arise from confusions about language and that the aim is dissolution rather than solution. That is a metaphilosophical position doing all the work in a body of first-order philosophy.

The field got its name and a journal in 1970 and became a subject rather than a set of asides.

Experimental philosophy from around 2000 made the methodological question empirical: if intuitions are the evidence, one can go and find out how stable they are. The results provoked a large defensive literature, and the exchange has been more productive than either side's rhetoric suggests.

The positions within it

Naturalism and autonomism about philosophy's relation to science; quietism and therapeutic conceptions, on which philosophy dissolves rather than answers; conceptual analysis and conceptual engineering, which asks not what our concepts mean but what they should mean; experimental philosophy. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Conceptual engineering is the growth area, and it is a significant shift: from describing concepts to assessing and redesigning them, which makes philosophy openly normative about its own vocabulary.

The progress question has become better posed rather than answered. Attempts to measure agreement across the profession have found large disagreement on the classic questions and considerable convergence on many smaller ones, which supports the view that philosophy progresses where nobody is looking.