The Endless Quest: The Perpetual Dilemmas of Philosophy
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Philosophy seems to be on a hiding to nothing. It has a 2,500-year history in the West and an extensive back-catalogue – of problems. There are questions about what exists, and what we know about it, such as: Do we have free will? Is there an external world? Does God exist? and so on. There are also questions of analysis and definition such as: What makes a sentence true? What makes an act just? What is causation? What is a person? This is a tiny sample. For almost any abstract notion, some philosopher has wondered what it really is.
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Yet, despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade. Other philosophers haven’t been slow to pick holes in their attempted answers and expose flaws or dubious assumptions in them. The punctures in the attempted answers then get patched up and put up for discussion again. But, what happens is that new punctures appear, or the patches fail and the old punctures are revealed again. Philosophy emerges as a series of arguments without end, and its questions settle into seemingly intractable problems.
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Here is a little gem from the 18th century. It’s known as Molyneux’s problem. Molyneux, the Irish scientist and politician, posed a question that has stumped philosophers ever since. Imagine someone completely blind from birth who’s been able to explore both a cube and a globe by touch. This person learns to identify and name these shapes. Now, suppose that this person is later able to see. Would they then be able to identify which is the cube and which is the globe, just by sight? Imagine them standing at a distance from the shapes. Would they be able to tell simply from looking which was the globe and which was the cube?
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Here is a companion thought experiment, now called the knowledge argument. By reading the appropriate books, you could learn all about the chemistry of ammonia. By reading more books, you could learn all about how the human olfactory system works and, in particular, how it reacts in response to ammonia molecules – what distinctive changes occur in the mucous membrane and in the olfactory nerves. Given all this textbook information, though, could you then know all there is to know about the smell of ammonia? Or is there something about the smell of ammonia, the qualitative experience of that sharp, pungent aroma, that you won’t understand from this learning, independent of experience?
Is the thought experiment illuminating about human nature, or has it gone badly wrong? The jury remains out on this, and indeed on every other, problem in philosophy. Philosophy displays increasing ingenuity without an emerging consensus. Progress doesn’t require consensus, of course: some philosophers might have solved a given problem without this being acknowledged across the board. But the degree to which there is, or isn’t, consensus in a given field can be one indicator of how much progress has been achieved.
