How Often Are the Big Questions of Philosophy Answered?

And What Explains the Unanswered Ones?

On my view, it’s clear that philosophy sometimes successfully answers big philosophical questions. The much more interesting question is why so many other big questions go unanswered for so long, sometimes for many centuries. I address these points in this post.

I have been thinking about these issues in a casual way for years. But I wrote this post partly in response to Michael Hannon’s Why Can't Philosophers Answer the Big Questions? post, from July 30.

1. The Easier Question

I start with the somewhat easier question: does philosophy ever answer some of its big questions?

Consider the most common idea on the topic, which Hannon calls the Spin-Off theory:

“[O]nce a philosophical question becomes tractable (i.e. once we develop the tools to answer it clearly, decisively, and with stable consensus), it ceases to be considered a philosophical question. Instead, it spins off into a new domain and becomes the foundation of a distinct science.”

I think this is more or less correct. Certain questions were solidly part of philosophy. Over time, philosophers figured out how to go about answering them, and eventually a new discipline arose from their investigations (or, an already existing discipline was transformed due to their efforts). Those answered questions used to be, when they were posed and then solved, part of philosophy. Hence, philosophy does answer some big philosophical questions—and has had remarkable success doing so.

Hannon disagrees, making two claims in this remark:

“To begin with, philosophy doesn’t deserve credit for the questions solved by modern science, and scientists have not solved what are genuinely philosophical problems.”

His first claim is false. Philosophers generate a new, modern, science, and that science answers certain big questions that were, at that time, part of philosophy. Philosophers “deserve credit” for that success—partial credit. Clearly, people who aren’t philosophers but are practitioners of the new science deserve credit too, partial credit. It’s a joint effort.

His second claim, that scientists haven’t solved the “genuinely philosophical” problems, seems to be saying that there are big philosophical questions (today, I assume) that scientists haven’t solved. I think he’s right about that.

But that isn’t a problem for the Spin-Off theory at all. Again, the Spin-Off theory says that there have been times T when a big question that was part of philosophy at time T was successfully answered via philosophers making huge contributions to a new discipline (the spin-off one). It’s hopeless to criticize that fact by pointing out that on some other occasions scientists don’t answer other big philosophical questions.

Someone might think that in the distant past, philosophy answered some of its big questions via generating spin-offs, but those days are over. I think this objection is just based on ignorance. I know of no reason to think the Spin-Off phenomenon won’t continue for a long time. Philosophy continues to have huge impact on other fields.

2. The Easier Question Revised

Someone might respond to what I’ve said about the Spin-Off idea by saying “I’m sorry but you didn’t understand my question about philosophy. My concern is with big philosophical questions today, not those from the past. I want to know why the big ones around today never get answered despite centuries of efforts. What you said about the Spin-Off idea is nice but it doesn’t address my real question”.

That’s a good question! In order to answer it, I think it’s useful to think a bit about what philosophy as turned out to be.

We have lots of questions about reality. Some are harder than others. Some are super hard. In fact, some are so damn hard we don’t know exactly what the subject matter of the question is (is it reality or just our conceptions of it or something else?) or how to begin to answer it in a thorough, reliable fashion. Holy shit, those are hard questions. These questions don’t count as scientific because, as I just said, we don’t know of any reliable way of even approaching them.

We have ended up calling those questions “philosophical”. So, it’s hardly a mystery why some big philosophical questions go unanswered for so long. It’s no surprise that some questions are going to have that status, and we have decided to throw them into the “philosophy” category.

In this case, the reason why philosophy sticks out in comparison with other fields as having so many big questions that stay unanswered for ages is that such questions just plain exist, and we slapped “philosophical” on them.

That’s an explanation of why philosophy is weird. It is not an explanation of why those particular questions stay unanswered. That’s the issue I turn to now.

3. The Harder Question

So, yes: philosophy does sometimes answer big philosophical questions. But why do so many philosophical questions go unanswered despite colossal efforts over centuries? That’s the harder question.

I have a couple things to say about that.

First, you can pose the very same question about other fields which are enormously successful. Physics is about as productive as a field gets, and it has plenty of big questions that remain unanswered despite centuries of investigation. So, just because a field has some big questions that remain unanswered after centuries of work doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong or unique about the field.

Second, in my view there is no one answer to the harder question. For some big philosophical questions that remain unanswered today, explanation E1 correctly says why we haven’t answered it. But for other big philosophical questions that remain unanswered, explanation E2, not E1, correctly says why we haven’t answered it—and E2 is very different from E1. For yet other questions, it will be explanation E3 and neither of E1 or E2. Finally, for some questions more than one of E1-E3 are parts of the explanation.

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Hannon’s first target—the Too Difficult theory—attempts to offer an explanation of why some of philosophy’s big questions go answered for so long.

“Unlike the Spin-Off Theory, which holds that philosophical questions are eventually answered and passed off to the sciences, this view [the Too Difficult theory] claims that some philosophical problems have answers, but we are incapable of grasping them. The obstacle is not the absence of evidence or method, but the limitations of the human mind.”

Hannon doesn’t like the Too Difficult theory:

“The Too Difficult Theory … paints a somber picture of our epistemic condition. We are seekers in the dark, reaching for insights that, by our very nature, we are unequipped to grasp. Although this view leaves open the possibility that other kinds of minds (e.g., post-humans, superintelligent aliens, or artificial intelligences) might someday succeed where we have failed, it offers little comfort for us. It casts philosophy as a discipline of permanent frustration, driven by questions that forever outstrip our cognitive capacities.”

He's mistaken here.

The Too Difficult theory doesn’t say that humans are incapable of knowing the answers to big philosophical questions. Instead, it says that humans are incapable of knowing the answers to some of the big philosophical questions. (Hannon correctly includes the term “some” in his characterization of the Too Difficult theory, which is needed in order to accurately characterize the theory.) That fact about our capabilities, if it is a fact, doesn’t remotely suggest that philosophy is a “discipline of permanent frustration, driven by questions that forever outstrip our cognitive capacities”. No, it says only that that certain philosophical big questions are beyond us. It shouldn’t be construed as saying that all or almost all philosophical big questions are beyond us, which, if true, would paint the depressing picture Hannon describes.

Like I pointed out above, you could say the same thing about physics and even math. Physicists still haven’t answered some big questions about spacetime or gravity, despite working on them for centuries. It might turn out that we are incapable of answering them due not to meager evidence but our cognitive limitations. That would not mean that physics is a “discipline of permanent frustration, driven by questions that forever outstrip our cognitive capacities”.

I endorse the Spin-Off theory. I’m not sure about the Too Difficult theory. I don’t know how often it applies to big philosophical questions. Some philosophers have said it applies to certain mind-body questions (but not all mind-body questions). Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. But even if the theory does apply to some of philosophy’s big questions, that doesn’t have the dire consequences Hannon says it does.

*****

Another thing that may explain why some big philosophical questions stay unanswered for so long is linguistic/conceptual subtlety. Hannon puts it this way:

“Perhaps the difficulty lies not in the complexity of the world, but in the structure of the questions themselves—especially in the language we use to pose them. On this view, philosophical disagreement often stems not from a lack of evidence or deficient methods, but from ambiguity, conceptual instability, or subtle shifts in meaning that make shared understanding elusive.”

I definitely endorse this theory, which I’ll call the Linguistic theory.

I think that for some of philosophy’s big questions that are unanswered for a long time, the Linguistic theory forms a big part of the accurate explanation of that fact. That is, I think that some big philosophical questions go a long time without answers, and the Linguistic theory explains one significant part of that fact—but another explanation has to kick in to explain the rest of it.

Terms such as “free will”, “idea”, “perception”, “God”, “physical”, and “rational” (for instance) clearly have multiple meanings that differ in subtle ways—and these differences often caused great confusion in philosophers in the past (as well as the present). For instance, you can’t get anywhere in addressing “Do we have free will?” or “Do we have free will if the universe is determined?” until you do some serious linguistic clarification of “free will”. Linguistic subtlety is a big (but not complete) part of the accurate explanation of why those questions have been around for centuries without generating consensus. I’ll return to this example below.

A more straightforward example is the question “Is belief in God rational?” The question is multiply ambiguous, and after clarification it divides into several more straightforward questions, most of which aren’t hard to answer. The primary reason why that question was around so long was that it needed subtle clarification.

The Linguistic theory shouldn’t be construed as saying that all or even almost all currently unsolved big questions of philosophy are unsolved due to linguistic/conceptual subtlety. The sober thought is that an interesting subset of the big philosophical questions that have gone unanswered have that unfortunate status wholly or partly because of linguistic issues (which come in various forms, which I won’t address).

Hannon criticizes the Linguistic theory:

“This diagnosis can be illuminating, but it carries a deflationary implication. If many philosophical disagreements are merely verbal, then the primary task of philosophy is not to discover new truths about the world, but to clean up conceptual confusion. On this view, philosophy becomes a kind of conceptual janitor: resolving pseudo-problems, clarifying terms, and showing where our words have led us astray.”

There are two mistakes here.

First, Hannon’s use of “merely” in front of “verbal” is inappropriate. Like I said above, I think the Linguistic theory partially explains why some big philosophical questions go so long without being answered. But I totally disagree with the idea that the disagreements over those questions were “merely” verbal. There was nothing “mere” about them. It took a lot of work to tease out the multiple different notions people were implicitly focusing on when using the terms listed above, “free will”, “idea”, “perception”, “God”, “physical”, and “rational”. Contrary to Hannon, even if the Linguistic theory has wide application, there’s nothing “deflationary” about it; these are hardly “pseudo-problems” just because their solution is wholly or partly linguistic/conceptual; and the comparison with janitors is off the mark.

Second, he is wrong to say that on the Linguistic theory “the primary task of philosophy is not to discover new truths about the world, but to clean up conceptual confusion”. That would be the primary task of philosophy if the Linguistic theory said that linguistic subtlety is behind all or almost all big philosophical questions that remain unanswered. But as far as I know, no one thinks that. Michael Dummett used to write things that sounded like that, but I think there was an implicit restricted quantification there.

Even so, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if linguistic subtlety is a main (but not sole) reason for the unsolved status of many big questions. Philosophy made a huge shift in the 20^th century, to examining linguistic issues surrounding philosophical debates. I think that shift was entirely appropriate, and I wouldn’t be surprised that linguistic confusion prevents a good portion of the toughest questions from being answered. But if so, there’s nothing “mere” about it.

*****

Another putative explanation for why some big philosophical questions stay unanswered for so long is metalinguistic negotiation. Hannon puts it this way:

“According to David Plunkett and Tim Sundell, philosophical disputes are best understood not as debates about descriptive truths but as metalinguistic negotiations—that is, as normative disagreements about how language ought to be used. On this view, when philosophers argue about justice, knowledge, causation, identity, or freedom, they are not uncovering facts about these notions but proposing ways of refining, structuring, or rethinking them to better serve our theoretical or practical purposes.

Unlike traditional verbal disputes, which often hinge on misunderstanding or equivocation and tend to dissolve once key terms are clarified, metalinguistic negotiations persist even after the parties recognize they are using words in different ways. This is because the disagreement is not about what the words mean in any pre-existing sense, but about how they should be used going forward. Far from being merely semantic, such disputes are deeply normative and pragmatic. They concern which conceptual frameworks best align with our values, explanatory goals, and social commitments.”

I’ll call this the Meta theory.

I think this theory accurately explains, at least in part, why some big philosophical questions go unanswered for a long-ass time.

More precisely: for each of the three theories I’ve looked at here—Too Difficult, Linguistic, and Meta—I think that they form a large part of the correct explanation of why several big philosophical questions go unsolved for very long periods of time. The Spin-Off theory is true too, but it addresses a separate issue.

4. An Example

To see how this works in action, so to speak, we can consider the big philosophical question “Do we have free will?” Let’s tackle the question why it went unanswered for so damn long. (I don’t mean to imply that it’s fully solved now.)

Surely a big part of the explanation is that we had to do some linguistic/conceptual work—and since that work was difficult and took ages to accomplish, that goes a helluva long way in explaining why the free will question went unanswered for centuries—which is what we’re trying to explain. We had to answer, in great detail, the question “Well, what do you mean by ‘free will’?” (or, as I would put it, “What the fuck are you even talking about?”). That’s why the Linguistic theory is applicable here.

But then, after that work is done, we have to go to the philosophy of science, to see about causal determinism. And that investigation requires actual science too. A few decades ago, a lot of smart people were convinced that quantum mechanics meant that the universe isn’t deterministic. Now we know that it might be. All of that stuff is another part of the explanation of the long period with no consensus solution. But it might turn out that we can never know whether causal determinism is true. So, maybe yet another part of the explanation of the unanswered status of the “Do we have free will?” question is the Too Difficult explanation.

Setting that aside, I can imagine that the Meta theory is yet another part of the explanation why the free will question goes so long. Perhaps some philosophers are fighting over what “free will” should mean, what relatively precise meaning we should assign it. Maybe some meanings cut conceptual nature at its joints, whatever that means. Or maybe some meanings are more relevant for related issues, such as those of moral philosophy or, alternatively, cognitive science. And part of the reason for the unanswered status of the free will question is that different philosophers are insisting on different relatively precise meanings and not broadcasting that fact to each other (or perhaps even to themselves!).

So, this is a (possible) example of how there is a multi-part explanation of why a big philosophical question goes unanswered for centuries. It’s a mistake to assume that there has to be a unitary explanation.

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There’s a lot more to say about these issues, but I think what I’ve gone over above is a good start to answering the questions I began with.