Current professional philosophers seem to be generally too confident about their ideas/positions, and lack sufficient appreciation of how big idea/argument space is and how little of it we’ve explored. I’m not sure if this is a problem with humans, or a problem with how philosophers are trained and/or selected. We should at least make a concerted effort to rule out the latter.
One concrete suggestion is instead of measuring progress (and competing for status, etc.) by how many open problems have been closed (which doesn’t work because we can’t be very sure whether any proposed solution is actually correct), we should measure it by how many previously unsuspected problems have been opened, how many previously unknown considerations have been pointed out, etc. This is already true to some extent, but to have high status, philosophers still seem expected to act as if they’ve solved some important open problems in their field, i.e., to have firm positions and to confidently defend them.
(I’m not sure this is the kind of answer you’re looking for, but I’ve been thinking this for a while and this seems a good chance to write it down.)
Current professional philosophers seem to be generally too confident about their ideas/positions, and lack sufficient appreciation of how big idea/argument space is and how little of it we’ve explored. I’m not sure if this is a problem with humans, or a problem with how philosophers are trained and/or selected. We should at least make a concerted effort to rule out the latter.
One concrete suggestion is instead of measuring progress (and competing for status, etc.) by how many open problems have been closed (which doesn’t work because we can’t be very sure whether any proposed solution is actually correct), we should measure it by how many previously unsuspected problems have been opened, how many previously unknown considerations have been pointed out, etc. This is already true to some extent, but to have high status, philosophers still seem expected to act as if they’ve solved some important open problems in their field, i.e., to have firm positions and to confidently defend them.
(I’m not sure this is the kind of answer you’re looking for, but I’ve been thinking this for a while and this seems a good chance to write it down.)