However...

However, eighty years later, we see numerous defenders of forms of transcendental idealism, Kantian constructivism, and the like. He also claims that philosophers have shown that value cannot be reduced to something else and that evolution cannot fully explain values. However, eighty years of neo-naturalist metaethics and sociobiology shows that this claim is not obviously true. Though I agree with Urban, I have many epistemic peers who disagree.

Third, he cites the growth of logic as a formal discipline. This is one of philosophy’s major accomplishments, but it is not clear that this helps. Formal logic may have less disagreement than other fields, but it is also the place where philosophy comes closest to being mathematics. Any list will be contentious. Probably, if I were to make a list of philosophy’s recent accomplishments, it would seem esoteric, strange, irrelevant, wrong, and/or silly to philosophers eighty years from now.

The outsider remains unimpressed. She can look at such lists and ask, do we yet know what right action is, what justification is, what knowledge is, what justice is, and so on? There remains extensive disagreement over these fundamental issues, and she remains worried that philosophy is unlikely to deliver her the truth. D. Progress as Destruction. [^7] Some philosophers defend philosophy by saying that our work at least shows what theories are false.

For instance, Gettier demolished the justified true belief analysis of knowledge. Quine, Putnam, and others eradicated logical positivism. Gödel showed us that Principia Mathematica did not axiomatise arithmetic. If this is progress toward truth, it must be progress by elimination. Refuting inadequate past theories clears the path for good answers, but does not thereby give us good answers.

(Even negative ‘progress’ tends to be reversed, as once dead doctrines, such as Ross' moral theory, are resurrected, albeit in better forms.[^8] ) Often, there are potentially infinite numbers of possible theories in any sub-field. So, even if over the past 2500 years of philosophy, we have managed to show that a few thousand theories are inadequate, that does not show us we are any closer to the truth. On the other hand, suppose there are a finite number of theories.

If so, permanently refuting a theory increases the probability one will accept the correct theory.