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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Scepticism About Philosophy The Argument against Philosophy ================================== Dissensus can be used in an argument against philosophy: The Argument against Philosophy . The goal of philosophy is to uncover certain truths. Radical dissensus shows that philosophical methods are imprecise and inaccurate.

Philosophy continually leads experts with the highest degree of epistemic virtue, doing the very best they can, to accept a wide array of incompatible doctrines. Therefore, philosophy is an unreliable instrument for finding truth. A person who enters the field is highly unlikely to arrive at true answers to philosophical questions. This is a rough sketch of the argument. I will refine it as necessary as the paper proceeds.

A person concerned only to get the truth would at the very least try to believe some randomly chosen doctrine rather than be agnostic, since there is at least some possibility that a random doctrine happens to be correct. She might even pursue philosophical methods if they increase the probability of being correct, as it is possible they do. Perhaps philosophers are twice as likely to have true answers to philosophical questions than non-philosophers are.

However, if this same person is equally concerned to avoid false beliefs about philosophical issues, then she would want to pursue philosophy only if it gave her a greater than 50% chance of getting a true belief. Given the degree of dissensus in most fields of philosophy, it seems unlikely that philosophy offers her this great a chance. Here is an analogy. Suppose, thousands of people, each of whom wants to go to São Paulo, randomly board all flights departing Dallas-Fort Worth.

Suppose they fill all departing seats, but are not told where they are going. Of these thousands, a few hundred in fact will land in São Paulo. Most will arrive somewhere else. Philosophy seems like this in many respects. It may bring some people to the proper destination, but it dumps most somewhere else. Actually, matters are worse than that. Travellers will know whether they have arrived in São Paulo. In philosophy's case, some may indeed arrive at truth.