However...

However, they will not have discernibly better grounds for believing this than their mistaken peers. They may believe themselves to have better grounds, and their peers believe this about themselves as well. However, from the outsider’s perspective, they look the same. They are smart people doing the best they can, and they disagree.

The outsider has little reason to think one philosopher is closer to the truth than the next, and little reason to think that if she became a philosopher, she would do any better. Here is another way of making the unreliability argument. Suppose that there are 10 competing doctrines in the field of philosophy of mind, each of which is accepted by 10 percent of the members of the American Philosophical Association.

Suppose, optimistically, that on the nature of consciousness 10 percent of the members of the APA have the right theory.

Suppose also that we can regard all members of the APA as epistemic peers, where two people are epistemic peers just in case they are equals with respect to their degree of epistemic virtue (thoughtfulness, freedom from bias, etc.) and their access to evidence.[^2] An uncommitted person, looking at the field from the outside, would worry that if she pursues philosophy, she will have something like a 1 in 10 chance of getting the right answer to the questions of the philosophy of mind.

She sees that philosophical methodology—studying arguments, making new arguments, creating new distinctions, reading texts, debating, etc.—generally leads people to accept some theory or other of the nature of consciousness.

(Let us assume that everyone who studies the philosophy of mind ends up accepting 1 of the 10 theories.) So, she knows that philosophical methodology will result in her accepting some theory, but from her standpoint, it is more likely than not that it will be the false theory. The greater the degree of disagreement among epistemic peers, the lower the probability that philosophizing will get her to the truth.

This argument assumes than an agnostic outsider who ends up pursuing philosophical methods will have either a random or proportional chance of accepting any theory. I.e., I am working on the assumption that she will either accept a theory at random or with a probability proportional to the percentage of her epistemic peers that accept any given theory. Real people probably do not have a random chance due to their background starting beliefs.