Progress in Philosophy: pro et contra in Metaphilosophical Studies

Abstract

The article describes the positions for and against the possibility of consider­ing progress in philosophy in the general framework of progress in science. The works of E. Dietrich, D. Chalmers, J. Shand, representing pessimistic or mo­derately pessimistic points of view, and the works of D. Stoljar, T. Williamson, P.M.S. Hacker as expressing an optimistic point of view, act as supporters of the op­position. Some models of considering progress are proposed: progress in the frame­work of the “abscissa axis” and “ordinate axis”, a model of progress in the form of a directed graph, in the form of opposition of internalism and externalism, progress in philosophy as an analogue of scientific progress in terms of changing models, progress as “increasing disagreement”. The concept of progress is closely connected with the concept of the goal of philosophy – the author states that there is complete ambiguity about the goal of philosophy and cites a number of obstacles to its explication related to both the training and professional activi­ties of philosophers. The author’s point of view is that progress in philosophy is conceptual in nature, associated with the concepts of sense, understanding, inter­pretation, but not necessarily with the number of quantitative characteristics of the growth of knowledge. The process of increasing in-depth and complicated understanding, refinement and generation of sense is represented by the author as a semiotic model in terms of the sign and the process of unlimited semiosis.