Are Philosophers Arrogant and Irrational?

What is the primary intellectual aim of philosophy?

The standard view is that philosophy aims to provide true answers to philosophical questions. According to David Chalmers, two types of considerations support this view. First, we can look at the primary motivation of philosophers, which, Chalmers claims, is to obtain true answers to important philosophical questions. He writes, “I suspect that for the majority of philosophers, the primary motivation in doing philosophy is to figure out the truth about the relevant subject areas.” Second, he looks at what the practice of philosophy consists of. Chalmers says, “most philosophy, or at least most analytic philosophy, consists in putting forward theses as true and arguing for their truth.” On these grounds, he draws two conclusions: first, the primary aim of philosophy is the attainment of truth; second, philosophy has not made much progress toward this goal.

The idea that philosophy’s central aim is discovering true answers to its enduring questions—what we might call the truth-convergence view—is widely endorsed. In addition to Chalmers, Jason Brennan frames the epistemic goal of philosophy as the pursuit of truth, and he draws a skeptical conclusion from philosophy’s persistent lack of agreement:

The goal of philosophy is to uncover certain truths. Radical dissensus shows that philosophical methods are imprecise and inaccurate. . . 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.

Indeed, most skeptics about philosophical progress (e.g., Kornblith, Shand, and Dietrich, in addition to Chalmers and Brennan) adopt this view. Their central complaint is not merely that philosophers disagree, but that they continue to circle back to the same unresolved questions, even after millennia. If we’re seeking truth, this is bad news for philosophy.

The truth-convergence view faces a cluster of familiar worries. If philosophy aims at discovering true answers to its central questions, then the field appears to be an embarassing failure: there is little consensus, little cumulative progress, and no stable body of philosophical knowledge. Without such knowledge, the very idea of philosophical expertise makes little sense (experts in what, exactly)? And if philosophy is not a reliable means of arriving at the truth, then truth-seekers do not have good grounds for pursuing philosophy. The result is an increasingly popular skepticism: that philosophy, judged by its own stated aim, is epistemically bankrupt.

I want to raise a different kind of challenge, one that does not question the feasibility of the truth-convergence view (I’ve done that elsewhere), but instead examines what it commits us to if we take it seriously. If the aim of philosophy is to discover true answers to its central questions, then, I claim, philosophers must be either deeply irrational or profoundly arrogant. They are irrational because they are pursuing a goal they have no reasonable hope of achieving, or they are arrogant because they believe they are likely to succeed where generations of brilliant thinkers have failed. Anyone who endorses the truth-convergence view, then, appears committed to one of these unflattering alternatives.

To pursue philosophy with the aim of discovering the truth is, I suggest, irrational. This is not because truth lacks value, but because philosophy is a strikingly unreliable method for arriving at it. One of the defining features of philosophical inquiry is deep and persistent disagreement. On virtually every major question—such as whether moral realism is true, whether we have free will, or whether consciousness can be explained in physical terms—there is no consensus, and there never has been. As Richard Fumerton says, “If you get ten philosophers in a room discussing any of the fundamental issues in philosophy, you are likely to get ten different and incompatible positions.” We can therefore be confident that philosophy is not a reliable way to arrive at philosophical truths, and that philosophers are not reliable sources of knowledge about which philosophical answers are the right ones.

Jason Brennan makes this point sharply. He argues that truth-seekers do not have good grounds for pursuing philosophy. The reason is straightforward. If your goal is to arrive at true answers to philosophical questions, then you should pursue that goal by using methods that have some record of success. But the tools of philosophy—argument, analysis, thought experiments, and appeals to intuition—have not consistently delivered truth. According to Brennan, someone who enters the field in hopes of discovering true answers is highly unlikely to succeed.

This is the heart of the irrationality concern. A basic principle of rational agency is that people should pursue their goals using means that are likely to achieve those goals. Continuing to seek truth through philosophy, despite extensive evidence that the discipline rarely delivers it, violates this principle. The problem is not with the value of the aim, but with the failure to adopt effective means of reaching it. On the truth-convergence view, the philosopher becomes someone who is committed to a worthwhile goal but relies on a strategy that is ill-suited to achieving it.

It would not be irrational to pursue philosophy for the sake of truth if one could reasonably expect, or even reasonably hope, to arrive at the correct answers. But this assumption raises a related concern. It imputes to truth-seeking philosophers a form of arrogance whereby each philosopher believes that they will be the one to solve some philosophical problem that great minds like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant could not. To accept the truth-convergence view while continuing to do philosophy is to assume that one’s own inquiry has a real chance of success, despite the long and well-known history of disagreement and inconclusiveness in the field.

This is not simply a matter of intellectual confidence; it’s unjustified hubris. If philosophy has consistently failed to generate consensus on its central questions, and if its methods have shown little success in producing stable or widely accepted truths, then the belief that one’s own efforts will succeed where others have failed begins to resemble a kind of self-importance that is difficult to defend. Most philosophers do not openly claim to be the next Kant, nor do they expect to deliver conclusive answers. Few have the audacity to echo Wittgenstein’s famous remark in the preface to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he writes: “The truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have essentially been finally solved.”

Nevertheless, the truth-convergence view requires more than modest engagement. It implies that philosophical inquiry, pursued as it has been, is capable of delivering the truth—and that one’s own inquiry stands a reasonable chance of doing so. Without strong reasons for thinking that one’s work is more truth-conducive than the vast majority of philosophical efforts that have come before, this belief seems unwarranted. In the absence of such reasons, the commitment begins to resemble intellectual vanity.

This is an uncomfortable conclusion. Fortunately, it’s one we don’t have to accept, as long as we’re willing to reject the idea that philosophy aims at truth.

If we are to avoid the conclusion that philosophers are either irrational or arrogant, then we need to rethink what we are doing when we do philosophy. The best alternative is to reject the truth-convergence view and instead adopt a different conception of philosophy’s primary aim—namely, understanding.

This is not a new suggestion. I have defended the understanding-first view of philosophy in earlier work, co-authored with James Nguyen, where we argue that philosophy is better conceived as an inquiry whose central goal is the achievement of understanding rather than the discovery of truth. I will not repeat those arguments here. Instead, I want to emphasize that this view has a distinctive advantage: it avoids the dilemma of arrogance and irrationality that threatens those who accept the truth-convergence model.

On the understanding-first view, philosophy’s value lies not in arriving at final answers, but in clarifying problems, identifying tensions, exploring conceptual possibilities, and grasping the interrelations among competing perspectives. Understanding is not a product that depends on consensus or convergence. It is an activity that deepens our grasp of complex questions, even when those questions remain open.

This view not only better captures what philosophers actually do, it also avoids the pitfalls of the truth-convergence model. It allows us to pursue philosophy without needing to believe we will arrive at the truth, and without assuming we are likely to succeed where generations of brilliant thinkers have failed. It removes the burden of unreasonable epistemic optimism and the risk of unjustified self-regard. In short, it gives us a way of making philosophical inquiry intellectually serious without making it epistemically implausible.

Moreover, conceiving of philosophy as aiming at understanding helps resolve a number of familiar puzzles about the discipline. It explains why philosophy can make progress even when its central questions remain unsettled. It explains how philosophers can develop expertise without ever discovering final truths. And it explains a peculiar but telling feature of academic philosophy: when hiring new philosophers, search committees do not usually care whether a candidate’s views are true. (This was David Lewis’s point.) No one is hired because they happen to be right about moral realism or the metaphysics of time. What matters is how the candidate argues, frames problems, explains positions, and pushes conversations forward. The goal is not to stock departments with people who hold the truth, but with people who advance our understanding.

In short, the value of philosophy does not rest on its ability to deliver truth, but on its capacity to transform how we see the world and think about our place in it. Truth may be elusive. Understanding is within reach. And when we adopt the understanding view, we not only gain a better explanation of what philosophy achieves, we also secure a more sustainable and intellectually honest vision of why it matters.