There is a powerful three-step argument that philosophy has made no progress. The first step maintains that a field makes genuine progress to the extent that, over time, it provides true answers to its central questions. The second step observes that the central questions of philosophy are among life’s “big questions”—concerning, inter alia, free will, personal identity, skepticism, universals, the mind–body relation, God, and morality. Step three delivers the bad news: we lack the answers to any of these questions. While there are a variety of responses to this argument, ours begins (in §1) by challenging its first step: true answers, even ones that yield collective convergence on the truth, do not capture what we ultimately want from our best philosophical views or theories (we will use these terms interchangeably). What we need are not simply widely accepted lists of individual truths, even those that are justifiedly believed or known, but theories poised to furnish a broad and systematic theoretical understanding (or simply ‘understanding’) with respect to the questions they address. At the same time, we acknowledge that shifting to understanding simply moves the bump in the rug: to promote understanding as a proper goal of philosophical inquiry does not suffice to establish philosophical progress, or even its possibility, for it provides no assurance that philosophers’ efforts, and in particular the methods they employ, are on track to realize this goal. In a variety of philosophical subfields, including metaethics (our primary case study), there have at various points been hints of recognition that lack of progress is due at least in part to the failure to develop and

中文翻译：

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为进步服务的方法

有一个强有力的三步论证，哲学没有取得进展。第一步坚持认为，一个领域取得了真正的进步，随着时间的推移，它为其核心问题提供了真正的答案。第二步观察到哲学的核心问题是生活的“大问题”——尤其是关于自由意志、个人身份、怀疑主义、普遍性、身心关系、上帝和道德。第三步带来了坏消息：我们对这些问题都没有答案。虽然对这一论点有多种回应，但我们的（在 §1 中）首先挑战了它的第一步：真正的答案，即使是那些在真理上产生集体收敛的答案，也不能从我们最好的哲学观点中捕捉到我们最终想要的东西，或者理论（我们将交替使用这些术语）。我们需要的不仅仅是被广泛接受的个人真理清单，即使是那些被合理相信或知道的真理，而是准备就它们所解决的问题提供广泛和系统的理论理解（或简单的“理解”）的理论。与此同时，我们承认，转向理解只是推动了地毯上的颠簸：将理解作为哲学探究的适当目标并不足以建立哲学进步，甚至它的可能性，因为它不能保证哲学家的努力，特别是他们采用的方法，正在实现这一目标。在各种哲学子领域，包括元伦理学（我们的主要案例研究），