Robust Pluralism About Philosophical Progress

ABSTRACT This article argues that there are two fundamentally different types of alethic and epistemic progress in philosophy. It is widely assumed that such progress is to be assessed by reference to the quantity or quality of philosophy's product (i.e., a type of output or outcome, such as true answers, coherent views, knowledge, or understanding), rather than to the manner in which philosophy is done—its performance . That assumption is mistaken. Performance progress is not reducible to product progress. This carries implications for debates about peer disagreement, epistemic consequentialism, philosophical methods, and the idea of philosophy as a “spiritual exercise.”