There are the “View X-ers” and “the Curious-ers”.

These are names Joshua Knobe (Yale) gives to two broad approaches to philosophy.

In a recent interview, he says:

A number of decades ago, there was a clear sense that your goal as a philosopher should be to articulate a big new philosophical view and then argue that everyone else is wrong and your new view is right. So there was a widespread understanding that you were supposed to have some paper where you say: “In this paper, I boldly introduce View X.” Then, over the course of the next few decades, you were supposed to keep saying that View X was right and defending it against all objections. Let’s refer to philosophers who do this as “View X-ers.”

The View X-ers always get a lot of attention, and they can sometimes manage to upstage the philosophers engaged in another, very different form of inquiry. The most noticeable fact about these other philosophers is that they are curious about philosophical questions. They are thinking about the big issues, but they aren’t wedded to any specific view about those issues. Instead, they are focused primarily on trying to think carefully about the evidence and what it suggests about the various different views. We can refer to these philosophers as the “Curious-ers.”

According to Knobe, we need more of the curious-ers:

Traditionally, I think the Curious-ers were completely underrated. They did lots of fantastic work, but all the attention got sucked up by the View X-ers. Things are clearly beginning to change on that dimension—but we still have not gone far enough. We need even more love for the Curious-ers!

I don’t quite know what I think about this distinction. It seems to me that there are plenty of philosophers who introduce a view, argue for its correctness, and defend it against objections, and so will look like “View X-ers” from the outside, or in retrospect. But this approach needn’t be owed to dogmatism, or habit, or arational influences, or lack of curiosity. To the contrary, one might be quite open-minded but not find alternatives to their own View X compelling. Or it might be curiosity that spurs a philosopher to focus on their View X—curiosity about whether it can withstand certain kinds of objections, or be extended, or be applied to new problems.  Maybe Knobe only had in mind thoroughgoing View X-ers, not the merely apparent ones. But how good is our evidence that any apparent View X-er is a thoroughgoing one?

Take Rawls. On the surface, he may come to mind as an example of a “View X-er.” After all, he did have a view and he defended it for decades. Yet he acted like a “Curious-er”, too. Consider: the multidisciplinary breadth in evidence in A Theory of Justice and in the content of his view, that major basic aspects of his theory changed over time in response to critics, that objections to his view led to his explorations of and fundamental contributions to a new branch of political philosophy. Whatever you may think of his view or his work, he doesn’t come off as lacking in curiosity. Perhaps Knobe has better examples in mind.

Even if we might question the distinction, it does seem like some philosophers may better exemplify valuable “curiosity about philosophical questions” in their work than others, or an attention to “big issues” with a mode of inquiry characterized more by open-minded agnosticism rather than defensiveness. I’d go along with Knobe’s call for for giving some love to these philosophers. Let’s hear who they are.