The Six Commitments: A Research Report on Historical Displacement
The Six Commitments: A Research Report on Historical Displacement
Research: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude. 2026.
Framing: The Learner’s Situation
The six philosophical commitments that ground Sterling’s Stoicism — substance dualism, libertarian free will, ethical intuitionism, foundationalism, correspondence theory of truth, and moral realism — are not positions the contemporary reader is likely to encounter as live options in professional philosophy. He will find them treated, if at all, as positions that were tried and abandoned. The ambient intellectual culture presents their absence as settled. The standard narrative is that these commitments lost ground because they were refuted.
That narrative is largely false. Each of the six lost ground through a mechanism other than decisive philosophical refutation. The purpose of this report is to document that claim with enough specificity to support further research. This is not a defense of the six commitments. It is a map of the historical record as it bears on the displacement question.
The report proceeds commitment by commitment, identifying: the period of dominance, the mechanism of displacement, the key figures and texts, and the current state. A concluding section identifies the overarching pattern.
C1 — Substance Dualism
At the end of the 19th century, substance dualism was the default philosophical anthropology and materialism was not a live option. The displacement was rapid and sociological rather than argumentative. William James described what followed as “the evaporation of the definite soul-substance,” and Arthur O. Lovejoy characterized the 20th century as “the Age of the Great Revolt against Dualism.” By the mid-20th century, dualism was probably at its lowest historical popularity.
The single most influential act of displacement was Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), which dismissed substance dualism as belief in a “ghost in the machine.” This was not a refutation — it was a rhetorical characterization that became professionally decisive. Daniel Dennett later institutionalized the dismissal by describing “the dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs,” and D. M. Armstrong wrote that dualism seemed “curiously formal and empty.” Novel and sophisticated defenses produced in the latter 20th century were largely ignored without substantive engagement.
The current state is one of partial rehabilitation. Physicalism remains dominant in philosophy of mind. Property dualism — a weaker position — is treated as a serious option. Substance dualism is undergoing a documented revival, with book-length defenses now appearing at major presses. The most comprehensive recent treatment is J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023). A 2013 Syracuse doctoral dissertation by Robert T. Lehe explicitly describes substance dualism as “this unfashionable view of the self” and argues that the displacement was methodological rather than argumentative. The SEP entry on dualism notes that the preference for property over substance dualism “is itself regularly challenged.”
Displacement mechanism: Rhetorical dismissal (Ryle), professional consensus without decisive argument, methodological assumption toward naturalism.
C2 — Libertarian Free Will
Libertarian free will — the position that human agents originate their own assents independently of prior determining causes — has not been refuted. It has been placed on the defensive by the combined pressure of compatibilism’s professional dominance and the so-called luck objection. Compatibilism has an ancient history; what changed in the 20th century was its acquisition of near-consensus status in academic philosophy. Libertarianism is described in current philosophical literature as fighting “a rear-guard battle,” facing two challenges: defending the necessity of indeterminism against compatibilism’s mainstream position, and defending the possibility of indeterministic free will against the luck objection.
Neither challenge constitutes a refutation. Compatibilism’s dominance is sociological. The luck objection is a contested philosophical problem, not a settled conclusion. Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument — one of the most important incompatibilist arguments in contemporary debate — remains unrefuted by compatibilist responses that simply redefine the terms. Sam Harris’s popular claim that “the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist” is a sociological report, not a philosophical finding.
The current state is that libertarianism is a minority position requiring sustained argument in a field where the burden of proof has been shifted onto it by consensus rather than by decisive philosophical work. Grant C. Sterling’s active research program on libertarianism and moral responsibility constitutes precisely the kind of sustained defense the position requires.
Displacement mechanism: Shift in professional prestige toward compatibilism; burden of proof reassigned by consensus rather than argument.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism
This is the clearest case of fashion rather than refutation in the literature, and the historical record is the most thoroughly documented of the six. Ethical intuitionism was one of the dominant forces in British moral philosophy from the early 18th century through the 1930s. The school included H. A. Prichard, W. D. Ross, H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt, C. D. Broad, and A. C. Ewing. It fell into disrepute in the 1940s and began to re-emerge as a serious position toward the end of the 20th century.
The displacement weapon was logical positivism’s verifiability criterion of meaning, stated most influentially by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic (1936). The verificationist argument was simple: ethical statements cannot be empirically verified; therefore they are cognitively meaningless; therefore they do not state facts that could be known by intuition or any other means. G. E. Moore’s case against ethical naturalism had already destabilized the field, and emotivism — developed by Ayer and C. L. Stevenson — occupied the resulting space. Moral claims were reinterpreted as expressions of emotion rather than as truth-apt propositions.
The weapon itself collapsed. Logical positivism’s verifiability criterion proved unable to withstand philosophical scrutiny — it could not verify itself by its own standard, and its account of scientific knowledge was contested by Popper, Kuhn, and others. Along with the decline of logical positivism, the emotivist framework it underwrote lost its foundational support. Intuitionism re-emerged, and philosophers including Robert Audi, Jonathan Dancy, David Enoch, Michael Huemer, and Russ Shafer-Landau are now prepared to identify as intuitionists. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on intuitionism states the arc precisely: dominant through the 1930s, disrepute in the 1940s, re-emergence toward the end of the century.
The key historical resource is the Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 chapter “From Intuitionism to Emotivism,” which documents the transition in detail.
Displacement mechanism: Logical positivism’s verifiability criterion, subsequently collapsed on its own terms.
C4 — Correspondence Theory of Truth
The correspondence theory of truth — the view that a belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality — received its canonical modern formulation from Moore and Russell in the early 20th century as part of their defense of metaphysical realism. Its displacement came from multiple directions: pragmatism (which redefines truth as what works), coherentism (which grounds justification in the internal coherence of a belief system rather than in correspondence to external fact), and the philosophy of science tradition associated with Kuhn.
Kuhn argued throughout his career that the correspondence theory should be abandoned, on the grounds that it is impossible to evaluate correspondence between beliefs and reality from any neutral standpoint. Rorty extended the challenge further: not only foundationalist justification but foundationalist truth-connections to external reality should be abandoned, with correspondence theory as the primary target. Rorty’s position is that there is no “one true system” and no system-external truth connections — coherentists, he argued, were “hesitating before the inevitable entire collapse of the foundationalist project.”
None of these challenges constitute decisive refutation. The SEP entry on the correspondence theory of truth documents an ongoing technical literature defending it. Kuhn’s objection has been answered: his argument against correspondence theory was shown to rest on a misidentification of correspondence as an epistemic theory rather than a non-epistemic one. The theory remains contested, not defeated.
Displacement mechanism: Pragmatist and coherentist reorientation, Kuhnian philosophy of science, Rorty’s anti-realism — none of which produced a decisive refutation of the theory itself.
C5 — Moral Realism
Moral realism — the position that there are objective moral facts, independent of individual or collective opinion — was displaced by the same weapon that displaced ethical intuitionism, since the two commitments are closely related. Emotivism, favored by the logical positivists in the first half of the 20th century, held that moral statements do not record facts but serve nondescriptive purposes such as expressing emotional attitudes. The displacement was not a philosophical refutation of moral realism; it was the temporary dominance of a framework that presupposed moral realism to be impossible on verificationist grounds.
With the collapse of logical positivism, moral realism became, and has remained, a major contested position in metaethics. Contemporary expressivist and quasi-realist positions — associated with Simon Blackburn and others — represent sophisticated attempts to explain how moral discourse can function without presupposing a domain of non-natural facts, but these are contested alternatives to moral realism, not refutations of it. The IEP entry on moral realism records the live character of the debate across cognitivism, descriptivism, moral truth, moral knowledge, and moral objectivity.
The pattern here is identical to C3: a position lost professional ground not through decisive argument but through the temporary ascendancy of a framework that itself collapsed.
Displacement mechanism: Emotivism backed by logical positivism, subsequently undermined by the collapse of the verificationist criterion.
C6 — Foundationalism
Foundationalism — the epistemological position that justified belief rests on a structure of basic beliefs that are not themselves dependent on other beliefs for their justification — held professional dominance until the 1950s, when it was challenged by Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Quine’s holistic naturalized epistemology denied that any belief is immune from revision in light of the total web of belief, effectively denying the privileged status of basic beliefs. Sellars attacked what he called “the myth of the given” — the idea that there are foundational deliverances of experience that arrive already justified without any conceptual mediation.
The combined effect of these attacks produced a professional consensus summarized bluntly in one summary of the period: “in the 20th century the traditional model of foundationalism has come to be viewed in most quarters as a dead theory.” Coherentism and anti-foundationalism occupied the space that resulted. Rorty generalized the conclusion into a wholesale rejection of the foundationalist project, arguing that there are no system-external justificatory or truth connections of any kind.
Yet the IEP entry on foundationalism documents an ongoing and live technical literature. Modest foundationalism — which does not require infallible basic beliefs or purely deductive chains — emerged around 1975 as a response to the Quinean objections, and remains a serious option. The regress problem that motivates foundationalism has not been solved by coherentism or infinitism; it has been sidestepped by methodological reorientation. Sellars’s “myth of the given” argument is itself contested.
Displacement mechanism: Quine’s holism and Sellars’s myth-of-the-given argument, producing methodological reorientation rather than decisive philosophical refutation of the foundationalist project.
The Overarching Pattern
Across all six commitments, the same structure appears. Each held professional dominance or serious standing in philosophy until some point in the 20th century. Each lost ground through a mechanism other than decisive philosophical refutation. The mechanisms differ by commitment: rhetorical dismissal reinforced by methodological assumption (C1), consensus shift that reassigned the burden of proof (C2), the rise and subsequent collapse of logical positivism’s verificationism (C3, C5), anti-realist philosophy of science and Rortyan anti-foundationalism (C4), and Quinean holism combined with Sellars’s critique (C6).
The claim in Sterling’s system — that the six commitments lost ground through professional fashion and methodological assumption rather than decisive refutation — is defensible across all six. It is strongest for C3 and C5, where the displacement weapon (verificationism) provably collapsed on its own terms, and for C1, where the displacement was openly rhetorical and dismissive rather than argumentative. It is somewhat more complex for C2, C4, and C6, where genuine philosophical problems remain in play alongside the sociological factors — but even in these cases, the honest characterization is “contested and on the defensive” rather than “refuted.”
For the learner approaching this material: the situation is not that Sterling holds a set of positions that philosophy has moved past. The situation is that he holds a set of positions that philosophy moved away from for reasons that are, in most cases, more sociological than philosophical, and that all six remain live enough to generate serious contemporary defenses. The ambient sense that these commitments are simply obsolete is itself a product of professional fashion, not a product of the philosophical record.
Key Sources for Further Research
C1 — Substance Dualism: J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, The Substance of Consciousness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Dualism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Dualism and Mind.”
C2 — Libertarian Free Will: Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (1983). Elzein and Pernu, “The libertarian predicament: a plea for action theory,” PMC 2019. Grant C. Sterling’s current research program on libertarianism and moral responsibility.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Intuitionism in Ethics.” Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, chapter “From Intuitionism to Emotivism.” Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (2005). Robert Audi, The Good in the Right (2004).
C4 — Correspondence Theory of Truth: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Correspondence Theory of Truth.” Kuukkanen, “Kuhn, the correspondence theory of truth and coherentist epistemology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2007.
C5 — Moral Realism: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Realism.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Realism: Moral, Objectivity, Truth.” Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (2003).
C6 — Foundationalism: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Foundationalism.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Foundationalism and Coherentism.” Roderick Chisholm’s work on modest foundationalism.
Research: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude. 2026.
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