The good news about having a comments service provided for free is that, well, it’s free. The bad news is that with free services, you generally get what you pay for. So it’s been rather buggy the last week or so. The upshot is that at least some comments got eaten. One of them was from Kent Bach, a comment on my plaintive little bleat about the absence of clear successes in philosophy. Here’s the comment:

It is surely a myth that there is no consensus in philosophy other than that there is no consensus. And many philosophers surely resist challenging what they take to be a matter of consensus. But this raises the question of illusory consensus, something on which there is not a consensus but on which there is a consensus that there is one. An illusory consensus, whether in politics, social life, or philosophy, is what R.D. Laing, in “The Politics of Experience,”aptly described as “a conformity to a presence that is everywhere elsewhere.”

You can worry about what everyone else thinks even if you’re mistaken about what it is that they do think. The interesting case is when what you take to be what everyone else thinks is what they falsely take to be what everyone else thinks.

There is also the question of domain restriction, of who counts as everyone else (who "they" are).

Note that Kent, unlike your humble author, picked up the (intentionally!) paradoxical element
in the original question.