Your previous post was good, but this one seems to be eliding a few too many issues. If you took a poll of physicists asking them to explain what their fundamental model — quantum mechanics — actually tells us about the world (surely a simple enough question), there would be disagreement comparable to that regarding the philosophical questions you mentioned. The survey you cite is also obviously unhelpful, in that the questions on that survey were chosen because they're controversial. Most philosophical questions are not very controversial, but for that very reason you don't hear much about them. If we hand-picked all the foundational questions physicists disagreed about and conducted a popularity poll, would we be rightly surprised to find that the poll results were divided?

(It's also worth noting that some of the things being measured by the poll are attitudinal and linguistic variation between different philosophical schools and programs, not just doctrinal disagreements. Why should we expect ethicists and philosophers of mathematics to completely agree in methodology and terminology, when we do not expect the same from physicists and biologists?)

There are three reasons philosophers disagree about foundational issues:

(1) Almost everyone disagrees, at least tacitly, about foundational issues. Foundational issues are hard, and our ordinary methods of acquiring truth and resolving disagreements often short-circuit when we arrive at them. Scientific realism is controversial among scientists. Platonism is controversial among mathematicians. Moral realism is controversial among politicians and voters. Philosophers disagree about these matters for the same basic reasons that everyone else does; the only difference is that philosophers do not follow the same social conventions the rest of us do that dictate bracketing and ignoring foundational disagreements as much as possible. In other words...

(2) ... philosophy is about foundational disagreement. There is no one worldly content or subject matter or methodology shared between all the things we call 'philosophy.' The only thing we really use to distinguish philosophers from non-philosophers is how foundational and controversial the things they talk about are. When you put all the deep controversies in a box and call that box Philosophy, you should not be surprised upon opening the box to see that it is clogged with disagreement.

(3) Inasmuch as philosophical issues are settled, they stop getting talked about. So there's an obvious selection bias effect. Philosophical progress occurs; but that progress gets immediately imported into our political systems, our terminological choices and conceptual distinctions, our scientific theories and practices, our logical and mathematical toolboxes. And then it stops being philosophy.

That said, I agree with a lot of your criticisms of a lot of philosophers' practices. They need more cognitive science and experimentalism. Desperately. But we should be a lot more careful and sophisticated in making this criticism, because most philosophers these days (even the most metaphysically promiscuous) do not endorse the claim 'our naive, unreflective intuitions automatically pick out the truth,' and because we risk alienating the Useful Philosophers when we make our target of attack simply Philosophy, rather than a more carefully constructed group.

LessWrong: Start tabooing the word 'philosophy.' See how it goes.