How far does reflective equilibrium take us? Investigating the power of a philosophical method

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gregor Betz
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 412679086

How powerful is philosophical reflection? Can it promote consensus, when different parties disagree on a philosophical problem? How far does it take non-ideal agents with bounded rationality in justifying their views? In this project, we aim to address such questions by analyzing the power of a popular philosophical method, viz. reflective equilibrium (RE, for short). RE is often appealed to in ethics and other parts of philosophy and has become the center of an intensive debate. Proponents of RE have invested high expectations in it and appealed to it e.g. to underpin a realist understanding of certain domains of discourse. Critics, by contrast, have argued that RE is (i) too implausible to grant justification, (ii) too difficult to apply in practice and (iii) not powerful enough to lead to consensus formation. So far, the debate between proponents and critics of RE suffers from a central shortcoming though: It lacks a common ground as to what exactly RE amounts to. Most characterizations of RE have remained too unspecific and vague to allow much progress. The aim of the proposed research is a new and much more thorough-going investigation of the power of RE. We wish to determine what it can accomplish and what its limitations are by drawing on a clarification of RE that we have obtained in recent research. In particular, we have available an operationalization of RE and a formal model that can be evaluated using computer simulations. To apply RE, an agent starts out with her commitments about a specific topic and then puts pressure on them by confronting them with a systematic theory. The fundamental unit of investigation thus is a (dual) epistemic state that consists of a set of commitments and a theory. Our operationalization of RE usefully distinguishes two kinds of aspects within the approach. The static aspects comprise the desiderata on epistemic states, viz. systematicity of the theory, its ability to account for the commitments and the faithfulness of the commitments to the initial view. Our model specifies measures that quantify to which extent these desiderata are fulfilled; it further fixes a trade-off between the desiderata. The dynamical aspects of the method, by contrast, encompass rules that characterize a dynamic process of equilibration. In previous research, we have developed software in which the rules can be applied in a stepwise manner.To assess the power of RE, we propose to answer the following research questions: 1. How plausible is RE as a method of justification in philosophy?2. How practicable is RE, in particular for non-ideal agents? 3. To what extent does RE reduce disagreement between different agents?4. What are the meta-ethical implications of RE, if it is applied to judgments about reasons?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Claus Beisbart