Topics Philosophy

Question What's the METHOD in philosophic research? Don't tell me, please, that it's logic or the principle of inconsistency. The logic can be applied to all kinds of thinking: scientific, religious, philosophic, and even artistic. What I mean by METHOD is something like case-control or cohort methodology in scientific research. Is there any methodology in philosophic research? Do philosophers conduct any research for testing their propositions/hypotheses with some kinds of evidence? How? Which kind of evidence are they concerned about? How much evidence is enough for approving or refuting a hypothesis?

Accepted:
March 31, 2006

Comments

Philosophy does not have a distinctive method. The subject is better characterised in terms of the problems it addresses than in terms of the methods it uses. But in philosophy we do often find ourselves in the situation where the question seems genuine but there is no straightforward procedure for answering. (Some might even be tempted to define a philsophical problem in this way: real questions with no clear way to determine answers.) The questions seem neither straightforwardly empirical, nor susceptible to anything like proof. So we scrabble around as best we can, clarifying, articulating, and checking for consistency and coherence.

And it might be worth adding that the absence of a "method" doesn't really distinguish philosophy from any other interesting rational inquiry. There is no "mathematical method". And, contrary to how many people speak, there is no "scientific method" either, at least not in any interesting sense of "method".

While it's right to say that philosophy has no single distinctive method, over time it has developed what I suppose could be called families or quivers of methods and tools. In some ways this collection has also determined the distinctive character of philosophy as a form of investigation. Among these tools and methods, I'd include things like: logic, yes, but also dialectic, transcendental argument, thought experiments, reductions, and intuition pumps; then there's normative principles of thought like Ockham's razor, Leibniz's law of identity, the principle of sufficient reason, and the principle of saving the phenomena; there are critical techniques like those related to class, sex, power, and race; there are conceptual distinctions used to analyze and order ideas like essence/accident, think/thin, acquaintance/description, a priori/a posteriori, categorical/modal; there are grounding ideas like those of 'basic', 'primitive', 'complete,' 'self-evident,' and indefeasable.