If you start with philosophy questions and add a method of resolving disagreements, you give the practice a new name.
• Philosophy where disputes are resolved by the axiomatic method and formal logic is called mathematics.
• Philosophy where disputes are resolved by experiment is called science.
• Philosophy where disputes are resolved by majority or consensus is called politics.
• Philosophy where disputes are resolved by appeal to a canon of texts and an interpretive history is called tradition (usually a legal, religious, or academic tradition).
Lately I've been wondering what other methods there might be by which a community could resolve disagreements about philosophical questions. Clearly there are better and worse ways. The motto that comes to mind is:
> The choice of the method determines the value of the results.
In particular, for a long time I've had a suspicion that worldviews are largely a matter of aesthetics. So could we make a clear, rigorous way of resolving philosophical questions based on aesthetic criteria?
Parsimony seems to have started off as an aesthetic principle. It says not to multiply entities unnecessarily, or in other words, whenever you have multiple possible explanations, it says to prefer the explanation that relies on the fewest, smallest new assumptions. That feels like an aesthetic to me! It tells us to be sparing and minimalistic in certain ways, re-using & re-combining a small set of ingredients into elaborate recipes.
Over the centuries, parsimony got formalized, and now it's also rigorously definable, e.g. with the Solomonoff prior and Kolmogorov complexity.
Another method could be a "fixed point" approach. As if on faith, take a particular idea as the fixed point -- something not only immune from skepticism, but indeed to be treated as foundational. Every other idea would be judged by its degree of compatibility with the fixed point.
Obviously, by itself, that's a straight path to nonsense as bad as conspiracy theory reasoning. But what about if it's not by itself?
Consilience is an intriguing potential method. The idea is look at what ideas survive under many different fixed points. Such ideas are robust across many worldviews. Thus it feels right that consilient ideas would be well worth trusting even if we don't fully accept any fixed points.
#philosophy