Skip to main content
Log in

In defense of reflective equilibrium

  • Published:
Philosophical Studies Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rekindling of interest in the method of reflective equilibrium. Most of this attention has been suspicious, however. Critics have alleged that the method is nothing more than a high-minded brand of navel-gazing, that it suffers from all the classic problems of inward-looking coherence theories, and that it overestimates the usefulness of self-scrutiny. In this paper I argue that these criticisms miss their mark because they labor under crucial misconceptions about the method of reflective equilibrium. In defending reflective equilibrium I put forward a handful of theses about the nature of inquiry (or, more generally, norm-governed enterprises) that form the backdrop to the method. The critics’ objections fall short, I argue, because they do not recognize reflective equilibrium’s embrace of these theses. Confronting these objections and understanding why they fail brings us to a better understanding what, exactly, the method of reflective equilibrium is. The answer I come to in the final section of the paper is that the method of reflective equilibrium is not, exactly, anything. It is a mistake to try to give a positive characterization of the view, to identify it with a concern with a particular species of data, particular procedures and methods, or even a particular conception of normative success. Instead, it should be understood as the denial of essentialism about just these matters—as a form of anti-essentialism about our epistemic inputs, methods, and goals.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Goodman (1955, pp. 61–62).

  2. Williamson (2007, p. 244).

  3. Lewis (1983, p. x), van Inwagen (1997, p. 309).

  4. Williamson (2007, p. 209): “In most intellectual disciplines, assertions are supposed to be backed by evidence. Mathematicians have proofs, biochemists have experiments, historians have documents. You cannot just say whatever you happen to believe. […] Let us proceed on the working hypothesis that evidence plays a role in philosophy not radically different from its role in all other intellectual disciplines. Without such a role, what would entitle philosophy to be regarded as a discipline at all?” Williamson’s question is rhetorical, of course, but I think we get a good answer from Kant. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant defines “a science” as “a doctrine that is supposed to be a system, that is, a whole of cognition ordered according to principles” (4:468). For Kant, something qualifies as a science on the basis of internal structural features—systematicity—and not because its inputs have the special status of evidence. Kant’s reasons for this are rooted in his metaphysics: securing the deep vindication that separates Williamson’s conception from Kant’s would mean knowing about things in themselves.

  5. Williamson does have replies available to these points, of course. We could say, for example, that we were mistaken about what our evidence was before Newton. I worry that this factive sense of ‘evidence’ doesn’t fit with the way that we use the word, and it threatens to deny the concept its characteristic role in guiding scientific debates. This debate cannot be resolved here, obviously.

  6. Kelly and McGrath (2011, p. 331). The objection I survey here is actually preceded by another. Kelly and McGrath quote Goodman as saying that we cannot have inductive knowledge. But, they insist, we clearly do have such knowledge. So there must be a notion of justification that goes along with inductive knowledge, a notion that solves the equation ‘x + true belief = knowledge’. Because Goodman-justification falls short of this standard, it also falls short as a notion of justification. But this is not what Goodman is denying when he says we have no knowledge of the future. His point, inelegantly stated perhaps, is that there is no way to gain absolute certitude about the future—“prevision” he calls it—and so our inductive methods are irredeemably fallible. The mistake he impugns in others is the assumption that justifying an inductive inference requires overcoming this fallibility with something that guarantees, come hell or high-water, that an induction is truth-preserving. Even if there is nothing we can do in our theorizing to guarantee the truth of an inductive conclusion, Goodman says, there is still a reasonable, and very pressing, question about which inductive inferences we ought to accept. Thus for Goodman the method of reflective equilibrium is attached to a fallibilistic conception of justification, but there is no reason to think it must be any weaker than that.

  7. Now, if Kelly and McGrath respond to this suggestion by revising the case so that Tabby has no such standing directive to take on board observations, then the example becomes less comprehensible, and we are owed a more elaborate account of Tabby’s cognitive history to understand the case. For instance, we would need to know what forces led Tabby to adopt such a strange stance, and just how eccentric Tabby would have to be to wind up in such a position. As Sharon Street (2009) has recently argued, many of philosophers’ favorite coherent-but-strange characters trade on strategic under description, and these characters become less strange when we fill out their background stories in ways that explain their eccentricities. It is also possible that Kelly and McGrath’s stock counterexample is supposed to be one where an agent is completely isolated from indications of her unreliability: it is not merely that she is missing a belief that knocks her out of equilibrium; she doesn’t have an observation, an experience, a test result, a computer simulation, or any other acquaintance with this unreliability. So we stipulate that Tabby’s methods are unreliable but this unreliability is inaccessible to her. If this is the case, then the objection afflicts not just reflective equilibrium theories, but all forms of internalism, and the standard rejoinder seems to apply: insofar as terms like ‘justified’ are normative, they must be capable, in principle, of guiding our actions, so any example that forfends such guidance by fiat is moot.

  8. This stance is probably rarer than is usually appreciated. Even Davidson (2001, p. xvi), in explaining how widely misunderstood his view is, declares that, “ ‘experience’ and ‘perception’ are perfectly good words for whatever goes on in our minds when we look around us, smell, touch, hear, and taste. I was so eager to get across the idea (for which I should have given credit to Wilfrid Sellars) that epistemic intermediaries between the world and our beliefs are a mistake that I made it sound to many readers that I were repudiating all serious commerce between world and mind. In truth my thesis then as now is that the connection is causal and, in the case of perception, direct.”

  9. See Elgin (1996, p. 110ff).

  10. One could argue that some methodology—probably one involving perception—must have an a priori warrant, or we will enter into a justificatory regress that ends in skepticism. But defenders of reflective equilibrium will deny this, and this doesn’t seem to be Kelly and McGrath’s argument anyway.

  11. Korsgaard (1996).

  12. Kornblith (2010, pp. 17–18).

  13. Korsgaard (1996, p. 93).

  14. Kornblith (2004, Chap. 5).

  15. Sometimes the method of reflective equilibrium will have a more definite character. John Rawls’s (1971) political use of the notion is an example. Rawls specifies a particular kind of judgment, “considered convictions”, as the input of his procedure because that kind of judgment is the locus of the overlapping consensus that he is after. His reliance on considered convictions is an acknowledgment of a pragmatic constraint on the use of reflective equilibrium in political philosophy, namely that a particular kind of consent is required for a theory of justice to have authority. The particulars of Rawls’s use of reflective equilibrium therefore arise from the particulars of his project, not from abstract considerations about the essence of reflective equilibrium.

  16. For helpful comments and discussion, I thank Catherine Elgin, Sophie Horowitz, Paulina Sliwa, and Ekaterina Vavova.

References

  • Davidson, D. (2001). Subjective, intersubjective, objective. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Elgin, C. Z. (1996). Considered judgment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodman, N. (1955). Fact, fiction, and forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, T., & McGrath, S. (2011). Is reflective equilibrium enough? Philosophical Perspectives, 24, 325–359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kornblith, H. (2004). Knowledge and its place in nature. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kornblith, H. (2010). What reflective endorsement cannot do. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80(1), 1–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korsgaard, C. M. (1996). The sources of normativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. K. (1983). Philosophical papers (Vol. 1). New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Street, S. (2009). In defense of future Tuesday indifference: Ideally coherent eccentrics and the contingency of what matters. Philosophical Issues, 19, 273–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Inwagen, P. (1997). Materialism and the psychological-continuity account of personal identity, in J. Tomberlin (ed.). Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 305–319.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williamson, T. (2007). The philosophy of philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kenneth Walden.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Walden, K. In defense of reflective equilibrium. Philos Stud 166, 243–256 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0025-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0025-2

Keywords

Navigation