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What is philosophical methodology, and how do you convey it to others?

In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

What is methodology?

I've been in the field as a student or professional for almost two decades, I've taught 1,000+ students, I've published articles, and yet I realized this week after referee comments with a revise-and-resubmit verdict that I have thus far never clarified for myself what is meant in our field by talk of "methodology." (I suspect, or at least hope, I'm not the only person with this blindspot) Will our wonderful blog readership demistify that concept for me? How do you explain your choice of methodology in your work to colleagues, to readers, to students?

Good question. If you check out p. 33 of Bourget and Chalmers, "Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey, you'll find that beyond a clear majority of philosophers supporting conceptual analysis and "empirical philosophy" as methodologies, there is wide disagreement–as there is, obviously, on most philosophical issues. 

I have my own views on philosophical methodology, which I defended here in my first book. In a nutshell, I contend that to make philosophy more truth-apt, we should (when possible) evaluate philosophical arguments and theories using seven principles of theory selection adapted from the sciences. Alas, that doesn't seem to have much caught on–and I'm not entirely opposed to more speculative philosophical methods (so long as we recognize that they are just that). So, when I teach (I only teach undergraduate courses), I normally just teach basic methods: logic, critical thinking, and basing arguments on premises that seem well-supported by our evidence, broadly construed. But, like the OP, I'm curious to hear from others! 

What is philosophical methodology to you, and how do you convey it to others?

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10 responses to “What is philosophical methodology, and how do you convey it to others?”

  1. James Lee

    I cover the following when I teach intro to philosophy:
    Conceptual analysis
    Thought experimentation
    Constitutive explanation
    I tell my students that a lot of philosophy comes down to two things:
    Answering what-questions
    Using answers to what-questions to answer why-questions.
    For example, we cover human nature in the intro course. Philosophical issues regarding human nature can be summed up as follows:
    1. What are human beings?
    2. How does your answer to #1 answer the question “Why are humans the way that they are?”
    Argumentation is then built up from the above skills. Students learn basic deductive reasoning by learning how to work with necessary and sufficient conditions. By learning constitutive explanation, students are also introduced to inference to the best explanation.

    Reply
  2. rabbit

    Broadly speaking, your methods are just the series of steps you take to generate a paper, including lit review, workshopping ideas and writing down arguments.
    When people argue about philosophical methodology, they usually have in mind different approaches to developing arguments and different views about what the arguments accomplish. When you need to justify your choice of methodology, you should likely refer to the aim that you’re trying to accomplish.
    Example (components of) approaches: consulting ordinary language use, consulting technical language use, consulting scientific evidence, eliciting intuitions via thought experiments, arguing via analogy, constructing formalized deductive arguments, providing normative reasons, applying a theory to a case, generating a theory from cases.
    Just to illustrate, if your aim is to accurately characterize the nature of electrons, then you would probably consult technical language use and scientific evidence, but not for instance consult ordinary intuitions.
    The complication in philosophy is that there is often meta-level disagreement about what certain methods accomplish. For instance, I disagree with Marcus’ view that borrowing science-like principles of theory selection is likely to be truth-conducive in philosophy. However, you can usually approach justifying your methodology in terms of explaining why you chose it, rather than needing to convince all your readership/referees/grant evaluators that your method in fact is the right one. Put differently, the lack of consensus around methods also seems to give philosophers some leeway in method choice.

    Reply
  3. Shay Allen Logan

    There are four steps:
    (1) Find something it’s hard to use language to do.
    (2) Use language to do it, and do it as precisely as possible while saying things that are close to true as you can. This lets the world and other bits of language push back as hard as they can.
    (3) Resist.
    (4) Make the changes referee 2 suggested.

    Reply
  4. Chris

    On the “methodology” section of a grant, the joke is that philosophers should put: think, write, read, and talk to others. Repeat these four things in various orders and combinations until you’ve answered the question you started with.
    More specifically, it is going to depend on your question. If you’re a historian, you might go to an archive to find the letter that clarifies Leibniz’ view that monads have no windows. If you do experimental philosophy, you’ll consult with psychologists and statisticians to learn to do surveys well.
    Often methodologies are borrowed from one area and used in another. One might apply game theory to think about the social contract, or use computer simulations to answer questions about the evolution of gender. You might read Titelbaum’s two volume set on Bayesian epistemology and decide to apply Bayesian tools to some area of epistemology – say, the nature of testimonial justification.
    You might draw on the results of one field – say, special relativity – to argue against a position in philosophy – say, presentism.
    A cautionary note:
    One lesson people sometimes draw from the history of science is that scientists themselves aren’t very good at describing their own methodology (e.g,. a scientist will say they’re following Popper’s falsification methodology, but really they’re not). Are philosophers better at understanding their own methodology? Maybe sometimes. What does the history of philosophy tell us?

    Reply
  5. academic migrant

    This item circulated on my social media feed a few days ago:
    M E T H O D S I N A N A LY T I C P H I L O S O P H Y
    A Primer and Guide
    E d i t e d b y J oa c h i m H o r vat h , S t e f f e n K o c h , &
    M i c h a e l G . Ti t e l b au m
    https://philpapers.org/archive/HORAPA-2.pdf
    Don’t know how useful it is as I haven’t yet read it, but it’s on my reading list.

    Reply
  6. Dan

    You might find some of the papers in this collection useful.
    https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-philosophical-methodology-9780199668779?cc=gb&lang=en&

    Reply
  7. Old School

    I can’t speak for historians, but I do contemporary analytic ethics, more or less (“is there a right to X?” “What do we owe so-and-so?” “what is ‘right’ and ‘owing’ exactly?”) and as far as I can tell there’s an agreed-upon methodology, even though it’s not hip to say so. The methodology consists in defending your thesis by showing – as clearly as possible — that if reasonable folks really thought hard about it, they’d come to agree with it. That means lots of stuff about what follows, often unexpectedly, from plausible or widely shared premises.
    This methodology, if you can call it that, has been in bad odor for almost 100 years, but that doesn’t seem to have weakened its hold. All that’s changed is that you’ll hear a lot of prominent people distancing themselves from it (“I don’t put much stock in conceptual analysis,” “I don’t even know what ‘analytic philosophy’ is,” “we should leave the armchair”). But all those same people then just go out and do it, even if they say it’s something else. It isn’t. It’s the same old stuff.

    Reply
  8. Carl Knight

    @ Old School
    I suppose I have a vested interest here, but isn’t reflective equilibrium widely understood as the dominant method in moral and political philosophy? Its defenders like Scanlon and critics like Anderson seem to agree on this. Admittedly, RE might be understood as a formalization of reasonable folks thinking hard, as you put it.

    Reply
  9. Old School

    @ Carl Knight
    Not sure I agree about the predominance of RE, but maybe we agree on the larger point: it’s definitely an instance (I wouldn’t say formalization) of the methodology I was describing. Paradigmatic, even!

    Reply
  10. There’s a literature on this

    In the literature one can find specific methodologies, as well as more abstract characterizations of methodology which are neutral between specific methodologies. Sometimes both are discussed in the same work. For example:
    Philosophical Methodology (by Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau)
    https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophical-methodology-9780192862464

    Reply

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