Philosophical methodology

Philosophical methodology encompasses the methods used to philosophize and the study of these methods. Methods of philosophy are procedures for conducting research, creating new theories, and selecting between competing theories. In addition to the description of methods, philosophical methodology also compares and evaluates them.

Philosophers have employed a great variety of methods. Methodological skepticism tries to find principles that cannot be doubted. The geometrical method deduces theorems from self-evident axioms. The phenomenological method describes first-person experience. Verificationists study the conditions of empirical verification of sentences to determine their meaning. Conceptual analysis decomposes concepts into fundamental constituents. Common-sense philosophers use widely held beliefs as their starting point of inquiry, whereas ordinary language philosophers extract philosophical insights from ordinary language. Intuition-based methods, like thought experiments, rely on non-inferential impressions. The method of reflective equilibrium seeks coherence among beliefs, while the pragmatist method assesses theories by their practical consequences. The transcendental method studies the conditions without which an entity could not exist. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods.

The choice of method can significantly impact how theories are constructed and the arguments used to support them. As a result, methodological disagreements can lead to philosophical disagreements.

The term "philosophical methodology" refers either to the methods used to philosophize or to the branch of metaphilosophy studying these methods. A method is a way of doing things, such as a set of actions or decisions, in order to achieve a certain goal, when used under the right conditions. In the context of inquiry, a method is a way of conducting one's research and theorizing, like inductive or axiomatic methods in logic or experimental methods in the sciences. Philosophical methodology studies the methods of philosophy. It is not primarily concerned with whether a philosophical position, such as metaphysical dualism or utilitarianism, is true or false. Instead, it asks how one can determine which position should be adopted.

In the widest sense, any principle for choosing between competing theories may be considered as part of the methodology of philosophy. In this sense, the philosophical methodology is "the general study of criteria for theory selection". For example, Occam’s Razor is a methodological principle of theory selection favoring simple over complex theories. A closely related aspect of philosophical methodology concerns the question of which conventions one needs to adopt necessarily to succeed at theory making. But in a more narrow sense, only guidelines that help philosophers learn about facts studied by philosophy qualify as philosophical methods. This is the more common sense, which applies to most of the methods listed in this article. In this sense, philosophical methodology is closely related to epistemology in that it consists in epistemological methods that enable philosophers to arrive at knowledge. Because of this, the problem of the methods of philosophy is central to how philosophical claims are to be justified.

An important difference in philosophical methodology concerns the distinction between descriptive and normative questions. Descriptive questions ask what methods philosophers actually use or used in the past, while normative questions ask what methods they should use. The normative aspect of philosophical methodology expresses the idea that there is a difference between good and bad philosophy. In this sense, philosophical methods either articulate the standards of evaluation themselves or the practices that ensure that these standards are met. Philosophical methods can be understood as tools that help the theorist do good philosophy and arrive at knowledge. The normative question of philosophical methodology is quite controversial since different schools of philosophy often have very different views on what constitutes good philosophy and how to achieve it.

A great variety of philosophical methods has been proposed. Some of these methods were developed as a reaction to other methods, for example, to counter skepticism by providing a secure path to knowledge. In other cases, one method may be understood as a development or a specific application of another method. Some philosophers or philosophical movements give primacy to one specific method, while others use a variety of methods depending on the problem they are trying to solve. It has been argued that many of the philosophical methods are also commonly used implicitly in more crude forms by regular people and are only given a more careful, critical, and systematic exposition in philosophical methodology.

Methodological skepticism, also referred to as Cartesian doubt, uses systematic doubt as a method of philosophy. It is motivated by the search for an absolutely certain foundation of knowledge. The method for finding these foundations is doubt: only that which is indubitable can serve this role. While this approach has been influential, it has also received various criticisms. One problem is that it has proven very difficult to find such absolutely certain claims if the doubt is applied in its most radical form. Another is that while absolute certainty may be desirable, it is by no means necessary for knowledge. In this sense, it excludes too much and seems to be unwarranted and arbitrary, since it is not clear why very certain theorems justified by strong arguments should be abandoned just because they are not absolutely certain. This can be seen in relation to the insights discovered by the empirical sciences, which have proven very useful even though they are not indubitable.