John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium is the method of “testing theories against judgments about particular cases, but also testing judgments about particular cases against theories, until equilibrium is achieved” (Blackburn 2008, 312; quoted in @2020clarke-doaneMorality, 46). Upon discovering that a general theory and a particular judgment conflict in a given case, “achieving RE demands that one or the other is abandoned or modified to resolve the conflict” (@2022awadComputational).
Some example applications of reflective equilibrium include:
- In Rawls’ field of moral philosophy, RE describes a process of bringing commitments to abstract, general moral principles in alignment with intuitive moral judgements about particular cases, as well as accounting for scientific knowledge about inconsistencies and contradictions;
- In mathematical discovery, plausible propositions are first identified, and then axioms are defined to systematize them (see also: The epistemological priority of mathematical principles typically precedes their logical priority, after Russell (1907)).
Rawls credited this method to Goodman, e.g., @1983goodmanFact.
the axiomatic method comes closest to the experimental method. Like the latter drawing its strength from the source of Cartesianism, it will “divide the difficulties in order to overcome them better.” It will try, in the demonstrations of a theory, to separate out the principal mainsprings of its arguments; then, taking each of these separately and formulating it in abstract form, it will develop * Indeed every mathematician knows that a proof has not really been “understood” if one has done nothing more than verifying step by step the correctness of the deductions of which it is composed, and has not tried to gain a clear insight into the ideas which have led to the construction of this particular chain of deductions in preference to every other one. the consequences which follow from it alone. Returning after that to the theory under consideration, it will recombine the component elements, which had previously been separated out, and it will inquire how these different components influence one another. There is indeed nothing new in this classical going to-andfro between analysis and synthesis;