Method
Reflective equilibrium
Overview
Reflective equilibrium is a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgements. Although he did not use the term, philosopher Nelson Goodman introduced the method of reflective equilibrium as an approach to justifying the principles of inductive logic (this is now known as Goodman's method). The term reflective equilibrium was coined by John Rawls and popularized in his A Theory of Justice as a method for arriving at the content of the principles of justice.
Dietmar Hübner has pointed out that there are many interpretations of reflective equilibrium that deviate from Rawls' method in ways that reduce the cogency of the idea. Among these misinterpretations, according to Hübner, are definitions of reflective equilibrium as "(a) balancing theoretical accounts against intuitive convictions; (b) balancing general principles against particular judgements; (c) balancing opposite ethical conceptions or divergent moral statements".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Hence complete and true Reality must be changeless, unalterable, so full of Being that it always and forever maintains itself in fixed rest and repose. As Bradley, the most dialectially ingenious Absolutist of our own day, expresses the doctrine "Nothing that is perfectly real moves." And while Plato took, comparatively speaking, a pessimistic view of change as mere lapse and Aristotle a complacent view of it as…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
States what Reflective equilibrium is.
We have recognised it, or the notion subjective (which includes the notion proper, the judgment, and the syllogism) as the dialectical result of the first two main stages of the Logical Idea, Being and Essence. To say that the notion is subjective and subjective only, is so far quite correct: for the notion certainly is subjectivity itself. Not less subjective than the notion are also the judgment and syllogism: and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Reflective equilibrium is.
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not, therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight into…
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
States what Reflective equilibrium is.
Philosophers who discussed Reflective equilibrium
Related ideas
- Nelson Goodman
- John Rawls
- Harvard University Press
- Princeton University Press
- Springer Science+Business Media
- Justice
- Original position
- Kai Nielsen (philosopher)
- Metaethics
- A Theory of Justice
- Ten Commandments
- Coherentism
- Justification (epistemology)
- Wicca
- Bible
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Paul Thagard
- Inductive reasoning
- T. M. Scanlon
- Social contract
- Consequentialism
- MIT Press
- Balance (metaphysics)
Place in the tradition
Part of Metaepistemology.