PP4 What makes for a good philosophical paradigm?
G'day my name is Bruce Robertson and this is Pirate Philosophy. In this series of videos, I'll be describing an original philosophy, one that you won't find anywhere else but it is one that is logical, rigorous and dynamic. Welcome to Pirate Philosophy.
In today's video, I want to discuss: 'what are the criteria for a good philosophy?' or more specifically for 'a good philosophical paradigm'. This is not so much philosophy itself, It is more meta-philosophy, where one is looking at the whole of a philosophy and trying to evaluate whether it's a good philosophy or not a good philosophy; or possibly how one might improve it. In that respect, it is not philosophy itself but a meta-philosophy at a level above philosophy. But nevertheless, of course, it's a part of philosophy as well.
So what is philosophy? Well, it's a collection of inter-related ideas about knowledge and about the real world and about logic. And what is knowledge? Knowledge is an accurate idea, or an idea that accurately describes the real world. And what is a paradigm? Well, a paradigm (as I discussed in an earlier video) is a collection of ideas that are self consistent and fit with each other and enable inferences to be made. In that respect, philosophy is a paradigm.
So what are the criteria for a good philosophical paradigm? As an introduction to that, there are a couple of similitudes that I would just like to look at very briefly. The first being that of science, being a paradigm, as presented by Thomas Kuhn, which is one of the gems of Standard Western Philosophy that I was referring to in an earlier video. It's a good idea that science is a collection of ideas that have assumptions and logical processes and you reach conclusions, which are accurate representations of the world. And Kuhn came up with five criteria for what he considered to be a good philosophy and they were accuracy, self consistency, explanatory (i.e. explaining more than what the original idea was supposed to, or designed to explain), simplicity and that it should make predictions. And of course, the criteria for a philosophical paradigm are somewhat distinct and different from those of a scientific paradigm. So the ones I'm suggesting are slightly different to those from Kuhn. I will be including three of his: accuracy, self consistency and simplicity. And the explanatory one and making predictions are incorporated to some degree in the other criteria that I will be suggesting.
The second similitude, I want to use is a little bit of an analogy for when looking for philosophical paradigm criteria and that is of the ideas in one's own head. Philosophy is closely linked to the ideas in one's head. Because that's how philosophy is done, how philosophy is communicated and it's the ideas in a person's head that are communicated and they are what is philosophy.
So what are the criteria that one might want for the ideas in one's own head? Well, obviously, self consistency is one of them; one doesn't want to have sort of jumps in one's knowledge and doesn't want to create cognitive dissonance where one idea suggests one thing and a different idea suggests another thing. One wants a harmonious, self consistent whole for the ideas in one's head. And that might well be translated into the criteria one would also want for a philosophical paradigm.
The other one of course, is accuracy. The ideas in one's heads need to be an accurate representation of the world so that one can interact effectively with the world. That said, philosophy is different from both of these. It's far more far ranging than science and it has to be much more explicit and more logical than the ideas in one's own head. The criteria I will be suggesting are to some degree somewhat arbitrary; they're not actually a part of my philosophy. It's a part of meta-philosophy; how to evaluate what makes a good philosophy or not. And in that respect, I can't prove them, they're not part of a paradigm in itself. So in that respect they are somewhat arbitrary and then one might well want to say, 'I want to use different criteria', or maybe 'fewer criteria' or 'different criteria'. These are just my suggestions for what are the criteria for a good philosophical paradigm. And also, they're neither exhaustive, (i.e they don't necessarily cover all the criteria one might want from a philosophy) and neither are they exclusive (i.e. some of the criteria may overlap with other criteria).
Nevertheless, they do suggest an effective method of evaluating the effectiveness of a philosophical paradigm. And certainly, they can be used when comparing two distinct paradigms, to determine which one fits the criteria better.
So the six criteria that I believe are essential for good philosophy are self consistency, comprehensiveness, accuracy, logic, explicitness and simplicity. I have put them in this order, for no reason other than the first letters spell out an acronym SCALES. So it's easy to remember if you can remember 'scales'.
Self consistency, Comprehensiveness, Accuracy, Logic, Explicitness and Simplicity
I'll go over these points one by one and take them in that order.
Self-consistency: obviously it's important for ideas to be consistent one with another. And within a paradigm, one wants all the ideas to be consistent with all the other ideas in that paradigm; and to do so without glitches, schisms, non-sequiturs nor cognitive dissonance. For if there are inconsistencies, it would indicate that there is something wrong with that paradigm and it needs working on.
The second one is comprehensiveness. and this one doesn't fit in with either the science paradigm nor the ideas in one's head. This requirement for comprehensiveness applies to philosophy,because philosophy is a discipline that takes into account all the knowledge and all the other disciplines of science and arts and knowledge and ties them all together. So it needs to be comprehensive and incorporate everything about the world. That is what philosophy is all about. If there are gaps in the philosophical paradigm, this may well be because the philosophy within that paradigm is incapable of describing aspects of knowledge within its framework and this would indicate a limitation on the effectiveness of the philosophy.
The third criteria is accuracy and it is important for a philosophy to describe the world accurately; fairly obviousreally.But if it doesn't, it would indicate that the philosophical paradigm is relating more to an abstract world or perhaps a fantasy world or something like that; it needs to accurately represent the facts of data of the world.
The fourth one is logic and this is important because logic is the process by which inferences are made; and the ideas within the paradigm need to be logically linked, so that one idea can be linked logically with another one. I think Kuhn didn't mention this one within his criteria for a scientific paradigm because he assumed that the logic of science is explicit and plain and exists anyway. But in philosophy, it's not explicit and plain a lot of the time; there seems to be a jump from one place to another and that is something to be avoided and one wants simple logic to lead one from one place to another.
The fifth criteria is explicitness and it is important for a philosophy to be explicit. Because it's a communicated discipline, philosophy needs to be communicated from one person to another and the ideas within it need to be explicitly shown; particularly with regard to the assumptions and logic of the philosophical paradigm. As mentioned before, you can't have a paradigm and you can't even have a philosophy if you don't have assumptions, because otherwise you can't say anything about the world. Even if you want to say the Sun is shining and you want to put that in philosophy, well, you can do that, but you're implying that the assumption is that your perception of the Sun is real and your idea that the sun is shining is real. You're also assuming that another person with whom you are communicating has the same notion of what a Sun is and what shining is; and this needs to be explicit within a philosophy, it can't be just assumed to be taken for granted and the assumptions that are made need to be explicit and plain. And so does the logic; the logic needs to be explicitly explained. Because otherwise other people can't follow one's line of reasoning; and without explicit assumptions and explicit logic, all one has left is just a sort of hand waving argument; and that is no good for a philosophy. And without explicitness, all one has are opinions; opinions about this, opinions about that and it's not a rigorous dynamic philosophy.
The last criteria I have is simplicity and while, to some degree, simplicity is not essential; (because one doesn't know what degree of complexity is required in order to describe the world), but nevertheless, one does want to prefer simplicity to complexity. And simplicity was included as one of Kuhn's criteria for science. But that said, one doesn't want a philosophy that is too simple; because otherwise it's not going to be comprehensive, it's not going to be accurate. To some degree, there may be a trade off between accuracy and simplicity, as there is in science to some degree; a more accurate theory might be somewhat more complicated or complex than a less accurate theory but nevertheless, a less accurate theory might be simpler than the more accurate but complicated theory. But that said, simplicity is something to be preferred, but not over-simplicity; what is required are simple ideas, simple logic, simple assumptions that are easy to understand, so that it is easy to follow what the philosophy is and how it is described.
So those are my suggestions for the criteria for a good philosophical paradigm.
Well, that is all I have for you today. If you have any interesting comments or questions about today's video, please leave them in the comment section below and if you would like to continue this journey with me, then please subscribe to my channel, give it a thumbs up and ring the bell.
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