Philosophical Methods

Return to Human Nature

Philosophers try to know the nature of things by using some of the following techniques:

• Defining terms

You cannot always define your terms precisely at the beginning of an inquiry, but you should always be checking the way you use terms as you start to clarify your views.

Lexical definitions. Necessary and sufficient conditions in definitions (R21)

• Questioning presuppositions

• Distinguishing senses
• Discovering entailments
• Fitting principles to cases
• Discovering ignorance
• Discovering limits of knowledge
• Theorizing from conceptual considerations
• Theorizing from current and new knowledge
• Maintaining logical consistency / searching out inconsistency
• Acknowledging logical possibility
• Fundamental focus on argument
• Searching for counter-examples
• Searching for necessity
• Using thought experiments
• Looking carefully at phenomena
• Dialectic -- logic in process....