Reflective Equilibrium and Conceptual Naturalness

The View from Oregon – 305: Friday 05 September 2024

It was only last year that I first encountered the idea of reflective equilibrium. This was originally formulated by John Rawls, but I don’t read Rawls, so I found it in Hao Wang’s book A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, where Wang calls reflective equilibrium “a fundamental component of methodology.”  Wang puts it like this:  

“For Rawls, considered judgments are those given when conditions are favorable to the exercise of our powers of reason. We view some judgments as fixed points, judgments we never expect to withdraw. We would like to make our own judgments both more consistent with one another and more in line with the considered judgments of others, without resorting to coercion. For this purpose, each of us strives for judgments and conceptions in full reflective equilibrium; that is, an equilibrium that is both wide-in the sense that it has been reached after careful consideration of alternative views-and general-in the sense that the same conception is affirmed in everyone’s considered judgments. Thus, full reflective equilibrium can serve as a basis of public justification; which is nonfoundationalist in the following sense: no specific kind of considered judgment, no particular level of generality, is thought to carry the whole weight of public justification.”

Having found the idea in Wang, I sought it out in its original form in Rawls. Wang cites three works by Rawls that develop the idea of reflective equilibrium, and I found the following in Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, which is usually considered to be his most important work:    

“By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation.”

A first question to ask here is whether reflective equilibrium is intended to be descriptive or prescriptive. Wang, in calling it a fundamental component of methodology, implies that it is a prescriptive ideal for methodology, and Rawls, in his framing of reflective equilibrium as something achieved through prolonged engagement with principles and judgments, also implies that reflective equilibrium is won and not given. However, I think there is an equally valid case to be made for reflective equilibrium being a description of how exactly we arrive at a stable body of knowledge—a mechanism in the sociology of knowledge, as it were.

It seems to me that in the social construction of knowledge that this is the process that does in fact take place: a wide variety of principles and judgments are surveyed, and we try to bring these many principles and judgments into equilibrium by revising a little here, and withdrawing a judgment there, until the whole web of knowledge (to employ a Quinean turn of phrase) is such that the same conception is affirmed in everyone’s considered judgments. I would not hold out for reflective equilibrium to be exhaustive, whether within the individual mind or in a social group, because there will always be outliers and exceptions, but, allowing for exceptions, both the individual and the social group do, in fact, arrive at some kind of reflective equilibrium, and this reflective equilibrium is embodied in bodies of knowledge that are shared in common by those within a given society.

If one were to maintain that reflective equilibrium is a norm that ought to govern knowledge, and not that knowledge does in fact amount to reflective equilibrium, how ought one to respond to the descriptive understanding of reflective equilibrium? I can’t really place myself in the position of being an advocate for prescriptive reflective equilibrium, so my guess as to how to justify this position can only be how it is seen by an outsider. One way to understand this situation is that there is a rough reflective equilibrium that obtains descriptively, but that there are so many conflicts that remain to be resolved within knowledge that we find ourselves forced to continue the process of reflective equilibrium now in an explicitly conscious form, in which we strive to overcome remaining differences within knowledge by furthering a process that was originally unconscious. This we could call the formalization conception of reflective equilibrium, since it is parallel to the formalization of bodies of knowledge that had developed informally throughout human history, but which, in their informal development, bequeathed to us certain problems that we need to resolve explicitly, and not as a byproduct of the unconscious forces that drive the historical process (including historical processes of knowledge).

If, however, we see the principles and judgments to be brought into reflective equilibrium as growing out of different (intuitive) sources, and belonging to distinct evolved bodies of knowledge with little in common with each other, then reflective equilibrium isn’t merely the explicit formalization of a process previously pursued implicitly, but a new effort at rationalization that is to bring together principles and judgments never previously unified. Here the work of achieving conceptual equilibrium occurs on a more fundamental level, and it may involve us in taking a deeper dive to formulate fundamental principles in common of which received principles are different manifestations. We still might have revisions and trimming to do, but the primary work is to find the deeper principles, and in fact once we identify these deeper principles they may of themselves force revisions on our received principles, now with good reason. This we could call the foundationalist conception of reflective equilibrium.

Probably there could be other conceptions of normative reflective equilibrium, but the formalization conception and the foundationalist conception are what come to me off the top of my head. And while I wrote above that I can’t count myself as an advocate for the normative conception of reflective equilibrium, and can only give an outsider’s perspective, I certainly feel the pull of it. I have been reflecting on reflective equilibrium since I first encountered it last year, and I have already worked it into two papers, through neither of these have yet appeared in print. The expanded version of my “A Complexity Ladder for Big History” (to appear in book form in a few months’ time) has a section on reflective equilibrium, for example. So the fact that I feel the pull of normative reflective equilibrium but can’t give an explicit account of it, nor why I feel the pull of it, demonstrates that I have been as yet unable to clarify my intuitions on the matter. There is something more going on, but it remains elusive to me.

In my previous newsletter I used the idea of conceptual naturalness without any attempt to explain further. I don’t remember where I first encountered this, but it has become something of a term of art in contemporary analytical philosophy, and it does nicely describe something important, namely, that our intuitions possess conceptual naturalness and that is why they are intuitions, and our scientific concepts are more likely to work well for us if they also possess some measure of conceptual naturalness. Reflective equilibrium is interesting in this context because it seems to me to be all about making compromises with conceptual naturalness—but a “just right” compromise, since too much compromise with conceptual naturalness will leave us with a concept bereft of conceptual naturalness. In other words, boundary conditions obtain for conceptual naturalness, even if we cannot at present define these boundary conditions. Like the famous definition of pornography, we know conceptual naturalness when we see it, and we notice it when it is absent. Indeed, conceptual naturalness may well be more evident in the breech than the observance, and this may turn out to be an important property of conceptual naturalness requiring further exposition.

The unknown boundary conditions for conceptual naturalness imply that the process of reflective equilibrium only can be pushed so far, i.e., that we can only depart from our initial intuitions to a certain degree through revision and alteration, until we lose contact with that intuition and it then fails to provide us with the conceptual foundation that it had been for us. But here we can ask an awkward question: is the process itself of reflective equilibrium, even constrained within its boundary conditions, and not departing from our initial intuitions beyond a certain window of conceptual naturalness (something like an Overton window of cognition), a conceptually naturalistic process, or is it, rather, possessed of a certain artificiality? Does the process of reaching reflective equilibrium feel naturalistic, or does it feel artificial? Should it feel naturalistic, or should it feel artificial? If we are ready to countenance artificiality in the process of reflective equilibrium, why should we even care about the conceptual naturalness of our intuitions? Why not ditch them altogether?

Conceptual artificiality—presumably the antithesis of conceptual naturalness—seems to me to be nothing other than formalization. Formal concepts often possess a heightened air of artificiality about them, but we employ them anyway, often at the expense of superseded intuitions that once possessed conceptual naturalness to a high degree, but could not be extended in their initial intuitive form to a more comprehensive conceptual framework which was the result of the growth of scientific knowledge, and most especially the growth of formal and formalistic concepts that we employ for the large-scale integration of the natural sciences—logic, mathematics, and metrology.

There is a quote from Bertrand Russell that I have used many times, and which now strikes me as a plea for conceptual artificiality:

“It is not easy for the lay mind to realise the importance of symbolism in discussing the foundations of mathematics, and the explanation may perhaps seem strangely paradoxical. The fact is that symbolism is useful because it makes things difficult. (This is not true of the advanced parts of mathematics, but only of the beginnings.) What we wish to know is, what can be deduced from what. Now, in the beginnings, everything is self-evident; and it is very hard to see whether one self-evident proposition follows from another or not. Obviousness is always the enemy to correctness. Hence we invent some new and difficult symbolism, in which nothing seems obvious. Then we set up certain rules for operating on the symbols, and the whole thing becomes mechanical. In this way we find out what must be taken as premiss and what can be demonstrated or defined.”   

Not only conceptual naturalness, but also conceptual artificiality has its uses. Russell presents symbolization and formalization as methods of conceptual artificiality that serve as a check on intuition. Are there other methods that might also serve the purpose of conceptual artificiality and thus also serve as a check on intuition? Is reflective equilibrium also just such a check on intuition—perhaps a kinder, gentler check on intuition, but still a check, revealing the limits of conceptual naturalness?

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