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Matthew McGrath, Philosophical Inquiries: Theories, Knowledge and Data, Analysis, 2025;, anaf008, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anaf008
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In their lucid and richly thought-provoking book, John Bengson, Terence Cuneo and Russ Shafer-Landau (hereafter, ‘the authors’) defend the following picture of philosophical inquiry and methodology. Philosophers are engaged in theoretical inquiry. Theoretical inquiry into a domain is successfully resolved just when theoretical understanding of the domain is thereby attained. We attain theoretical understanding of a domain just when we fully grasp a theory concerning the domain that has the following six properties. The theory must be:
Grasping such a theory is the ultimate (proper) goal of theoretical inquiry concerning a domain, including philosophical inquiry. Next question: how should we structure philosophical inquiry so that we make the most progress toward attaining this goal? The process of inquiry should have two stages: data collection and theorizing. Data are propositions about the domain that we inquirers jointly have epistemic reason to believe and which do not belong to any well-formed theory. Theorizing should be guided by methods that will likely lead us to theoretical understanding. This leads to the Tri-level Method, which tells us to construct a set of claims that ‘(i) accommodate and explain the data, (ii) are themselves substantiated and integrated, and (iii) possess specific theoretical virtues’ (2022: 108), where each level is more important than succeeding ones. The best theory is the one that satisfies these conditions, so ordered, better than its competitors.
