Virtuously circular

Reflective Equilibrium, justification, and especially the role of theoretical virtues therein constitute a vast expanse of under-explored ground. In view of this, the following research question guides the investigation of this dissertation:
How can we integrate theoretical virtues into an account of RE such that they play an active role in addressing objections to the justificatory power of RE? The work towards developing an answer to the research question is organized as follows: It is appropriate to decompose the research question into more manageable parts. To this purpose, the dissertation is split into three parts.
Part I is dedicated to arrive at an informal, but sufficiently elaborate understanding of theoretical virtues in RE. To begin with, I draw on elaborate accounts of RE to spell out the key ideas and central components of RE in Chapter 2. This serves to see how theoretical virtues are integrated into RE, and to provide a clear target for objections. In Chapter 3, I present objections to RE as well as prominent rejoinders. I focus on two objections that can be subsumed under the worry that RE is too weak as an account of justification, and hence put the justificatory power of RE into doubt: conservativity and no-convergence. In Chapter 4, I survey the literature in philosophy of science, from which theoretical virtues originate, in order to get an idea of the roles and issues of theoretical virtues. In view of the issues of ambiguity and trade-offs, I propose that theoretical virtues for RE need to be configured, i.e., selected, specified, weighted and aggregated, in view of the pragmatic-epistemic objectives pursued by RE.
Part II aims to overcome vagueness by formalisation. In Chapter 5, I take up the universal objective of coherence in RE, and I select and specify virtues to develop a substantive notion of coherence in a deductive framework. The second part of developing a configuration of theoretical virtues, aggregation and trade-offs, is addressed in Chapter 6. In Chapter 7, I introduce the fullfledged, formal model of Beisbart, Betz, and Brun (2021), which completely implements a configuration of theoretical virtues for RE. In Chapter 8, I analyse the formal model of RE. This lead to a series of technical, but highly interesting analytical results about weightings of theoretical virtues and other RE desiderata. This helps deepen our understanding of the inner workings of the model, and the results are useful to prepare, and later, interpret, computer simulations.
Part III serves to explore simulations on the basis the formal model, which is implemented as a computer program. I select a set of prospective parameters to be used in the subsequent simulation studies in Chapter 9. In Chapter 10, I operationalise three aspect of conservativity in the formal model, and examine whether the formal model performs better as the objection would lead us to expect. I proceed in a similar fashion for the study of convergence with RE on the basis of simulations in Chapter 11. Finally, in Chapter 12, I discuss the findings in the previous parts, see what lessons can be learned for the informal debate about RE, and provide an outlook to further research.

2023

dissertation

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