Reflective Equilibrium (RE) is a method of justification to which many philosophers appeal.
The basic idea of RE is the mutual adjustment of commitments and theory to each other: An agent starts with what she is committed to accept about a certain topic. Theories are supposed to systematize her commitments. The agent goes back and forth between the commitments and theory, and tries to adjust them to each other until an equilibration state is reached.
Since RE was so far underspecified, we have recently developed a more precise account (Baumberger and Brun 2016; 👉 details) and a formal model of RE (Beisbart, Betz and Brun 2021; 👉 details). It uses some minimal logic and can be solved using computer simulations.
Project Description
Subproject "Theoretical Virtues"
Subproject "Overlapping Consensus: Modelling Rawlsian Reflective Equilibrium"
Subproject "Assessing a Formal Model of Reflective Equilibrium"
In this subproject, we assessed the formal model of RE proposed by Beisbart, Betz and Brun (2021; 👉 details) by numerical investigation. We simulated RE processes for a broad spectrum of model parameters and initial conditions and used four different model variants (including the original model). We analyzed the dependence of simulation results on different parameters and assessed the models' consistency conduciveness and ability to reach global optima and full RE states. The technical report "Assessing a Formal Model of Reflective Equilibrium" summarizes our findings (👉 details).