There is joy, and sometimes perverse satisfaction, in the work of philosophy—a rush that can be difficult to relate to those not already bitten by the bug. Philosophers find reward in deducing surprises by revealing unforeseen entailments, deriving implications of views one already holds, and delighting in the buzzy squirms that come with the resulting cognitive dissonance.

If one is to find reward in doing philosophy, one needs to know how it is done. To more fully understand and inform the doing of philosophy requires a recognition and explication of the various gadgetry within the philosopher’s toolbelt.

That’s David Kelley (Univ. of Auckland), who, in a pair of articles, begins to catalog a subset of that gadgetry, what he refers to as “philosophy moves”, building on the work of Alan Hájek (ANU) on “philosophical heuristics” (who himself is building on Descartes). UPDATE: Oxford University Press has kindly made Hájek’s “Philosophical Heuristics and Philosophical Creativity” temporarily open access. Thanks, OUP!

This is a useful project, both for the discipline’s own understanding of its methods, but also for students learning how to do philosophy.

Hájek’s list of moves includes:

• check extreme cases
• check near-extreme cases
• reflexivity — “take a philosophical thesis and to make it refer to itself, to plug into a function itself as its own argument, and more generally, to appeal to self-referential cases.”
• self-undermining test
• beget new arguments out of old — “arguments involving space can often be rewritten to create parallel arguments involving time; arguments involving time can often be rewritten to create parallel arguments involving modality; and we can reverse these directions.”
• rationality ←→ morality — “many problems and theses in theories of rationality can be rewritten as problems and theses for various metaethical theories.”
• trial and error with various test cases “until you find one that meets your needs.”
• new applications — “take some big philosophical idea or program and apply it to a new case. The scheme is to apply philosophical system X to specific problem Y, for suitable X and Y.”
• various methods for arguing that X is possible

Kelley’s list of philosophy moves (so far) includes:

• pluralism — “Neither X, Y, nor Z are exclusively correct. The suitable account is a pluralist view which accommodates them all.”
• the tripartite distinction —  “We can organize our analysis of this concept by distinguishing ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims.”
• conceptual gradience — “It’s not fully this way or that way; it is somewhere along a spectrum—this concept admits of degrees.”
• multi-dimensional models — “criterial pluralism + conceptual gradience = multidimensional model of X.”
• kind to particular — “There is disagreement about this well-known kind. But it’s not a kind; it’s a particular.”
• the meta-question shift — “we examine not the content of the topic but the way we have hitherto been posing the central question about the target of our analysis.”
• concept elimination — “This concept is incoherent, has no referent, or holds no promise for doing the work we thought it would. We should dispense with it altogether.”
• substance to process — “The phenomenon of concern has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of ‘stuff’. But it might better be thought of as a process.”
• meta-moves — combinations of the foregoing moves

Both Kelley and Hájek provide further explanation and examples of these moves in their respective works, which I encourage you to check out. (Kelley’s are open access. Maybe Oxford University Press could make Hájek’s open access for a while?)

Additions to the list are welcome, as are pointers to other works which identify philosophical moves.