I think WW Bartley was striving to achieve just this goal in “The Retreat to Commitment”. His approach (after much discussion of the Protestants’ approach to philosophy as background) is to ask what the goal of thinking about thinking should be. He concludes that anyone who thinks the question is interesting must be looking for techniques to help find out what is true about the world we live in. If you and your interlocutor can agree on that, then you’re well on your way to being able to establishing correspondence with reality as the metric for better and worse choices of how to think.
Bartley’s success in the book is in arguing well that you don’t have to taken any particular theory, approach, or metric as primary in the struggle to decide what works best. At any particular moment you have to have a place to stand, but if there are reasons to doubt the foundations you are using, you can stand somewhere else for a while and inspect those foundations.
At the end you want to come back to contemplation of the question as to which approaches seem to lead to the best understanding of the truth of the world.
I think WW Bartley was striving to achieve just this goal in “The Retreat to Commitment”. His approach (after much discussion of the Protestants’ approach to philosophy as background) is to ask what the goal of thinking about thinking should be. He concludes that anyone who thinks the question is interesting must be looking for techniques to help find out what is true about the world we live in. If you and your interlocutor can agree on that, then you’re well on your way to being able to establishing correspondence with reality as the metric for better and worse choices of how to think.
Bartley’s success in the book is in arguing well that you don’t have to taken any particular theory, approach, or metric as primary in the struggle to decide what works best. At any particular moment you have to have a place to stand, but if there are reasons to doubt the foundations you are using, you can stand somewhere else for a while and inspect those foundations.
At the end you want to come back to contemplation of the question as to which approaches seem to lead to the best understanding of the truth of the world.