Philosophical Heuristics and Philosophical Creativity

They say that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics—“castle early,” “avoid isolated pawns,” and so on. Analogously, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics—philosophical heuristics—although they have not been nearly so well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases.” Sometimes they suggest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time or space.” Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). This chapter is partly an introduction to a larger project of mine of identifying and evaluating philosophical heuristics, illustrating them with numerous examples from the philosophical literature. I also intend it to be a contribution to the philosophy of creativity: I argue that such heuristics can enhance one’s ability to make creative contributions in philosophy.