Dr Alex Franklin | King's College London

Date | 11 March 2026

Title | 'Against Rigour: In Favour of Informal Standards for Reduction in Philosophy of Science'

Abstract:

Many would regard rigour as self-evidently a virtue in philosophical theorising. By considering two vignettes from recent debates over reduction in philosophy of physics I'll argue that the pursuit of rigour has distracted philosophers from the questions that motivated their research: in both contexts I'll suggest that less rigorous analysis would better enable such questions to be satisfactorily answered. I'll claim that these case studies exemplify aspects of the broadside against rigour developed in Mark Wilson’s 'Imitation of rigor: An alternative history of analytic philosophy’ (2021).