All things considered, what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of comparative, ideological, and empirical reasoning?

Question

What will be an ideal response

Answer 1

Comparative reasoning is powerfully persuasive and it can yield creative suggestions resulting in novel interpretations and interesting models and hypotheses. But comparative reasoning is notoriously unreliable as a way of discovering what is true. Ideological reasoning can help us see what our beliefs and values imply and it is useful for formulating policy positions. But the starting points for ideological arguments must ultimately be taken on faith, and because, unlike empirical reasoning, ideological reasoning provides no workable mechanisms for collaborative self-correction. And ideologies demand too much mindless conformity, and spawn too much violent repression, and engender too much foolish and prideful Us-vs.-Them thinking. The only control ideological reasoning exerts over natural phenomena is forcing behavioral compliance with its various rules and social mores. Empirical investigation and the application of our critical thinking skills and habits of mind to scientific inquiry are fundamentally group endeavors. It is the community that determines what is most important to study. Science progresses when the entire scientific community can evaluate the merits of a scientific investigation through replications and refinements of the original investigation. Replication and refinement yield either disconfirmation of the original investigation's findings or generation of support and possible improvements of the original findings. The scientific community uses a process of reasoning that has a built-in capacity for objective self-monitoring and self-correcting through independent inquiry. It is this capacity that gives empirical reasoning an advantage over comparative reasoning and ideological reasoning. Empirical reasoning calls for the application of the four tests of the logical quality of arguments at every stage of scientific investigation. The results are evident in our increasing knowledge of how the natural world works, and in the technological, biomedical, and engineering benefits humans have achieved over centuries by using scientific inquiry.