Science has a method. A method is a general procedure for approaching questions in a systematic way. Important philosophers in history have used unique and powerful methods too, for example Kant used the critical method of thinking about what can be thought, and Plato used the method of dialogues. I suppose, in order to make any real progress on reducing problems to theories, one must use some sort of method, even if it’s intuitive and ad hoc. I don’t mean to imply that philosophy has to be as exact as solving an algebraic problem; the simplicity of the algebraic method restricts it to a very limited set of problems, and philosophy has to confront a wide range of subtle and often poorly-defined questions. So what we need might perhaps better be described as a strategy rather than a method.
Daniel Dennett, as you can note when reading his “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” and other papers, had an interesting method he sometimes used that I call the “as-if” method. The idea is to take some phenomenon and analyze it in terms strictly limited to appearances, or an analogy or simile. Then, as pragmatists like to do, you can say that the difference between what seems to the case, and what actually is the case, is splitting hairs that don’t really matter. Pragmatists don’t like to split hairs, and besides, in life we often have to deal with the appearances of things anyway, and the inner facts of the situation don’t matter that much. You may not like the method, and it’s certainly not a scientific method, but it is an interesting approach which can produce results when other approaches fail.
A method I’ve found that appeals to me is the binary distinction, the opposition, the dichotomy. Sometimes people object that all dichotomies are false, or that a distinction I’m making is a “false” dichotomy, so-called because of the classical logical fallacy by that name. And it’s certainly the case that not all dichotomies we might make are necessary dichotomies, leading to the “fallacy of the excluded middle,” but I think, as a philosophical method, it has to be allowed, at least as a starting point.
The mathematician G. Spencer Brown wrote a book on logic called “Laws of Form” which has since become a classic. In it, he developed a complete calculus of logic by starting from one simple element: the distinction, which he represented as a vertical mark on the page separating the white space it cleaved into two parts. That is, he made a binary distinction, a distinction that has only two choices. This is the fundamental element of arithmetic also, the 0 and 1 counters from which all the integers, and all of arithmetic, can be generated. As we in the modern era know very well, the binary number system is the basis of all modern computers and all digital technology.
One of the interesting things computer technicians have learned is that the simple binary distinction, the 0 and 1 of binary computer representation, is capable of building up a virtual world that looks virtually identical to the real one. Photographs can be scanned and stored as sequences of binary numbers that encode both the color and intensity of every pixel (dot) in the picture. By increasing the density of the dots, the binary picture can be made arbitrarily accurate, reproducing the original scene to any desired degree of faithfulness. Some software today creates entire virtual worlds of images and sounds that the viewer can move through and manipulate. It’s all based on binary distinctions, the starting point of all thought.
A typical example where we might make a binary distinction is with temperature, breaking it into two possibilities, hot and cold. To insist that all temperatures are hot or cold will meet some resistance. We know that some temperatures are hotter than others. We know that there is a mid-range of temperatures that don’t seem particularly hot or cold. Generally we would prefer a sliding scale, a continuum of temperatures, in order to describe the full range and subtlety of variation that can occur. But the distinction of hot and cold is useful. The first thing we need to know when touching an object is if it’s so hot that can cause damage, and so the body makes a very quick sorting of the temperature and makes a painful classification if it’s too high. It should be obvious that we can do a sorting, given any two objects, of whether one is hotter than the other, so we can always break the continuum of temperatures down into binary distinctions. In other words, the continuum of temperatures can be digitized.
Another case where we might make a binary distinction is between mental and physical objects. This basic move has an ancient origin. Today it’s considered mainly a Cartesian sorting, and often considered a fallacy. Supposedly, everything mental has a physical reduction, so the entire class of mental objects is unnecessary and illusive.
Unfortunately, discarding the binary distinction of mental and physical removes a discrimination from our cognitive domain. It’s intended to be a simplifying step by the proponents of the reduction, but it in fact limits our ability to meaningfully categorize some types of phenomena, namely the things that happen inside our own head such as emotions and memories. Whether they have a physical reduction or not, they still have an experiential role to play as emotions and memories; losing sight of this fact doesn’t help at all.
Whether or not we’re happy with the categories of mental and physical, there are two general conclusions we can reach from these observations. The first is that the classical fallacies should not be taken as hard and fast rules; sometimes dichotomies are not false, and sometimes, argumentum ad populum is just what you want (in popular elections). The second is that philosophical methods are not rigorous; you can’t rely on them to produce valid results automatically. Even so, some sort of method is going to be necessary when trying to work problems. You should work out what methods work for you, and be open to allowing other philosophers their approach to working a problem.

