Theoretical adversarial collaboration: a template

Abstract

Adversarial collaborations have become increasingly prominent in empirical science, where proponents of competing theories jointly design experiments capable of discriminating between them. Much less attention has been given to theoretical disputes that cannot readily be resolved by experiment. We distinguish theoretical adversarial collaboration from its empirical counterpart and propose a five-step template for conducting it. The procedure is designed to move disputants beyond familiar critique-reply-rejoinder exchanges by requiring sustained clarification, supervised steel-manning of the target theory, and the collaborative development and refinement of objections. Its condition for success is that the collaboration produce insights that substantially exceed the existing literature: either novel, non-obvious arguments show that the theory can meet the objections, or the theory's advocate concedes that new conceptual resources or revisions are required. The template was developed through reflection on, and implemented in, our own adversarial collaboration in philosophy and foundations of physics. We offer it here as a general framework for constructive and publishable progress in philosophy, foundational science, and other areas of inquiry in which disputes cannot readily be resolved by experiment.