Evidence-Based Philosophy: A Foundational Methodological Framework for the Transformation of Philosophical Inquiry into a Formal Discipline

Title: Evidence-Based Philosophy: A Foundational Methodological Framework for the Transformation of Philosophical Inquiry into a Formal Discipline Author: Boris Kriger (ORCID: 0009-0001-0034-2903) Information Physics Institute, Gosport, Hampshire, United Kingdom Institute of Integrative and Interdisciplinary Research, Toronto, Canada Description: This monograph develops the thesis that philosophy can and should undergo a structural transformation into an evidence-based discipline, and that the tools required for this transformation — mathematical formalization, empirical integration frameworks, and artificial intelligence-based verification — are now sufficiently mature to make it achievable. The historical reliance on unconstrained speculative methods, while once the only available approach, is increasingly difficult to justify given the current availability of formal, empirical, and computational tools. The work provides a precise operational definition of Evidence-Based Philosophy grounded in four conditions: formal coherence, empirical compatibility, operationalizability, and falsifiability or empirical distinguishability. A five-step methodological protocol is formulated for converting philosophical inquiry into evidence-based form: conceptual reduction to operational definitions, identification of measurable proxies, explicit structural modeling, identification of falsifiable scenarios, and cross-domain consistency testing. A complete mathematical framework is developed, including Bayesian models of philosophical claim evaluation with structured priors, formal coherence metrics based on information-theoretic mutual information, dynamical systems models of paradigmatic transition with AI as a catalytic bifurcation parameter, Bayesian model selection for philosophical theory comparison, and an information-theoretic measure of genuine philosophical progress. All formal apparatus is accompanied by detailed interpretive commentary accessible to readers from psychology, sociology, and biology. The monograph introduces the Reflexive Inference Constraint, which demonstrates information-theoretically that generalization from individual introspection to universal claims is bounded by the structural overlap between the observer and the class of systems under study. This result, derived from the data processing inequality, establishes that evidence-based methods are not merely desirable but informationally necessary for philosophical claims with universal scope. No amount of introspective depth, reasoning sophistication, or contemplative rigor can extract class-level information not already present in the structural relationship between the observer and its class. The concept of Conceptual Responsibility is developed, grounding ethical obligations of philosophical authors in the empirically demonstrated dynamics of idea degradation through serial transmission. Drawing on Bartlett's serial reproduction paradigm, iterated learning models, and information-theoretic structural analogies, the framework shows that formalization serves ethical as well as epistemic functions: formally structured claims resist the lossy compression of mass communication better than informal prose. Detailed case studies demonstrate the evidence-based method on historically resolved problems (the nature of heat, the nature of disease, the formalization of logic, decision theory) and on a currently open problem — the evolutionary necessity of predictive processing in adaptive systems — formalized as the Predictive Viability Law. A worked formal proof (the Pragmatic Consistency Theorem via Dutch book argument) demonstrates that the method can be carried through completely for a specific philosophical claim. The normativity objection is addressed through three independent arguments: feasibility constraints (ought implies can), the competence requirement (cross-domain knowledge as prerequisite for responsible normative judgment), and the empirical studyability of normative reasoning processes. A reformed peer review architecture is proposed incorporating mandatory AI-assisted verification at multiple stages. A Secondary Communication Principle establishes that accessible and metaphorical philosophical exposition is epistemically legitimate only when grounded in prior formal and evidence-constrained work. The monograph responds in detail to critical peer review, addressing concerns regarding the alchemy analogy, survivorship bias in case studies, operationalizability of the mathematical framework, the status of illustrative dynamical models, self-referential consistency, and the scope of the proposed peer review reform. This work is part of a broader research program investigating the formal structure of interdisciplinary knowledge systems, and builds on prior results in information-theoretic bounds on self-referential inference, the ethics of intellectual communication, and physical constraint arguments for predictive architectures in adaptive systems. Keywords: evidence-based philosophy; formal methods; philosophy of science; AI-assisted verification; methodological reform; Bayesian epistemology; philosophical formalization; peer review; computational philosophy; interdisciplinary methodology; reflexive inference; conceptual responsibility; predictive processing; information theory; dynamical systems; paradigmatic transition License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Resource type: Publication / Preprint Language: English Related identifiers: IsSupplementedBy: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18355847 (The Reflexive Inference Law) IsSupplementedBy: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18488818 (Conceptual Responsibility) IsSupplementedBy: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18444910 (The Evolutionary Inevitability of Predictive Processing)