Reasonablenessism

A set of twelve principles for navigating honest inquiry beyond the reach of formal proof. Not a system of belief, but a method for holding beliefs well: with appropriate confidence, honest accounting of evidence, and the willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads.

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The Twelve Features

1. Feature 1 — No Source Is Axiom No source — scripture, tradition, science, authority — is treated as self-certifying. Every claim earns its standing by what it demonstrates.

2. Feature 2 — The Steelman Is the Test The strongest version of a position is the one to be engaged. Defeating a weakened form of a claim proves nothing.

3. Feature 3 — Personal Experience as Testimony First-person experience is evidence — not proof, but evidence that must be accounted for rather than dismissed.

4. Feature 4 — The Stance Applies to Itself Reasonablenessism is subject to its own standards. It is not self-exempting.

5. Feature 5 — Provenance Is Irrelevant to Truth-Value Where a claim comes from does not determine whether it is true. The content is what matters.

6. Feature 6 — Convergence of Independent Witnesses Independent sources arriving at the same structural conclusion provide stronger evidence than any single source, in proportion to their genuine independence.

7. Feature 7 — The Self-Sealing Test A claim that cannot be falsified by any possible evidence is not a strong claim — it is a definitionally protected one. Self-sealing claims receive reduced evidential weight.

8. Feature 8 — Universal Subjective Convergence Implies Objectivity When a subjective experience converges universally across independent experiencers, it points toward something structurally real.

9. Feature 9 — Explicit Confidence Tiers Claims should be held with confidence proportional to the evidence for them. Explicit tiering prevents overconfidence and underconfidence alike.

10. Feature 10 — Logic Where It Reaches; Concordance Where It Doesn’t Formal derivation is used as far as it goes. Beyond its reach, convergence of independent witnesses takes over. The method knows which tool it is using.

11. Feature 11 — Minimum Necessary Miracles Among competing explanations, prefer the one that requires the fewest structurally exceptional events. This is not naturalism — it is parsimony.

12. Feature 12 — Fruit, Not Lineage A tradition is assessed by what it produces in the people who genuinely practice it, not by the authority of its origin.