Nine Criteria for Evaluating Competing Worldviews

The sciences benefit from well-articulated epistemological standards — satisfactory structure, explanatory power, empirical support — that allow competing theories to be weighed against one another with some rigor. Philosophy possesses no comparable consensus. This is not merely an oversight; it stems from a deeper problem: the absence of agreement on what philosophy itself is for. Without a shared understanding of philosophy's purpose, criteria for evaluating philosophical success remain elusive.

Clément Vidal addresses this impasse by proposing that philosophy be anchored to the perennial 'big questions' — What is? Where does it all come from? Where are we going? What is good and evil? How should we act? What is true and false? These questions constitute the irreducible core that any comprehensive worldview must engage. They are simultaneously philosophical, scientific, and existential, and they provide the functional definition of philosophy's scope that has been missing.

From this foundation, Vidal derives nine metaphilosophical criteria distributed across three domains. Objective criteria include scientificity, internal consistency, and scope of explanatory reach. Subjective criteria address fit with lived experience, personal utility, and emotional adequacy. Intersubjective criteria evaluate a worldview's capacity to reduce interpersonal conflict, its narrative coherence for communities, and its power to mobilize collective action toward beneficial ends. These criteria do not function as an algorithm for producing the correct worldview. They serve instead as a diagnostic framework — a structured means of identifying strengths, exposing weaknesses, and making the comparative evaluation of worldviews more disciplined and transparent.