The Dojo Test

The dojo test is the gate every topic on Virtue & Paradox has to pass. A philosophical claim that cannot be turned into a drill you can do or a line of reasoning you can check is first demoted to a history entry.

A figure of speech

The word dojo is used here as a figure of speech for a practice room: a place where an idea gets tried by use rather than admired from a distance. The term has nothing to do with martial arts training or with any real training hall, and no physical technique is taught under it.

How the test works

A claim passes in one of two ways. It passes as a drill if you could act on it within 24 hours and record what you did. It passes as a check if it leads to reasoning you can verify, by hand or by enumerating the cases.

A claim that passes neither way gets one of two outcomes. It becomes a history entry, written as the history of an idea rather than as something to practice, or it is not written at all.

The trolley problem shows the difference. Taught as a quiz with one fixed answer, it fails, since nothing is left to do once the answer is given. Rebuilt as a set of variants that change one detail per rep, it passes, because each variant is a check you can run on your own judgment.

What the test does not decide

Passing or failing says nothing about whether a claim is true. The dojo test decides only what kind of entry a claim gets on this site.

The test applies the site's working position that philosophy is a verb, not a noun. Like that position, it is a choice about topics and writing. It is not a claim about what philosophy is, and it does not suggest that a week of practice can settle whether a claim is true.

The test also sits upstream of the armchair gap. Once a claim passes as a drill, the drill guide works on the distance between understanding the claim and carrying it out.