Maybe. It seems to me that there could be two systems of political ideas—call them A and B—both of which are pretty credible when taken as wholes, but for which if you take any single proposition from one and examine it in the context of the other, it’s obviously wrong.
(The same thing happens with scientific theories. Key words: “Quine-Duhem thesis”.)
On the other hand, it does also happen that basically-unrelated ideas get bundled together as part of a package deal, and in that case we probably do generally want to try to separate them. So I’m not sure what the best way is to make the tradeoff between splitting and lumping.
Maybe. It seems to me that there could be two systems of political ideas—call them A and B—both of which are pretty credible when taken as wholes, but for which if you take any single proposition from one and examine it in the context of the other, it’s obviously wrong.
(The same thing happens with scientific theories. Key words: “Quine-Duhem thesis”.)
On the other hand, it does also happen that basically-unrelated ideas get bundled together as part of a package deal, and in that case we probably do generally want to try to separate them. So I’m not sure what the best way is to make the tradeoff between splitting and lumping.