The analytic method of reflective equilibrium is at once a method of doing philosophical work and a defence of the resulting work against various possible sceptical attacks. Its first employment was in Nelson Goodman's Fact, Fiction and Forecast, certainly one of the most influential analytic works of the mid-twentieth century. After setting out a version of Hume's problem of induction (the problem of justifying as rational our confidence in inductively formed beliefs, such as the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow or that gravity will continue to work on cars), Goodman suggests that the problem can be avoided if we take seriously the idea that our particular judgements about induction and our general inductive principles justify each other through a continuous accommodation that seeks a point of stability:

Although reflective equilibrium remains influential as a potential defence against the sceptic within the philosophy of science and general epistemology, in contemporary analytic work it is more commonly employed in analytic ethics and political philosophy, a situation almost entirely due to John Rawls's seminal book A Theory of Justice.