I’ve found a catchy name for what I had previously referred to as the “principle of additivity” in my Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas (which is falling behind schedule; sorry): “Panidealism”. It’s the position that any idea, even a ridiculously stupid one, has an intrinsic inestimable value. The reasoning is fairly simple: either an idea “works”, in which case it is worth something on its own, it does not, in which case knowing that it does not is itself worth something, or we’re not sure, in which case we will ascertain and reaffirm the status of other ideas in the process of seeking it.

In other words, there is no such thing as a bad idea, hence the name. This should be somewhat intuitively familiar to other compulsive brainstormers 🙂

To give an example, suppose I said rainbows end in pots of gold. This is probably false, but if we knew it was, we would be better off, because now we can derive “rainbows do not end in pots of gold”. If we didn’t know, we’d look for rainbows, and perhaps discover, say, that they are circular when viewed from above – also a useful fact.