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Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy

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Abstract

Practitioners of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ have collected data that appear to show that some philosophical intuitions are culturally variable. Many experimental philosophers take this to pose a problem for a more traditional, ‘armchair’ style of philosophizing. It is argued that this is a mistake that derives from a false assumption about the character of philosophical methods; neither philosophy nor its methods have anything to fear from cultural variability in philosophical intuitions.

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Notes

  1. I take it that this is a standard understanding of ‘counterexample’. However, in a recent paper defending the JTB theory, Brian Weatherson (2003) defines ‘counterexample’ in the following way: ‘Let us say that a counterexample to the theory that all Fs are Gs is a possible situation such that most people have an intuition that some particular thing in the story is an F but not a G’ (Weatherson 2003, 2; Italics added). Weatherson may use words as he pleases, of course, but his definition runs together precisely the two things I think need separating, namely (a) the issue of whether a possible case genuinely falsifies a theory (I call such cases ‘counterexamples,’ or ‘genuine counterexamples’.) and (b) the issue of whether ‘most people have an intuition’ that a case falsifies a theory. Note that on Weatherson’s definition there may be counterexamples to a theory even if the theory is true. This makes Weatherson’s initially surprising claim that the JTB theory may be true even in the face of Gettier’s counterexamples rather less surprising.

  2. An anonymous referee (this journal) reminds me that, in Naming and Necessity, Kripke writes, ‘Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking’ (Kripke 1980, 42). So, am I wrong to insist that, even by Kripke’s own lights, the Gödel-case argument against descriptivism does not depend on treating intuitions as evidence? Firstly, even if I am wrong to insist on this, the important issue, as I make clear later in the main text, is not whether Kripke thinks that intuitions about the Gödel-case argument matter crucially as evidence, but instead whether they really do matter in that way. Secondly, the surrounding context of the quote makes it clear, I think, that Kripke is not endorsing an intuitions-as-evidence method for philosophy in general, or for evaluating counterexamples in particular. In the surrounding text, Kripke is responding to a skeptic who doubts that the philosophical distinction between necessary and contingent properties overlaps with any distinction possessed by non-philosophers. Kripke maintains that it does, and then goes on, in the quote above, to respond to a different sort of skeptic, one who doubts that that kind of overlap is evidence for, specifically, the meaningfulness of assertions involving the philosophical notions. So, the sorts of things that have ‘intuitive content’ are not judgments about hypothetical scenarios, they are, instead, philosophical distinctions and notions. And their having ‘intuitive content’ is a matter of how closely these match up with non-philosophical distinctions and notions. Lastly, closeness of match, Kripke says, is evidence only that the philosophical notions may be used to make meaningful assertions. In fact, Kripke explicitly puts aside the question of whether ‘there are any nontrivial necessary properties’, and asks us to focus on just ‘the meaningfulness of the notion’ (Kripke 1980, 42-43). Clearly, we cannot infer from any of this that Kripke would accept that intuitions about hypothetical cases are essential evidence about what is true concerning them. The quote with which I began may seem to suggest that there is at least an implicit appeal to intuitions in Kripke’s presentation of the Gödel-case. Closer inspection of its surrounding context reveals that this is not so.

  3. See Bealer 1998, Goldman and Pust 1998, and Pust 2000.

  4. I say ‘reasonable’ not ‘clearly correct,’ since it is possible for those who accept the view that intuitions are evidence to argue that variability in intuitions of the kind uncovered by the experimental philosophers does not pose an insurmountable difficulty. Perhaps only considered or reflective intuitions are evidence, or perhaps it is only the intuitions of the experts (i.e. the philosophers) that matter.

  5. This is somewhat inaccurate, since Weinberg et al. (2001) did not use the 10 coins-case as a test case in their studies. (Instead, they used a variation on Lehrer’s (1965) ‘Nogot/Ford’ case.)

  6. Two anonymous referees (this journal) urge that Rawls’s (1971, 1993) account of how to select justified ‘principles of justice’ is an account that depends on taking moral intuitions about particular cases as evidence for moral theory. The picture is that, on the Rawlsian account, we start with our moral intuitions about particular cases on one side and we try to bring these into ‘reflective equilibrium’ with a variety of moral principles on the other. Though I am off my home turf here, and though Rawls himself seems to endorse a somewhat different picture, I will say that the account just described strikes me as very strange indeed. What we want, surely, are moral principles that don’t conflict with particular moral truths; conflicts with intuition will matter only if what is intuited is true. And how do we know whether our moral intuitions about particular cases are true? We know this by assessing arguments for or against their truth. In other words, in ethics, just as in epistemology and philosophy of language, philosophers need not appeal to intuitions as evidence, even if they, misleadingly, sometimes do.

  7. Keep in mind that to deny that philosophy must treat intuitions as evidence is not to deny that intuition is the causal source of some philosophical knowledge.

  8. Joshua Knobe’s widely read papers in experimental action theory (Knobe 2003a, b) concern, Knobe says, the concept of intentional action. Similarly, Shaun Nichols’s papers in experimental metaphysics (Nichols 2004 and Nichols 2006) are supposed to concern the concept of free action.

  9. Some philosophers, including Ernest Sosa (2007), William Lycan (2006), and an anonymous referee (this journal), have suggested that persistent cultural variation in philosophical intuitions may indicate mere ‘verbal disagreement’. (Nichols and Ulatowski (2007) take a similar line on the ‘Knobe Effect’, first reported in Knobe 2003a.) Perhaps, for example, ‘knowledge’ in an East Asian English speaker’s mouth expresses a different, though presumably related, concept than that expressed by ‘knowledge’ in a Western English speaker’s mouth. If so, then there may be no real conflict—no ‘substantive disagreement’—between East Asian English speakers who judge that agents in Gettier cases ‘really know’ and Western English speakers who judge that they don’t. I find this line implausible. It is of course possible that subtle conceptual differences are producing the apparent disagreement. But there is no evidence at all that this is in fact what is going on. People can and do have persistent disagreements about even putative necessary truths without this implying that they are operating with different concepts. Philosophers have such disagreements with one another all the time. Presumably, they are not, most of the time, ‘speaking past each other’.

  10. The criticism of experimental philosophy offered in the main text differs from most other published criticisms. Most such criticisms concede that philosophy treats intuitions as evidence. Ernest Sosa (2007) and William Lycan (2006) concede this, and, in commentaries on Machery et al. 2004, Michael Devitt and Henry Jackman do so as well. These philosophers accept that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence, but they deny that cultural variation of the sort uncovered by Machery et al. (2004), or Weinberg et al. (2001), impugns philosophical method. Sosa and Lycan argue that cultural variation in philosophical intuitions (if it really exists—both Sosa and Lycan express doubts about whether the studies conducted to date really establish that there is such variation) may indicate only that different cultures have different concepts of knowledge, reference, or what have you. (See note 9, above.) Devitt (ms) and Jackman (2009) argue, among other things, that, in the case of semantic theories at least, it is the intuitions of semanticists, not ‘the folk’, which should matter. If I am right, these concessive replies concede something untrue; traditional philosophical method does not depend on treating intuitions as evidence, and experimental philosophers, along with a fair number of misguided traditionalists, are therefore operating with a flawed conception of philosophy. An exception is Timothy Williamson (2004, 2007), who argues, as I do, that philosophy does not depend evidentially on intuitions.

  11. Philosophers are surely not obligated to explain cultural variability in philosophical intuitions; they lack the proper training. Cultural anthropologists or social psychologists are best equipped to explain that sort of variability. Of course, philosophers are obligated to explain why certain philosophical intuitions are false, if they believe them to be. But explaining why a given philosophical intuition is false is different from explaining why it is held by some person or group, and only the former is a properly philosophical project.

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Acknowledgements

For help thinking through the issues raised in this paper, I’d like to thank Harry Deutsch, Patrick Hawley, Joe Lau, Don Tontiplaphol, and audiences at the University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University. Three anonymous referees (this journal) made suggestions that led to substantial improvements.

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Deutsch, M. Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 447–460 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0033-0

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