Abstract
Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity.
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Notes
Asking exactly how our explicit views about knowledge, truth and evidence vary across cultures diachronically and geographically is of course very interesting, and has been studied (see Shapin 1994).
Perner (1991, ch 7) lists these two principles as ones that children master early.
This term is due to Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007), as are the labels for the other subgroups within experimental philosophy.
This label is not perfect, though, since it potentially misleadingly associates experimental descriptivists and experimental analysts. ‘Descriptivism’ is the name of a thesis about the semantics of theoretical terms that underwrites one way of justifying the program of experimental analysis.
This is taken from Nichols et al. (2003).
For this study, ‘Western’ subjects were US undergraduates of European ancestry; ‘East Asian’ subjects were either subjects in East Asia (China, Japan and Korea) or US undergraduates who were either natives of East Asia, or first or second generation immigrants.
On the Truetemp Case, 32% of Western subjects had the intuition that Charles knew; 68% of Western subjects had the intuition that he didn’t know (n = 189). In contrast, 12% of East Asian subjects had the intuition that Charles knew; 88% of EA subjects had the intuition that he didn’t know (n = 25).
On the Gettier Case, 26% of Western subjects had the intuition that Bob knew; 74% of Western subjects had the intuition that he didn’t know (n = 66). In contrast, 57% of East Asian subjects had the intuition that Bob knew; 43% of EA subjects had the intuition that he didn’t know (n = 23).
That two subjects are using the same flow chart but making a different choice at some point on it does not imply that they only differ in some not folk-epistemological respect: judging whether Bob could easily have been wrong might itself be a folk epistemological judgement—performed using some folk epistemological heuristic for calculating reliability, for example. Thanks to Christophe Heintz for clarifying this point for me.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This paper was written while on leave funded by the AHRC as part of the ESF’s Eurocores program; thanks to both institutions for their support.
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Spicer, F. Cultural Variations in Folk Epistemic Intuitions. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 515–529 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0023-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0023-2