Abstract
‘Intuition deniers’ are those who—like Timothy Williamson, Max Deutsch, Herman Cappelen and a few others—reject the claim that philosophers centrally rely on intuitions as evidence. This ‘Centrality’ hypothesis, as Cappelen (2012, Philosophy without intuitions. Oxford University Press, Oxford) terms it, is standardly endorsed both by traditionalists and by experimental philosophers. Yet the intuition deniers claim that Centrality is false—and they generally also suggest that this undermines the significance of experimental philosophy. Three primary types of anti-Centrality argument have cross-cut the literature thus far. These arguments, I’ll claim, have differing potential consequences on metaphilosophical debate. The first sort of argument centers on worries about the term ‘intuition’—for instance, worries about whether it has clear application, or whether anything actually falls under it. Call this the Argument from Unclear Application. The second argument type involves the claim that evidence in philosophy consists not of facts (or propositions or what have you) about intuitions, but of facts about e.g. knowledge and causation. Call this the Argument from Antipsychologism. The third type involves an attempt to demonstrate that philosophers support their claims not via bald appeal to intuition, but via argumentation. Call this the Argument from Argumentation. Although these three arguments have merit, none of them undermines the importance of experimental philosophy. Nonetheless, they do have significant consequences for the methodological debates that dominate meta-philosophy, and for experimental philosophy in particular.
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Notes
Experimental philosophy has since been upgraded to an ‘enormous mistake’ (Cappelen 2014a).
See Ichikawa and Jarvis (2009) for defense of a similar view based not on our ability to evaluate counterfactuals but on our ability to understand truth in fiction.
See Bengson (2014) for more on this argument.
Interestingly, Deutsch does not have this sort of doubt about the concept of an intuition. As will be discussed in a later section, he freely admits that intuition is the causal source of our belief that Gettier’s cases are not cases of knowledge.
As an anonymous reviewer points out, not all research programs survive once we have reason to believe their target does not exist—phlogiston theory, for instance. There are complicated questions that we might ask about the conditions under which a research project can survive after certain of its presuppositions have been proven false. Yet even if ‘experimental philosophy’ were intrinsically bound up with the notion of an intuition, one might argue that a ‘successor’ project involving largely the same methods and aims could take its place (perhaps simply targeting ‘philosophical cognition’). If such a move were plausible (see the next section) it would, it seems to me, still count as a win for the experimentalists rather than for Cappelen.
For some empirical support for the claim that intuition is heterogeneous, see Nado (2014).
One could interpret this as a contextualist claim—what counts as ‘knowing’ shifts in philosophical contexts. In fact, I think it’s more plausible to claim that philosophy simply aims at an epistemic state that is higher than knowledge; we might call it knowledge*. For current purposes it makes little difference—the present aim is just to hint at possible routes for avoiding the skeptical conclusion.
In previous work Nado (2015) I argued not that philosophical activity employs higher epistemic standards than ordinary activity, but that it is more ‘epistemically demanding’—that one needs a more reliable data source to meet the goals of philosophy than one needs to meet the goals of everyday inquiry. See also Alexander and Weinberg (2014) for a similar view. I now think that both theses are true, and that the greater epistemic demandingness is in part what necessitates the use of higher epistemic standards.
This point has also been made by Ichikawa (2014); he also distinguishes, as I do below, between the claim that philosophers use intuited propositions as evidence and the claim that they use intuited propositions as evidence because those propositions are intuited. However, while I believe that philosophers frequently do use intuited propositions as evidence because they are intuited, Ichikawa disagrees.
For the moment the interpretation of ‘because’ will be left open; one might interpret it in a purely causal fashion or in the sense of ‘having a reason’. Section 3 will return to the question of whether a purely causal interpretation suffices to defend the project of experimental philosophy.
‘Rock’ status is somewhat of an exception here—instead of appeal to explicit mention, Cappelen employs a ‘Rough Guide to Rock Detection’, according to which the presence of argumentation is evidence of the absence of Rock status. We’ll return to this in the section on the Argument from Argumentation.
Further, Cappelen does explicitly claim that absence of the features he discusses is evidence for absence of reliance on intuition; and that his case studies show that there is no reliance on those features (see Cappelen 2012, p. 114). If I’m right about the above, then this is about as plausible as the claim that absence of explicit appeal to the phenomenal features of vision is evidence of an absence of reliance on vision.
Not necessarily a very large step, of course.
Jonathan Ichikawa (2013) also discusses what he calls the “What else?” argument; he does not himself endorse the argument, though he does claim that Cappelen’s critique does not suffice to undermine it.
Note that even a critic of intuition can invoke this sort of argument to support Centrality. She might claim that philosophers standardly view intuition as the only way to justify a certain class of philosophical beliefs, and that they therefore standardly accept those beliefs when and only when they are intuitive. Nonetheless (the critic continues), intuition does not justify that class of beliefs and philosophical practice should therefore be revised—either by admitting that the relevant class of beliefs cannot be justified, or by admitting that there are other ways to become justified in holding those beliefs.
Of course, the fewer such thought experiments there are, and the smaller intuition’s role in their use, the less dramatic the impact experimental philosophy will have. But the picture of experimental philosophy as dooming the discipline—burning the armchair, if you will—was always a bit too theatrical. It makes for good press, but it also threatens to write a check it can’t cash. To my eyes experimental philosophy is still in the position to make a variety of more modest, yet still crucially important, critical contributions to our methodological practices.
See also Weinberg (2014) on ‘intuition escape clauses’.
In his replies to critics (Cappelen 2014a), Cappelen notes that Weatherson’s notion of ‘Socratic knowledge’ (Weatherson 2014) might be used to explicate the source of much of our common ground claims. As Cappelen uses the concept, it appears to cover something like those propositions which we are put into a position to know due to preexisting tacit knowledge (e.g., though I have not been previously presented with a given thought experiment, I can in some way make use of tacit knowledge I already possess to come to an immediate judgment about the thought experiment). Again, however, that leaves the question of how the tacit knowledge is acquired. I find it overwhelmingly plausible that in many cases the relevant tacit knowledge will be due to one of the various psychological processes that are frequently labeled ‘intuition’. But even this isn’t required—all that’s required is that in some non-negligible proportion of such cases the source of the tacit knowledge is the same as that which underlies the folk judgments studied by experimental philosophers. We’ll return to this shortly.
Aristotle’s view on slavery plausibly falls under the class of exceptions to this generalization.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for comments from an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies, as well as from the audience at Lingnan University’s Workshop on Methodology. The work described in this paper was fully supported by a Grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. LU 359613).
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Nado, J. The intuition deniers. Philos Stud 173, 781–800 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0519-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0519-9