Abstract
The debate between scientific realists and anti-realists is now a classic debate in the Philosophy of Science. Van Fraassen (2002) has suggested that the positions that take part in the debate involve not only different doxastic attitudes regarding some propositions, but different epistemic stances, that is, different sets of commitments, values and epistemic strategies. The formulation of this debate in terms of epistemic stances and the voluntarist epistemology it motivates make it plausible to think of it as a deep disagreement. This kind of disagreements cannot be settled by reason alone because they lack the conditions that are necessary for arguments to work. I argue, however, that the attempts to use arguments can have an epistemic value in these contexts, as they can help reveal intuitions. I adopt the view on intuitions put forward by Chudnoff (2014), according to which they are mental states capable of motivating epistemic action. I claim that, while the attempt to utter an argument cannot convince an opponent of changing her mind, it can make her perform some epistemic actions and, thus, bring out some of her intuitions. To show how arguments can work in this way, I take as a study case one of the main realist arguments: the No Miracles Argument.
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Notes
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection: one frequent trait of empiricist is their resisting to let themselves be carried away by intuitions. In the case of the NMA, empiricists may acknowledge they have certain intuition regarding the need for an explanation of the success of scientific theories but still refuse to trust that intuition because they have reasons to refrain from inferring in accordance to it. Even if this is so, eliciting intuitions in the opponent might be helpful in a case of disagreement. Finding out about the existence of certain intuition gives the agent the opportunity to judge how valuable that intuition is for her epistemic life. The result might be the realization that she does rely on that intuition in many of her epistemic practices and, as a consequence, she is not the empiricist she thought she was.
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Serebrinsky, D. Epistemic Stances, Arguments and Intuitions. J Gen Philos Sci 55, 79–94 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-023-09643-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-023-09643-8