Abstract
Timothy Williamson devotes significant effort in his The Philosophy of Philosophy to arguing against skepticism about judgment. One might think that the recent “experimental philosophy” challenge to the philosophical practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence is a possible target of those arguments. However, this is not so. The structure of that challenge is radically dissimilar from that of traditional skeptical arguments, and the aims of the challenge are entirely congruent with the spirit of methodological improvement that Williamson himself exemplifies in the Afterword of his book.
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Notes
All otherwise unreferenced page citations are to Williamson (2007).
It follows that I will not be trafficking at all in “the psychologization of evidence” (pp. 211ff). It is fine for my purposes if one considers only the judged propositions, when known, to be evidence. The challenge can be framed in Williamson-friendly terms that many propositions commonly taken to be evidence, in fact are not such.
There are of course many distinctions to be made within these practices of taking intuitions/judgments as evidence for philosophical claims, and many of these issues look different when philosophers aim at something like a conceptual analysis, and when they take themselves to be investigating an extra-mental reality. In the context of this Symposium, given Williamson’s views, my arguments can be taken as focusing on the latter sort of practices.
Schnall et al. (2008).
Strictly speaking, unwanted lack of variation can be as much of a problem as unwanted variation; a thermometer that always gave the same readings even as the temperature changes is an epistemically unsuccessful thermometer.
One appropriate line of response would be to deny that the variation is unwanted, by defending a form of relativism, contextualism, or the like. I will not address such responses here, though see Swain et al. (2008) for a brief discussion.
See Weinberg (2007).
But cannot the defender of the armchair then just beg off of the challenge? For example, Westerners and East Asians disagree concerning the Gettier case, for example––so can’t we (Westerners) just appeal to our judgments that we (Westerners) are right, and the East Asians are wrong, so there’s just no challenge to worry about?
No. First, bootstrapping arguments of this sort have proved generally unpopular with armchair-judging epistemologists, for whom the near-consensus seems to be that the problem of easy “knowledge” is indeed a problem (Cohen (2002); Elga (2007) is a nice example of taking this as an established view. I should note that there are at least some key dissenters, e.g., van Cleve (2003), Bergmann (2004).) Nonetheless this is not a route that the defender of the armchair can easily pursue.
Second, even while armchair judgments are generally left as admissible as we explore whether and how armchair philosophy might meet this challenge, it is nonetheless probably appropriate to consider the particular cases for which there is evidence of inappropriate sensitivity as facing an actual defeater. This defeater may of course potentially be removed by further investigation, but it does stand until such investigations are concluded successfully. So there is no quick-and-dirty evasion of the challenge to be had here. (I am particularly grateful to Adam Leite for discussion of this point.)
One popular such claim is that philosophers have a kind of expertise that should keep their judgments from displaying these sorts of sensitivities, and Williamson gestures at such a move (p. 191). The truth of such claims is a complicated matter, and there is a large and complex literature on the psychology of expertise that could be brought to bear. But it is perhaps enough here that such a literature needs to be brought to bear. One implication of that literature is that our folk theory of expertise is not actually very good at discerning what sorts of training will or will not produce real expertise. Whether or not philosophers are, in the sense appropriate here, experts in their judgments, is just one more philosophically-important question that cannot be addressed well from the armchair. See, e.g., Shanteau (1992) and the papers in Charness et al. (2006).
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Acknowledgements
Very particular thanks are owed here to Stephen Stich, with whom a precursor to this paper was jointly presented at the 2008 Arche Centre workshop on Williamson’s Philosophy of Philosophy; I take full responsibility for any infelicities in the paper’s current form or content. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with the other participants at that workshop, and with Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Adam Leite.
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Weinberg, J.M. On doing better, experimental-style. Philos Stud 145, 455–464 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9405-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9405-7