Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2):315-332 (2011)
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Abstract |
Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [2004; forthcoming] use experimental methods to raise a spectre of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke's G del example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants' intuitions about semantic reference for that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We detail a type of ambiguity found in Machery et al.'s probe but not yet noted in the response literature. We argue that this epistemic ambiguity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on participants' responses. We found that this accounts for much of the variation in Machery et al.'s original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, their argument is no longer convincing
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Reprint years | 2010, 2011 |
DOI | 10.1080/00048401003639832 |
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References found in this work BETA
Naming and Necessity.Saul A. Kripke - 1980 - In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 431-433.
Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style.Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2004 - Cognition 92 (3):1-12.
The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person Versus Third Person Approaches.Kirk Ludwig - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):128-159.
View all 13 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Are Philosophers Expert Intuiters?Jonathan M. Weinberg, Chad Gonnerman, Cameron Buckner & Joshua Alexander - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):331-355.
Knowledge Entails Dispositional Belief.David Rose & Jonathan Schaffer - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (S1):19-50.
Epistemic Intuitions in Fake-Barn Thought Experiments.David Colaço, Wesley Buckwalter, Stephen Stich & Edouard Machery - 2014 - Episteme 11 (2):199-212.
Experimental Attacks on Intuitions and Answers.John Bengson - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3):495-532.
View all 37 citations / Add more citations
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