In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with their theories. Finally, (...) philosophers are more confident in rejecting theories to the extent that they have several counter examples involving diverse cases. I argue that these facts are better explained by philosophers' using intuitions as evidence than by any plausible contrary explanations. I further argue that aspects of philosophical practice that my thesis may initially seem ill-suited to explain are in fact unsurprising whether or not my thesis is true. (shrink)

This article examines the method of reflective equilibrium (RE) and its role in philosophical inquiry. It begins with an overview of RE before discussing some of the subtleties involved in its interpretation, including challenges to the standard assumption that RE is a form of coherentism. It then evaluates some of the main objections to RE, in particular, the criticism that this method generates unreasonable beliefs. It concludes by considering how RE relates to recent debates about the role of intuitions in (...) philosophy. (shrink)

Recently, a number of phenomenological approaches to experiential justification emerged according to which an experience's justificatory force is grounded in the experience’s distinctive phenomenology. The basic idea is that certain experiences exhibit a presentive phenomenology and that they are a source of immediate justification precisely by virtue of their presentive phenomenology. Such phenomenological approaches usually focus on perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In this paper, I aim at a phenomenological approach to ethical experiences. I shall show that we need to (...) make a distinction between evaluative experiences directed at concrete cases and ethical intuitions directed at general principles. The focus will be on evaluative experiences. I argue that evaluative experiences constitute a sui generis type of experience that gain their justificatory force by virtue of their presentive evaluative phenomenology. In Sect. 1, I introduce and motivate the phenomenological idea that certain experiences exhibit a justification-conferring phenomenology. In Sect. 4, I apply this idea to morally evaluative experiences. In Sect. 5, I suggest that certain epistemic intuitions should be considered epistemically evaluative experiences and I outline a strong parallelism between ethics and epistemology. (shrink)

Intuitions is presented as a counterpart of Rethinking Intuition ( DePaul and Ramsey 1998 ). 1 After 16 years, it revisits the topic of the place of intuitions in philosophy in light of two developments...

Recent metaphilosophical debates have focused on the methods/epistemology of philosophy, and the structure of the discipline. The paper reports the results of an exploratory study examining the relationship between personality and both kinds of metaphilosophical view. The findings reported are No important link between personality and attitudes to intuitions, Apparent differences between experts and non-experts as to which subfields are considered central, Only limited evidence that perceptions of centrality are related to personality in minor ways. Although no dramatic relationships between (...) personality and metaphilosophical view are found, the results nonetheless prompt some reflection about the role played by judgements about the centrality of subfields within the discipline. (shrink)

Bernard Molyneux presents some new arguments against descriptive evidentialism about intuitions. Descriptive evidentialism is the thesis that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. Molyneux's arguments are that: the propositions that intuition putatively supports are treated as having a degree and kind of certainty and justification that they could not have got from being intuited; intuitions influence us in ways we cannot explain by supposing we treat them as evidence; and certain strong intuitions that persuade us of their contents are treated as (...) inadmissible in the context of justification. This article presents a partial defence of descriptive evidentialism against these new arguments. (shrink)

A reorientation is needed in methodological debate about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Methodological debate has lost sight of the reason why it makes sense to focus on questions about intuitions when thinking about the methods or epistemology of philosophy. The problem is an approach to methodology that focuses almost exclusively on questions about some evidential role that intuitions may or may not play in philosophers’ arguments. A new approach is needed. Approaching methodological questions about the role of intuitions (...) in philosophy with an abductive model of philosophical inquiry in mind will help ensure the debate doesn't lose sight of what motivates the debate. (shrink)

In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of experimental philosophy titled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions published in 2001, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic background as well as socioeconomic status. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, (...) to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes and hence greater power to detect differences, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Our results suggest that epistemic intuitions are more robust across ethnic and socioeconomic groups than Weinberg et al. (2001) indicates. Given our data, we believe that the notion of differences in epistemic intuitions among different ethnic and socioeconomic groups that follows from Weinberg et al. (2001) needs to be corrected. (shrink)

The field of experimental philosophy has received considerable attention, essentially for producing results that seem highly counter-intuitive and at the same time question some of the fundamental methods used in philosophy. A substantial part of this attention has focused on the role of intuitions in philosophical methodology. One of the major contributions of experimental philosophy on this topic has been concrete evidence in support of intuitional diversity; the idea that intuitions vary systematically depending on variables such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, (...) or gender. Because of the important implications, these findings have been the subject of extensive debate. Despite the seeming significance of the findings and despite all the debates that the experimental philosophy movement has prompted, what has not been examined systematically is the reproducibility of the results. Instead, the reported findings have been simply accepted as established facts. We set out to replicate a wide range of experiments and surprisingly failed to reproduce many of the reported findings, some of which are from the most cited and attention grabbing papers of the field. We draw two conclusions from our findings. The first is that the instability of intuitions has been exaggerated by experimental philosophers. Intuitions appear to be more uniform across different demographic groups. The argument that intuitions need to be discarded because they depend on arbitrary factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or gender does not seem tenable anymore. The second conclusion is that experimental philosophy needs a better system to ensure the reproducibility of published findings. The current research-publication system of various empirical fields, especially those employing statistical methods, leads to an overproduction of false-positive findings in the published literature. Unless changes are made to the current research-publication system, this overproduction is likely to continue, in experimental philosophy as well as other disciplines. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

‘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 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 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. (shrink)

According to orthodox views of philosophical methodology, when philosophers appeal to intuitions, they treat them as evidence for their contents. Call this “descriptive evidentialism.” Descriptive evidentialism is assumed both by those who defend the epistemic status of intuitions and by those, including many experimental philosophers, who criticize it. This article shows, however, that the idea that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence struggles to account for the way philosophers treat intuitions in a variety of philosophical contexts. In particular, it cannot account (...) for philosophers' treatment of a priori intuitions, for nonpropositional uses of intuition, and for philosophers' failure to use intuition to exclude the counterintuitive. The article concludes that alternatives to descriptive evidentialism (some of which are sketched) must be developed, and that much of the recent debate between traditionalists and skeptics from, for example, experimental philosophy is probably based on a false presupposition. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, (...) play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline and defend a traditional yet controversial view of conceptual analysis, particularly as it is used in epistemology. I will defend the view against a number of objections, all of which focus on the idea that conceptual analysis relies upon linguistic intuitions. Rather than trying to deny this claim, I will seek to vindicate the use of conceptual analysis within epistemology even given its reliance on linguistic intuitions. To do so, I first outline the view of (...) conceptual analysis I have in mind and then respond to three broad objections from Quill Kukla, Allan Hazlett and Stephen Stich. (shrink)

This chapter will consider three themes relating to the significance of intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In §1, I’ll review and explore the relationship between philosophical use of words like ‘intuitively’ and any kinds of mental states that might be called ‘intuitions’. In §2, I’ll consider the widely-discussed analogy between intuitive experience and perceptual experience, drawing out some interesting similarities and differences. Finally, in §3, I’ll introduce the recent movement of ‘experimental philosophy’, and consider to what extent its projects are tied (...) up with questions about the role of intuitions in philosophy. My primary aim will be to survey and explain; I will make no effort, however, to hide the fact that I’m a philosopher and a partisan to some of these debates. So there will be some arguments for controversial points of view, too—hopefully these will be easily perceptible, and my opponents fairly represented. Limitations of space demand a rather superficial treatment of most of our topics; endnotes will direct the reader to more comprehensive discussions. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers are committed – either implicitly or explicitly – to Propositionalism about thought-experimental intuitions. According to this view, thought-experimental intuitions are phenomenally conscious, spontaneous, and non-theoretical; most importantly, Propositionalists claim that intuitions bear consciously accessible propositional content. The negative project of this essay is a critique of, the rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Propositionalism. In addition, I propose an alternative position – namely, Interpretationalism. According to Interpretationalism, intuitions possess the features ascribed in -; however, they do (...) not bear consciously accessible propositional content. Instead, intuitions acquire cognitive significance by virtue of being interpreted in light of a subject’s background beliefs. (shrink)