We argue that moral judgment studies currently conducted utilizing virtual reality (VR) devices must confront a dilemma due to how virtual environments are designed and how those environments are experienced. We begin by first describing the contexts present in paradigmatic cases of naturalistic moral judgments. We then compare these contexts to current traditional (vignette-based) and VR-based moral judgment research. We show that, contra to paradigmatic cases, vignette-based and VR-based moral judgment research often fails to accurately model the situational features of (...) paradigmatic moral judgments. In particular, we compare and contrast six recent VR studies to support our view that only simulations high in context-realism and perspectival-fidelity can produce ‘virtually real experiences.’ After analyzing the constituents of a virtually-real experience, we go on to propose guidelines for the creation of VR studies. These guidelines serve two purposes. First, we aim to increase the ecological validity of such studies in order to advance our understanding of moral judgments. Second, we believe that such guidelines should inform how Institutional Review Boards assess VR research. We show that our guidelines are urgently needed given the current lax review standards in place. (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)

Michael T. Stuart (2021 and 2022) has proposed imagination as an intellectual dual‐process virtue, consisting of imagination1 (underwritten by cognitive Type 1 processing) and imagination2 (supported by Type 2 processing). This paper investigates the consequences of taking such an account seriously. It proposes that the dual‐process view of imagination allows us to incorporate recent insights from virtue epistemology, providing a fresh perspective on how imagination can be epistemically reliable. The argument centers on the distinction between General Reliability (GR) and Functional (...) System Reliability (FSR), for example in relation to Kengo Miyazono and Uko Tooming's (2023) argument for epistemic generativity. Furthermore, the paper claims that the dual‐process virtue account enables us to integrate a wide range of findings from the literature on epistemology and imagination. Moreover, it suggests a novel way to distinguish the virtues of creativity and imagination and presents a case for viewing imagination as a virtue rather than a skill. (shrink)

Thought experiments figure prominently in contemporary epistemology. Beyond that humdrum observation, controversy abounds. The aim of this paper is to make progress on two fronts. On the descriptive front, the aim is to illuminate what the practice of using thought experiments involves. On the normative front, the aim is to illuminate what the practice of using thought experiments should involve. Thought experiments result in judgments that are passed on to further philosophical reasoning. What are these judgments? What is the point (...) of making them? What basis do we have for making them? A conception of thought experiments includes answers to these three questions. My thesis is that epistemologists should use thought experiments in accordance with a conception of them organized around the idea of explanation. My case for endorsing the thesis rests on the fruitfulness of the interventions in current debates about the content, point, and basis of thought experiment judgments that it suggests. (shrink)

This work investigates intuitions' nature, demonstrating how philosophers can best use them in epistemology. First, the author considers several paradigmatic thought experiments in epistemology that depict the appeal to intuition. He then argues that the nature of thought experiment-generated intuitions is not best explained by an a priori Platonism. Second, the book instead develops and argues for a thin conception of epistemic intuitions. The account maintains that intuition is neither a priori nor a posteriori but multi-dimensional. It is an intentional (...) but non-propositional mental state that is also non-conceptual and non-phenomenal in nature. Moreover, this state is individuated by its progenitor, namely, the relevant thought experiment. Third, the author provides an argument for the evidential status of intuitions based on the correct account of the nature of epistemic intuition. The suggestion is the fitting-ness approach: intuition alone has no epistemic status. Rather, intuition has evidentiary value as long as it fits well with other pieces into a whole, namely, the pertinent thought experiment. Finally, the book addresses the key challenges raised by supporters of anti-centrality, according to which philosophers do not regard intuition as central evidence in philosophy. To that end, the author responds to them, showing that they fail to affect the account of intuition developed in this book. This text appeals to students and researchers working in epistemology. (shrink)

Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. (...) Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments. (shrink)

This chapter suggests a scheme of reconstruction, which explains how scenarios, questions and arguments figure in thought experiments. It then develops a typology of ethical thought experiments according to their function, which can be epistemic, illustrative, rhetorical, heuristic or theory-internal. Epistemic functions of supporting or refuting ethical claims rely on metaethical assumptions, for example, an epistemological background of reflective equilibrium. In this context, thought experiments may involve intuitive as well as explicitly argued judgements; they can be used to generate moral (...) commitments, to explore consequences of moral theories, and to show inconsistencies within or between moral commitments and moral theory; but the results of thought experiments by themselves do not settle what is epistemically justified and may also be rejected. Finally, some prominent challenges are discussed: do unrealistic scenarios undermine epistemic thought experiments? Are ethical thought experiments misleading? Do they rely on weak analogies? Are there specifically moral objections to ethical thought experiments? (shrink)

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry fueled by the empirical discovery of irrational bias (e.g., the order effect) in people's judgments has recently been challenged by research suggesting that people can introspectively track intuitional instability. The two studies reported here build upon this, the first by demonstrating that people are able to introspectively track instability that was experimentally induced by introducing conflicting expert opinion about certain cases, and the second by demonstrating that it was (...) the presence of instability?not merely the presence of conflicting information?that resulted in changes in the relevant attitudinal states (i.e., confidence and belief strength). The paper closes with the suggestion that perhaps the best explanation for these (and other) findings may be that intuitional instability is not actually ?intuitional.? (shrink)

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry has recently been bolstered by empirical research suggesting that people’s concrete-case intuitions are vulnerable to irrational biases (e.g., the order effect). What is more, skeptics argue that we have no way to ‘‘calibrate” our intuitions against these biases and no way of anticipating intuitional instability. This paper challenges the skeptical position, introducing data from two studies that suggest not only that people’s concrete-case intuitions are often stable, but also (...) that people have introspective awareness of this stability, providing a promising means by which to assess the epistemic value of our intuitions. (shrink)

Strategic ignorance is a widespread phenomenon. In a laboratory setting, many participants avoid learning information about the consequences of their behaviour in order to act egoistically. In real life, many consumers avoid information about their purchases or the working conditions in which they were produced in order to retain their lifestyle. The question is whether agents are blameworthy for such strategically ignorant behaviour. In this paper, I explore quality of will resources, according to which agents are blameworthy, roughly, depending on (...) their moral concern. The account I will propose—the Maximal Account—has three innovative features: it utilizes a suitable concept of maximal moral concern, it offers an accountability version of the account which significantly differs from the more familiar attributability variant, and it maintains that agents without maximal concern are blameworthy. (shrink)

Brown (The laboratory of the mind. Thought experiments in the natural science, 1991a , 1991b ; Contemporary debates in philosophy of science, 2004 ; Thought experiments, 2008 ) argues that thought experiments (TE) in science cannot be arguments and cannot even be represented by arguments. He rest his case on examples of TEs which proceed through a contradiction to reach a positive resolution (Brown calls such TEs “platonic”). This, supposedly, makes it impossible to represent them as arguments for logical reasons: (...) there is no logic that can adequately model such phenomena. (Brown further argues that this being the case, “platonic” TEs provide us with irreducible insight into the abstract realm of laws of nature). I argue against this approach by describing how “platonic” TEs can be modeled within the logical framework of adaptive proofs for prioritized consequence operations. To show how this mundane apparatus works, I use it to reconstruct one of the key examples used by Brown, Galileo’s TE involving falling bodies. (shrink)

Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitive science, the set of imaginative processes (...) is then divided into two kinds: one that is unconscious, uncontrolled, and effortless, and another that is conscious, controlled, and effortful. This paper outlines the different epistemological strengths and weaknesses of the two kinds of imaginative process, and argues that a dual process model of imagination helpfully resolves or clarifies issues in the epistemology of imagination and the closely related epistemology of thought experiments. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities may reflect (...) an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

This paper outlines a new method for identifying folk intuitions to complement armchair intuiting and experimental philosophy, and thereby enrich the philosopher’s toolkit. This new approach—trope analysis—depends not on what people report their intuitions to be but rather on what they have made and engaged with; I propose that tropes in fiction reveal which theories, concepts and ideas we find intuitive, repeatedly and en masse. Imagination plays a dual role in both existing methods and this new approach: it enables us (...) to create the scenarios that elicit our intuitions, and also to mentally represent them. The method I propose allows us to leverage the imagination of the many rather than the few on both counts—scenarios are both created and consumed by the folk themselves. (shrink)

This article criticizes what it calls perspectival thought experiments, which require subjects to mentally simulate a perspective before making judgments from within it. Examples include Judith Thomson's violinist analogy, Philippa Foot's trolley problem, and Bernard Williams's Jim case. The article argues that advances in the philosophical and psychological study of empathy suggest that the simulative capacities required by perspectival thought experiments are all but impossible. These thought experiments require agents to consciously simulate necessarily unconscious features of subjectivity. To complete these (...) experiments subjects must deploy theory-theoretical frameworks to predict what they think they would do. These outputs, however, systematically mislead subjects and are highly prone to error. They are of negligible probative value, and this bodes poorly for their continued use. The article ends with two suggestions. First, many thought experiments are not problematically perspectival. Second, it should be possible to carry out “in-their-shoes” perspectival thought experiments by off-loading simulations onto virtual environments into which philosophers place subjects. (shrink)

This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...) paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach. (shrink)

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain (...) normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. (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)

This paper motivates, explains, and defends a new account of the content of thought experiments. I begin by briefly surveying and critiquing three influential accounts of thought experiments: James Robert Brown’s Platonist account, John Norton’s deflationist account that treats them as picturesque arguments, and a cluster of views that I group together as mental model accounts. I use this analysis to motivate a set of six desiderata for a new approach. I propose that we treat thought experiments primarily as aesthetic (...) objects, specifically fictions, and then use this analysis to characterize their content and ultimately assess their epistemic success. Taking my starting point from Kendall Walton’s account of representation (Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990), I argue that the best way to understand the content of thought experiments is to treat them as props for imagining fictional worlds. Ultimately, I maintain that, in terms of their form and content, thought experiments share more with literary fictions and pictorial representations than with either argumentation or observations of the Platonic realm. Moreover, while they inspire imaginings, thought experiments themselves are not mental kinds. My approach redirects attention towards what fixes the content of any given thought experiment and scrutinizes the assumptions, cognitive capacities and conventions that generate them. This view helps to explain what seems plausible about Brown’s, Norton’s, and the mental modelers’ views. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized (...) scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analyzed. (shrink)

A "good" arguer is like an architect with a penchant for civil and civic engineering. Such an arguer can design and present their reasons artfully about a variety of topics, as good architects do with a plenitude of structures and in various environments. Failures in this are rarely hidden for long, as poor constructions reveal themselves, often spectacularly, so collaboration among civical engineers can be seen as a virtue. Our logical virtues should be analogous. When our arguments fail due to (...) being uncivil and demagogic, since we inhabit the arguments we build, we are all crushed beneath our flawed reasoning. This mixed metaphor takes us to a self-referential analysis of argumentation, analogy, and humor. I argue that good argumentation strives to collaboratively convince rather than belligerently persuade. A convincing means toward this end is through humorous analogical arguments, whether the matter at hand is ethical, logical, theological, phenomenological, epistemological, metaphysical, political, or about baseball. (shrink)

This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to the abuse of (...) described cases; they identify no special problem with fanciful examples. (shrink)

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predominant way to approach theories formulated as conditional or biconditional statements. In this paper, we examine selected theories of musical expressivity presented in such logical forms, analyzing the possibilities for constructing thought experiments (...) against them. We will argue that philosophical intuitions are not available for the evaluation of the types of counterarguments that would need to be constructed. Instead, the evaluation of these theories, to the extent that it can succeed at all, will centrally rely on inferential, non-immediate access to our subjective musical experiences. Furthermore, attempted thought experiments lose their methodological function because no proper distinction can be drawn between the persons figuring in the thought-experimental scenario and the evaluator of the scenario. Consequently, some of the central contributions to what is generally understood to be analytic philosophy of art are shown to represent a form of aesthetic criticism, offering much less basis for rational argumentation than is often thought. (shrink)

Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) commonly been assumed. However, these methods may still provide insight into some human strategies for navigating unfamiliar moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Intuition-based argumentation is ubiquitous across most philosophical subfields. Moral and political philosophers in particular frequently justify normative principles on the basis of thought experiments that evoke judgments about specific (hypothetical) cases. Lately, however, intuitions have come under attack and their justificatory force is being questioned. This essay asks whether we can acknowledge the epistemic fallibility of intuitions, while nevertheless reaching reliable normative conclusions. To that effect I investigate three different strategies of relating specific intuitions and more general normative principles: the (...) intuitionist, coherentist, and foundationalist methods. Showing that none of them succeeds in making up for the problematic epistemic status of intuitions in the justificatory process, I conclude that normative principles are unreliable to the extent that they are based on thought-experiments. (shrink)

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophical objections; however, our project (...) is as much constructive as critical. Building on Thomson's philosophical argument, we report the results of a study that was designed to examine commonsense intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice. We find that a surprisingly high proportion of people judge that they should give up their lives to save a small number of unknown strangers. We also find that the willingness to engage in such altruistic self-sacrifice is predicted by a person's religious commitments. Finally, we show that folk-moral judgments are sensitive to agent-relative reasons in a way that diverges in important ways from Thomson's proposed intuitions about the trolley problem. With this in mind, we close with a discussion of the relative merits of folk intuitions and philosophical intuitions in constructing a viable moral theory. (shrink)

What does global justice or charity requires us to give to other people? There is a large theoretical literature on this question. There is much less experimental work in political philosophy relevant to answering it. Perhaps for this reason, this literature has yet to have any major impact on theoretical discussions of global justice or charity. There is, however, some experimental research in behavioral economics that has helped to shape the field and a few relevant studies by political philosophers. This (...) paper reviews this research. Moreover, it argues that the little work that has been done can offer some methodological lessons to empirically engaged philosophers of many kinds. Finally, it suggests that there is reason for those interested in global ethics and charitable giving to consider doing new kinds of experimental and other empirical work in addition to traditional experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of scientific research into the nature of our moral psychology that demonstrates that human morality is fully grounded in the natural world and, thus, part of our evolved nature. Yet, many, if not most, scholars in the social sciences and humanities remain sceptical or pessimistic. Looking at a number of these recurrent concerns, I identify the source of this resistance as ‘moral creationism’: a set of beliefs, grounded in relativism and romanticism, (...) about morality as irreducibly complex, holistic and non-decomposable, and that, therefore, implicates the scientific approach to morality as irrelevant, misguided, or in the extreme, itself somehow taboo or unethical. I demonstrate that moral creationism is intellectually unfounded by examining evidence on moral diversity and universality, moral and conventional norms, emotion and reasoning in moral judgment, moral conflict, moral progress and religion and morality. I argue that rejecting moral creationism not only prevents an inaccurate view of our moral psychology, but also has implications for the plausibility and justification of various normative theories, for reforming the practice of moral philosophy and can inform applied ethical areas. Without the protective strategy of moral creationism as a default position, humanists as well as scientists will both benefit as already fruitful inquiry, constructive engagement, collaboration and incorporation of novel investigative methods across disciplines can continue to grow. (shrink)

In recent years, experimental philosophers have questioned the reliance of philosophical arguments on intuitions elicited by thought experiments. These challenges seek to undermine the use of this methodology for a particular domain of theorizing, and in some cases to raise doubts about the viability of philosophical work in the domain in question. The topic of semantic reference has been an important area for discussion of these issues, one in which critics of the reliance on intuitions have made particularly strong claims (...) about the prospects for philosophical theories of reference and arguments based on claims about reference. In this article, I review the main lines of argument in this area of experimental philosophy, with particular emphasis on the relevance of empirical data about intuitions to philosophical views. I argue that although traditional philosophical theorizing about reference faces little threat from experimental data about intuitions, there is nevertheless much to be gained from collecting and analyzing such data, which holds the promise of greatly enriching our conception of the mechanisms governing judgments about semantic reference in ways that are highly relevant to philosophers. (shrink)

I propose that paradigmatic cases of self-deception satisfy the following conditions: (a) the person who is self-deceived about not-P pretends (in the sense of makes-believe or imagines or fantasizes) that not-P is the case, often while believing that P is the case and not believing that not-P is the case; (b) the pretense that not-P largely plays the role normally played by belief in terms of (i) introspective vivacity and (ii) motivation of action in a wide range of circumstances. Understanding (...) self-deception in this way is highly natural. And it provides a non-paradoxical characterization of the phenomenon that explains both its distinctive patterns of instability and its ordinary association with irrationality. Why, then, has this diagnosis been overlooked? I suggest that the oversight is due to a failure to recognize the philosophical significance of a crucial fact about the human mind, namely, the degree to which attitudes other than belief often play a central role in our mental and practical lives, both by "influenc[ing our]... passions and imagination," and by "governing.. .our actions.". (shrink)

I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate (...) control. (shrink)

I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by non‐conscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation and deliberate (...) control. (shrink)

The invention of the computer has revolutionized science. With respect to finding the essential structures of life, for example, it has enabled scientists not only to investigate empirical examples, but also to create and study novel hypothetical variations by means of simulation: ‘life as it could be’. We argue that this kind of research in the field of artificial life, namely the specification, implementation and evaluation of artificial systems, is akin to Husserl’s method of free imaginative variation as applied to (...) the specific regional ontology of biology. Thus, at a time when the clarification of the essence of our biological embodiment is of growing interest for phenomenology, we suggest that artificial life should be seen as a method of externalizing some of the insurmountable complexity of imaginatively varying the phenomenon of life. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special issue of Perspectives on Science, the outcome of a workshop entitled "Thought Experiments in Science: Four Blind Spots," held at the University of Toronto, March 23rd, 2012. The recent revival in philosophical study of thought experiments has been limited to fields like epistemology, science studies, and metaphilosophy. With this issue we hope to facilitate a discussion about how some other disciplinary perspectives might bear on the subject; specifically, the history of philosophy, literary studies, (...) phenomenology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Counterfactual reasoning has been used to account for many aspects of scientific reasoning. More recently, it has also been used to account for the scientific practice of modeling. Truth in a model is truth in a situation considered as counterfactual. When we reason with models, we reason with counterfactuals. Focusing on selected models like Bohr’s atom model or models of population dynamics, I present an account of how the imaginative development of a counterfactual supposition leads us from reality to interesting (...) model assumptions; how it guides our reasoning from these assumptions to interesting consequences for the model scenario via counterfactual entailment; and how it leads us back to conclusions on real target phenomena. (shrink)

We report two experiments exploring the perception of how contemporary philosophy is often conducted. We find that (1) participants associate philosophy with the practice of conducting thought experiments and collating intuitions about them, and (2) that this form of inquiry is viewed much less favourably than the typical form of inquiry in psychology: research conducted by teams using controlled experiments and observation. We also found (3) an effect whereby relying on intuition is viewed more favorably in the context of team (...) inquiry than in individual inquiry and (4) that greater prior exposure to philosophy lowered one’s opinion of inquiry driven by intuitions and thought experiments. Finally with respect to participant gender, we found that (5) women favored observation over intuition more than men did, and (6) tended to view a question pursued by a research team as more important than men viewed it. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \ is a way for them to \. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to \ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \, then an agent cannot both know (...) how to \ and fail to believe that w, the way that she \s, is a way for her to \. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like “implicit beliefs”—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism. (shrink)

In some domains experts perform better than novices, and in other domains experts do not generally perform better than novices. According to empirical studies of expert performance, this is because the former but not the latter domains make available to training practitioners a direct form of learning feedback. Several philosophers resource this empirical literature to cast doubt on the quality of philosophical expertise. They claim that philosophy is like the dubious domains in that it does not make available the good, (...) direct kind of learning feedback, and thus there are empirical grounds for doubting the epistemic quality of philosophical expertise. I examine the empirical studies that are purportedly bad news for professional philosophers. On the basis of that examination, I provide three reasons why the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise does not undermine the status of philosophical expertise. First, the non-philosophical task-types from which the critics generalize are unrepresentative of relevant philosophical task-types. Second, empirical critiques of non-philosophical experts are often made relative to the performance of linear models—a comparison that is inapt in a philosophical context. Third, the critics fail to discuss findings from the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise that have more favorable implications for the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. In addition to discussing implications for philosophical expertise, this article makes progress in the philosophical analysis of the science of expertise and expert development. (shrink)

In domains like stock brokerage, clinical psychiatry, and long‐term political forecasting, experts generally fail to outperform novices. Empirical researchers agree on why this is: experts must receive direct or environmental learning feedback during training to develop reliable expertise, and these domains are deficient in this type of feedback. A growing number of philosophers resource this consensus view to argue that, given the absence of direct or environmental philosophical feedback, we should not give the philosophical intuitions or theories of expert philosophers (...) greater credence than those of novice philosophers. This article has three objectives. The first is to explore several overlooked issues concerning the strategy of generalizing from empirical studies of non‐philosophical expertise to the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. The second is to explain why empirical research into a causal relationship between direct learning feedback and enhanced expert performance does not provide good grounds for abandoning a default optimism about the epistemic superiority of expert philosophical theories. The third is to sketch a positive characterization of learning feedback that addresses developmental concerns made salient by the empirical literature on expert performance for specifically theory‐driven or “armchair” domains like philosophy. (shrink)

A widespread claim, which I call ‘the Emotionality Claim’, is that imagination but not supposition is intimately linked to emotion. In more cognitive jargon, imagination is connected to the affect system, whereas supposition is not. EC is open to several interpretations which yield very different views about the nature of supposition. The literature lacks an in-depth analysis of EC which sorts out these different readings and ways to carve supposition and imagination at their joints. The aim of this paper is (...) to fill this gap. I shall argue that existing readings of EC fail to properly account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. The tendency is to start from narrow conceptions of both imagination and supposition. I shall argue for a novel interpretation of EC pivoting on different ways a mental state can connect to the affect system. (shrink)

Deep disagreements are characteristically resistant to rational resolution. This paper explores the contribution a virtue theoretic approach to argumentation can make towards settling the practical matter of what to do when confronted with apparent deep disagreement, with particular attention to the virtue of courage.

The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use of intuitions, (...) and I note that the intuitions are of the sort had by preschool children, and that they are traceable to a deep-seated cognitive outlook, which is often called “psychological essentialism.” Further, if we did not have such a cognitive outlook or implicit belief set—a belief set which is in fact in place by at least age 4—then we would not have the relevant philosophical intuitions. In light of this, I consider the question of whether natural kinds actually have scientifically discovered or discoverable essences, and whether these putative essences could determine the extensions of our terms and concepts as Kripke, Putnam, and many others have supposed. In fact, a number of philosophers of biology and chemistry have argued that biological and chemical kinds do not have such essences, yet these arguments—particularly in the case of chemistry—have not been assimilated by philosophers more generally. The reason for this poor assimilation is, I suggest, that the Kripke/Putnam view is just so intuitive. But this fact, I argue, is due to a deep-seated cognitive bias, rather than to any special insight into the nature of reality. (shrink)

Oppression is easily recognized. That is, at least, when oppression results from overt, consciously professed racism, for example, in which violence, explicit exclusion from economic opportunities, denial of adequate legal access, and open discrimination perpetuate the subjugation of a group of people. There are relatively clear legal remedies to such oppression. But this is not the case with covert oppression where the psychological harms and resulting legal and economic exclusion are every bit as real, but caused by concealed mechanisms subtly (...) and systematically employed. In many cases, those with power and privilege use cultural stereotypes in order to sustain an unjust status quo. This is so even if the biases are implicit, automatic, and contrary to the consciously professed beliefs of the stereotyper. Furthermore, since many of these biases are not consciously reasoned into one's system of beliefs, and since they are notoriously difficult to bring to consciousness and dislodge via direct, logical confrontation, some other creative means of resistance is needed. I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious matters, but in a playful manner that fosters creative and critical thinking, and cultivates a desire and skill for recognizing incongruities between our professed ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards. Successful subversive wits create fictional scenarios that highlight such moral incongruities, but, like philosophical thought experiments, they reveal a moral truth that also holds in the real world. Such humor offers opportunities for "border crossing" where the audience is encouraged to see from the perspectives of marginalized people who, because they inhabit ambiguous spaces in between the dominant and subordinate spheres, are in an epistemically privileged position with respect to matters of oppression. Subversive humorists open their audiences to the lived experiences of others, uncover the absurdities of otherwise covert oppression, and appeal to our desire to be truthful and just. (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)

Often philosophers have reason to ask fundamental questions about the aims, methods, nature, or value of their own discipline. When philosophers systematically examine such questions, the resulting work is sometimes referred to as “metaphilosophy.” Metaphilosophy, it should be said, is not a well-established, or clearly demarcated, field of philosophical inquiry like epistemology or the philosophy of art. However, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries there has been a great deal of metaphilosophical work on issues concerning the methodology of (...) philosophy in the analytic tradition. This article focuses on that work. (shrink)