According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, we (...) examine each perspective’s metaphilosophical implications and demonstrate that taking each perspective requires different methods. Adopting these different methods, we argue that the different interpretations of the Anti-Novelty Claim range from nearly trivially true to unlikely but untested. Importantly, we emphasize that each interpretation offers unique philosophical insights, yet addressing them requires diverse types of evidence, preventing a singular, straightforward answer to whether conceptual engineering is new. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

The paper engages in two metaphilosophical disputes. The first concerns the importance of studying original texts to establish the methods used by philosophers. The second addresses the role of intuitions in philosophical arguments. In this paper, I argue that a close reading of original texts is crucial for the methodological dispute on the role of intuitions in philosophy. I refer to the critique of this stance proposed by Landes, discuss it, and justify my claim by presenting the results and benefits (...) of a corpus study concerning the practice known as “intuition-talk” in the theory of reference. The study consists of an in-depth qualitative analysis of this practice with respect to four parameters: indicators of intuition-talk, the subject of that talk, the mode of that talk (whether intuition-talk is used by formulating a judgment on a particular case or ascribing a general property to a given phenomenon), and the issue of whether intuitive claims are supported by arguments. I discuss the results, their consequences, and outline some challenges that need to be addressed in future studies conducted within the proposed approach and thereby demonstrate why such a study, focused on the content of original texts, should be seen as metaphilosophically valuable. (shrink)