An argument is epistemically self-defeating when either the truth of an argument’s conclusion or belief in an argument’s conclusion defeats one’s justification to believe at least one of that argument’s premises. Some extant defenses of the evidentiary value of intuition have invoked considerations of epistemic self-defeat in their defense. I argue that there is one kind of argument against intuition, an unreliability argument, which, even if epistemically self-defeating, can still imply that we are not justified in thinking intuition has evidentiary (...) value. (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)

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced (...) by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

Abstract: Some proponents of “experimental philosophy” criticize philosophers' use of thought experiments on the basis of evidence that the verdicts vary with truth-independent factors. However, their data concern the verdicts of philosophically untrained subjects. According to the expertise defence, what matters are the verdicts of trained philosophers, who are more likely to pay careful attention to the details of the scenario and track their relevance. In a recent article, Jonathan M. Weinberg and others reply to the expertise defence that there (...) is no evidence for such expertise. They now receive a reply in this article, which argues that they have misconstrued the dialectical situation. Since they have produced no evidence that philosophical training is less efficacious for thought experimentation than for other cognitive tasks for which they acknowledge that it produces genuine expertise, such as informal argumentation, they have produced no evidence for treating the former more sceptically than the latter. (shrink)

In this paper I survey some recent developments in experimental philosophy and discuss their bearing on two leading theories in epistemology: Contextualism and Interest Relative Invariantism. In the first part of the paper, I survey some general issues of how experimental philosophy may be relevant to assessing contextualism and IRI. In the second part, I discuss and critique some of the recent experimental work.

It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...) I argue that the psychological claim — that a capacity for mental simulation explains our intuitive judgements — does not, even if true, provide reasons to reject rationalism. (More generally, a simulation hypothesis, about any category of judgements, is very limited in its epistemological implications: it is pitched at a level of explanation that is insensitive to central epistemic distinctions.) I also argue that Williamson’s semantic claim — that intuitive judgements are judgements of counterfactuals — is mistaken; rather, I propose, they are a certain kind of metaphysical possibility judgement. Several other competing proposals are also examined and criticized. (shrink)

In a recent paper Weinberg (2007) claims that there is an essential mark of trustworthiness which typical sources of evidence as perception or memory have, but philosophical intuitions lack, namely that we are able to detect and correct errors produced by these “hopeful” sources. In my paper I will argue that being a hopeful source isn't necessary for providing us with evidence. I then will show that, given some plausible background assumptions, intuitions at least come close to being hopeful, if (...) they are reliable. If this is true, Weinberg's new challenge comes down to the claim that philosophical intuitions are not reliable since they are significantly unstable. In the second part of my paper I will argue that and why the experimentally established instability of folk intuitions about philosophical cases does not show that philosopher's expert intuitions about these cases are instable. (shrink)

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and contextualism. While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, (...) an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially prescriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative prescriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. Our main goal in this paper is to show that the standard argument against naturalized epistemology has it almost exactly backwards. (shrink)

What are intuitions? According to doxastic views, they are doxastic attitudes or dispositions, such as judgments or inclinations to make judgments. According to perceptualist views, they are—like perceptual experiences—pre-doxastic experiences that—unlike perceptual experiences—represent abstract matters as being a certain way. In this paper I argue against doxasticism and in favor of perceptualism. I describe two features that militate against doxasticist views of perception itself: perception is belief-independent and perception is presentational. Then I argue that intuitions also have both features. The (...) upshot is that intuitions are importantly similar to perceptual experiences, and so should not be identified with doxastic attitudes or dispositions. I consider a popular argument from the introspective absence of sui generis intuition experiences in favor of doxasticism. I develop a conception of intuition experiences that helps to defuse this argument. (shrink)

Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit (...) theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity. (shrink)

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to (...) reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism , the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for (...) two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys. (shrink)

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...) participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. (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)

How ought we to go about forming and revising our beliefs, arguing and debating our reasons, and investigating our world? If those questions constitute normative epistemology, then I am interested here in normative metaepistemology: the investigation into how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs about how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs -- how we ought to argue about how we ought to argue. Such investigations have become urgent of late, for the (...) methodology of epistemology has reached something of a crisis. For analytic epistemology of the last half-century has relied overwhelmingly on intuitions,1 and a growing set of arguments and data has begun to call this reliance on intuition seriously into question (e.g., Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich 2001; Nichols, Stich, and Weinberg 2003; Cummins 1998). Although that method has not been entirely without defenders (BonJour 1998; Bealer 1996; Jackson 1998; Sosa forthcoming; Weatherson 2003), these defenses have not generally risen to the specific challenges leveled by the anti-intuitionist critics. In particular, the critics have attacked specific ways of deploying intuitions, and the defenders have overwhelmingly responded with in-principle defenses of the cogency of appealing to intuition. An analogy here would be someone’s responding to arguments alleging systematic.. (shrink)

Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...) compatibilist denies that determinism has the consequences the incompatibilist thinks it has. According to the compatibilist, the truth of determinism does not preclude the existence of free will. (Even if we learned tomorrow that determinism is true, it might still be true that we have free will.) The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of understanding, how, if at all, the truth of determinism might be compatible with the truth of our belief that we have free will. That is, it's the problem of deciding who is right: the compatibilist or the incompatibilist. (shrink)

Recently Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder found that folk attributions of valuing tend to vary according to the perceived moral goodness of the object of value. This is an interesting finding, but it remains unclear what, precisely, it means. Knobe and Roedder argue that it indicates that the concept MORAL GOODNESS is a feature of the concept VALUING. In this article, I present a study of folk attributions of desires and moral beliefs that undermines this conclusion. I then propose the (...) beginnings of an alternative interpretation of the data that appeals to intrinsic biases in our third-person mindreading mechanisms. (shrink)

Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief? Only if we have reason to trust intuition here. But intuitions are unreliable in a wide range of cases. And it can be argued that the Gettier intuitions have a greater resemblance to unreliable intuitions than to reliable intuitions. Whats distinctive about the faulty intuitions, I argue, is that respecting them would mean abandoning a (...) simple, systematic and largely successful theory in favour of a complicated, disjunctive and idiosyncratic theory. So maybe respecting the Gettier intuitions was the wrong reaction, we should instead have been explaining why we are all so easily misled by these kinds of cases. (shrink)

A heuristic is a rule of thumb. In psychology, heuristics are relatively simple rules for making judgments. A fast heuristic is easy to use and allows one to make judgments quickly. A frugal heuristic relies on a small fraction of the available evidence in making judgments. Typically, fast and frugal heuristics (FFHs) have, or are claimed to have, a further property: They are very reliable, yielding judgments that are about as accurate in the long run as ideal non-fast, non-frugal rules. (...) This paper introduces some well-known examples of FFHs, raises some objections to the FFH program, and looks at the implications of those parts of the FFH program about which we can have some reasonable degree of confidence. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has recently argued that few mental states are luminous , meaning that to be in that state is to be in a position to know that you are in the state. His argument rests on the plausible principle that beliefs only count as knowledge if they are safely true. That is, any belief that could easily have been false is not a piece of knowledge. I argue that the form of the safety rule Williamson uses is inappropriate, and (...) the correct safety rule might not conflict with luminosity. (shrink)

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; (...) the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is the name for a recent movement whose participants use the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates. Given both the breadth of the research being carried out by experimental philosophers and the controversial nature of some of their central methodological assumptions, it is of no surprise that their work has recently come under attack. In this paper we (...) respond to some criticisms of experimental philosophy that have recently been put forward by Antti Kauppinen. Unlike the critics of experimental philosophy, we do not think the fledgling movement either will or should fall before it has even had a chance to rise up to explain what it is, what it seeks to do (and not to do), and exactly how it plans to do it. Filling in some of the salient details is the main goal of the present paper. (shrink)

At the intersection of social and virtue epistemology lies the important, yet so far entirely neglected, project of articulating the social dimensions of epistemic virtues. Perhaps the most obvious way in which epistemic virtues might be social is that they may be possessed by social collectives. We often speak of groups as if they could instantiate epistemic virtues. It is tempting to think of these expressions as ascribing virtues not to the groups themselves, but to their members. Adapting Margaret Gilbert's (...) arguments against individualist accounts of collective beliefs, I show that individualist accounts of group virtues are either too weak or too strong. I then formulate a non-individualist account modeled after Gilbert's influential account of collective beliefs. A crucial disanalogy between collective traits and beliefs, I argue, makes the success of this model unlikely. I conclude with some questions with which the future work on collective epistemic virtues should engage. (shrink)

Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science – systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it is now generally agreed that experimental philosophers have made surprising discoveries about people's intuitions in each of these areas, (...) considerable disagreement remains about the philosophical significance of the key findings. Some have argued that work in experimental philosophy should be assessed by asking whether it can contribute to the kind of inquiry that is normally pursued within analytic philosophy, while others suggest that work in experimental philosophy is best understood as a contribution to a more traditional sort of philosophical inquiry that long predates the birth of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that contemplation of an imaginary particular may have cognitive and motivational effects that differ from those evoked by an abstract description of an otherwise similar state of affairs. In his Treatise on Human Nature, Hume ([1739] 1978) writes forcefully of this.

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...) (Weinberg et al. 2001). In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and the paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference. (shrink)

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for (...) our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be making some empirical assumptions about people’s intuitions and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, though it is far from clear exactly what these empirical assumptions are. Moreover, on what is perhaps the most natural reading, he is making at least one assumption about which many cognitive scientists who study concepts have serious doubts. In the first of our two sections, we will elaborate this theme. Our goal, in that section, is not so much to criticize as to seek clarification. It is a great virtue of this journal’s multiple review format that critics can pose questions to authors, and the authors get to reply. So we hope that in his reply Jackson will help us understand his defense of conceptual analysis by explaining more clearly what his empirical assumptions are; and if he is indeed making an assumption that many cognitive scientists would challenge, we hope he will tell us why he thinks that challenge is misguided. In the second section, our stance will be more critical. There is one empirical assumption about which Jackson is admirably clear and explicit. However, we think there is now good reason to think that this assumption is false. (shrink)

While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...) surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up. (shrink)

To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...) appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted. (shrink)

This article argues that heuristics play a key role in philosophy, in generating both our verdicts on proposed counterexamples to philosophical theories and philosophical paradoxes. Heuristics are efficient ways of answering questions, quick and easy to use, but imperfectly reliable. They have been studied by psychologists and cognitive scientists such as Gigerenzer and Kahneman, but their relevance to philosophical methodology has not been properly recognized. Several heuristics are discussed at length. Thepersistence heuristiccan be summarized in the slogan ‘Small changes don’t (...) matter’. Without it, updating would present an intractable problem for both natural and artificial intelligence. But our reliance on the persistence heuristic also makes us vulnerable to paradoxes of vagueness.Disquotational heuristicsof various kinds are considered. They play central roles in our ascriptions of truth, falsity, and belief, but they also generate semantic paradoxes such as the Liar and Frege puzzles about coreference. The use of an additive heuristic for combining reasons is also discussed. Our reliance on fallible heuristics in philosophy does not make philosophical knowledge impossible, just as our reliance on fallible heuristics in perception does not make perceptual knowledge impossible. Nevertheless, it should motivate us to take a more critical attitude to our data. By identifying and analyzing the heuristics on which we rely, we may be able to work out where they make us most vulnerable to error. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma (Luck, 2009a) is a paradox concerning the moral permissibility of two types of acts performed within computer games. Some attempt to resolve the dilemma by finding a relevant difference between these two acts (Bartel, 2012; Patridge, 2013; Young, 2016; Nader, 2020; Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, 2020; and Milne & Ivankovic, 2021), or to dissolve the dilemma by arguing that the permissibility of these acts is not as they seem (Ali, 2015; Ramirez, 2020). More recently some have attempted to resist the (...) dilemma by undermining the intuitions supporting it (Montefiore & Formosa, 2022; Formosa et al., 2023). The purpose of this paper is to consider what might follow from such resistance. (shrink)

Can a minority agent, Jamal, discriminate against a majority agent, Dave, conceptually speaking? Taking an experimental-philosophical approach, this article addresses the conceptual puzzle by investigating both the ordinary usage of discrimination and whether the academic literature reflects the folk concept. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of discrimination as it is used across the discrimination research field. The analysis produces two novel definitions of discrimination: a symmetric conception, which implies multi-directionality, and an asymmetric conception, which implies uni-directionality. Then, I empirically (...) investigate the US lay concept of discrimination (N = 1,487). The highlight of the paper is an experiment on whether US ordinary usage is symmetric or asymmetric (Study 1), tested across four contexts and three traits (Hiring: Gender, Club: Sexuality, Dating: Race, Parental: Gender). In addition, I study which groups are most often discriminated against, according to respondents, to record potential sensitivity to the frequency of discrimination (Study 2). Overall, the results show that ordinary usage in the US is symmetric across different contexts and traits, and that paradigmatic minority groups are most often discriminated against. So, according to respondents, Jamal can discriminate against Dave, although Jamal is more often discriminated against than Dave. (shrink)

The expertise defense is the best-known response by armchair philosophers to the challenge posed by experimental philosophers regarding the trustworthiness of intuitions. In a series of recent experiments, Experimental philosophers have recently focused on professional philosophers, claiming that, contrary to what the expertise defense assumes, philosophers’ intuitions are no less susceptible to the influence of irrelevant factors (the direct strategy). Additionally, drawing from literature on expertise, they contend that, unlike other domains of expertise, practice does not improve philosophers’ intuitions (the (...) indirect strategy). In this paper, adopting a skill-based perspective on expertise, my primary objective is to defend the expertise defense against both direct and indirect strategies. Based on the skill-based account, I present three arguments against the direct strategy by challenging its power, scope and methodology. Furthermore, borrowing empirical findings from recent literature on expertise, I argue against the indirect strategy that four skills that constitute philosophical expertise regarding thought experiments can be improved through various forms of practice, including deliberate practice. However, my moderate defense departs from typical versions of the expertise defense since I argue that while recent experiments by experimental philosophers cannot undermine the expertise defense, they provide valuable insights into philosophical expertise. (shrink)

A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...) take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher’s methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (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)

Heritable personality traits often predict fundamental philosophical disagreement. This conclusion is based on studies of more than 15,000 people sampled from diverse cultures and educational backgrounds, including verifiable experts. In this chapter, we review some of this research showing links between personality and philosophical bias in free will, intentional action, and ethics. Our discussion focuses on serious challenges that these philosophical biases pose (e.g., limits on the use of philosophical intuitions as evidence). We close with discussion of the Philosophical Personality (...) Argument and brief consideration of emerging projects in applied experimental philosophy. (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)

Metaethical debunking arguments often conclude that no moral belief is epistemically justified. Early versions of such arguments largely relied on metaphors and analogies and left the epistemology of debunking underspecified. Debunkers have since come to take on substantial and broad-ranging epistemological commitments. The plausibility of metaethical debunking has thereby become entangled in thorny epistemological issues. In this thesis, I provide a critical yet sympathetic evaluation of the prospects and challenges facing such arguments in light of this development. In doing so, (...) I address the following central question: how could genealogical information undermine the epistemic justification of moral beliefs? In Part I, I begin answering the central question by extracting explicit and implicit epistemic principles from three popular debunking arguments. These arguments, due to Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, and Sharon Street, generate principles concerning ontological parsimony, explanatory dispensability, epistemic insensitivity, lack of epistemic safety, unexplained reliability, epistemic coincidences, and explanatory constraints on rational belief. Having set out the principles tasked with explaining how genealogical information undermines, Part II of the thesis seeks to evaluate whether debunking arguments built on them succeed. To this end, I consider two types of challenges faced by such arguments. First, there are strategies that attempt to block global moral debunking arguments. I argue that one popular such strategy, the so-called ‘third-factor strategy’, has been misunderstood. When understood correctly, it is of no help in answering debunking arguments. I then flesh out an alternative and more promising strategy for blocking such arguments. I then turn to internal challenges facing debunkers, particularly those who rely on ‘explanationist’ principles. I argue that explanationist debunking arguments, as well as most others, fall prey to one or more of four internal challenges: the implausibility of first-order epistemic principles, the threat of overgeneralization, the threat of self-defeat, and the need for costly metaepistemic commitments. I conclude that current debunking arguments fail to establish that no moral belief is justified. By analyzing why existing arguments fail, I develop two conditions of adequacy that debunkers must satisfy in order to navigate the internal challenges successfully. I end by suggesting future directions that debunkers should pursue to rehabilitate the prospects for global moral debunking arguments. (shrink)

Mathematicians often conduct aesthetic judgements to evaluate mathematical objects such as equations or proofs. But is there a consensus about which mathematical objects are beautiful? We used a comparative judgement technique to measure aesthetic intuitions among British mathematicians, Chinese mathematicians, and British mathematics undergraduates, with the aim of assessing whether judgements of mathematical beauty are influenced by cultural differences or levels of expertise. We found aesthetic agreement both within and across these demographic groups. We conclude that judgements of mathematical beauty (...) are not strongly influenced by cultural difference, levels of expertise, and types of mathematical objects. Our findings contrast with recent studies that found mathematicians often disagree with each other about mathematical beauty. (shrink)

This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall (...) growing trend in publications in experimental philosophy, encompassing four developmental stages. Second, it found that significant changes in topics of interest have taken place, with some gaining increasing attention, others seemingly going out of fashion, and still others remaining popular constantly. Third, the study identified lists of leading philosophers, frequently cited publications, and popular journals helpful for researchers and newcomers to get a quick start in learning about the field. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers often seem to ignore or downplay the significance of demographic variation in philosophically relevant judgments. This article confirms this impression, discusses why demographic research is overlooked in experimental philosophy, and argues that variation is philosophically significant.

The crux of this paper is to provide a concentrated critical evaluation of Galen Strawson's innovative approach to the self. To that end, I will first attempt to concisely introduce his general thesis, which seems appropriate to be broken up into two major pieces: the phenomenology (experience) of the self, what the self would have to be; and the metaphysics of the self (i.e., a query refers to its metaphysics [its existence and nature]: whether there is any). Explaining and discussing (...) Strawson's twofold account of the self is my first target in this paper. And it is with these two parts that I take issues. Accordingly, I shall determinedly try to develop a counterargument according to which Strawson's establishment of his entire enterprise of the self is based merely on unjustified intuitive generalisation. Next, I will put more effort into making some more argumentative points, mainly to show how his metaphysics does not give much thought to some vital matters of the self in comparison with the systems of metaphysics of his forebears of Western philosophers. What all this means is that Strawsonian metaphysical analysis of the self so conceived and so described appears philosophically to drive itself to justly be placed in an ahistorical context. (shrink)

The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might (...) wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called ‘meta-skepticism’ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to determine the role of intuitions in Gettier cases. Critics of the Method of Cases argue that arguments developed within this method contain a premise that is justified by its intuitiveness; they also argue that intuitions are unreliable sources of evidence. By contrast, Max Deutsch argues that this critique is unsound since intuitions do not serve as evidence for premises. In Gettier cases, an intuitive premise is justified by other arguments called G-Grounds. I propose (...) a different view on the role of intuition in Gettier cases. I introduce a distinction between concept-revision arguments and concept-application arguments. On the basis of this distinction and Craig's and Spicer's distinction between intuitions of intension and intuitions of extension, I show that (1) intuitions of extension do not serve as evidence for any G-Grounds; (2) intuitions of intension do play an evidential role for all G-Grounds, but (3) in the case of G-Grounds which are used as concept-application arguments, they are a poor source of evidence, while (4) in the case of G-Grounds used as concept-revision arguments, they could be a reliable source of evidence if they are intuitions of intension of a speaker immersed in philosophical discourse. (shrink)