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Intuitions, reflective judgments, and experimental philosophy

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Abstract

Experimental philosophers are often puzzled as to why many armchair philosophers question the philosophical significance of their research. Armchair philosophers, in contrast, are often puzzled as to why experimental philosophers think their work sheds any light on traditional philosophical problems. I argue there is truth on both sides.

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Notes

  1. See Weinberg et al. (2001), Nahmias et al. (2006), and Chituc et al. (2016).

  2. For similar suggestions, see Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007), Knobe and Nichols (2008), and Sommers (2011).

  3. For a contrary view, see Deutsch (2010, 2015) and Cappelen (2012). For replies, see Bengson (2014), Weinberg (2014), and Nado (2016).

  4. For overviews of this literature, see Knobe and Nichols (2008, 2013), Alexander (2012), Machery and O’Neill (2014), Lombrozo et al. (2014), and Sytsma and Buckwalter (2016).

  5. Buckwalter and Turri (2015) also provide evidence that participants sometimes make judgments that do not accord with OIC, but they do not explore the cognitive underpinnings of these judgments.

  6. These cases are adapted from Sinnott-Armstrong (1984).

  7. This was a within-subjects study, and the order in which participants read the two scenarios didn’t affect their responses.

  8. The authors of this study do not use the word ‘intuition’ to describe their data, but as I’ve defined this notion it is clearly what they have in mind.

  9. Admittedly, it is difficult to distinguish among students (a) merely clarifying an earlier statement, (b) revising their opinion of an earlier statement, and (c) changing what they say, without changing their opinion, in response to social cues. In a weak attempt to screen off (b) and (c), I chose to start the discussion by asking students to clarify their own responses, rather than by trying to interpret their responses myself and asking if they agreed. After several students indicated they meant (something like) “Adams ought to have been there at noon”, I tried to clarify this view and, once I did, several students who made the ‘ought’ attribution in highblame said (something like) “That’s exactly what I meant”. People can of course be mistaken about what they thought they meant, but I think we should take at least some of these students at their word.

  10. Two participants were excluded for failing a comprehension check: they both agreed and disagreed with the same statement across two questions.

  11. Five participants (8%) who agreed with the initial ‘ought’ attribution picked option (C), indicating that neither option adequately described their opinion.

  12. Thank you to Mike Stuart for analyzing the data in this section.

  13. To their credit, the research team was sensitive to the possibility of ambiguity: that’s part of the motivation for how they designed their second experiment, which tested whether their findings were distorted by blame validation. However, this follow-up study was not designed to rule out the type of ambiguity I am positing.

  14. Recognition that these intuitive disagreements might be verbal can be found even within the experimentalist movement itself (e.g. Nichols and Ulatowski 2007).

  15. See DeRose (1999: p. 2), Cohen (1999: p. 62), and Schiffer (1996: p. 317).

  16. This section provides a condensed version of the argument made in (Hannon 2017), but it also makes an important revision. In my earlier work, I contrasted ‘surface intuitions’ with ‘reflective intuitions’. I now think this is a mistake. The relevant reflective judgments need not be intuitive at all, so I now contrast intuitions with reflective judgments.

  17. This is an empirical claim that must be tested. Later I will argue that the simple survey method used by NSW (and many other experimental philosophers) is an inadequate tool to test this claim.

  18. This claim is similar to an idea that has been defended elsewhere, namely, that the intuitions being tested by the experimentalists are not the philosophically relevant ones (see Williamson 2005; Kornblith 2007; Ludwig 2007; Kauppinen 2007; Deutsch 2010). In Sect. 4, however, I will argue that my view is distinct from these other proposals in several important ways.

  19. In an earlier study, NSW consider two versions of this objection (Weinberg et al. 2001; reprinted 2008: p. 39). The first version is this: they are looking at the wrong sorts of intuitions, since the right sort require at least a modicum of reflection. In reply, NSW maintain their participants did reflect “at least minimally”, as evidenced by the fact that some participants wrote brief explanatory comments after their answers. But this reply is not persuasive for two reasons: first, there is no evidence that the subjects in their 2003 study on skepticism were provided with a similar opportunity to explain their answers; and second, even if subjects were given this opportunity to reflect, more than a modicum of reflection may be necessary for some people to find skepticism intuitive. NSW then consider a second version of this objection: that the right sorts of intuitions are those that emerge after an extensive period of discussion and reflection, which is the sort philosophy typically encourages. In response, they doubt that people’s reflective judgments will differ from their intuitions. However, this view cannot be convincingly maintained without argument.

  20. I am assuming these people can be led to feel skeptical anxiety on a rational basis (rather than, say, the use of rhetoric or a drug). If most people can be led to feel the force of skepticism in this way, it would suggest there is some shared core to our epistemic judgments and that skepticism is a part of it.

  21. Williamson (2007), Deutsch (2010), and Cappelen (2012).

  22. See Kauppinen (2007) and Ludwig (2007).

  23. Weinberg et al. (2013) use two measures to operationalize the difference between intuitions and reflective judgments: need for cognition (Cacioppo and Petty 1982) and cognitive reflection (Frederick 2005). However, they acknowledge there might be better ways to operationalize this distinction, and Kauppinen (2007) doubts that we can adequately operationalize these notions without giving up the non-participatory social scientific method used by experimental philosophers. Kauppinen says the only way to make sure that a particular response genuinely reflects the respondent’s concept is to abandon experimental philosophy and the engage in dialogue with the subject.

  24. However, some people doubt that reflection improves our reliability (see Kornblith 2012).

  25. Two studies that indicate a significant difference between lay people and professional philosophers are Sytsma and Machery (2010) and Horvath and Wiegmann (2016). However, some studies do not report any difference between philosophers and lay people, such as Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012).

  26. Likewise, Cappelen (2012) argues that philosophers do not rely upon intuitions as evidence when theorizing, though they may occasionally slip up with talk of ‘intuitions’.

  27. One might define ‘expertise’ as the having ability to “grasp the relevant aspects of the hypothetical case considered” (Grundmann 2010: p. 500), but that would make the need for expertise a fairly trivial requirement.

  28. Williamson claims that Gettier’s argument, when properly understood, does not rely on intuitions (2007: pp. 184–186). For Williamson, our evidence that knowledge isn’t justified true belief doesn’t consist of our intuitions that it is possible for someone to have a justified true belief that p without knowing that p. Rather, it consists of the fact that it is possible for someone to have a justified true belief that p without knowing that p. This does not appeal to intuitions as evidence but rather to facts about the world. However, the ‘thin’ conception of intuitions I’m working with leaves room for intuitions to be simple counterfactual judgments about contingent matters of fact, as Williamson contends. Further, Alexander (2010: pp. 382–383) convincingly argues that even if Gettier’s argument can be reformulated to not mention psychological facts about us (as Deutsch claims), this argument must still indirectly appeal to intuitions as evidence.

  29. Some data suggests that Gettier intuitions display more variability than philosophers have thought (Weinberg et al. 2001), but this data has been heavily criticized (Machery et al. 2015).

  30. Stich and Weinberg (2001: p. 642) raise this objection against Jackson (1998).

  31. In an earlier study, Weinberg et al. (2001) use this approach to identify subjects who treat ‘knowledge’ as synonymous with ‘subjective certainty’.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Elizabeth Edenberg, Mike Stuart, and two anonymous referees for very helpful feedback.

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    Michael Hannon

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Hannon, M. Intuitions, reflective judgments, and experimental philosophy. Synthese 195, 4147–4168 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1412-1

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