Jonathan M. Weinberg

Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizable group of epistemological projects-a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition-would be seliously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empilical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are hue. Much of this evidence delives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undernune their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are

Are philosophers expert intuiters

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers’ reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so theres no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers’ training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense.

Innateness as closed process invariance

Controversies over the innateness of cognitive structures play a persistent role in driving research in philosophy as well as cognitive science, but the appropriate way to understand the category of the innate remains in dispute. The invariantist approaches of Stich and Sober face counterexample cases of traits that, though developing invariantly across different environments, nonetheless are not held by nativism partisans to count as innate. Appeals to canalization (Ariew) or to psychological primitiveness (Samuels) fail to handle this liberalism problem. We suggest a novel approach to innateness: closed process invariantism.

Living with Innateness (and Environmental Dependence Too)

Griffiths and Machery contend that the concept of innateness should be dispensed with in the sciences. We contend that, once that concept is properly understood as what we have called ‘closed process invariance’, it is still of significant use in the sciences, especially cognitive science.

The “unreliability” of epistemic intuitions

According to a rather common way of thinking about philosophical methodology, philosophical intuitions play a significant role in contemporary philosophy. On this view, they are an essential part of our “standard justificatory procedure” (Bealer 1998) or the “method of standard philosophical analysis” (Pust 2000), and are part of what makes philosophical methodology unique (Levin 2004, Goldman 2007). We advance philosophical theories on the basis of their ability to explain our philosophical intuitions, and appeal to them as evidence that these theories are true and as reasons for believing as such. Although examples of this way of thinking about philosophical methodology abound, the example most frequently discussed by Kenneth Boyd and Jennifer Nagel (and passim in the literature) comes from Gettier (1963), which aims to show that knowledge is not simply justified true belief. Gettier’s paper includes two hypothetical cases involving a person who has deduced a true belief on the basis of a justified false belief and, on that basis, formed a justified true belief that doesn’t seem to count as knowledge. We are supposed to just see this, and this philosophical intuition is in turn supposed to count as sufficient evidence against the claim that a person knows that p just in case that person’s true belief that p is justified.

Two uneliminated uses for "concepts": hybrids and guides for inquiry.

Macherys case against hybrids rests on a principle that is too strong, even by his own lights. And there are likely important generalizations to be made about hybrids, if they do exist. Moreover, even if there were no important generalizations about concepts themselves, the term picks out an important class of entities and should be retained to help guide inquiry.

Competence: What's in? What's out? Who knows?

Knobes argument rests on a way of distinguishing performance errors from the competencies that delimit our cognitive architecture. We argue that other sorts of evidence than those that he appeals to are needed to illuminate the boundaries of our folk capacities in ways that would support his conclusions.

Naturalism and Intuitions: Commentary on Steven Hales, Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

Professor Hales’ highly intriguing position requires him to fend off attackers from at least two very different fronts: on the one hand, those who would defend the superiority of philosophical intuition over the likes of putative religious revelation and drug-induced hallucinations; on the other hand, those who would agree that philosophical intuitions are in the same epistemic ballpark as those other would-be sources of evidence – because all of them are just unscientific hokum. He largely addresses the former in chapter 2, and the latter in chapter 4, and it is in chapter 4 that I was pleased to find a sustained engagement with the experimental critique of philosophical intuitions that Shaun Nichols, Steve Stich, and I launched a few years ago in our ‘Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions’. 1 Hales is, of course, unpersuaded by our critiques, and argues back against them. So one of my main objectives here will be to take stock of his arguments, and try to suggest how an ‘experimental philosophy’ critic might respond. (I will be speaking only for myself, though I think that my co-authors would be in broad agreement.) But my objective will not just be self-defence, for in the process of putting forward a version of our argument that is immune to Hales’ objections, I will also be articulating a conception of philosophical practice that threatens several of the main theses of Hales’ book. Let me start with a brief recap of some of the experimental findings that should raise some doubts in the minds of would-be practitioners of what we called ‘intuition-driven romanticism’, and to which Hales responds in the book. In our 2001 study, we found surprising variation in the epistemic intuitions of people of different ethnic backgrounds. To take one example from that study, we presented a version of a Gettier case: