Joshua Alexander

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.

Putting the trolley in order: Experimental philosophy and the loop case

In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey peoples intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomsons famous Loop Case, which she used to call into question the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. We found that intuitions about the Loop Case vary according to the context in which the case is considered. We contend that this undermines the supposed evidential status of intuitions about the Loop Case. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for philosophers who rely on the Loop Case to make philosophical arguments and for philosophers who use intuitions in general.

Is experimental philosophy philosophically significant

Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to philosophy. In this paper, I defend the significance of experimental philosophy by defending the significance of intuitions—in particular, by defending their significance from a recent challenge advanced by Timothy Williamson.

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.

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.