What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, the intuition is naturalistically innocuous, but it has a contingent content and could be known at best a posteriori. We suggest an alternative to Williamson’s account, according to which we apprehend thought-experiment intuitions through our grasp on truth in fiction. On our view, intuitions like the Gettier intuition are necessarily true and knowable a priori. Our view, like Williamson’s, avoids naturalistic skepticism.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here.
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[...] deviant Gettier case (what Ben Jarvis and I have also called a ‘bad Gettier case’) is a situation in which the literal text used to describe a [...]
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