Perceptual Justification and the Logic of 'Because'

Here's an invalid argument form:

1. If x is F, then that's because x is G.
2. If x is G, then x is H. Therefore,
3. If x is F, then that's because x is H.

This instance should make it obvious that this form is invalid, if it's not already obvious:

1. If Laila got an A, then that's because she received a total score of 80 or higher.
2. If Laila received a total score of 80 or higher, then she passed the course. Therefore,
3. If Laila got an A, then that's because she passed the course.

I'm not sure just what inferences are valid in the logic of this sort of 'because', but this one isn't. If there were an appropriate 'because' in premise (2), then transitivity of 'because' would establish the validity of the inference. I'm not sure whether I think 'because' is transitive'. But it's not closed under the material conditional, or even entailment.

So I think that Eli Chudnoff is mistaken in supposing that these two arguments support the idea that perceptual and intuitive justification obtains in virtue of phenomenology:

1. If your perceptual experience representing that p justifies you in believing that p, then it does so because in having this experience it is for you just like having a perceptual experience that puts you in a position to know that p.
2. If in having an experience it is for you just like having a perceptual experience that puts you in a position to know that p, then it has presentational phenomenology with respect to p.
3. So if your perceptual experience representing that p justifies you in believing that p, then it does so because it has presentational phenomenology with respect to p. (Intuition, p. 92)

1. If your intuition experience representing that p justifies you in believing that p, then it does so because in having that experience it is for you just like having an intuition experience that puts you in a position to know that p.
2. If in having an experience it is for you just like having an intuition experience that puts you in a position to know that p, then it has presentational phenomenology with respect to p.
3. So if your intuition experience representing that p justifies you in believing that p, then it does so because it has presentational phenomenology with respect to p. (Intuition, p. 97)

These arguments are invalid. The validity would, I think, be debatable if each premise (2) were strengthened into a 'because' claim. Maybe that is the most charitable interpretation of Eli here?

Review of Philosophy Without Intuitions

I've been working for a while now on a review of Herman Cappelen's book Philosophy Without Intuitions. (Here are my several blog posts about it from this fall.) I've now completed a first draft of a review. I include it in full below the jump here. (I also have a pdf here, if you prefer to read it that way.) Comments, as always, are welcome.

Arguments for Cappelen's 'Centrality'

Philosophy Without Intuitions is an extended argument against Centrality, the thesis that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence. Herman's official conclusion is that "on no sensible construal of 'intuition', 'rely on', 'philosophy', 'evidence', and 'philosopher' is it true that philosophers in general rely on intuitions as evidence when they do philosophy." The broad argumentative structure of the book is this: Herman says that defenders of Centrality don't offer arguments in its favor, but that "I take it two kinds of arguments are tacitly assumed". These two arguments he then goes on, in the two parts of his book, to consider in detail and refute.

The dialectical strategy, therefore, affords a defender of Centrality with two significant avenues of response, short of taking on Herman's arguments head-on:

• One could maintain that Centrality carries enough prima facie plausibility that it does not require argument; in the absence of compelling arguments against Centrality, it is reasonable to accept it.
• One could offer an argument for Centrality other than the two Herman considers.

With respect to (1), it may be helpful to consider an analogy. Contemporary archaeology widely assumes the existence of a mind-independent external world. Practically all archaeologists assume that the kind of idealism espoused by the late British Empiricists is false; they treat as perfectly coherent the idea, for example, that there might be a skull underground that no one will ever see or learn about. But although the assumption that there is a mind-independent external world is extremely widespread among archaeologists, one rarely sees arguments for this conclusion offered. And as philosophers well know, providing a cogent argument for this conclusion is not at all straightforward. But it's hard to take seriously the idea that this omission constitutes any serious error qua archaeologist -- we think that (a) our colleagues in the archaeology department are proceeding perfectly reasonably, and (b) their assumption is probably true, even if we're not sure how to provide an argument for it.

Can the defender of Centrality respond to Herman in a parallel fashion? To be sure, there are some differences here -- Centrality is a claim about how philosophy works, and the archaeologists' assumption is a claim about the broader world. But it's not clear why such a subject matter claim should make any important difference here. We have two claims: philosophers use intuitions as evidence, and there is an external world; both are widely assumed, and neither is given much argument. Indeed, there's a case to be made that both seem to share a deeper property as well: it is not at all clear how in principle one would go about investigating them empirically. So if one antecedently just considers it obvious that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence, I am not at all sure that one will feel compelled by anything in the book to change one's mind.

With respect to (2), I think that some philosophers have been convinced that intuitions must be playing important evidential roles, not because it is obvious from watching how philosophers work, but because of epistemological concerns. The philosopher I have in mind takes her cue from the apparent epistemological difference between certain philosophical judgments -- say, the judgment that Mr. Truetemp doesn't have knowledge -- and paradigmatic empirical judgments -- say, the judgment that it was sunny in Vancouver today. There is a straightforward perceptual story to tell about my epistemic access in the latter case; it is one that affords a central role to certain of my perceptual experiences. But it doesn't look very much like my knowledge about Mr. Truetemp works in the same kind of way. There just aren't any sensory experiences that I've had that seem relevantly akin to the visual experiences that established my perceptual knowledge. It’s all very well to say that it needn’t be an intuition that’s doing the justifying here, but, unless one is offered an alternate story, one is bound to remain less than fully satisfied. Herman is quick to emphasise that there are arguments underwriting my judgment about Mr. Truetemp -- and he's right, and I think that's significant -- but arguments proceed on the basis of premises, and what story are we to tell about my epistemic access to the relevant premises? Insofar as it doesn't seem very plausible that perceptual experience can ultimately be establishing the premises from which I can conclude that Mr. Truetemp doesn't know, one might be tempted to think that it must be some other kind of experience, which plays a similar role to that of perceptual experience.

Call this line of thought the ‘What Else?’ Argument (WEA):

1. People sometimes come to justified philosophical beliefs via armchair methods.
2. In many of these cases, no sensory experience is playing justificatory roles.
3. All justified beliefs must be mediated by something like sensory experience.
4. Intuitions are the best candidates for such experiences in the cases in question. Therefore,
5. In some cases, people come to justified philosophical beliefs with intuitions playing justificatory roles.

I do not endorse the WEA -- I reject premise (3). (You can also be a philosophy-skeptic, denying (1), or a Quinean, denying (2).) But I do think it plausible that it or something like it does motivate the thesis that intuitions are playing important evidential roles in philosophy. This is an epistemological argument, not a methodological one; it does not proceed, as the ones Herman considers do, on the basis of empirical claims about how philosophers go about constructing arguments (except for the uncontroversial-in-this-context premise (1)). The WEA-endorsing proponent of Centrality, it seems to me, escapes Herman's critique unscathed.

Casullo on Negative and Positive Approaches to Apriority

Chapter 1 of Al Casullo's book, A Priori Justification, explores various theories of a priori justification. In the penultimate step of the chapter, he's argued that the motivations behind various theories ultimately converge on two views -- one 'negative', and one 'positive'. This is from p. 31 (with his labels changed for simplicity):

• (Neg) S's belief that p is justified a priori if and only if S's justification for the belief that p does not depend on experience.
• (Pos) S's belief that p is justified a priori if and only if S's belief that p is justified by some nonexperiential source.

Thus stated, the negative characterization (N), Al says, is ambiguous, because of different ways in which justification can depend on experience. So (N) is disambiguated into:

• (Neg-Weak) S's belief that p is justified a priori if and only if S's belief that p is nonexperientially justified.
• (Neg-Strong) S's belief that p is justified a priori if and only if S's belief that p is nonexperientially justified and cannot be defeated by experience.

Of the three remaining views -- Pos, Neg-Weak, and Neg-Strong, Al goes on to claim that there are really only two, because Pos and Neg-Weak are equivalent. The rationale here seems to be the idea that  every justified belief has its justification due to a source, and any given source is either experiential or nonexperiential. Take a justified belief, and consider the binary question of whether its justification's source is experiential; Neg-Weak says yes if it is; Pos says no if it isn't.

But I think this bit of reasoning is too quick. I'm suspicious of the move from nonexperiential justification to derivation from a nonexperiential source. To equate Pos with Neg-Weak is to legislate in advance that for any justified beliefs, there is a source of its justification. That is to say, it assumes prior to argument that there is no original justification -- justification that does not depend on a source. But that there is such original justification is, it seems to me, a coherent view that occupies a spot in logical space. (For what it's worth, I also think it's true; Ben and I defend it in The Rules of Thought.)

Sources generate things that weren't already there. The assumption that justification for a priori justified belief must derive from a source is, I think, part of the motivation for supposing there must be some kind of faculty of intuition to serve as source.

I'm not sure whether there are nonexperiential sources of justification. But I'm firmly committed to beliefs that are justified in a way that doesn't depend on experience. If these two attitudes are jointly coherent, then Casullo is wrong to equate Pos with Neg-Weak.

Cappelen on Explaining Away Intuitions

The 6-page Chapter 5 of Herman Cappelen's Philosophy Without Intuitions is an argument against "Explain":

Explain: Suppose A has shown (or at least provided good arguments in favor of) not-p. If many of A's interlocutors (and maybe A herself) are inclined to sincerely utter (and so commit to) 'Intuitively, p', then A is under an intellectual obligation to explain why this is the case (i.e. why there was or is this inclination to utter and commit to 'Intuitively, p'). She should not full-out endorse not-p before she has discharged this obligation.

(The metasemantic character of this principle is because Herman thinks that 'intuitively' is context-sensitive, and that this is the only way to capture the attitude in its generality.) Against Explain, Herman considers various things that people might mean by sentences like "intuitively, p", and suggests that, for each of them, Explain looks pretty unmotivated. For example, when considering the idea that it means something like "at the outset of inquiry we believed or were inclined to believe that p", he writes:

When 'Intuitively, p' is so interpreted, it is hard to see any reason to accept Explain. Suppose a philosopher A has presented a good argument for not-p. The fact that some judge or are inclined to judge that p before thinking carefully about the topic isn't something that in general needs to be explained by A. The question under discussion is whether p is the case. The argument for not-p addressed and settled that question. (90)

As with so much of Herman's book, I'm in agreement with the main thrust here. In a paper I wrote on this topic a little while back ("Explaining Away Intuitions"), I said, along very similar lines to Herman's, that:

Widespread practice notwithstanding, it is not prima facie obvious why philosophers should, in general, be concerned with explaining intuitions, or with explaining them away. Intuitions are psychological entities; philosophical theories are not, in general, psychological theories. Ontologists theorize about what there is; it is quite another matter, one might think, what people think there is. Epistemologists concern themselves with knowledge, not with folk intuitions about knowledge.

And:

If I’m to theorize about, say, the nature of reference, I should not feel at all guilty if I fail to explain why people like chocolate, or why the Detroit Lions are so bad. Why should I feel differently about the fact that some people think that in Kripke’s story, the name ‘Gödel’ refers to Schmidt? Th is psychological fact is interesting, and is, it seems to me, well worth explaining. But it is not clear why it should be the reference theorist’s job to explain it. His job is to explain reference, not to explain intuitions about reference.

Obviously, with respect to these passages, Herman and I are very much on the same page. However, I went on in that paper to make a major caveat, which I think Herman may be overlooking. Sometimes, considerations having to do with intuitions are relevant to the nonpsychological question, too. This may be so even if the evidence doesn't derive from intuition in any interesting sense. (In other words, I don't think that the plausible version of Explain relies on the truth of anything like Centrality.) I agree with Herman that if you have an argument that you recognize to be conclusive for a given philosophical thesis, then you don't have to worry too much about other people's intuitions. But sometimes you need to worry about those intuitions in order to be able to recognize that an argument is conclusive. Recognizing that an argument is a good one is a cognitive achievement, and intuitions can be relevant for whether this achievement is met. They might, for example, defeat one's justification for a given premise.

This observation isn't inconsistent with the letter of Herman's remarks in Chapter 5. In a footnote, he clarifies that his scope is limited: "[t]o make things simple, I assume that we have settled that not-p (or at elast made it sufficiently plausible for us to endorse it) and that all that remains a sa potential obstacle is the commitment to 'Intuitively, p'." But this isn't always—or, in the interesting cases, even very often—the case. As I wrote in my paper mentioned above:

Sometimes, for instance, a philosopher may be deliberating about a particular view, without being at all sure what to think. I find in myself conflicting intuitions, and don’t know which to endorse. If I can see that one of those intuitions is a member of a class that I’m likely to find appealing even if false, this might provide me with some reason to prefer the other. The Horowitz case provides a nice example: if I am in internal tension between (a) the thought that it’s better to do that which results in more lives being saved, and (b) the thought that it’s wrong to kill somebody in a way over and above the way it’s wrong to let somebody die, I may, if I’m convinced by her explaining‐away, discount (b) as the product of a general error in rationality.

So I think that by focusing on the cases where one has already identified a conclusive argument, Herman is probably not looking at the best candidates for situations in which consideration of intuitions might be interesting.

Cappelen on Intuition and Philosophical Exceptionalism

I'm reading through Herman Cappelen's Philosophy Without Intuitions again, trying to settle on a few discussion points to pull out for a review. The book is an extended argument against 'Centrality', the thesis that

[c]ontemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories. (3)

Centrality, Herman says, is a widely-held misconception of philosophy, which has confused quite a lot of metaphilosophical theorizing, but hasn't had much effect on first-order philosophical argumentation. I'm broadly sympathetic to this conclusion, but there are a few respects in which I suspect Herman's argument might be too quick. I'll probably blog about several of them; here is one.

When clarifying the target of his critique, Herman specifies that the interesting version of Centrality should be interpreted as applying distinctively to philosophy, as opposed to other disciplines:

Since Centrality is a claim about what is characteristic of philosophers, it should not be construed as an instantiation of a universal claim about all intellectual activity or even a very wide domain of intellectual activity. Suppose that all human cognition (or a very wide domain of intellectual life) appeals to intuitions as evidence, from which we can derive as a special instance that philosophers appeal to intuitions as evidence. Such a view would not vindicated Centrality, since according to Centrality the appeal to intuitions as evidence is meant to differentiate philosophy—and, perhaps, a few other kindred disciplines—from inquires into the migration patterns of salmon or inflation in Argentina, say. If it turns out that the alleged reliance on intuitions is universal or extends far beyond philosophy and other allegedly a priori disciplines, that would undermine Centrality as it is construed in this work. ... As a result, it will be crucial when evaluating an argument for the significance of intuitions to keep track of its scope. An argument that shows that all intellectual activity relies on intuitions as evidence, and then derives Centrality as a corollary, will not be acceptable given how Centrality is presented by its proponents. (16)

I think that Herman is overlooking the following possibility, which is worthy of consideration: evidential reliance on intuition is ubiquitous, and not distinctive of philosophy. However, philosophy is unusual in that (a) a higher proportion of the interesting action involves the contribution of intuition than it tends to in other fields, and (b) in some canonical instances of philosophy, intuition provides all the relevant evidence. According to the picture I'm thinking of, intuition is one important source of evidence everywhere, and it's playing a particularly interesting role in philosophy. If this were true, I think it would vindicate an interesting version of Centrality, and one that makes a reckoning with the epistemic significance of intuition a pressing issue for philosophers, even though it did not claim that intuition is not a source of evidence in other realms. I'm inclined to interpret at least many of those philosophers who do emphasize the role of intuitions in philosophy as thinking in something like this way.

I do think the view sketched here is wrong; establishing this is one of the central aims of my forthcoming book with Ben Jarvis. But I don't think Herman is right to leave it off of the conceptual map.

The Rules of Thought

Benjamin Jarvis and I have been working for some time now on a book manuscript on mental content, rationality, and the epistemology of philosophy. I posted a TOC of our first draft last summer. Since then, we've received some helpful comments from reviewers, and have revised extensively; we now have a full new draft, which we feel ready to share with the public. If you're interested, you can download the large (2.3 MB, 331 page) pdf here. Comments and suggestions are extremely welcome.

I'm including a table of contents of the new draft in this post, to better give an idea of what we're up to.

Rationality, Morality, and Intuition

Suppose that Katie is sitting out in the sun. Here are two propositions:

(1) It is sunny.

(2) Jonathan is wearing glasses or Jonathan is not wearing glasses.

It's pretty plausible to develop the case in such a way that each of (1) and (2) would be rational for Katie to believe, and irrational for her to disbelieve. Why is it rational for Katie to believe (1), and irrational for her to disbelieve it? Because of various experiences she is having, like the way the sky looks, and the way her skin feels. (Obviously.) Why is it rational for her to believe (2), and irrational for her to disbelieve it? Now that's a more interesting question. (Under some circumstances, Katie might be rational in accepting (2) in part because of her perceptual experience -- for instance, if she can see that I am wearing glasses. We stipulate that she doesn't know, or have any reason to believe, that I am or am not.) One answer that seems to be reasonably widely held is that, in just the same way that the rationality of (1) is explained by Katie's perceptual experience, the rationality of (2) is explained by her intuitive experience. I think that this is a very bad answer, and in this post, I'll press an analogy that I hope will make you think this answer very bad too.

If the rationality of (2) depends on Katie's intuitions, then, if she lacked the relevant intuitions, she would no longer suffer rational pressure to accept (2). But that's crazy. Imagine Katie's stupid counterpart, Dummy, who does not have any intuitions about (2). It's rational for Dummy to accept (2), and irrational for her to reject it, just like it is for Katie. The difference between Katie and Dummy is, Katie's intuitions help her to see what she has reason to accept. Dummy is blind to her rational obligations. Dummy doesn't escape rational obligations just by lacking intuitions. We can take it a step further, and imagine yet another counterpart, Crazy, who has the intuition that (2) is false, or even necessarily false. Would it be rational for Crazy to deny (2)? Definitely not. The rational thing for Crazy to do would be to reject her crazy intuition and accept (2). So the fact that (2) is rational for Katie does not depend on her intuitions.

This point is very obvious in the moral domain.

Dick has promised his shy friend to speak on his behalf to the woman he loves, but breaks the promise, deciding instead to woo the woman in question for himself. Our confident judgment that Dick acts immorally does not depend in any way on our assessment of his moral sensibilities. Dick may be a moral imbecile, who lacks sensitivity, even at the intuitive level, to his moral requirements. His failure to intuit in accordance with his duties to his friend constitute a moral shortcoming, and they do not by any means exempt him from said duties. Dick may even have had the intuition that betraying his friend was the correct action; still, that don’t make it right!

Nobody thinks that Dick escapes his moral obligations by failing to have the relevant intuitions, or even by having contrary ones. So nobody should think that of Katie, either.

Brian Talbot on intuitions in philosophy

I spent the last week at the APA Pacific in San Diego. I have several topics inspired there that I'm hoping to write up quick blog posts about, including some philosophical and nonphilosophical ones. In general, I think I'm going to start using this blog for a bit more extraphilosophy content. I'll start that not-right-now, though, because first I want to write up a reaction Brian Talbot's talk, An Argument for Old-Fashioned Intuition Pumping (pdf link).

Brian was defending the traditional philosophical project of investigation into extra-mentalist subject matters, and arguing that the best way to do this involves heavy reliance on intuitions. His main focus was on the appropriate conditions for measuring such intuitions, but my main point of departure comes earlier, in the suggestion that traditional armchair philosophy must or should rely on intuitions in any interesting sense. Brian makes a stark contrast between intuitions and what he calls 'reasoned-to judgments'. Anything reasoned to is, Brian says, no intuition. I disagree, but let's allow the stipulation. The question is whether we have any special reason to care about intuitions in Brian's sense. Brian says we do: his argument is roughly this: a reasoned-to judgment that p is not itself evidence for p; rather, it reflects the evidence upon which the reasoning is based. So we should, when investigating the evidence for p, look to the evidence on which any reasoning is based; in the relevant cases, this must be intuition.

From this methodological stance, Brian makes some fairly sweeping claims about philosophical methodology and experimental philosophy, emphasizing the need to study intuitions directly, isolating them from any influence by reasoning. This, to my mind, is a rather bizarre idea. Good reasoning, in my view, is at the center of good philosophy. So I'm pretty suspicious of any approach to methodology that wants to marginalize reasoning.

In the Q&A, I raised something like this point. I pointed out that, at least so far as Brian had said, it was open for the defender of traditional philosophical methods to deny that intuitions play the important starting-point role that Brian articulated; perhaps reasoning is ultimately where the action is. Brian's response was effectively that reasoning must have starting points, and those starting points are intuitions. But reasoning, in general, need not have starting points; sometimes, good reasoning can proceed from the null set of premises. Another audience member raised the apt example of a reductio.

Brian's response to this was effectively to allow that there might be some philosophical knowledge achievable in this way, but that the strategy would extend only to tautologies. Insofar, then, as philosophers are interested in establishing more than just tautologies, one will need intuitions as starting points. Someone following my strategy, Brian said, will not count as engaging in the traditional project he intends of substantive investigation into extramentalist subject matters.

Now I don't know what exactly Brian means by 'tautology', but it seems to me that there are two ways one can go, either of which looks fine. If tautologies are limited to, e.g., obvious logical truths, then there is no reason to accept that good reasoning, without intuitions, can yield only tautologies. For good reasoning need not be limited to logical reasoning. I think that one can reason, for instance, from 'S knows that p' to 'p'; this kind of reasoning can underwrite the knowledge, from no premises, that knowledge is factive. And I don't see why this couldn't extend to all of that philosophy which is plausibly a priori. If, on the other hand, Talbot wants to call claims like these tautologies, then it'll just turn out that philosophers sometimes discover interesting tautologies.

False Intuition and Justification

Suppose somebody has a false intuition about an a priori matter. Is she justified in believing its content? Many plausible answers, of course, will begin with "it depends...". On what does it depend?

Ernie Sosa thinks that among the things upon which it depends is whether the false intuition derives from "some avoidably defective way"; such errors constitute "faults, individual flaws, or defects." (I think Sosa means these two quoted bits to be approximately equivalent, or at any rate, to apply together in the relevant cases.) Sosa thinks this is what is going on when somebody follows her strong inclination to affirm the consequent, inferring from q and (if p, q) to p. By contrast, "the false intuitions involved in deep paradoxes are not so clearly faults, individual flaws, or defects. For example, it may be that they derive from our basic make-up, shared among humans generally, a make-up that serves us well in an environment such as ours on the surface of our planet."

So Sosa's line is that false intuitions do not justify when they derive from faults, flaws, and defects, but do justify when they derive from our basic make-up and are generally shared among humans. I'm suspicious that this distinction will hold up to scrutiny. I think there may be an equivocation on the relevant kinds of 'faults,' 'flaws,' and 'defects' going on. In one sense, of course, one is flawed by virtue of being incorrect; beliefs are supposed to be true, so if one goes wrong, that constitutes some sort of defect. This, of course, cannot be what Sosa has in mind. Instead, he seems to be imagining flaws as deviations from some sort of imperfect but generally effective strategy for getting around in the world. This is, perhaps, the more ordinary sense of a defect. My computer, even when it is working properly, will occasionally crash; a tendency to crash constitutes a defect only when it is not working properly. And maybe there is a good reason why humans ought to have tendencies to accept, for instance, naive set theory.

The problem for this line is that there is also plausibly sound reason for humans to have tendencies to commit more obvious errors, like affirming the consequent. Given the environments we face, having a tendency to affirm the consequent will help us to recognize patterns and confirm hypotheses; inductive reasoning generally looks a bit like affirming the consequent. Similarly with other standard errors; they derive from heuristics that are generally helpful.

So we face a dilemma for upholding Sosa's distinction. Do we say that these errors — these false judgments arising from generally good heuristics — constitute defects or not? If not, then they are relevantly like Sosa thinks the intuitive premises involved in deep paradoxes are. If so, what makes them so, and why should they not apply also to the cases of the paradoxes?

Consider three people. First, the possible über-rational being who looks at me the way the fallacious gambler now looks to me. She describes us both as defective; as failing to live up to the standards of rationality. She can see that I am not tempted by one particular error (the gambler's fallacy) — but also that I regularly commit another (fallacy X), and have some attraction to a third (naive set theory). Second, myself: I think of the fallacious gambler as defective, but of myself and my peers, I think our attraction to naive set theory as nondefective; my more ignorant peers who have not studied philosophy, I even consider justified. (We will suppose I have Ernie's views.) Third, the gambler himself, who accepts his characteristic fallacy and naive set theory alike, and sees no defect in any of us. He considers himself justified in both cases.

All parties agree that the gambler is wrong; he proceeds in a defective way inconsistent with intuitive justification. But Ernie thinks I'm importantly different from him. Ernie thinks that I am not defective, but merely have some tendencies to affirm falsehoods that derive from my general human nature. Our rational superior, presumably, thinks of me as defective in just the same way as the gambler, but to a lesser degree. Does Ernie give any reason we should think her wrong about this?

Concepts and Survey Results

I'm thinking about a point that Ernie Sosa has made in response to survey-based experimental philosophy challenges. As we all know, some critics have argued that certain experimental results challenge traditional armchair philosophy. In particular, for example, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich found that there seemed to be a systematic divergence of epistemic intuitions depending upon the ethnic background of the subjects studied: students of East Asian descent were more likely than students of European descent to, for instance, describe Gettier cases as cases of knowledge.

Here's a line that Ernie has pressed a few times now:

And the disagreement may now perhaps be explained in a way that casts no doubt on intuition as a source of epistemic justification or even knowledge. Why not explain the disagreement as merely verbal? Why not say that across the divide we find somewhat different concepts picked out by terminology that is either ambiguous or at least contextually divergent? On the EA side, the more valuable status that a belief might attain is one that necessarily involves communitarian factors of one or another sort, factors that are absent or minimized in the status picked out by Ws as necessary for “knowledge.” If there is such divergence in meaning as we cross the relevant divides, then once again we fail to have disagreement on the very same propositions. In saying that the subject does not know, the EAs are saying something about lack of some relevant communitarian status. In saying that the subject does know, the Ws are not denying that; they are simply focusing on a different status, one that they regard as desirable even if it does not meet the high communitarian requirements important to the EAs. So again we avoid any real disagreement on the very same propositions. The proposition affirmed by the EAs as intuitively true is not the very same as the proposition denied by the Ws as intuitively false.

(That's quoted from his contribution to the recent Stich and His Critics volume.)

As I'd understand it, the core suggestion here is this: maybe there's no real disagreement here; some group of subjects say that such and such 'is a case of knowledge,' while philosophers and other subjects say that such and such is not a case of knowledge, and there's no genuine disagreement, because the former subjects don't mean knowledge by 'knowledge'.

So here's my question. (One question, anyway. I have a few more.) What does any of this have to do with concepts? As I understand it, it's a question about meaning and reference: what does the word 'knowledge' refer to in a given subject's mouth? One can run a little detour through concepts if one wants: word meanings are concepts; the concepts are different; so the word is ambiguous. But what, if anything, does this 'conceptual ascent' contribute? I rather suspect that it does more to distract than to help. Steve Stich's response to Sosa emphasizes concepts in a way that looks to me largely irrelevant:

There is a vast literature on concepts in philosophy and in psychology (Margolis and Laurence 1999; Murphy 2002; Machery forthcoming), and the question of how to individuate concepts is one of the most hotly debated issues in that literature. While it is widely agreed that for two concept tokens to be of the same type they must have the same content, there is a wide diversity of views on what is required for this condition to be met. On some theories, the sort of covert ambiguity that Sosa is betting on can be expected to be fairly common, while on others covert ambiguity is much harder to generate. For Fodor, for example, the fact that an East Asian pays more attention to communitarian factors while a Westerner emphasizes individualistic factors in applying the term ‘knowledge’ would be no reason at all to think that the concepts linked to their use of the term ‘knowledge’ have different contents (Fodor 1998).

But Fodor's theory of concepts is not a theory of word meanings. What bearing does it have on whether there might be an Asian-American idiolect in which 'knowledge' means something other than knowledge? (I do mean this as a serious question; I'm less fluent in Fodor than I'd like.)

To my mind, the sort of view that Ernie needs to be worrying about is not Fodor's but Burge's. More on that in a future post, I think. For now, just this question: is anything usefully gained by thinking about Sosa's suggestion here in terms of concepts?

Draft monograph on rationalism

As you may have noticed, I haven't been posting here much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that, as many of you will know, my personal life has lately been very exciting. Carrie Jenkins and I are recently engaged to be married. So that's pretty awesome. It also means I'm spending a good chunk of my time working on wedding planning.

The other reason I haven't been posting much is that, for all of this summer, and much of the past year, I've been, when focused on philosophy, focused on work on a co-authored book monograph with Benjamin Jarvis. That's been on a relatively grand scale, and didn't lend itself well to blogging. However, we now have a draft of a book monograph, and we're ready to give it a limited distribution to philosophers who might have comments and suggestions for us.

Our book is tentatively titled Rational Thinking: Philosophical and Quotidian. It offers a theory of mental content, a characterization of the relation between rationality and apriority, and a treatment of philosophical methodology. It is descended in fairly direct ways from the work we've done in our two previous co-authored papers, here and here.

If you're interested in having a look, email me and I'll send you the pdf. I'm placing a detailed table of contents below the fold, to better indicate the sort of topics we're covering.

Maybe now that we've gotten the manuscript to this stage, I'll find myself blogging on philosophy more often. I have an idea for a paper about the relation between modal epistemology and linguistic treatments of modality.

UPDATE 15 JULY 2011: new TOC and downloadable new draft available here. Old TOC below.

Intuition and experience

I know that there is snow outside; this knowledge is based in part on my visual experience. When I look out the window, I have experiences that partially constitute seeing snow. I also know that squares have four sides. Arguably, this knowledge is independent of experience, depending only on my conceptual competence, or rational capacities, or something like that. My knowledge that squares have four sides is not derived from experience, the way that my knowledge that there is snow outside is.

According to certain prominent rationalist views, what explains this difference is that my knowledge about squares, unlike my knowledge of snow, is based not on perception but on intuition. I have the intuition that p, and intuitions are a source of evidence, and so now I have justification for believing that p. It's hard for me to see how, on a view like this, the relevant knowledge comes out independent of experience. For intuitions are experiences, every bit as much as perceptual experiences are. Indeed, some rationalists characterize intuitions phenomenologically: intuitions feel a certain way, and having that sort of feeling provides justification for intuitive beliefs.

On this sort of view, intuitions look to be just another kind of way of experiencing the world. One way that we experience the world is by seeing things; another is by intuiting things. You can call things learned that latter way a priori if you want to, but this just doesn't look to me like belief independent from experience. On the contrary, on this sort of a view, it looks like the a priori beliefs are those that are based on a certain kind of experience: the intuitions.

Explaining Away Intuitions

Explaining Away Intuitions, (2010) in Studia Philosophica Estonica, special issue on intuitions. Refer to published version, available here.

What is it to ‘explain away’ an intuition? Philosophers often attempt to explain intuitions away, but it is often unclear what the success conditions for their project consist in. I attempt to articulate these conditions, using several philosophical case studies as guides. I will conclude that explaining away intuitions is a more difficult task than has sometimes been appreciated; I also suggest, however, that the importance of explaining away intuitions has often been exaggerated.

Intuitions and Begging the Question

Intuitions and Begging the Question. Under Review. Version of 4 July, 2009.

What are philosophical intuitions? There is a tension between two intuitive criteria. On the one hand, many of our ordinary beliefs do not seem intuitively to be intuitions; this suggests a relatively restrictionist approach to intuitions. (A few attempts to restrict: intuitions must be noninferential, or have modal force, or abstract contents.) On the other hand, it is counterintuitive to deny a great many of our beliefs—including some that are inferential, transparently contingent, and about concrete things. This suggests a liberal conception of intuitions. I defend the liberal view from the objection that it faces intuitive counterexamples; central to the defense is a treatment of the pragmatics of ‘intuition’ language: we cite intuitions, instead of directly expressing our beliefs via assertion, when we are attempting to avoid begging questions against certain sorts of philosophical interlocutors.

Sosa on Virtues, Perception, and Intuition

Sosa on Virtues, Perception, and Intuition. Version of 19 January, 2009.

I critically evaluate Ernest Sosa's (2007) contrast between intuitive justification and perceptual justification. I defend a competence-based approach to intuitive justification that is continuous with epistemic justification generally.

Who Needs Intuitions?

Who Needs Intuitions? Two Experimentalist Critiques Version of 9 January, 2011. To appear in Booth and Rowbottom, (eds.) Intuitions, Oxford University Press.

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.