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For millennia, philosophers have speculated about the origins of ethics. Recent research in evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences has shed light on that question. But this research also has normative significance. A standard way of arguing against a normative ethical theory is to show that in some circumstances the theory leads to judgments that are contrary to our common moralintuitions. If, however, these moralintuitions are the biological residue of our evolutionary history, it is not clear why (...) we should regard them as having any normative force. Research in the neurosciences should therefore lead us to reconsider the role ofintuitions in normative ethics. (shrink)

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Radical experimentalists argue that we should give up usingintuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I first argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact suggest that someintuitions are reliable. I next consider and reject a different way of handling the radical experimentalists' challenge, what I call the Argument from RobustIntuitions. I then propose a way of understanding why someintuitions can be unreliable and howintuitions can conflict, (...) and I argue that on this understanding, both moderate experimentalism and the standard philosophical practice of usingintuitions as evidence can help resolve these conflicts. (shrink)

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What sorts of things are theintuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experimentintuitions 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-experimentintuitions 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. (shrink)

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In a recent paper Weinberg (2007) claims that there is an essential mark of trustworthiness which typical sources of evidence as perception or memory have, but philosophicalintuitions lack, namely that we are able to detect and correct errors produced by these “hopeful” sources. In my paper I will argue that being a hopeful source isn't necessary for providing us with evidence. I then will show that, given some plausible background assumptions,intuitions at least come close to being (...) hopeful, if they are reliable. If this is true, Weinberg's new challenge comes down to the claim that philosophicalintuitions are not reliable since they are significantly unstable. In the second part of my paper I will argue that and why the experimentally established instability of folkintuitions about philosophical cases does not show that philosopher's expertintuitions about these cases are instable. (shrink)

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The standard view of philosophical methodology is that philosophers rely onintuitions as evidence. Herman Cappelen argues that this claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively onintuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

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In a recent paper, Peter Singer suggests that some interesting new findings in experimental moral psychology support what he has contended all along—namely thatintuitions should play little or no role in adequate justifications of normative ethical positions. Not only this but, according to Singer, these findings point to a central flaw in the method (or epistemological theory) of reflective equilibrium used by many contemporary moral philosophers. In this paper, we try to defend reflective equilibrium from Singer’s attack and, (...) in part, we do this by discussing Singer’s own favoured moral methodology as outlined in his Practical Ethics . Although basing ethics solely on (certain kinds of)intuitions certainly is problematic, we argue, basing it solely on ‘reason’ gives rise to similar problems. The best solution would arguably be one which could strike a balance between the two—but, we suggest, this is precisely what reflective equilibrium is all about. (shrink)

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In this paper I argue that reflection on the threat of climate change brings out a distinct challenge for appeals to what I call the Anti-Demandingness Intuition, according to which a view about our obligations can be rejected if it would, as a general matter, require very large sacrifices of us. The ADI is often appealed to in order to reject the view that well off people are obligated to make substantial sacrifices in order to aid the global poor, but (...) the appeal to the same intuition is much less intuitively plausible against the view that we are obligated to make great sacrifices if that is the only way to avoid severe climate change. I claim that there are no plausible grounds on which to accept the ADI with respect to addressing global poverty while rejecting it with respect to avoiding severe climate change. I conclude that we should accept that morality is far more demanding than we typically accept, and suggest two lessons of my discussion regarding the practice of appealing tointuitions in moral argument. (shrink)

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What is it to explain away an intuition? Philosophers regularly attempt to explainintuitions away, but it is often unclear what the success conditions for their project consist in. I attempt to articulate some of these conditions, taking philosophical case studies as guides, and arguing that many attempts to explain awayintuitions underestimate the challenge the project of explaining away involves. I will conclude, therefore, that explaining awayintuitions is a more difficult task than has sometimes been (...) appreciated; I also suggest, however, that the importance of explaining awayintuitions has often been exaggerated. (shrink)

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Since the famous debate between Russell (Mind 14: 479–493, 1905, Mind 66: 385–389, 1957) and Strawson (Mind 59: 320–344, 1950; Introduction to logical theory, 1952; Theoria, 30: 96–118, 1964) linguisticintuitions about truth values have been considered notoriously unreliable as a guide to the semantics of definite descriptions. As a result, most existing semantic analyses of definites leave a large number ofintuitions unexplained. In this paper, I explore the nature of the relationship between truth valueintuitions (...) and non-referring definites. Inspired by comments in Strawson (Introduction to logical theory, 1964), I argue that given certain systematic considerations, one can provide a structured explanation of conflictingintuitions. I show that theintuitions of falsity, which proponents of a Russellian analysis often appeal to, result from evaluating sentences in relation to specific questions in context. This is shown by developing a method for predicting when sentences containing non-referring definites elicitintuitions of falsity. My proposed analysis draws importantly on Roberts (in: Yoon & Kathol (eds.) OSU working papers in Linguistics: vol. 49: Papers in Semantics 1998; in: Horn & Ward (eds.) Handbook of pragmatics, 2004) and recent research in the semantics and pragmatics of focus. (shrink)

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I address Sinnott-Armstrong's argument that evidence of framing effects in moral psychology shows that moralintuitions are unreliable and therefore not noninferentially justified. I begin by discussing what it is to be epistemically unreliable and clarify how framing effects render moralintuitions unreliable. This analysis calls for a modification of Sinnott-Armstrong's argument if it is to remain valid. In particular, he must claim that framing is sufficiently likely to determine the content of moralintuitions. I then re-examine (...) the evidence which is supposed to support this claim. In doing so, I provide a novel suggestion for how to analyze the reliability ofintuitions in empirical studies. Analysis of the evidence suggests that moralintuitions subject to framing effects are in fact much more reliable than perhaps was thought, and that Sinnott-Armstrong has not succeeded in showing that noninferential justification has been defeated. (shrink)

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In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemicintuitions 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 true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemicintuitions 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 undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument. (shrink)

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According to the No-Luck-Thesis knowledge possession is incompatible with luck – one cannot know that p if the truth of one’s belief that p is a matter of luck. Recently, this widespread opinion was challenged by Peter Baumann, who argues that in certain situations agents do possess knowledge even though their beliefs are true by luck. This paper aims at providing empirical data for evaluating Baumann’s hypothesis. The experiment was designed to compare non-philosophers’ judgments concerning knowledge and luck in one (...) case that Baumann takes to be in favor of his claim and other cases where, according to him, absence of knowledge coincides with luck. The results show that the cases do not differ in a significant way between each other with respect to verdicts regarding knowledge and luck. In all cases subjects were more reluctant to judge that the ‘Gettierized’ belief is knowledge and more likely to judge that it is true by luck in comparison to a belief that is an uncontroversial instance of knowledge. However, the negative relationship between knowledge and luck ascriptions predicted by the No-Luck-Thesis was almost absent. The data raise some doubts about the No-Luck-Thesis, but the reasons for doubt are different than what Baumann expected. (shrink)

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Standard methods in experimental philosophy have sought to measure folkintuitions using experiments, but certain limitations are inherent in experimental methods. Accordingly, we have designed the Free-WillIntuitions Scale to empirically measure folkintuitions relevant to free-will debates using a different method. This method reveals what folkintuitions are like prior to participants' being put in forced-choice experiments. Our results suggest that a central debate in the experimental philosophy of free will—the “natural” compatibilism debate—is mistaken in (...) assuming that folkintuitions are exclusively either compatibilist or incompatibilist. They also identify a number of important new issues in the empirical study of free-willintuitions. (shrink)

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In the paper I introduce and discuss the interpretative procedure; a stage of investigation in thought experiments in which it is determined which states of affairs are genuine realizations of the described story. I show how incorporating the interpretative procedure to the reconstruction of a certain kind of thought experiments, i.e., the method of cases, provides a solution to the so-called problem of deviant realizations. According to this problem it is hard to formulate the logical structure of the method of (...) cases that excludes far-fetched interpretations of a particular thought experiment's description that are inconsistent with the expected conclusion of the experiment. As I show, if we agree that the interpretative procedure precedes the act of establishing whether the thing which is at issue (e.g., knowledge) appears within a certain state of affairs, deviant realizations could be ruled out, since within interpretative procedure we establish the set of states of affairs that are compatible with the intentions of the author of the thought experiment. In the paper I provide a general explanation of how this task could be fulfilled by semanticintuitions and discuss their contextual dependence. (shrink)

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When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can proceed either by thinking about the entity from a *functional* standpoint or by thinking about the entity from a *physical* standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking asymmetry. It appears that ascriptions of states involving phenomenal consciousness are sensitive to physical factors in (...) a way that ascriptions of other states are not. (shrink)

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In this piece, I advocate and motivate a new understanding of thought experiments, which avoids problems with the rival accounts of Brown and Norton.

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Studies suggest that people's moralintuitions are sensitive to morally irrelevant factors, such as personal force, spatial distance, ethnicity or nationality. Findings of this sort have been used to construct debunking arguments. The most prominent champion of this approach is Joshua Greene, who has attempted to undermine deontology by showing that deontologicalintuitions are triggered by morally irrelevant factors. This article offers a critical analysis of such empirically informed debunking arguments from moral irrelevance, and of Greene’s effort to (...) undermine deontology. One problem with arguments from moral irrelevance concerns the hierarchy between the targeted case-specificintuitions and the more generalintuitions about which factors are morally (ir)relevant. If we assume that generalintuitions always take precedence over case-specificintuitions, arguments from moral irrelevance become dialectically useless. By contrast, if we assume that both case-specific and generalintuitions should be taken seriously, particularly sweeping debunking projects, such as Greene’s, are unlikely to go through. Another problem concerns the experimental aspect of arguments from moral irrelevance. Empirically informed arguments from moral irrelevance have been presented as examples of how empirical moral psychology can advance moral theory. But arguments from moral irrelevance can also be constructed from the armchair. And basing these arguments on empirical findings about laypeople’sintuitions is even counterproductive. (shrink)

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Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folkintuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folkintuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our (...) methodology of surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

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Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment is often considered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from Nozick's thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the operation of ourintuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since ourintuitions are not always responsive to stipulation) but fill (...) in the concrete details that would make them irrelevant. If we do this, we may see our feelings about the experience machine becoming less negative. Second, I argue that, even if our feelings about the experience machine do not perfectly track hedonistic reasons, there are various reasons to doubt the reliability of our anti-hedonisticintuitions. And finally, I argue that, since in the actual world seeing certain things besides pleasure as ends in themselves may best serve hedonistic ends, hedonism may justify our taking these other things to be intrinsically valuable, thus again making the existence of our seemingly anti-hedonisticintuitions far from straightforward evidence for the falsity of hedonism. (shrink)

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A growing body of empirical literature challenges philosophers’ reliance onintuitions as evidence based on the fact thatintuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and socio-economic status. Our research extends this challenge, investigating Lehrer’s appeal to the Truetemp Case as evidence against reliabilism. We found thatintuitions in response to this case vary according to whether, and which, other thought experiments are considered first. Our results show that compared to subjects who receive (...) the Truetemp Case first, subjects first presented with a clear case of knowledge are less willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case, and subjects first presented with a clear case of nonknowledge are more willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case. We contend that this instability undermines the supposed evidential status of theseintuitions, such that philosophers who deal inintuitions can no longer rest comfortably in their armchairs. (shrink)

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Using empirical evidence to attackintuitions can be epistemically dangerous, because various of the complaints that one might raise against them (e.g., that they are fallible; that we possess no non-circular defense of their reliability) can be raised just as easily against perception itself. But the opponents of intuition wish to challengeintuitions without at the same time challenging the rest of our epistemic apparatus. How might this be done? Let us use the term “hopefulness” to refer to (...) the extent to which we possess a good capacity for the detection and correction of the errors of any fallible source of evidence. I argue that we should not trust putative sources of evidence that are substantially lacking in hopefulness (even if they are basically reliable), and that we are indeed already operating under such a norm in our ordinary and scientific practices. I argue further that the philosophical practice of the appeal tointuitions is, in these terms, badly hopeless... (shrink)

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Various studies show moralintuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moralintuitions have an unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moralintuitions are fairly stable with respect to (...) whatintuitions we have, the effect of framing on the strength of thoseintuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. (shrink)

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Many philosophers hold that experts’ semanticintuitions are more reliable and provide better evidence than lay people’sintuitions—a thesis commonly called “the Expertise Defense.” Focusing on theintuitions about the reference of proper names, this article critically assesses the Expertise Defense.

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To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have differentintuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate (...) their results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophicalintuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences inintuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

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Despite the swirling tide of controversy surrounding the work of Machery et al. , the cross-cultural differences they observed in semanticintuitions about the reference of proper names have proven to be robust. In the present article, we report cross-cultural and individual differences in semanticintuitions obtained using new experimental materials. In light of the pervasiveness of the Knobe effect and the fact that Machery et al.’s original materials incorporated elements of wrongdoing but did not control for their (...) influence, we also examined the question of whether the moral valence of actions described in experimental materials might affect participants’ responses. Our results suggest that uncontrolled moral valence did not distort participants’ judgments in previous research. Our findings provide further confirmation of the robustness of cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semanticintuitions and strengthen the philosophical challenge that they pose. (shrink)

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Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

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In this paper, I explore a question about deductive reasoning: why am I in a position to immediately infer some deductive consequences of what I know, but not others? I show why the question cannot be answered in the most natural ways of answering it, in particular in Descartes’s way of answering it. I then go on to introduce a new approach to answering the question, an approach inspired by Hume’s view of inductive reasoning.

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The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilistintuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

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This essay situates some recent empirical research on the origin, nature, role, and reliability of moralintuitions against the background of nineteenth-century debates between ethical naturalism and rational intuitionism. The legitimate heir to Millian naturalism is the contemporary method of reflective equilibrium and its defeasible reliance on moralintuitions. Recent doubts about moralintuitions—worries that they reflect the operation of imperfect cognitive heuristics, are resistant to undermining evidence, are subject to framing effects, and are variable—are best addressed (...) by ethical naturalism as part of a broad dialectical equilibrium. (shrink)

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Rationalists about the psychology of moral judgment argue that moral cognition has a rational foundation. Recent challenges to this account, based on findings in the empirical psychology of moral judgment, contend that moral thinking has no rational basis. In this book, Hanno Sauer argues that moral reasoning does play a role in moral judgment—but not, as is commonly supposed, because conscious reasoning produces moral judgments directly. Moral reasoning figures in the acquisition, formation, maintenance, and reflective correction of moralintuitions. (...) Sauer proposes that when we make moral judgments we draw on a stable repertoire ofintuitions about what is morally acceptable, which we have acquired over the course of our moral education—episodes of rational reflection that have established patterns for automatic judgment foundation. Moral judgments are educated and rationally amenable moralintuitions. -/- Sauer engages extensively with the empirical evidence on the psychology of moral judgment and argues that it can be shown empirically that reasoning plays a crucial role in moral judgment. He offers detailed counterarguments to the anti-rationalist challenge (the claim that reason and reasoning play no significant part in morality and moral judgment) and the emotionist challenge (the argument for the emotional basis of moral judgment). Finally, he uses Joshua Greene's Dual Process model of moral cognition to test the empirical viability and normative persuasiveness of his account of educatedintuitions. Sauer shows that moral judgments can be automatic, emotional, intuitive, and rational at the same time. (shrink)

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Ladyman and Ross do not think that contemporary metaphysics is in good standing. However, they do think that there is a version of metaphysics that can be made to work – provided we approach it using appropriate principles. My aim in this paper is to undermine some of their arguments against contemporary metaphysics as it is currently practiced.

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In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilistintuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue (...) that Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’sintuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)

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After decades of receiving a lot of attention on the epistemological level, the so-called ‘problem ofintuitions’ is now in the center of debates on the metaphilosophical level. One of the reasons for this lies in the unfruitfulness of the epistemological discussions that recently subsided without producing any significant or broadly accepted theory ofintuitions. Consequently, the metaphilosophical level of discussion of the ‘problem ofintuitions’ inherits the same difficulties of the epistemological level. The significance of Max (...) Deutsch’s book The Myth of the Intuitive is his effort to resolve these problems in a clear and persuasive way. He is not only trying to debunk problems behind the vagueness of the ‘intuition-talk’ by drawing important distinctions that usually go under the radar in the contemporary literature, but also develops his own account of philosophical methodology. In this paper I will present some of his arguments against the traditional view of intuitional methodology, as well as his own solutions to the presented problems. Regardless of Deutsch’s insightful account of the ‘problem ofintuitions’, I find that some difficulties in his own proposal are inherited from the unresolved issues ofintuitions on the epistemological level. (shrink)

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We develop an argument for a novel version of moral intuitionism centered on the claim that moralintuitions are trustworthy. Our argument employs an epistemic principle that we call the Trustworthiness Criterion, a distinctive feature of which is its emphasis on oft-neglected social dimensions of cognitive states, including non-doxastic attitudes such as intuition. Thus our argument is not that moralintuitions are trustworthy because they are regress-stoppers, or because they are innocent until proven guilty, or because denying their (...) epistemic contribution would be self-defeating, or because they are presupposed in rational inference, or because they are analogous to perceptions, or because they are based on understanding—individualistic claims that have elsewhere been used (controversially) in defense of the thesis that moralintuitions are in good epistemic standing. Rather, our argument appeals to the idea that moralintuitions are trustworthy because they are the outputs of a cognitive practice, which has epistemically-fecund social elements, that is in good working order. (shrink)

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