How to challenge intuitions empirically without risking skepticism.
About philosophical intuitions
Framework arguing about Trustworthiness of basic sources of evidence
Reliability vs. Hopefulness: While reliability concerns whether a source typically provides true beliefs, hopefulness deals with the process and mechanisms behind those beliefs, ensuring they can be corrected when they go awry.
This framework aligns with both scientific and everyday epistemic practices
Philosophical intuitions: intuitions having normative content, or modal content
Toward intuitions as philosophical evidence
The opponents of intuition can’t ask supporters to defend intuition without any use of intuition — no other method is inherently capable of doing it
The case for hope
One source is hopeless if we wouldn't even know what it means to use it carefully
4 sources of hope
External corroboration — can be corroborated by others
Internal coherence — agreement both within and across subjects
Detectability of margins
Theoretical illumination — how they work when they do, and why they fail when they don’t
Hope does not always come from intrinsic aspects of the source of evidence itself so much as from the particular practices of using it
These four sources of hope seem to exhaust the possibilities: Any such possibility for checkability would have to come from within the device’s signal (detectable margins), from comparing different deliverances of the device (internal coherence), from comparing deliverances of the device to results from other methods (external corroboration), or from our understanding of the device itself (theoretical illumination).
Hope in nonscientific special epistemic practices
The legal system: there’s discovery and an entire appeals process
Why is philosophical intuition hopeless?
We lack a robust sense of the margins of intuition
It’s very hard to know the accuracy of intuition
Senses of certainty are very prone to “theory contamination”
The best theories of how intuitions work do not help incorporate error-detection and error-correction procedures into our philosophical practice
We don’t really know the underlying psychology of the propositional seemings that we term intuitions — we have no sense of from where one intuitive seeming arises. It’s different from explicit inferences
Plenty of potentially relevant scientific results here, but no psychologists has yet taken an interest in figuring out how to apply such science to the intuitions of philosophers.
Experimental philosophers — e.g Haidt, are still in infancy
Little information about the overall degree of intra and intersubjective agreement and agreement with sources of evidence outside of philosophical intuition; “what we don’t know about where we don’t agree”
Ethnic or socioeconomic differences between subjects can predict differences in their intuitions about various cases
E.g Gettier’s cases and Kripkean anti-descriptivists cases in the theory of reference, Asian subjects and Western European subjects have different intuitions
Philosophers might have overestimated the amount of intrasubjective agreement that one can expect
External corroboration
Not reality, like no area outside philosophy, speaks to some philosophical domains in question; and for such domains, we don’t have a method outside intuition
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