Abstract
Perhaps personality traits substantially influence one’s philosophically relevant intuitions. This suggestion is not only possible, it is consistent with a growing body of empirical research: Personality traits have been shown to be systematically related to diverse intuitions concerning some fundamental philosophical debates. We argue that this fact, in conjunction with the plausible principle that almost all adequate philosophical views should take into account all available and relevant evidence, calls into question some prominent approaches to traditional philosophical projects. To this end, we present the Philosophical Personality Argument (PPA). We explain how it supports the growing body of evidence challenging some of the uses of intuitions in philosophy, and we defend it from some criticisms of empirically based worries about intuitions in philosophy. We conclude that the current evidence indicates that the PPA is sound, and thus many traditional philosophical projects that use intuitions must become substantially more empirically oriented.
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Notes
We use personality to refer to stable, global, and heritable personality traits such as the Big Five Personality traits (John 1999). The nature, causes, and assessment of global personality traits have been debated for some time (cf., Mischel and Shoda 1995). Our view is consistent with a suitably fine-grained modern account of personality (cf., Funder 2006).
This analysis is similar to one given by Goldman and Pust, “Mental states of type M constitute a basic evidential source only if M states are reliable indicators of the truth of their contents (or the truth of closely related contents), at least when the M states occur in M favorable circumstances” (1998, p. 180).
Sometimes one endorses a view not based on evidence. For example, in Haidt et al. (2000) moral dumbfounding, people end up endorsing a position despite not having any evidence for their moral convictions. In such circumstances, intuitions are not used as evidence. So, one can end up endorsing a view not based on evidence. However, if philosophers end up endorsing philosophical claims in such a manner, then that is even worse news for defenders of intuitions. In such situations, intuitions do no work in the resulting philosophical position one ends up endorsing.
We want to be clear that these are not the only ways to go about philosophy or that all philosophers use intuition gathering strategies. We only claim that these strategies are very popular and held to be valuable by large portions of contemporary philosophy.
Some theorists (Horvarth 2010) argue that some of the other findings argued to bear on the truth of intuitions (e.g., order effects, affect, framing effects) are not always present. In cases where they aren’t present, they obviously don’t call into question the truth of those intuitions. However, other factors like culture and personality are arguable always present. Hence, personality findings are immune from this type of criticism.
A piece of evidence is trustworthy if one can detect and correct for errors in those pieces of evidence (Weinberg 2007, p. 325).
We make no claim about the extent to which Prinz actually uses intuitions for his Neo-Platonic project. In fact, Prinz’s work is a nice example of one alternative way to do a Neo-Platonic project without extensive uses of intuitions.
(E) does not entail that empirical evidence is the only evidence for Neo-Platonic projects. Rather, (E) holds that empirical evidence should play some substantial role in most Neo-Platonic projects The qualifier ‘most’ is included because it is possible that some Neo-Platonic projects (e.g., in logic) are not susceptible to the PPA. However, this exception should be of little solace as the PPA has implications for a large number of Neo-Platonic projects.
Direct intuitions are intuitions that are not about cases (e.g., immediately intuiting that “2 + 2 = 4” is true). Intuitions are not direct if they involve cases (Horvarth 2010, p. 460).
We take it as a bit ironic that Ludwig’s claim that what “we” as philosophers are interested in is an empirical claim. And at least some philosophers do not have this kind of definition in mind as they think that intuitions can be fallible (e.g., Sosa 2007a; Bealer 1998). So, by Ludwig’s lights, those theorists aren’t philosophers. But that seems improbable. If that is the case, then what Ludwig might really mean by “we” is “philosophers who think like me.” But as many have noted, why should we be interested in intuitions that the group of “Ludwig-like-philosophers” are interested in? It’s not at all clear what the answer to that question is (e.g., Stich 1990, 1998; Weinberg et al. 2001).
This remark echos Jackson when he writes, “we know that our own [philosophers’] case is typical and so can generalize from it to others. It was surely not a surprise to Gettier that so many people agreed about his cases” (1998, p. 37) or when Ludwig states that philosophers engage in experimental methods “informally in teaching and in conversation with nonphilosophers” (2007, p. 155).
We take it that any burden of proof must be at least in principle satisfiable by the experimentalist. For example, Kauppinen states an extremely high burden of proof when he says “the actual studies conducted so far have failed to rule out competence failures, performance failures, and the potential influence of pragmatic factors” (2007, p. 105). Ruling out these factors is something that is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to do in experimental science. In fact, if that burden of proof was standard in experimental psychology, we would not be able to make many inferences about much of anything from experimental data. So, the appropriate burden of proof must be something less stringent.
Just because philosophers are more reflective does not mean that their intuitions are necessarily of a higher quality. Some troubling effects persist in those who are more reflective, see Weinberg et al. (2008).
Even if training reduces the effects of personality on intuitions, that would not automatically mean that intuitions that are the result of training are qualitatively better. As Weinberg (2007) notes “having the ‘right’ intuitions is the entry ticket to various subareas of philosophy” (p. 337). If those intuitions reflect similar personalities among philosophers, then personality may still influence philosophers’ intuitions. For selection biases of philosophers, see Livengood et al. (2010) and Buckwalter and Stich (2011).
They operationally define and measure expertise with a reliable, validated psychometric test of knowledge of the free will debate.
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Acknowledgments
Authorship is equal. We would like to thank Al Mele, Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, Stephen Stich, Stewart Cohen, Eric Schulz, attendees at the Northwest Philosophy Conference, and attendees at the Experimental Philosophy Workshop in Wroclaw, Poland for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also indebted to Gerd Gigerenzer and the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, for support during the development of this project.
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Feltz, A., Cokely, E.T. The Philosophical Personality Argument. Philos Stud 161, 227–246 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9731-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9731-4