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Notes
One of the most interesting ideas in the paper is that “the important intuitions are the ones you barely notice or remember.…if you remembered them enough to argue about them (or experimentally test them), the fragility conditions had probably been triggered, and the intuition probably wasn’t doing much argumentative work” (this volume).
I wish I had made this clearer in PWI: this is what I had in mind when I talked about ‘common ground’ and it is what I was relying on e.g. in the discussion of Thompson’s violinist in Sect. 8.3.3 (and throughout the book).
The phenomenon described above I take to be fairly uncontroversial. Full-blown theories of tacit knowledge will no doubt be controversial, but the points above will, I predict, not be points of contention between more sophisticated theories.
These points are, I think, common ground between Weatherson and me.
For an elaboration on these remarks, see also Cappelen (forthcoming a).
30 seconds is my guesstimate of the point at which a judgment moves from being intuitive to reflective (e.g. in the Mercier and Sperber (2009) sense.) If that turns out to be wrong (and it’s really 22 or 84 seconds), it makes no difference to the points made here and below.
All of this is compatible with it sometimes being possible to make a snap judgment about a philosophical topic (e.g., I have two hands). The point is that it is not a norm that we restrict ourselves to snap judgments and it is not, as a matter of fact, what we do most of the time or even typically (though of course we do it occasionally).
I have, maybe, made the disagreement seem larger than it is: Weatherson thinks the significance of appeals to intuitions are typically overstated and in Sect. 7 he lists several case studies from Lewis where he claims the intuitive is appealed to. The problem with the cases is that no evidence is presented that Lewis operated with (or expected his readers to operate with) a quick-no-personal-level-attention-and-no-reflection restriction or norm. Looking at the text of “Causation as Influence” (Lewis 2000) will not settle that question.
What I just said about philosophy is neutral on the question of whether intuitive judgments are important outside of philosophy. Such judgments might be extremely important in everyday life. Philosophy is not like everyday life—in PWI, I call it “a hyper-rational, epistemically hyper-demanding” context (p. 190).
Not only does Weatherson’s account undergenerate, it also (as Josh Dever pointed out to me) overgenerates. Many topics in linguistics will get counted as philosophy and large parts of mathematics. More generally, specific arguments in various places would end up counting as philosophy: e.g. a conclusion in physics that the sled will slide a certain way under certain forces will count as part of philosophy because we can make a Socratic judgment of that case.
It is also worth noting that Chalmers repeatedly points out that it is consistent with e.g. the Gettier text that the intuitive, minimally construed, is present in it. That, again, is not positive evidence of presence.
In what follows, I use ‘noninferential’ as shorthand for ‘broadly noninferential’, in the sense of Chalmers (this vol.). I will, however, still use ‘broadly’ to modify ‘inferential’.
Maybe the charitable way to read this sentence is not as denying that there’s noninferential epistemic justification, but as claiming that there is broadly inferential epistemic justification and then emphasizing that it can coexist with a broadly inferential justification. But so read, it is hard to make it ‘just obvious’ that there’s noninferential epistemic justification: after all, we easily confuse that with the non-transparency of the broadly inferential justification that is available. In my view, that’s what goes on in most of these cases: we have non-transparent broadly inferential epistemic justification and we confuse the non-transparent part with there being something noninferential providing justification.
The notion of an ‘effective feature’ is introduced on pp. 115–116, and appealed to throughout the book.
He writes: “Concerning (F1): this involves a certain theory of intuitions. … Many theorists deny that there is such phenomenology,…But these theorists are not ipso facto denying that there are intuitions” (this vol.).
Chalmers says nothing about what obviousness is, so it’s possible that what he has in mind is something very different from F1. Maybe a more developed theory of the obvious could push the debate forward.
In discussion Chalmers has said there is both: in effect the obviousness provides it. It is hard to assess that proposal without answers to the question in (3) above.
This is one reason why F1, or the ‘Seem True’ feature, is added by a number of intuition-theorists: they say that the naïve comprehension axiom seems true (despite being false and having no justification).
I no longer think this is exactly the right way to put the criticism of experimental philosophy. I say a bit about why in Cappelen forthcoming b, where I describe what I call ‘the Knobe reply’. Weinberg does not endorse the Knobe reply, so I won’t pursue that issue here.
Note that I anticipate Weinberg’s misreading throughout the book. See e.g. Section 8.4.2 where I explicitly consider the objection that arguments are given for p in a text doesn’t show that p doesn’t have Rock status. I encourage readers to look at my reply there and consider whether Weinberg’s characterization is correct.
Nor is it: I (or we) intuit that C. This is how I make the point in PWI, Chap. 11.
See Williamson (2007), Chap. 7.
He says: “nothing in their discussions of the noncomparative use of ‘seem’ implies that the term could not be so used to pick out non-sensory states or events, to describe how one is intellectually appeared to, or, perhaps better, how things are presented to one as being, when one reflects on them” (this vol.). Maybe nothing in their discussions prevents this, but it doesn’t mean the attempt to refer succeeds.
So when Bengson says about Kripke’s use of ‘intuitive’ that “it is clear, I think, that he treats these also as epistemically significant: the weight he places on them is difficult to comprehend if we do not interpret his remarks about the connection between evidence and the intuitive as having fairly general application (cf. Hughes 2004, p. 110, 113)” (this vol.). I disagree if this is supposed to be an alternative to the suggested ‘pre-theoretic’ interpretation that I defend on pp. 71–75. If Bengson disagrees, the disagreement is hard to engage with since he doesn’t engage with my detailed textual exegesis of those various passages.
Bengson says that to endorse this interpretation is to “endorse a substantial link between evidence and the intuitive” (this vol.). That’s misleading: the proposal is that having pre-theoretic content is evidence for being contentful. That is not what any proponent of Centrality (in the tradition I am addressing) means when they say that intuitions serve as evidence for philosophical theories.
The sentence, “I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself”, isn’t entirely naturally interpreted, but these are transcripts of spoken remarks (and the alternative interpretation is even more uncharitable).
I should add that this isn’t an entirely charitable reading on my part since I think the underlying thought is wrong: illusions of thought are, I think, common (see Cappelen 2013). The view I attribute to Kripke is nonetheless very plausible and widely endorsed.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Josh Dever and Brian Weatherson for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Cappelen, H. Replies to Weatherson, Chalmers, Weinberg, and Bengson. Philos Stud 171, 577–600 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0285-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0285-0