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Virtue, Intuition, and Philosophical Methodology

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Book cover Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa

Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series ((PSSP,volume 119))

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Abstract

This chapter considers Ernest Sosa’s contributions to philosophical methodology. In Sect. 1, Sosa’s approach to the role of intuitions in the epistemology of philosophy is considered and related to his broader virtue-theoretic epistemological framework. Of particular focus is the question whether false or unjustified intuitions may justify. Section 2 considers Sosa’s response to skeptical challenges about intuitions, especially those deriving from experimental philosophy. I argue that Sosa’s attempt to attribute apparent disagreement in survey data to difference in meaning fails, but that some of his other, more general, responses to experimentalist skeptics succeed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ludwig (2007).

  2. 2.

    Bealer (1992, 1998).

  3. 3.

    Sosa (2007a), p. 54, emphasis in original.

  4. 4.

    Ibid. p. 47.

  5. 5.

    Ibid. p. 49.

  6. 6.

    Ibid. p. 55.

  7. 7.

    Sosa (2007b), p. 51. For subjects to “track” a proposition in the relevant sense is approximately for their beliefs to be counterfactually sensitive to the truth of that proposition; if a subject’s belief tracks the fact that p, then, were p not the case, the subject would not believe that p. See, for example, Nozick (1981), p. 185.

  8. 8.

    Sosa (2007a), pp. 56–57.

  9. 9.

    The central places in which Sosa considers views of this sort are his (2007a), pp. 56–60 and (2007b).

  10. 10.

    We may interpret (3) as a de re judgment about the amount of hair that Ernest Sosa has; thus do we make plausible that the justification here is intuitive. The judgment that Ernest Sosa is not bald is plausibly a perceptual one.

  11. 11.

    For example, Sosa (2007a), pp. 22–23.

  12. 12.

    Sosa (2007a), p. 60.

  13. 13.

    Sosa (2007a), p. 62.

  14. 14.

    For an overview, see Conee and Feldman (1998).

  15. 15.

    Sosa (2007a), p. 58. See Sosa (2007b), pp. 53–54, for effectively the same point, developed a bit more thoroughly.

  16. 16.

    Sosa (2007b), p. 54.

  17. 17.

    For a useful overview, see Tversky and Kahneman (1974), especially pp. 1124 (for the connection to generally reliable heuristics) and 1130 (for the prevalence of these rational errors even among experts).

  18. 18.

    Sosa (2007a), pp. 63–64.

  19. 19.

    Sosa (2009), p. 108.

  20. 20.

    Sosa (2010a), p. 419.

  21. 21.

    For example, Stich (2009), p. 233.

  22. 22.

    Sosa (2010a).

  23. 23.

    Sosa (2010a), pp. 421–422.

  24. 24.

    Chalmers (2011) offers an approach to verbal disagreement that classifies James’s case as merely verbal, but points out that it is not plausibly regarded as one in which the participants are fail to disagree about any particular proposition. Chalmers is noncommittal about whether disputes about knowledge like the ones Sosa discusses are candidates for treatment as mere verbal disputes.

  25. 25.

    See, for example, Sosa (2007c), p. 102.

  26. 26.

    Sosa (2007b), pp. 68–69.

  27. 27.

    For example, Swain et al. (2008).

  28. 28.

    Sosa (2007c), p. 105. Weinberg (2007) argues that this move is not available, because philosophical intuition is fallible in a way importantly worse than perceptual experience is; however, Ichikawa (2011) argues to the contrary.

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Acknowledgments 

Thanks to Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, Ernest Sosa, and John Turri for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall E370, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada

    Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa

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  1. Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
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Correspondence to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West 200, London, N6G 1H3, Ontario, Canada

    John Turri

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Ichikawa, J.J. (2013). Virtue, Intuition, and Philosophical Methodology. In: Turri, J. (eds) Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5934-3_1

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