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My discussion here is focused on the latter half of the book concerning the “argument from philosophical practice. I am in wholehearted agreement with the first half’s thesis that the usage of the term “intuition” is highly motley and of no methodological use.
I should note that Cappelen does pay a little attention to this text, acknowledging its existence in a brief footnote on p. 106. But, totally inexplicably, he claims that this is consistent with a picture of intuitions that includes Rock. I see no way that this could be so, given the way that Rock gets used throughout Chapter 8.
Another somewhat mysterious aspect of Cappelen’s treatment of my text: he is puzzled by the “usually” in my characterization, seeing it as some sort of shortcoming, and tries to replace it (pp. 118–119). But it should be clear now why it is needed—such threats to the prima facie status of ECG will arise sometimes, but far from always.
I will not be concerned here with the question of when it is a proposition like ‘p is intuitive’ that is ECG, and when the intuited proposition p itself is ECG. The short answer is that philosophers often fall back to the former when sufficient evidential pressure is placed on the latter.
Including things like p. 320n2, about how epistemologically thin the relevant status is supposed to be.
What about ‘evidence recalcitrance’? This is, again, not something that Cappelen offers much textual guidance for, so it is hard to know what is supposed to be motivating it. I think what he has in mind is something like the independence of intuition from belief as emphasized by theorists like George Bealer. But that’s not quite evidence recalcitrance: Cappelen’s notion involves having an argument for p, then losing that argument, but still being inclined towards p, whereas Bealer is more concerned with cases of being convinced that p is false, yet still finding oneself with the intuition that p. I don’t know of anywhere in the literature that anyone talks about what Cappelen is talking about; and the sort of phenomenon that Bealer and others is concerned with is operating on a clear analogy with the way we can have a percept as if p, even when we know that not-p, as with various perceptual illusions. I do not have space to pursue the point further here, but this phenomenon of belief independence, and this particular point of similarity with perception, would have been the right thing for Cappelen to consider when exploring why philosophers engage in “explaining away” unwanted intuitions.
Putting aside rare cases where someone actually does write something like “as everyone learns in grad school”.
Cohen, personal communication.
Even though there are real Gettier cases in the actual world, for example, one pretty much never hears anyone refuse to attribute knowledge on the basis of Gettierization, except in a philosophy setting.
On p. 118n9, Cappelen observes, correctly, that Rock would be a very rare status at best for perceptions to have. Unfortunately, he misses another chance here to let that serve as an indicator to him that, whatever the intuition theorists who appeal to this perceptual analogy have in mind, it is likely something other than Rock.
Gettier’s very short gloss on his cases in such terms as “sheerest coincidence” is also an excellent example.
There is a potential wrinkle here regarding Lehrer’s coherentism, so there may be some highly indirect inferential evidence back from the theory to the case, on his overall picture. The point here is just that making sense of Lehrer’s argument requires us to see him as offering what he takes to be a consideration which is not directly dependent on that internalism, but which instead can be used to argue for it. I should note that one can also usefully compare Lehrer’s case-based argument here to BonJour’s in his classic (1985), where he offers similar sorts of cases (his clairvoyants), and explicitly defends a case-based method in his debate with the externalists.
One should not understand experimental philosophy, as Cappelen does, fundamentally in terms of survey-based the philosophical intuitions of non-philosophers (p. 219), though the modal experimental philosophy paper is clearly of that sort. Even setting aside the interesting x-phi work that’s not on intuitions at all, such as Eric Schwitzgebel’s investigations into the behavior of ethicists, important much work has also been done on intuitions in expert philosophical populations (e.g., Karola Stoltz and Paul Griffiths), and yet other work on intuitions has not been survey-based but instead used such methods as fMRI (e.g., Joshua Greene).
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To appear in Philosophical Studies symposium on Herman Cappelen, Philosophy Without Intuitions.
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Weinberg, J.M. Cappelen between rock and a hard place. Philos Stud 171, 545–553 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0286-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0286-z