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Notes
This is not to say that political philosophers could not help with this question. There are lots of questions that should have as their research centre some other department, but to which philosophers can usefully help. Indeed, the examples from economic methodology and evolutionary explanation I just mentioned are two more such questions.
Philosophers sometimes understate the importance of independent checks. We can know a scale is working, but if we want to check its reliability we don’t use it, we use something else. I suspect that a certain amount of theory-independence is part of the explanation of the value of intuitions.
Relatedly, I have not seen Liverpool get awarded an undeserved free kick for about that long.
There is an ambiguity in Cappelen’s text that I am not sure I am interpreting the right way. Let’s assume that someone intuits that in a particular case, \( c \) doesn’t cause \( e \). Call the content of that intuition, i.e., what is intuited, \( p_{d} \). And call the proposition that the person has this intuition, i.e., the event of the intuiting, \( p_{g} \). Plausibly both \( p_{d} \) and \( p_{g} \) could be evidence in the right cases, though most of the time the salient evidence will be \( p_{d} \). I think \( p_{d} \) can be an unjustified justifier in the sense that other beliefs, e.g., that a particular theory of causation is false, can be justified on the basis of \( p_{d} \), but no other beliefs the agent has justify \( p_{d} \). But you might want a stronger sense of ‘unjustified’, where it means not just not justified by anything else, but not justified at all. I think in these kinds of cases, \( p_{d} \) is justified, just not justified by anything else. And the justification is, as I’ll get to below, strong but fragile. If when Cappelen says that intuitions, according to Centrality, are unjustified justifiers he means that the belief that \( p_{d} \) is unjustified, then I am not defending Centrality. I just mean that the agent need not have any other mental states which justify the belief \( p_{d} \), or indeed any access to anything that justifies \( p_{d} \). But for all that it might be that the belief that \( p_{d} \) is justified, and the grounds for the justification include what the agent learned about causation as a child, plus perhaps her competence in distinguishing causes from non-causes.
I am simplifying a little here. My preferred position is that intuiteds provide strong but fragile evidence, while intuitings provide weak but resilient evidence. The reason this is relevant is related to footnote 7.
At one point in Ben Levinstein’s doctoral dissertation (Levinstein 2013), he considers whether there’s a general rule for deciding which of two conflicting sources we can trust. There turns out to be very little in general one can say. In particular, trust the more reliable source turns out not in general to be good advice. If sources have characteristic errors, it might be that given what the two sources have said, it is better on this occasion to trust the less reliable source, because the verdicts the sources deliver provide evidence that we are seeing one of the characteristic errors of the more reliable source. It takes more space than I have here to fill in the details of this argument, and most of the details I’d include would be Levinstein’s not mine. But here’s the big conclusion. Assume that intuitions are often wrong, but rarely dramatically wrong. The reason for that is that heuristics are bad at getting things exactly right, and good at getting in the ballpark. And that careful reasoning is often right, but sometimes dramatically wrong. This is trickier to motivate, but I think true. Then when intuition dramatically diverges from theory, and we don’t have independent reason to think that intuition is mistaken about the kind of case that’s in question, we should trust the intuition more than the theory.
There is interesting work to be done on the relative role of intuitions and arguments about principles, but I’m going to leave that for another day, and focus here on cases. The principles/cases distinction can be a bit slippery, but paradigm cases are easy to identify, and we’ll be working with fairly paradigmatic cases here.
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Weatherson, B. Centrality and marginalisation. Philos Stud 171, 517–533 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0289-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0289-9