Abstract
Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct (experimental) strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect (inductive) strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus.
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Notes
We use the term ‘intuition’ fairly broadly in this paper, i.e., as potentially covering a wide range of spontaneous cognitive responses to thought experiment cases (see, e.g., Pust 2012 for an overview). This broad use is open to the objection that only intuitions of a specific kind matter for philosophical methodology and thus count as genuine intuitions (see, e.g., Bengson 2013; Ludwig 2007). We do not have the space to discuss this objection in more detail here. However, we would like to note that we are skeptical about the methodological significance of the ‘genuine intuitions objection’, since it is not clear whether even professional philosophers typically respond to thought experiment cases with “genuine intuitions” in their everyday practice (for discussion, see, e.g., Alexander 2012, Chapter 5; Alexander and Weinberg 2007; Horvath 2010; Weinberg and Alexander 2014).
For a qualified empirical defense of philosophers’ intuitive expertise, see De Cruz (2015) on the basis of dual process psychology, and Buckwalter (2014) on the basis of the psychology of expert biases and limitations. See also Nado (2015a) for a qualified endorsement of philosophical expertise that does not, however, aim to rebut the experimental restrictionist challenge.
Some philosophers have argued that the findings of experimental philosophy are methodologically irrelevant because intuitions about thought experiment cases do not, on closer inspection, play any significant methodological role in philosophical practice (Cappelen 2012, 2014; Deutsch 2009, 2010, 2015). In this case, the expertise defense might be obsolete simply because there would be no challenge from experimental philosophy in the first place. The controversy over this important issue is still ongoing, however, and a number of philosophers have offered forceful replies to various arguments for the methodological irrelevance of intuitions (see, e.g., Bengson 2014; Boghossian 2014; Brogaard 2014; Chalmers 2014; Ichikawa 2014; Nado 2015b; Weinberg 2014). For the purposes of this paper, we will therefore simply assume that intuitions about thought experiment cases, broadly understood, do play a significant methodological role in philosophical practice.
It should be noted, however, that—due to the mediating role of operationalization—even the most direct psychological investigation of philosophical judgments and intuitions will still be indirect in comparison to, e.g., the observation of overt human behavior or bodily movements. For this reason, one should think of the distinction between direct and indirect strategies more as a continuum than as a strict dichotomy.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting these clarifications.
After this paper was accepted for publication, we learned about a recent study by Carter et al. (2015) that inter alia suggests that philosophical experts are less willing than lay people to self-ascribe knowledge of simple analytic truths versus knowledge of widely accepted empirical truths (thanks to Martin Peterson for the pointer).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to make our procedure more explicit.
Steup, for example, explicitly notes that there is “… broad agreement among epistemologists that Henry’s belief [in the fake-barn case] does not qualify as knowledge” (Steup 2014, section 1.2).
Two subjects (one expert subject, one lay subject) were excluded from this analysis because they spent over 10,000 s longer than all other subjects.
We calculated all comparisons assuming equal and unequal variances. Since the results differed only marginally (it was never the case that a certain difference was significant using one assumption but not significant when the other assumption was used) we chose to report our findings in the most common form, i.e., without adjusting the degrees of freedom.
Since Sculpture is modeled after fake-barn cases (see above), our finding that lay people tend to ascribe knowledge in this case basically confirms a key result of the pioneering study on fake-barn cases by Colaço et al. (2014).
After this paper was accepted for publication, we learned about an unpublished study by Carter et al. (ms) that inter alia compares expert and lay intuitions concerning fake-barn-style cases, and that mostly confirms our own findings. For example, Carter, Pritchard, and Sheperd also found that, on average, lay people and experts do ascribe knowledge in such cases, even though experts are less inclined to ascribe knowledge than lay people (thanks to Joshua Shepherd for the pointer).
Since the ratings of 3 and 4 were labeled with ‘mildly disagree’ and ‘mildly agree’, respectively, one might interpret ratings of 3 or below as cases of disagreement and ratings of 4 or above as cases of agreement. Applying this classification, only 3.8 % of the expert subjects agreed with the claim that the little girl knew the outcome of the coin flip, while 33.8 % of the lay subjects agreed with this claim.
Thanks to Shen-yi Liao and Hannes Rusch for pressing this point on independent occasions.
There is a disanalogy between Exam and standard lottery cases that might be relevant to their knowledge-related assessment, however. For on the natural assumption that the student is in normal physical condition, there might be no close possible world where this particular student dies during her final exam. And in that case, the professor’s belief that the student will survive her final exam could not easily have been false, i.e., the professor’s belief is safe. For this reason, one might count cases like Exam as bona fide cases of knowledge—unlike standard lottery cases, where we assume that every lottery ticket wins in some close possible world (see, e.g., Pritchard 2005). A more systematic investigation of (expert) intuitions about lottery-style cases would thus have to compare cases like Exam with cases that are more closely analogous to standard lottery cases (thanks to Jens Kipper for pressing this point).
After this paper was accepted for publication, Aaron Meskin pointed out to us that the phrase ‘dollar bills’—without the qualifier ‘ten’—is naturally taken to refer to one dollar bills only. So taken literally, our vignette would trigger a reading according to which only the one dollar bills—but not the ten dollar bills—are fake in the scenario described, and this would weaken the analogy with the original fake-barn case. However, none of the people who took the study, or who saw the vignette in conference presentations—and not even the native speakers among our proof-readers—seem to have noticed the mistake (or, more cautiously, none of them felt the need to point it out to us). Moreover, our results for Dollar are almost identical to other results for fake-barn style cases (see above and below). Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that the participants in our experiment simply accommodated the mistake in line with the intended reading of the case description, which is clearly suggested by the final sentence of our vignette—a sentence that makes little sense on the assumption that only the one dollar bills in the scenario are fake. In all fairness, however, it would be useful to have a follow-up study that confirms the insignificance of our mistaken phrasing (thanks to Joshua Alexander and Aaron Meskin for discussion).
One expert subject was excluded from this analysis because she or he spent over 1000 s longer (2554 s) than all other subjects.
Thanks to Shen-yi Liao and Hannes Rusch for pressing the importance of distribution patterns.
Thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for the suggestion.
The lay participants for this additional experiment were selected in the same way as in our two main experiments (see above). 178 lay subjects were included in our analysis. The main difference in the design of the experiment was that each participant only responded to one randomly selected version of the six versions of the coin flip case, which helped to prevent order effects (thanks to Shen-yi Liao for suggesting that our original findings might involve order effects). The mean ratings for the six cases did not differ significantly, F(5, 172) = .41, p = .84, with means varying between 2.45 and 2.92 (overall = 2.74) and percentages of agreement between 24 % and 46 % (overall = 36 %). So the additional experiment clearly disconfirms our second hypothesis.
Thanks to Eddy Nahmias for this suggestion [in a comment on our post “Expert Intuitions About Knowledge” on the Experimental Philosophy blog; Horvath and Wiegmann (2013)].
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Joshua Alexander, James Andow, Steve Clark, Jens Kipper, Shen-yi Liao, Aaron Meskin, Jonas Nagel, Eddy Nahmias, Jennifer Nado, Martin Peterson, Hannes Rusch, Joshua Sheperd, Jonathan Weinberg, and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and discussions. Thanks also to our audiences at the lecture series Gedankenexperimente—Kann man aus dem Lehnstuhl die Welt erforschen? at Universität Zürich in May 2014, the X-Phi Workshop Vienna at Universität Wien in June 2014, the conference Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Experimentellen Philosophie at Philipps Universität Marburg in June 2014, and the conference Investigating the Nature and our Understanding of Causality, Morality, Language, Mind, and Aesthetics—the inaugural meeting of the Experimental Philosophy Group Germany—at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in November 2015. Alex Wiegmann was supported by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG WA 621/21-2).
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Horvath, J., Wiegmann, A. Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge. Philos Stud 173, 2701–2726 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0627-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0627-1