Conflicting Reflective Equillibriums?

Empirically-minded philosophers have recently relied quite heavily on data about folk intuitions concerning a myriad of subjects--including intention, intentionality, epistemology, free will, the philosophy of language, moral responsibility, moral objectivity, and criminal culpability. One of the most interesting--albeit not very surprising--findings is that philosophers are often out of touch with how philosophical laypersons respond to famous philosophical thought experiments. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk about the relationship between folk intuitions and conceptual analysis during a graduate student philosophy conference at the University of Utah. One of the issues that was brought up--inspired by a paper written by Adam Feltz (a fellow graduate student in philosophy here at FSU)--was how the gathering data on folk intuitions affects the arguments put forward by staunch advocates of intuitions such as George Bealer. More specifically, does the fact that there are systematic cross-cultural differences in intuitions about thought experiments--e.g., Gettier cases--cast doubt on the centrality of intuitions in many contemporary philosophical debates? After all, given that people start with quite different intuitions, isn't it quite possible that two "rational agents" will arrive at different conclusions--both of which are the result of reflective equillibrium? If so, this is not only a problem for Bealer, it also poses problems for other philosophers who rely on intuitions and reflective equillibrium--most notably, John Rawls. Kim Sterelny--the key note speaker at the aforementioned conference--made an insightful comment that I found particularly helpful. Rather than focussing on cross-cultural studies in our efforts to highlight the problem with conflicting intuitions, why shouldn't we focus instead on the conflicting intuitions of philosophers themselves--e.g., the disagreement between consequentialists and deontologists. After all, many of these philosophers have been thinking about these issues for decades. And if we grant that many of these same philosophers are also robustly rational agents--a perhaps dubious assumption!--it is strange indeed that despite the process of reflective equillibium which nearly all of them have undertook, they nevertheless end up on opposite sides of the fence. Given the dynamics of philosophical debates such as these, don't we have enough prima facie reason to worry about the evidential status of intuitions as it is?
If so, why doesn't the empirical data about conflicting intuitions give us additional reason to sound the knell of the heyday of intuition driven philosophy? How might philosophers such as Bealer and Rawls respond? More importantly, what is left of philosophy once the evidential values of intuitions are called into question?

Comments

[Jonathan Weinberg]

(Thanks for starting the posting back up! We'd hit quite a doldrom there.)

One possible response is that the utilitarian and the Kantian's intuitions are not now the products of a completed equilibrium, but are still engaged in the process of RE. So if there's still disagreement now, that's fine -- those disagreements are part of the world-historical process of RE moving itself inexorably forward, to the great Cosmic Equilibration at the end of history....

[Adam Feltz]

Here is the paper to which Thomas refers. I also have a bit on an alternative to the intuition approach that does not make reference to intuitions in epistemology, but I am not sure how certain I am of that bit.

http://home.earthlink.net/~mrmotzki/Documents/intuition's%20place.pdf

[Jason]

I'm interested in the article you mention but had trouble with the link. I'll try back sometime later.

I've just recently gotten interested in the subject, and have a few thoughts. (My sympathies are mixed, but let me focus here on a few things the pro-intuition philosopher might say.)

First, pro-intuition philosophers like Bealer often insist that, in fact, there is quite widespread agreement on intuitions. They think that claims to the contrary are generally overstated. For instance, basically everyone agrees that true belief by itself is insufficient for knowledge, and it's easy enough to come up with similarly uncontroversial intuitions. This by itself may be enough to ensure that it's legitimate for intuitions to play some positive role in your epistemology. The question then is just about how much total work they can legitimately do.

Second, pro-intuition philosophers are free to say that while intuition is one thing, common sense is another. Maybe the vast majority of college sophomores who've never taken a metaphysics class say (when you ask them) that it's possible that THIS VERY lecturn right here, which in fact is made out of wood, could have been made out of ice. But so what? Common sense is wrong about lots of things; no big surprise if it's also wrong about the essential properties of material objects. As long as a pro-intuition philosopher can give some principled way to distinguish between vulgar common sense and refined intuition, she needn't be embarrassed if empirical studies show that, say, 98% of the public thinks the wooden lecturn could've been made of ice while 98% of philosophers think that it couldn't be. Surely, the pro-intuition philosopher isn't saddled with saying that we should expect people's unreflective thoughts about cases they never encounter should agree with philosophers' thoughts about those cases. A pro-intuition philosopher can be an intuition elitist, valuing some people's judgments and not others.

This sort of line could also be used to attack the relevance of cross-cultural differences. It wouldn't be amazing if the common sense of Americans from warm climates disagrees with the common sense of Americans from cold climates on the question of whether this very lecturn could've been made of ice. And such differences might attest to important underlying psychological differences. But, as long as refined intuition agrees that the lecturn couldn't have been made of ice, then the pro-intuition philosopher seems okay.

Third a number of pro-intuition philosophers insist that even though there are, of course, ongoin disputes in, say, ethics and epistemology, this shouldn't lead us to underestimate the degree to which (a) genuine progress has been made in such areas on the basis of appeals to intuitions, and (b) real consensus has emerged.
In response to Professor Sterelny's point, a pro-intuitiion philosopher might think it doesn't really matter that INDIVIDUAL philosophers end up on different sides of the fence, so long as the community of philosophers gravitate toward some position. Suppose Professors X, Y, and Z all went to grad school before the 1970s. When content externalism exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, X, Y, and Z all thought it was crap. X, Y, and Z all held strong internalist intuitions, which they took to their grave. If so then X, Y, and Z ended up on one side of the fence while Kripke, Putnam, and Burge ended up on the other. Still, if the philosophical community as a whole has gravitated toward content externalism -- which, basically, it has -- then the pro-intuition philosopher needn't worry too much that X, Y, and Z were never able to get the right intuition. A pro-intuition philosopher can appeal to the epistemic role of the community, and can even grant that the intuitions of rational, trained philosophers can be discounted sometimes (e.g., if they are trapped in a certain paradigm).

There's much more to say here; I find the subject very interesting. But, I've already written a lot more than I meant to, and so I'll leave it at that.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Let me try to offer some quick rejoinders to a couple parts of the pro-intuition case as Jason puts it forward -- I think it will be useful to explore how this dialectic can develop.

As to the issue of how much agreement or disagreement there is, I think the intuition-opponent should grant that in an overwhelming number of ordinary-case intuitions, there really is widespread agreement of a sort she does not wish to make trouble for. She is not trying to be a skeptic about whether we can judge, of an average chair, that it is indeed a chair. Rather, she should question the inference from the granted reliability of ordinary-case intuitions to any conclusion about the reliability of the more extraordinary-case intuitions that are more typically relied upon by philosophers. An analogy: if someone claimed that they could see through walls, and you objected to this claim, it would do them little good to point out all the ordinary cases in which vision does a perfectly good job of revealing our surroundings to us.

I think that many philosophers do hold something like the intuition-elitist view. The operative clause, however, is "As long as a pro-intuition philosopher can give some principled way to distinguish between vulgar common sense and refined intuition". I suspect that they cannot. At least, they have not yet done so. There are some quick gestures towards it in Bealer and in BonJou, in terms of the underlying phenomenology of 'real' intuitions, but my sense is that they are not very persuasive here -- and anyway they offer no means for how we are to settle things when two persons disagree as to what is or is not a 'real' intuition.

[Neil]

*Rather, she should question the inference from the granted reliability of ordinary-case intuitions to any conclusion about the reliability of the more extraordinary-case intuitions that are more typically relied upon by philosophers*

How do we distinguish ordinary from extraordinary cases? Using intuitions, right? I doubt there is a principled way to avoid appeal to intuitions.

How do we distinguish between what Jason calls common-sense and informed intuition? Actually, I don't think it's that hard. First we have filters on the inputs: people who are not informed on the debate simply don't count (recall Kuhn: the point of education is to get noviates to share a way of seeing with the community). Second, we require *wide* reflective equilibrium, which is to say that the view must be consistent with the best science, natural and social, and plausible philosophical positions. I don't think appeal to anything intrinsic about the intuitions is necessary

[Adam Feltz]

Thomas writes: "Why doesn't the empirical data about conflicting intuitions give us additional reason to sound the knell of the heyday of intuition driven philosophy?"

I am sympathetic with the spirit of this question. Perhaps intuition's place in the particularly normative fields should be replaced by other means. Presumably this is so because we have alternatives to the intuition approach (e.g. linear modeling). I am not sure, however, that we have similar alternatives in other fields of philosophy such as metaphysics (just to name one). Of course, the arguments that the anti-intuitionist uses against epistemology and ethics can be adapted to the other fields. But without a viable alternative I am not sure that we should give up intuitions in those fields...I mean, how else would we do them?

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Neil's and Adam's last comments share a kind of presupposition that is very common in these sorts of discussions. And I think it's important to notice this presupposition, and to try to figure out how to reject: namely, if one is to be a critic of the current mode of analytic reliance on particular kinds of intuitions, then one must do so by being a critic of all intuitions. I'll call this the Yucky Conditional. Given that the consequent of YC presents an extremely tough epistemological row to hoe, accepting YC can lead to resistance to the entire intuition-critical project.

But as I noted in my earlier comment, we just don't need to fight on those terms. For example, that's why I said (and I'm not sure why Neil didn't pick up on this) that we should just grant the reliability of ordinary-case intuitions. Doing so is a good first step towards a necessary part of the intuition-critical project: clarifying what exactly our target is. In the process, we preempt a lot of the quick pro-intuition counter-responses that depend on YC. Neil's comment a version of it, and really so is the Bealer line that Jason put forward above.

This is not to say that we can reject YC for free. There's some serious work to be done here by us experimental philosophy types. But if we at least make it clear -- including making it clear to ourselves -- that we don't endorse YC, then we and our opponents can start to get to work on the next, better generation of arguments.

[Neil]

Jonathan,

You're a little - only a little - unfair to me in saying that my comment is a version of a YC-dependent response. I had 2 points; the first seems YV dependent, but the second - that there are filters on intuitions that are principled - is not. And I'm not sure that the degree of dependence of the first argument is so great as to make it without all force, from Jonathan's point of view.

Here's what I think needs to be done to move the debate forward. First, anti-intuitionists need to stop attacking a straw philosopher. No one seriously thinks that intuitions are the end of the matter (or at least they had better not). Suppose I use a Gettier case to cast doubt on JTB accounts. I don't say "JTB accounts are false - look!". I say something more along the lines of "well, this doesn't seem like knowledge to me". And that's not meant to end the argument, its meant to be an invitation. I ask you to say why it is knowledge after all (ideally, at least, I also say why not only doesn't it look like knowledge, but give an account of why it's not knowledge). Intuitions should guide our work, but no intuition is immune to doubt (and doubt is cast on an intuition by showing that it conflicts with some ordinary case intuitions).

Now turn to the pro-intuition side (or at least to those who accept the view, that Jason and I have separately defended, that informed intuitions should count, but common sense doesn't). What we need to do is to give an account of analysis that isn't reliant on Lewis-style collection of platitudes. Because that method is obviously reliant on common sense. So there is some basic and hard work to be done in methodology. I hope Jason wants to take it on - frankly, I'm not equipped.

[tnadelhoffer]

Here is one thing that some of us experimental types are interested in: whenever a philosopher suggests that one of the selling points of their theory is that it agrees with common sense or our ordinary intuitions--a straightforward empirical claim--it is perfectly reasonable to question whether their theory does in fact enjoy widescale intuitive support. Luckily for us, there are empirically honest ways of testing to see whether claims about common sense are true or false--and a number of us have begun running just these sorts of test. Sometimes social scientists have already collected the salient data and other times they have not--in which case, survey studies are run and the data is slowly collected. As far as I can tell, there is no plausible reason to think that this sort of work is philosophically problematic. If it turns out that a majority of people do not think we have libertarian free will (LFW)--nor do they think that LFW is necessary for moral responsibility, then this would certainly take the air out of the argumentative sails of libertarians who get a lot of mileage by assuming that people share their view. No one--or at least no one I am aware of--suggests that once we determine what folk concepts and intuitions are we will then be able to use the data to falsify philosophical theories. But we will certainly be in a position to determine who has "squator's rights" when it comes to a particular philosophical debate. In the free will debate, for instance, compatibilists have always been on the defensive since their views purportedly fly in the face of common sense.

Some experimental philosophers admittedly have bigger fish to fry. Their target is the central role that intuitions often play in contemporary analytic philosophy. The problems with intuitions are two-fold: First, whose intuitions are philosophers interested in when they talk about intuitions. Second, what kind of evidentiary status are intuitions supposed to have. This second problem becomes all the more problematic for the intuition-friendly types once we acknowledge that intuitions vary across cultures, genders, races, socio-economic status, etc. Hell, philosophers themselves spend an awful lot of time in argumentative impasses that are fueled by conflicting intuitions. Given this state of affairs, what good are intuitions? Asking this question is not an underhanded way of suggesting that philosophers could avoid appealing to intuitions--it is simply a way of wondering whether we ought to hang much on them.

Yet other experimental types are interested in the widespread philosophical assumption--fueled by intuition-driven philosophers such as Bealer--that intuitions give us access to "the truth" and that there is a proper method of consulting intuitions--namely, reflective equillibrium. On the surface, it seems like philosophy is rife with examples of stagnated debates that suggest that this approach is ineffective at best--misguided at worst.

Ultimately, I think Jonathan is correct in pointing out that being critical of certain kinds of (and appeals to) intuitions does not commit one to being critical of all intuitions. Indeed, there are plenty of interesting philosophical projects to be built upon folk intuitions--from action theory and ethics to free will.
Of course, many philosophers--including Neil--are skeptical of folk intuitions and/or common sense. In certain areas of discourse--e.g., logic, philosopy of science,philosophy of mathematics, or ontology--this skepticism is well-founded. In other areas, however, it seems entirely unjustified. When it comes to free will or moral responsibility, for instance, what ordinary people think about these issues seems entirely salient. After all, determining whether people are "really" free or "ultimately" morally responsibile--unlike determining whether a particularly complicated argument is valid or whether sub-atomic particles "really" exist--will depend in part on our ordinary concepts, reactive attitudes, and moral practices. In this respect, I think Adam is correct in pointing out that intuitions will have different roles to play in different areas of philosophy.

I am nevertheless skeptical of Neil's seeming aversion for all things common sensical. It seems as if he holds what Jonathan calls an "intuition-elitist view" (IEV) that I find troubling. I also agree with Jonathan that proponents of the IEV fail to "give some principled way to distinguish between vulgar common sense and refined intuition." Neil's suggestion that there are two intuition filters that we can rely on separating common sense intuitions from informed intuitions seems problematic. He says:

"How do we distinguish between what Jason calls common-sense and informed intuition? Actually, I don't think it's that hard. First we have filters on the inputs: people who are not informed on the debate simply don't count (recall Kuhn: the point of education is to get noviates to share a way of seeing with the community). Second, we require *wide* reflective equilibrium, which is to say that the view must be consistent with the best science, natural and social, and plausible philosophical positions. I don't think appeal to anything intrinsic about the intuitions is necessary."

First, if we take this suggestion at face value, it would mean that very few people have intuitions that matter on issues such as free will, moral responsibility, political obligations, etc. And while this would give philosophers a good reason to never have to "mingle with the masses," it is too elitist for my tastes--not to mention the fact that it seems methodologically problematic once we look at how divergent intuitions are even among people who are lucky enough to have their intuitions count. Second, the way Neil cashes out reflective equillibrium--namely, the state of being constrained by "the best science, natural and social, and plausible philosophical positions"--does end up depending on intuitions. For instance, does socio-biology or gender constructionism count as some of the best social science? How do we cash out the notion of "plausible philosophical positions" if not in terms of their intuitive plausibility. I, for one, find Lewisean possible worlds quite implausible--but that does that mean that Lewisean modal realism is false. Minimally, I do not think defenders of IEV can get off so easily.

I am not suggesting that common sense should be the court of final appeal. Nor am I suggesting that philosophers should always be beholden to folk intuitions. I do, however, think that Al Mele is correct to point out that when philosophical views are wholly unconstrained by common sense and/or folk intuitions the proponents of these views have reason to worry that perhaps they have little more than a "philosophical fiction" as a subject matter. Minimally, proponents of these views need to make sure they explain why we should care about the technical philosophical concept of x, when understanding the ordinary concept of x is an important goal in its own right.

[Neil]

Thomas,

Why are you worried about intuitions elitism? It doesn't entail political elitism, after all. I actually suspect that filtering opinions and arguments is a necessary condition of intellectual progress. A great deal of what we do is testimony-reliant, and we don't and can't count everyone's testimony equally. Moreover, the folk have some very odd views. Recall the line quoted by Parfit:

It is always fascinating to speculate on who we would have been if our parents had married other people.

Metaphysical relativism is common; so is a moral relativism justified on moral grounds. I don't do experimental philosopy, defined narrowly (I don't have the skills or the money), but I do a lot of reading in the experimental literature. There I encounter a lot claims that, when I mention them to students, I'm told are false. It's counterintuitive - and therefore false - that people don't know the reasons for their choices, that priming effects work, that blindsight is possible. Of course, all of these things are true (and I could keep on listing them). My all-time favorite is the preference for anecdote over data: I'm forever being told that, for instance, there are plenty of jobs available for people who them, where the evidence adduced is that a friend of a friend advertised for a worker and no one applied. So long as the folk reason badly, I shall continue to discount their intuitions.

How do we ensure that we're still talking about the same things, when we talk about free will and moral responsibility? I actually think that there isn't any one thing the folk mean by either term. Instead, it's a loose collection of closely linked concepts. So we don't preserve sameness of meaning when we refine the terms. On the other hand, our concepts are clearly continuous with the folk concepts.

[tnadelhoffer]

Neil,
Since it is late and I am sleepy, this will have to be much shorter than my last comment. My tiredness notwithstanding, I still think that you are trying to conflate issues that I was trying to keep apart. For instance, you discuss instances where laypersons don't accept or acknowledge the existence or possibility of certain forces, bahaviors, disorders, etc. Yet, we know these things exist--e.g., blindsight. Hence, you suggest, why should we care about these silly uninformed folks--they are wrong about all sorts of things. But each of the examples you give is quite different than the question of whether, for instance, free will exists. After all, there is a fact of the matter concerning whether priming effects work or whether people are aware of the springs of their own actions. It is unclear what the analagous "facts of the matter" are concerning free will or moral responsibility. Hence, while I agree with your willingness to dismiss folk intuitions concerning a myriad of issues that they often know little or nothing about--I do not think that the wholesale rejection of the opinions of a majority of the 6 billion or so people in the world is either helpful or productive. Of course, if most of these people thought that the earth is flat, I would obviously dismiss their intuitions concerning the shape of the earth. But if a majority of them thought that communism is superior to democracy or that there are no objective moral truths, I think that might be something worth paying attention to.

For now, I need to pay attention to my pillow. Hopefully more people will add to this discussion thread while I am asleep. In the meantime, thanks again for a number of interesting and helpful comments.

[Neil]

Sleep well, Thomas. I wouldn't like to think that you had no comment from me to wake up to (i's only 4.30 in the afternoon here. I'm not tired. Or proud (as Arlo Guthrie once said)).

One difference between me and lots (not all!) of other empirically minded folk is that I take history and culture seriously. I'm impressed by the wide range of views people have espoused across time and geography. If you are, then you think that people's views about all sorts of things cannot be taken as inputs into a process that seeks the truth. All kinds of moral views have been accepted as true by all sorts of people, including strange kinds of views that mix fatalism and responsibility. For instance, as I recall the early Greeks thought that people can be caused to do things by the gods and deserve punishment for doing them. They also thought that the person who dishes out a deserved punishment may nevertheless deserve punishment for that act. Just a few decades ago in the US and Western Europe homosexuality was widely regarded as wrong. A few decaded before that, torturing animals was not seen as morally wrong. And so on. I don't think we need to leave the domain of morality and free will to have reason to distrust the folk.

A slogan: 6 billion people can be wrong.

[Justin]

Here, again, is an intuition which I bet a lot of non-philosophers have: this very lecturn, which is in fact made of wood, could have been made of ice. This intuition conflicts with the view held by many philosophers that if the lecturn is made of wood, then it muts have been made of wood. Pro-intuition philosophers needn't say that the common sense intuition is simply wrong *period*, they instead could try to explain away the common sense intuition as follows...

"These non-philosophers are indeed intuiting a real possibility, but they are misdescribing it. It really is possible that there could be an object looking (feeling, etc.) just like this lecturn, but made out of ice rather than wood. It's this possibility people are intuiting, but they misspeak when they say that they have the intuition this very lecturn could have been made of ice."

It seems to me that anti-intuition philosophers must concede that the folk are occasionally bad at reporting their intuitions in roughly this way. It's often possible to convince students within the period of half a class (if not less) that this very lecturn couldn't have been made of ice, despite these students' initial claims to the contrary. It's not that the students are being indoctrinated to change their intuitions so quickly, it's that they hadn't really thought about what their intuition says is possible. This is one way in which a disagreement between common sense and philosophers' intuitions needn't be so worrisome to a pro-intuition philosopher.

If this sort of re-description strategy can be used often, it seems like good consequences follow for the pro-intuition philosopher. First, the pro-intuition philosopher can avoid claiming that what happens is you grow a magical new faculty of intuition (or anything similar) once you become a philosophy professor. It's just that philosophers are better at describing their intuitions than the folk are. Second, it seems to at least potentially be fairly friendly to common sense -- after all, the folk are right about SOMETHING when they say the lecturn could have been made out of ice. Third, perhaps by using this re-description strategy a principled distinction can be drawn between what the intuitions the folk say they have and the intuitions philosophers say they have.

(By the way, I'm "Jason" from above. I'm not sure why that comment has me as Jason -- maybe b/c of the person using the computer before me?)

[tnadelhoffer]

Neil,
I suppose my point above about the existence of free will and moral responsibiility--unlike the existence of subatomic particles, priming effects, etc.,--is that they are contingent upon how these concepts are carved up. If there are quarks now, then there were quarks during the time of Socrates. But if it is wrong to punish people now for things they cannot control, it does not follow that it was "really" wrong for the Greeks. The kind of relativism I am espousing is conceptual rather than merely cultural or ethical. But now is neither the time nor place to hash out the details of my broadly Wittgensteinian view (see, e.g., Robert Arrington's Rationalism, Realism, and Relativism for a detailed sketch of the kind of relativism I have in mind). If the 6 billion people on this planet still believed in the Greek practice of punishing deodands (i.e., inanimate objects that have caused someone harm), then views about what is required for moral responsibility would have to acomodate this view. Similarly with free will, fatalism, and moral responsibility. Of course, this is not suggest that we would not be justified in arguing for revision of our punitive practices--but we would not be replacing a "false" theory of moral responsibility and replacing it with a "true" one--rather we would be converting people from looking through the lenses of one paradigm into looking through another. But we would first need to try and appreciate the nuances of the old paradigm--otherwise we will not be able to get a foothold in our attempts to change it.

Jason/Justin,
The main worry with what you suggest is that people's beliefs and intuitions are quite malleable. So, for instance, with your lecturn case--while you might be correct that you could quickly convince the group of students that the lecturn could not have been made out of ice (since if it had been made out of ice it would have been a different lecturn), I am confident that you could also convince students who had the contrary intuition that the lecturn could have been made out of ice. Especially once we are allowed to appeal to rhetoric and other forms of persuasive oratory (think Johny Cochran). I also see no reason to concede that the folk are sometimes (often?) bad at reporting the content of their intuitions. It depends on what you mean by "intuition." So long as intuitions are taken to be spontaneous judgments about whether x is the case, I see no way that they could misdescribe them. In the case you mention, it's not that they had the one intuition all along--they simply misdescribed it. It's that once you explain the difference to them, their beliefs about the possibility of the lecturn having been made of ice may change. I think that one of the upshots of people like myself having taken a critical stance towards intuitions is that it forces philosophers to be more clear about what they take intuitions to be and what distinguishes intuitions from other mental events such as beliefs. For instance, if you ask undergraduates who have not studied the free will debate whether or not we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true--most of them say no. Yet if you give them deterministic scenarios and ask them whether the agents in these scenarios are free and morally responsible, most of them say yes. It looks like the first question gets as their beliefs about free will and moral responsibility, whereas the second one gets at their intuitions about particular cases. By my lights, the fact that these two come apart is fascinating and it is something philosophers should pay attention to.

OK, that's it for now. Viva Le Resistance!

[Eddy Nahmias]

Tell me if this very simple way of putting it helps or not:

No one should think that folk intuitions or commonsense can tell us anything about the way the world actually is--for instance, whether indeterminism is true or whether humans actually have agent causal powers. Here, philosophers and, more so, scientists will have to discover the truth.

But philosophers should care if folk intuitions and commonsense suggest that the world must be indeterministic or we must have agent causal powers in order to count as free and responsible for their actions (e.g., to deserve praise and blame, punishment and reward). If the folk have these libertarian intuitions and concepts regarding freedom and responsibility (and, contra philosophical tradition, I think most people do *not*), then if the experts discovered that they are not in fact satisfied, well then, we'd have some eliminating or revising of ordinary conceptions and practices to do. If the folk do *not* have these intuitions and concepts, then the experts' discoveries about indeterminism and agent causation would be irrelevant to freedom and responsibility. (Personally, I suspect the experts' discoveries about human psychology and mental causation will be the ones that *are* relevant.)

So, to put it (too?) simply: we should care less about what the folk think about factual matters; we should care lots about what the folk think about normative and conceptual matters (in part to see what factual matters matter).

(None of this is to suggest that folk intuitions are, in general, epistemically reliable or uncorrectable or that philosophers' intuitions about some matters are not much more reliable, etc.)

[Jonathan Weinberg]

No one seriously thinks that intuitions are the end of the matter (or at least they had better not). Suppose I use a Gettier case to cast doubt on JTB accounts. I don't say "JTB accounts are false - look!". I know that the discussion has moved on since this earlier line of Neil's, but I still wanted to comment on this (and the charge of attacking 'straw philosophers' that went with it). Because isn't the thing that Neil is saying no one does pretty much exactly what Gettier himself did? Moreover, I think there are lots of arguments in epistemology and in metaphysics that work more or less exactly like that. If there is some wriggling around in the face of an intuition, it's almost always to try to show how the theory under attack isn't in fact inconsistent with the intuition, and only very rarely a response to the intuition itself. There may be a good number of philosophers who monger intuitions in the more responsible way that Neil advocates, but there's still plenty of others -- too many, I think we'd both agree -- out there who don't.

Also, let me add my 'ditto' to Thomas's response to Justin, with regard to redescription strategies. Really, we just don't know enough about intuitions and intuition-producing psychological mechanisms to know now whether redescription strategies guide people towards the 'real' intuition, or guide them away from the 'real' intuition, or whether there's just no real intuition here at all but a lot of competing pieces of locally malleable, squishysquishy heuristic cognition.

FWIW: I have never had the intuition that the lecturn couldn't be made of ice. And I think it does make sense to wonder what I'd have been like if I had had different parents. And I bet I'm not alone. Part of the problem with the appeal to elite intuitions is that elites tend to be self-sustaining in a way that may not be truth-conducive: if you don't start with the 'right' kinds of intuitions, you just don't get to -- and probably wouldn't want to -- come play in the literature.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Hrm, the html tags that were supposed to be in that last comment didn't seem to materialize. To clarify, the following text was supposed to be in italics, as I was quoting something Neil had written earlier:

No one seriously thinks that intuitions are the end of the matter (or at least they had better not). Suppose I use a Gettier case to cast doubt on JTB accounts. I don't say "JTB accounts are false - look!".

[Neil]

Jonathan,

If you seriously wonder what youwould have been like if you had had different parents, and you think that the intuition that you could not have had different parents falls into the region of controversial intuitions, then we have such radically divergent intuitions regarding what is an ordinary case in which intuitions can be appealed to, and what an extraordinary case, that my original reply is once again in order: we can't escape controversial intuitions. Give up appeal to intuitions and give up philosophy (indeed, intellectual inquiry).

[Jonathan Weinberg]

The issue with the essential-parentage intuition is that I take the intuition to be much more contestable than the practitioners who use it take it to be, yet the institution is structured so as to insulate practitioners from any such contesting. (Frankly, it seems to me that the intuition must be based on some misunderstandings about human developmental biology, but that's perhaps besides the point here.) The issue is not about the case itself, but about the intuition -- the yes-or-no seeming concerning the case. I do take it that hypotheticals about who we'd be with different parents are a fairly common sort of thing to wonder about, so it might well count as an ordinary case, not an extraordinary case. But, as noted, as an ordinary case, the ordinary sort of intuition seems overwhelmingly to be: yes, I could have been me even with different parents.

[Neil]

Huh? I remember someone in primary school wondering what it felt like to be dead. The folk wonder all kinda stuff. And so, it seems, does Jonathan. If you think that you could have been you with different parents, Jonathan, you seem to me to be committed to some kind of non-naturalistic criterion of what makes you you. Your soul may have placed in a different body. I suspect that that's vacuous even if the metaphysics were acceptable.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Oh, hogwash -- you're trying to tell me that necessity of origins is the only naturalistically-acceptable theory of personal identity? That it's not even possible to have a naturalistic account in terms of, say, various of my current psychological properties; or various aspects of my formative years; or, say, some sort of weighted-features approach including origins, psychological properties, and maybe other important parts of a person's upbringing; or...? There are a vast number of possibilities out there! All you've done is to take this one little piece of bad developmental biology, mythologized it, and turned it into a defining feature of both naturalism & intellectual inquiry itself.

Yes, the folk do wonder all kinds of stuff -- which, as near as I can tell, puts them on a pretty even par with philosophers. I mean, just check out the literature on qualia, f'rinstance....

This is all wonderfully illustrative of everything that can go awry in an intuition-elitist metaphilosophy: it can build up & worship the strangest idols, then turn around & insist that such worship is part of the very fabric of rationality.

[Neil]

I don't think I'm committed to necessity of origins account of personal identity in saying that it doesn't make sense to wonder who you would have been if you had different parents. Criteria for cross-world identity are not necessarily critiria for personal identity. My claim is that I can't make any sense of cross-world identity on the other accounts you mention. I do, of course, admit that this is an intuition, but it seems to me to be so well-entrenched that if it is going to be doubted than the kinds of intuitions we rely upon in doing ordinary science (what counts as disconfirmation of a theory, and especially what counts as too many epicycles to be plausible) are also in doubt.

On a different topic; this has gotten snarky, and I think it's my fault. So I want to apologise. Sorry.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

I don't see why some version of counterpart theory couldn't easily accommodate those sorts of proposals?

[Neil]

I would have thought that counterpart theory could accommodate these proposals alright - by importing them. To be clear: I don't say that you need to accept a Kripkesque necessity of origin story. I say that *if* you want to be able to identify the same person across possible worlds then you need such a theory. It may well be that the story is wrong; in that case not only can you not wonder who you would have been with different parents, you can't wonder who you would have been in a different possible world with the *same* parents.

Details aside, I'm interested in how intuition sceptics think we should go about addressing this kind of question at all w/o reliance on intuitions. Should we simply drop the question altogether?

[Jonathan Weinberg]

I don't understand your last comment at all (I might just not follow what you mean by "importing" here). But it seems to me that you're saying that counterpart theory doesn't even begin to make sense of sentences like, "I might have had different parents" -- or even "I might have had bbq for lunch today" (given I didn't in fact, do so). But that would be, I think, to ignore the main resources available to counterpart theory. What cp maybe can't do is make sense of someone's saying, "I -- by which I mean the actual me that exists in this possible world and no other -- might have had different parents". But since no one actually says anything like that, it's hardly a burden on cp to make sense of it. It just has to make sense of the perfectly ordinary "I might have had different parents". Which it seems to me it does. Why doesn't it?

As I said earlier, I don't think anyone should be an intuition-skeptic in the sense of rejecting all intuitions. (I'd be interested in seeing other folks chime in on that question!) But if you mean contested-and/or-extraordinary-intuition-skeptic, then there are a number of ways to address questions like these without reliance on either contested or extraordinary intuitions. Indeed, I suspect that serious linguists trying to the semantics of the English subjunctive would do just that -- by appealing entirely to fairly ordinary sorts of utterances, and for that matter to empirical measures of what people actually say. Another standard way to do this would be to look at the sciences, see what sorts of notions of modality, transworld identity, etc. they need to make their theories go, and run a Quinean sort of inference from the ontological commitments of our best theories. Yet a third way would be to ask, "what purposes are counterfactual claims and the like meant to serve in our cognitive economy?", and then see what sort of structures would best serve those purposes (on analogy here with Ed Craig's metaphilosophy in Knowledge and the State of Nature). Take your pick; I'm partial to the last of these options, myself.