On Intuition Snobbism

Josh Alexander and I, in our recent "Analytic Epistemology & Experimental Philosophy", consider a typology of different ways in which philosophers might understand their own appeals to intuition:

First, it might be supposed that when a philosopher relies on intuitions as evidence, she is relying only on her own personal intuitions as evidence. Let’s call this view, intuition solipsism. Second, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of the class of professional philosophers.  Let’s call this view, intuition elitism. Third, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of a broader class that includes non-philosophers – commonly referred to as “the folk.” Let’s call this view, intuition populism.

But of course there are sub-varieties of these main types, and one type of intuition elitism has recently manifested in a blogging dispute (which Jen linked to) over at "Close Range".  (There are also some interesting issues raised there about experimental design, but they turn out to be less substantial than originally advertised; basically, there are some ways in which some of the early experimental philosophy work could be done better, but none of it adds up to a reason to reject that work.)

The metaphilosophical view on offer there is that philosophers' reports count in ways that our subjects' reports don't -- not necessarily because philosophers are better than ordinary folk per se, but because the standards for what counts as having an intuition at all is pretty high.  Let us (tongue-in-cheekily) call this particular version of elitism, intuition snobbism.  It is in some ways more democratic than elitism, since in principle anyone could have a proper intuition.  But one expects that philosophers will generally have more of them, because of the training and demands of their profession.

Now, here is the main problem for snobbism: if we crank up the dial on what counts as an intuition, then we accordingly will have to dial down our confidence that anyone is actually having a gin-u-wine intuition at any given time.  First, we have to lower our confidence that other philosophers' reports of their intuitions -- their alleged intuitions -- in the journals and talks are, in fact, really reporting intuitions, and not some other form of intellectual seeming.  More broadly, we have to surrender our sense that folks at large concur with us on many of our favorite intuitions.  So, for example, this infamous bit of Jackson -- which I think reflects a kind of reasoning very common among IDR practitioners -- would have to be sacrificed:

...I am sometimes asked – in a tone that suggests that the question is a major objection – why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what governs our classificatory practice, don’t I advocate doing serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various cases? My answer is that I do – when it is necessary...  Everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class of students is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answer they get in the vast majority of cases. But it is also true that often we know that our own case is typical and so can generalize from it to others." (pp. 36-37 of From Metaphysics to Ethics)

We also see this kind of thinking involved in the line that provoked this discussion, Marc Moffet's comment on this post over at the Leiter blog:

After all, while I know plenty of smart linguists who reject [Jason Stanley's] particular theory of the syntactic structure of know-how attributions, it is very rare to find someone who understands the Gettier cases but who doesn't have the Gettier intuitions (i.e., that they are not cases of knowledge).

But merely comprehending the cases isn't enough, on an intuition snob approach.  They need to have, say, the force of necessity; or a strong modal tie to the truth; or to be experienced as internally justifying. 

The intuition snobs also have to give up one of their favorite rhetorical moves against the experimental restrictionists: the tu quoque.  Here's an example from Marc, in our recent exchange: "Moreover, I can't even begin to count the number of people that profess not to trust intuitions as part of their philosphical theorizing, but then turn around and rely on them evidentially in the next breath."  Well... how do you know that that is what they were doing?  Why do you have any confidence at all that it was an intuition that they were relying on?  Maybe it was just a judgment of some other sort, such as a tacit sense of the weight of the empirical evidence.  Indeed, speaking for my own case, I'm pretty sure that unless you saw me using DeMorgan's Law or something rudimentarylike that, it wasn't a snob-worthy intuition that I was using.

Even from a Cartesian standpoint, snobbery would require us to become rather less certain that our own reactions to thought-experiments are proper intuitions.  There are just too many cases in history of various theorists being utterly certain that they had grasped, via the lumen naturale, some inmost metaphysical truth, which most of us now find unintuitive to begin with.  (The Principle of Sufficient Reason is an excellent example, as is most of the arguments for God's existence in the Meditations.  Most folks seem unpersuaded by BonJour's appeal to an intuition of a schematic form of an inductive inference at the end of In Defense of Pure Reason, at least in part because what he puts out as intuitive just doesn't strike everyone as such.)  And there is too much scientific psychology about the ways in which the human mind is all too happy to play tricks on itself, convincing itself where it ought not be convinced, which is why there is all too many scientific norms that are in place precisely to keep us from being able to pull such autochicanery.

So, given the significant costs that snobbery would incur, we might well ask: why be a snob?  There's no descriptive methodological reason to go snobbish -- it's not already built into philosophical practice, and a great many philosophers think that their intuitions can be relied upon because they're already manifested in our quotidian folk practices.  (Those are the "intuition populists" that Josh and I consider.)  For example, a Jacksonian is committed to intuitions being little more than the expression of our shared folk theories underlying our conceptual competences, for example.  See also, say, DeRose on the ordinary language basis for his form of contextualism.  Marc notes, rightly, that everyone is at least appealing to some-sort-of-intuitive-state-or-other, but snobbery is a non-starter as an account of anything that all or even most analtyic philosophers are appealing to.

This gives us a sense in which intuition snobs and restrictionists are similar:  they are both advocating a radical change in philosophical methods.  The  restrictionists are motivated here by the idea, inter alia, that philosophy would do better to take a few methodology lessons from the sciences.  (I think that's what naturalism should really be about, by the way -- not a physicalist ontology, but adding some as-scientific-as-we-can-manage methods to our tool kit.)  And of course we're motivated by our particular findings, even as preliminary as they are.  But where does snobbery get its motivation?  I think it derives mostly from concerns about having a certifiably anti-skeptical epistemology, one in which intuitions can play an important role as a basic (though not infallible or incorrigible) source of evidence.  And, actually, I'm perfectly happy to be on board with something like that, as a matter of fundamental epistemology.

But here's the thing: we're not doing fundamental epistemology here.  We're doing methodology.  And basicness isn't a meaningful category from a methodological standpoint -- we now have oodles & scads & tons of evidence of all sorts that speak to the range & scope of when perception, memory, testimony, & various & sundry forms of intellectual seemings are more, less, or not at all trustworthy.  Maybe only a very special sub-class of those intellectual seemings are capable of getting things off the ground in the first place, and need to have conditions like the aforementioned internally-justifying nature in order to qualify as properly basic.  But none of that matters after we get off the ground, and indeed we've been flying high for a long time now.  Basicness is a starter-motor for the engine of inquiry; once we're in motion, it's finished with its job.

So, where does that leave things?  In the context of the debate over philosophical methodology, intuition snobbery comes at a great price: the general loss of being able to determine, in our own practices, in our collaborators, and in our interlocutors, just when we do or don't have a proper intuition on our hands.  I suspect that this would be a methodologically disastrous price, but it's clearly something that could be argued about (and argued about empirically).  But it's not at all clear that snobbery really buys you very much for that price.  All we get is a bit of epistemological machinery that doesn't do us any methodological good.   Not, on the whole, a good bargain for philosophy.  But isn't it just like snobs to accept only what they take to be the best, regardless of the price? 

;-)

Comments

[SeanD]

This is an interesting post, and I agree that epistemic basicness seems to be a red herring here.

But you don't mention here the idea, which seems to me to be quite prevalent in ethics, that it's not 'intuitions' but rather 'considered convictions' that have evidential weight in philosophical debates; where, I take it, to be a 'considered conviction' is to be something like an ordinary intuition that's been subjected to some careful initial scrutiny as to its internal consistency, its possible provenance in epistemic dispositions (i.e., racist bias or some such) that we have but do not endorse, etc....

Together with the postulate that most anyone could but not everyone does engage in this kind of reflection regarding their intuitions, it strikes me that this is a quite plausible form of intuition 'snobbery'. Indeed, it seems to me that (at least in the areas of philosophy I encounter regularly, e.g., the value-theoretic ones) this is more-or-less the explicit self-understanding of practicioners, typically under the description of 'the method of reflective equilibrium'. Further, it seems to me that if we consider all of the ways in which an intuition can fail to be a considered conviction (particularly by being the result of a subsconscious bias), we should be more than willing to pay the 'methodological price' of a certain prima facie suspicion of (untutored) opinions; given that there are all sorts of irrational and even morally reprehensible processes (as, indeed, some great x-phi work as shown) by which these might come about.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Sharp post, thanks!

[Jen Wright]

There certainly is quite a bit of rhetorical force behind calling what John, Marc, and others are doing (tongue-in-cheek or not) "intuition snobbism". But, frankly, Jonathan, that is all it is: rhetoric. And though I've never actually tested it, it would be my guess that the use of rhetoric is highly negatively correlated with genuine intellectual and scientific progress.

Granted, opinions on this issue run hot and there is a healthy amount of disagreement. But, rather than reject the "snobbish" project out of hand, I think it is worth reflecting on the fact that what the ultimate goal is (or at least should be) is to get clearer on what intuition is, how/when it functions as a useful philosophical tool, and how (if possible) to best track it empirically.

There is no compelling reason - at least from where I'm standing - to think that what trained philosophers and/or the common layperson are calling intuition is always *in fact* intuition. For one thing, there is currently a hob-glob of cognitive/emotive processes that have been thrown into the trash can of "intuitive processes": heurstical reasoning, "gut" reactions, emotional responses, snap judgments, innate modules....you name it. These are very different sorts of processes -- and I think it is misleading to call them all "intuitive", much less intuition.

One thing that your research has certainly brought to the forefront is that what sorts of things are actually going on when people (be they philosophically trained or naive) form judgments about philosophically interesting concrete cases is something that requires (and deserves) much more strenous philosophical and empirical discussion and investigation. But, hey -- as philosophers and scientists, that is what we do best. Nonetheless, at this juncture I'd argue that all we can *responsibly* conclude is that the jury is still out. Such a conclusion certainly isn't as sexy as one that seeks to overthrow philosophical methodology as we know it, but if "sexy" is what we are after, then we've probably made some bad career choices.

With respect to the WNS paper that is being discussed, I finally downloaded the whole thing and took a glance. I am assuming (no,*hoping*) that there exists more data to back up the claims you all are making than is presented in this article. I'm not going to go into any big discussion here, but there are a number of worries (from an empirical standpoint) about the data collected and analyzed in the studies reported. Even if it is the case that the statistical analyses employed hold up under what appear to me to be basic normality assumption violations (e.g., comparing groups of 189 and 217 to groups of 25 and 20!), the design, the vignettes, the data collection, the analyses -- none of these are anywhere close to ideal. And while this has certainly been acknowledged, I think we really need to appreciate the gravity of the issue. Any responsible investigation of these tricky and complicated issues is going to require much more careful (as well as extended and replicated) empirical investigation than is given to us here. As I said, perhaps you are all already well on the way to providing us with such research -- and if so, I am excited to see it.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

I am unsure that Jen is correct in assuming that Jonathan's choice of terminology--as loaded as it is--is nothing more than plain rhetoric. After all, snob can be both a positive and a negative evaluative term. For instance, I know many self-professed wine snobs--a title *not* chosen for its negative connotations but rather because it suggests that they are "really" in the
know--unlike the plebians who drink merlot (or worse, white zin). In this respect, Jonathan could simply be suggesting that the Bealerians of the world are to intuitions what many sommeliers are to wine--viz., unabashedly snobbish.

More importantly, even if Jonathan wasn't using the term "snob" in this way, he would have been justified in doing so (or so methinks). After all, Bealer has a view by which intuitions have strong modal ties to the truth under high quality cognitive conditions. Of course, this is itself a modal claim--for he is interested in establishing (a) that it is possible that philosophy is both autonomous and authoritative with respect to the sciences, (b) that is possible that some intuitions are modally tied to the truth, and (c) that is possible that some creatures--perhaps only creatures cognitively superior to us!--experience the kind of high quality cognitive conditions that get the whole armchair intuition-driven approach off the ground.

On his view, intuitions are to philosophical investigation what observations are to scientific investigation (e.g., both are fallible). But even if we concede that it is *possible* that some super-philosophers with super-strong modal truth-seeking intuitions can access a priori truths that are universal, general, and necessary without having to leave their super-armchairs, why should we think that human philosophers have these powers? Similarly, even though it's possible that a counterpart of mine on some possible world might be (or depending on how you cash out modality, *is*) a sommelier, that gives me no reason whatsoever to think I am a sommelier.

I take the thrust of the Stich-style attack on intuitions to be that the gathering data give us empirical grounds for thinking that we do *not* have super-intuitions and that we are *not* super-philosophers with armchairs that magically enable us to penetrate the veil of appearances and comprehend the true nature of things. Worse still, even if we lofty philosophers did have these super-intuitions, we would have no way of knowing that we have them on any given occasion. But if (a) we can't know whether we have the right kind of intuitions even in cases where we actually do, and (b) if science cannot even in principle shed light on the matter, then what more has Bealer done than arrogantly taken himself to be a super-philosopher whose intuitions--unlike the misguided and uninformed judgments of the folk--have strong modal ties to universal truths.

If the Bealers of the world want more than the mere possibility of truth seeking intuitions--and what good are merely possible truth seeking intuitions--they will need to do more than beg the question in such a snobbish way. Of course, it might just be that my intuitions concerning the meaning of "snob" are not modally tied to the truth--but who's to say?

[jonathan weinberg]

Jenn,

Um... huh?

"it would be my guess that the use of rhetoric is highly negatively correlated with genuine intellectual and scientific progress." Really? Just think of how many great philosophers were also great rhetoricians. (Plato (who would of course deny it) and Hume jump immediately to mind.) Not that I'm saying that any of us x-phiers are playing in that league!!! But it seems to me that one finds rhetoric ubiquitously in intellectual endeavors both good and bad. I think we would get a true statement if we edited as follows:

"it would be my guess that the use of rhetoric _in the absence of other substantive argument_ is highly negatively correlated with genuine intellectual and scientific progress."

But, come on, other than the coining of the name and the last rhetorical (aha!) question, the rest of the post is all argument! It's not like I just wrote, "neener neener snobsnobsnob neener snob", is it? Over the course of several paragraphs, I articulate the target; make the case that it has a series of undesirable consequences; and contend that it offers little of positive value to offset those consequences. Maybe you would think the arguments are wrong, or even wrong-headed, and I freely admit that it's hardly of worked-out & publishable quality (this is a _blog_, after all) but surely you'd grant me that they are, in fact, _arguments_. And I'd be happy to hear more of your thoughts on them, should you decide to treat them as such.

As for what you've said about the WNS paper, about juries being out etc., there's really nothing that you're saying there that is inconsistent with anything we've ever said about it, or with what I said in my responses to Marc's recent post. Yep, I agree, let's do more studies! It would help if the people who wanted to defend intuitions would recognize that that's what they need to do, though, instead of trying to find reasons to just wholly discount the findings, which I still think is not a supportable line for them to take. Now, as for the stats stuff, however, I'm definitely prepared to be schooled on that; but (fwiw & iirc) we used the Fisher's exact because it was supposed to be ok with such a distribution in our cells, and anyway my understanding is that the main danger of using it is loss of power. If you want to get more into the details of that, I'll have to see what Steve & Shaun can remember of our particular mode of analysis.

Let me add my dittos to what Thomas said in regard to snobbism as a term that is both not obviously inapt, and not obviously something that its adherents should disavow. But, hey, I got taught by a guy who described _his own view_ as "mad-dog nativism", so maybe I have unusually permissive views about choices of "ism".

I'm not sure I'd sign 100% on to the rest of Thomas' way of construing the dialectic here, though, because (i) I do think that we have _some_ super-duper intuitions, just not nearly as many as philosophers typically think; (ii) I still think of the situation as more of the empirical results presenting a _yet-unmet challenge_ to IDR practitioners, rather than having solid evidence of a proposition like the one Thomas articulates -- different IDR groups may be able to respond in different ways; and (iii) I don't take Bealer(ians) to be the primary target of the argument.

[John Bengson]

The discussion is getting a bit, er, hairy, so let me pause just to make sure I have the dialectic straight. If I've gotten it wrong, I hope someone will let me know where I've messed it up. Here goes:

Originally, Marc raised some concerns about the methodology employed in WNS. One of these concerns was that WNS did not establish validity (i.e., that their studies study what they purport to study) since they did not provide sufficient evidence that participants were not reporting some mental state other than an intuition. Jonathan's response was that this criticism is grounded in a form of intuition snobbism, and that snobbism is problematic for independent, non-empirical reasons. Thomas's contribution is that to the extent that snobbism is committed to Bealerianism, intuition snobbism is problematic for still further reasons.

A few replies to Jonathan's discussion of snobbism can be found at Close Range. Here I just want to say a few things about Thomas's criticisms of Bealer's position (some of which I see Jonathan just distanced himself from in his most recent comment, which was posted while I was writing this). So, in what follows I'm addressing Thomas -- hi Thomas!

First, you write:

"I take the thrust of the Stich-style attack on intuitions to be that the gathering data give us empirical grounds for thinking that we do *not* have super-intuitions and that we are *not* super-philosophers with armchairs that magically enable us to penetrate the veil of appearances and comprehend the true nature of things."

As I understand Bealer, he does not require that we be in ideal cognitive conditions, and thus we need not be super-intuiters, in order for intuition to be a basic source of evidence for us. (In this regard, it's important to keep the quantifiers in order in Bealer's analysis; see Bealer's response to Kim in his short 1998 paper "Concept Possession", available via JSTOR.) Nor does Bealer appeal to magic. Rather, his explanation of intuition's modal reliability is, in a way, quite mundane: it's just a matter of concept-possession. Or perhaps you think it requires magic to possess or understand concepts?

Second, you write:

"if (a) we can't know whether we have the right kind of intuitions even in cases where we actually do, and (b) if science cannot even in principle shed light on the matter, then what more has Bealer done than arrogantly taken himself to be a super-philosopher whose intuitions--unlike the misguided and uninformed judgments of the folk--have strong modal ties to universal truths."

Two thoughts about this conditional: First, I may just be daft, but I'm not sure why we should think this conditional is true. I guess I just don't see how the consequent of the conditional follows from, or is otherwise supported by, the antecedent. Second, the implication is that Bealer accepts both (a) and (b). I'd be interested to know why you think this. As far as I can tell, Bealer accepts neither. Regarding (a), Bealer's account of intuition is primarily phenomenological. So, if introspection is any good (Eric's worries about phenomenal introspection duly noted) then we're ok. Regarding (b), as you probably already know, Bealer has an extended discussion of the varieties of ways in which intuitions, including his own, might go wrong in "The Origins of Modal Error". Some of these ways, a few of which are noted at the outset of sec4, are clearly the domain of cognitive science, as Bealer is well aware.

Third, you write that Bealerians should not "beg the question in such a snobbish way". Again, I may just be daft, but I guess I don't see this. Giving arguments for a particular conclusion (as Bealerians have done) doesn't presuppose the snobbish view that one is a "super-intuiter" or otherwise infallible, as far as I'm aware. But, again, I may just be missing your point here.

[marc moffett]

Thomas, I think you are confusing Bealer's theory of concept possession with his theory of intuitions. Although intuitions play a role in the latter theory, he does not require that one be in super-high cognitive conditions simply to have intuitions.

Bealer does, I think rightly, require at least the following: that the content seems true and necessary. In my response to Jonathan at CR, I tried to spell out the sense of necessity (perhaps not in a way which B himself would be entirely happy about) in terms of something like a supervenicence claim. Specifically, when I consider a case (say, the Brown/Barcelona case) it not only seems true that Smith doesn't know but it seems that given *exactly* that situation it couldn't be that he knows. I don't personally find this to be an extremely difficult or obscure description of the phenomenology, especially when contrasted with states that aren't like that.

B. also has a further thesis about intuitions, that they have a strong modal tie to the truth. But that thesis is logically independent of his characterization of intuitions proper. Instead, they are part of his theory as to why intuitions are part of our basic evidence, a theory he dubs modal reliablism.

Regarding Jonathan's post. Jonathan thinks that because I am skeptical that the subjects in the WSN study are having intuitions (or, at least, are basing their responses on those intuitions), that I am therefore committed to some highly demanding theory of the conditions under which one can have intuitions. But this is simply a non sequitur. I was perhaps misleading our exchange by saying that I think that there are significant constraints on when one is having an intuition. As J notes, I do think they are sufficiently strong to make it plausible that many of the WSN subjects are not having intuitions, but since I think those are pretty unfavorable conditions that still leaves a lot of room open.

Moreover, I think the quote he gives above from Jackson is consistent with constraints of this nature. After all, Jackson does say that when we are teaching this stuff it is like field work. But this is just the sort of setting where confusions and ambiguities can be cleared up. That is very different from plopping a vignette in front of someone and asking them to respond.

I want to add that, like Jen, I do think that with sufficient care the methodological shortcomings of WSN can be overcome. I would be interested in seeing the results; I think that they would be important results.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

John,

Fair enough. But let's unpack your reading of Bealer whereby "Rather, his explanation of intuition's modal reliability is, in a way, quite mundane: it's just a matter of concept-possession. Or perhaps you think it requires magic to possess or understand concepts?"

But then what it looks like we get is concept-possession-snobbism rather than intuition snobbism. After all, it looks to me like full-concept-competency is defined in equally snobbish terms. Consider the following remarks from Bealer with respect to the difference between mundane folkish concept-possession and full-blown [super-philosophical] concept possession:

"A subject possesses a concept in the full sense iff (i) the subject at least nominally possesses the concept and (ii) the subject does not do this with misunderstanding or incomplete understanding or just by virtue of satisfying our attribution practices or in any other weak sense."

But how do we determine whether a given individual possesses a concept in the "full sense"? Surely, to appeal to one's own intuitions at this stage would be question begging (not to mention snobbish), no?

Bealer can't simply define what it means to have a concept determinately in terms of one's having intuitions about the concept that have modal ties to the truth without once again begging the entire question at hand. More importantly, even if I concede that it is possible for an individual to possess a concept in the full Bealerian sense, what standard am I to rely on in deciding whether I happen to have such a possession on any given occasion?

Perhaps this is why Bealer makes the move towards philosophical inquiry being a "civilization wide" endeavor--but this won't do either. After all, present competency with the concept of "water" involves knowing that it is H20. But surely the Greeks were competent with the concept as well--albeit before humans had nailed down the periodic table (consequently, their intuitions about Twin Earth would be different than ours!). And while you might be tempted to say that, in point of fact, the Greeks--unlike us--weren't fully competent after all, you will need some intuition-independent standard that justifies your presumption that you actually possess the concept fully. After all, who's to say your understanding is less problematic than the Greeks (think Kuhnian paradigm shift here)?

Simply defining determinateness in the following way won't do:

"Determinateness = the mode m of understanding with the following properties: (a) correctness, (b.i) categorical completeness, and (b.ii) noncategorical completeness."

How do we establish (a) on any given occasion without simply assuming that our intuitions are correct in the first place? Either we beg the question or we assume that we, unlike the folk, have some kind of super-competency power. I called it magic earlier just to be sarcastic--but call it whatever you'd like. Having done so, explain to me how philosophers--or anyone else for that matter--are supposed to have the power to intuit that (a) their intuitions are modally tied to the truth, (b)these intuitions are formed under ideal conditions, and (b) these intuitions are driven by full-blown-concept-possession. By my lights, snobbery is unavoidable in this context--so, why not simply embrace it? After all, the most common rejoinder to experimental work in philosophy is "well, we knew that the folk were dumb and confused in the first place. What we care about are the vaunted intuitions of philosophers." This response at least has the virtue of being honest if elitist.

[marc moffett]

Oops! There is a misleading implicature from my claim that "Although intuitions play a role in the latter theory, he does not require that one be in super-high cognitive conditions simply to have intuitions." The misleading implicature is that you have to be in super-high cognitive conditions to determinately possess a concept. That, too, is false on George's view, but it is beside the point.

[jonathan weinberg]

Getting back to Sean's comment for a minute: Sean, I think that's an entirely plausible line of argument that could be developed. I don't think it's snobbist, however, in that it seems to be part of the view that intuitions are a badly mixed bag. Rather, I think it is a calibrational argument: we start with the hodgepodge of good and bad intuitions, but by deploying some proper filtering methods, we can separate the epistemic wheat from chaff. Now, the kicker here is that there seems to be some open questions -- ones with significant empirical content -- as to whether the proposed methods (i) are generally followed by philosophers as advertised, and moreover (ii) do a sufficiently good job of straining out the bad cases. But it's a kind of strategy I'd love to see really filled out and tested.

[jonathan weinberg]

Though I think it's a separate issue from the main post (and that's fine -- I just note this in following John's lead in trying to keep the dialectic maximally clean-shaven), I do agree with some of Thomas' critique as expressed in his last comment. Namely, the Bealerian cannot simultaneously have _both_ Bealer's machinery for making the connection between determinate concept possession and the epistemic status of intuition on the one hand, _and_ the everyday sense that concept possession is something quotidian & mundane. At a minimum, the Bealerian machinery makes it a very substantive claim to show that anyone determinately possesses any particular concept. And I think we can go further & argue that it's not at all clear that we determinately possess very many concepts at all outside of logic and mathematics. I doubt that anyone in the history of the universe has ever actually determinately possessed the concept KNOWLEDGE, for example.

[John Bengson]

Thomas,

Thanks for the clarification. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be raising the familiar circularity worries about using intuition to justify intuition. Since I have nothing new to say on the subject, I'll defer to the vast literature on the topic.

Jonathan,

You're entirely right that on Bealer's view of concept possession, it turns out that we mere humans probably do not perfectly grasp the concepts we possess. Of course, in the case of the concept of knowledge, most of us are probably better than Burge's Arthritis-man. But most likely we're still not perfect -- a verdict I myself find pretty difficult to deny. Of course, such snobbism, as Thomas calls it (the label 'modesty' strikes me as more accurate here), doesn't threaten the epistemic status of intuition. The view that determinate concept possession requires perfect mastery of the concepts one possesses is quite consistent with a modal reliabilist account of intuition as a basic source of evidence, since modal reliabilism (perhaps unlike its contingent reliabilist cousin) can allow that a subject S's intuitions involving a concept C can be a fallible, yet basic source of evidence for S even if S does not determinately possess C.

Incidentally, I wonder what you think about the following proposal. Given (1) the controversy surrounding the nature of intuition and (2) the near-consensus that, whether or not x-phi studies are tracking intuitions, such studies are definitely tracking some sort of *judgment*, perhaps those of us doing x-phi should consider casting our studies, findings, discussion, and so forth in terms of judgment, rather than intuition. What do you think?

[jonathan weinberg]

"The view that determinate concept possession requires perfect mastery of the concepts one possesses is quite consistent with a modal reliabilist account of intuition as a basic source of evidence, since modal reliabilism (perhaps unlike its contingent reliabilist cousin) can allow that a subject S's intuitions involving a concept C can be a fallible, yet basic source of evidence for S even if S does not determinately possess C." Could you perhaps clarify where in Bealer's writings this shows up? It seemed to me pretty clear (in, e.g., "A Theory of the A Priori") that determinate concept possession is what, for Bealer, establishes the right kind of modal tie. So, if you don't got determinate possession, you don't got that tie. The account in the "Modal Error" paper would, I think, be one in which we still retain the determinate concept possession even when we are suffering a transient modal hiccup. E.g., "What has happened is that, in spite of having a full underlying mastery of the concept, Carnap locally misunderstands it. That is, he has a local (i.e., in principle temporary) disruption of his otherwise full understanding of the concept."
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And I'm afraid that for my purposes I'll have to demur on your proposal about what terms to frame the debate in. Convince the rest of the philosophical world to stop using "intuition" in this way, and I'll stop using it, too. But, as I noted on the other thread, the word has a much, much broader usage than just how it figures in the neorationalist corner of the epistemology community, and I mean to be issuing a challenge to pretty much all of it. Nonetheless, I do agree that "judgment" is a safer term to use here, in terms of what inferences one can draw from survey data, so if a particular experimentalist only needs the weaker claims for their purposes, then they would be wise to take your advice.
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Given the context of discussion, I actually think the circularity worry of the sort Thomas raises is more pressing than you're allowing. Namely, we need not just a _theoretical_ but a _practical_ way of solving it. Epistemology is one thing, and showing the conceptual coherence of a form of rationalism may be a significant achievement in epistemology. But Thomas' worry (I think) is that, in a methodological context, Bealer's theory is the equivalent of the theory of the stock market that says: buy low, sell high. Yes, that sounds great -- but _how_ do we do it?

[marc moffett]

John says, "You're entirely right that on Bealer's view of concept possession, it turns out that we mere humans probably do not perfectly grasp the concepts we possess." This is not right, at least not if you mean "determinately" by "perfectly". Nothing about B's views concerning determinate concept possession suggest that humans do not routinely determinately possessing concepts, modulo local misunderstanding. (This point is explicit in his reference to the 'Hegelian' nature of determinateness in "A theory of the a priori'.)
Determinate possession is a certain natural mode of understanding on B’s view. The thought behind his analysis of it is that one determinately possesses a concept iff one satisfies certain correctness and completeness constraints, as per Thomas's post. The idea behind a priori stability is just that it should be *possible* for someone who satisfies those constraints to take on more and more truths w/out kicking out of the mode, and so to be able to have intuitions about more and more property-identity propositions. But none of this implies that that in order to determinately possess a concept YOU have to be in super-high cognitive conditions. So B’s view is pretty neutral on the sorts of cognitive conditions one must be in order to have (modally) reliable intuitions.
I take it then that Thomas’s and Jonathan’s complaint is that if this is what it takes to be determinate, why should we think we are determinate (even if we are)? It’s a fair question. And I think that to answer it, it is essential that we get clear on B’s dialectical situation. Note that B thinks he has established the following claims: (i) that intuitions constitute part of our basic evidence and (ii) that our basic evidence must be modally reliable. His arguments for (i) may be found in ‘The Incoherence of Empiricism’ and his arguments for (ii) may be found in the first part of ‘A theory of the a priori’. But given (i) and (ii), it follows that our intuitions are modally reliable. He then offers an explanation for the modal reliability of our intuitions, namely, that we determinately possess the concepts involved in them and when we see what that amounts to it turns out that it entails modal reliability. But note that this last point is merely explanatory and not part of the argument for modal reliability itself; he takes himself to have already established that our intuitions are modally reliable. Given this, we can turn the dialectical situation around and argue via IBE. We have it (so B assumes) that our intuitions are modally reliable. What is the best explanation for this? Well, that we determinately possess our concepts, since modal reliability is highly likely on his theory of determinate possession [p(reliability given determinate) = 1]. Of course, there might be another way of accounting for our modal reliability, for instance, because we are near enough to being determinate. But that would merely count as a challenge to his explanation of why we are modally reliable and not as a challenge to his argument that we are modally reliable. At any rate, that is how I reconstruct the argument.

Of course, I have no doubt that there will be objections to the argument for modal reliability. But it is important to disentangle the issue because, hopefully, it makes clear why B isn't committed to any particularly strong version of snobbism.

[John Bengson]

Sorry, I guess I was being sloppy. I meant to say that Bealer can allow that a subject S's intuitions involving a concept C can be a fallible, yet basic source of evidence for S even if S does not *perfectly* possess C. I intended to use 'perfectly' in my post to mean 'determinately and in ideal cognitive conditions', which is something we mere humans probably don't achieve (hence modesty). But looking back at what I wrote I realize I wasn't entirely consistent about using 'perfectly' in this way. That'll teach me to write a post at 3am!