Are philosophers super-duper-expert intuiters?

In the course of my regular blog-reading today, I came across two items in fairly close succession, and it helped crystallize a line of thought I've been having concerning the "expertise defense" as a response to the restrictionist x-phi arguments.

First and foremost, here's the great Daniel Ariely reporting some data showing professional doctors falling prey to default effects.  (Btw, if you're not already familiar with him and his work, it's well worth your time.  Here is a TED talk of his, a fun little trifle that does discuss the default bias a bit and a different foible in expert physician cognition.  His book Predictably Irrational is very accessible, too.)

Second, and rather more speculatively, it seems highly plausible that professional politicians fall prey to the illusion of control, thinking that the one set of things that they most directly do control -- their votes -- have a much  more substantial impact on their  political lives than they really are likely to.

Yglesias has no study to cite, but it does seem to me to make sense of a lot of the weird posturings and maneauvers that we see so many politicians do, even when polls show that almost no voters pay attention to or cares about such things.  (And see also the 538 post that Yglesias links to there.)  The recent fooferaw about "deem and pass" is surely of this sort.

So, what we see here are but two cases -- plucked very much at random, merely from what the internet happens to have thrown at me today -- of something that there are cases of throughout the literature on such things: populations of people who clearly should count as experts in making particular sorts of decisions,  nonetheless proving themselves suceptible to the sorts of unconscious tricks and biases that we know influence non-expert cognition all the time.  (Note I am appealing here only to politicians' putative expertise at politics, i.e., what will get them re-elected, and not at policy.  The typical Congressman's  expertise in the latter may well be  questionable.)  It's not that such experts may not be, in a great many ways,  better than ordinary folk on an individual basis.  But such generic meliorative comparisons simply do not make it very much more likely that, for any particular cognitive foible, the experts will be very susceptible to it themselves.

So when philosophers want to make the expertise defense, note that what they really need is not merely that philosophers are in some ways or other superior to ordinary subjects, in various philosophical judgment tasks.  In some sufficiently weak form, I agree that such a claim is unproblematic at this time.  But what proponents of this defense need -- if they are to preempt the restrictionist challenge, and avoid incurring the obligation instead to meet that challenge with empirical results of their own -- is something much, much stronger.  What they need is the claim that philosophers possess a kind of expertise not even possessed by professional doctors concerning medicine, or members of the U.S. Congress concerning politics -- that is, a kind of expertise that would place them beyond the reasonable suspicion that they, too, face a real epistemic danger of being systematically influenced in their judgments by various factors that ought not so influence.  Perhaps it is time to start calling it the "super-duper-expertise defense", to capture more accurately just how strong a claim it is, that such defenders of the armchair actually need to be entitled to.

Comments

[Daniel Nolan]

I think, and I imagine every defender of the armchair thinks, that philosophers are sometimes subject to influence in their judgements by various factors that should not influence them. (And that this influence is "systematic", in at least some good senses of that term.)

But why would defenders of the armchair need to deny this? I'm happy to not be put beyond "the real epistemic danger" of falling prey to such influences. In doing inquiry we run epistemic dangers of believing things for bad reasons.

Furthermore, if that danger was some threat to armchair philosophers, I do not see how doing some empirical work could help. Anyone, no matter how much empirical investigation they have done, is alo subject to a real epistemic danger that their judgements are influenced by various factors that should not influence those judgements. If that's a problem that requires "superduper expertise", we're all doomed, experiments or no experiments.

I hope experimental philosophers will agree that they don't need to be immune to this epistemic risk to be able to do good work. So I can't see why any experimental philosophers, at least, should think that's a fair thing to insist on from armchair philosophers.

[Jonathan Ichikawa]

I agree with Daniel; it's not obvious that a defender of armchair methodology must eliminate the possibility or even likelihood of systematic bias effects. Of course, after many conversations with Jonathan and his ilk, it's now not obvious that the 'restrictionist challenge' is an attack on the sort of sensible view that Daniel is suggesting. So it's not obvious just what the 'expertise defense' is committed to. I think that it'd be crazy to deny that professional philosophers are often susceptible to systematic biases. But I doubt that's what any serious defender of 'the expertise defense' ever intended.

[Chris Hallquist]

Couldn't the behavior of politicians be explained by supposing they aren't always worrying about getting reelected (since lots of offices are pretty safe for incumbents) but instead they're trying to boost their status within the political establishment by impressing fellow elites with their political cleverness? It could turn out to be a case of cognitive bias all the same, since often such moves depend on the pretense of really doing something else, but the question is worth asking.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Hi Daniel,

I agree with everything you say, but as you note, it's just not likely that what you're talking about there is what we x-phi types have in mind. You're right that absolute freedom from any & all epistemic risk is an unattainable standard, and trying to impose a demand for it would, I think, be a form of pouring old skeptical wine into new terminological wineskins.

But that's precisely why I try to speak in terms like "real epistemic danger". Some sorts of epistemic risks we appropriately do not concern ourselves with, in our methods -- in particular, extremely small ones that would be too costly or difficult to address, given the size of the threat; or very diffuse and abstract ones that we just can't really do anything about anyway. (The possibility of some rare quantum event making our measuring apparatus give a funny reading exactly in every case that we use it would exemplify both of those, I would think.) And there may be other good reasons to disregard some bit of epistemic risk.

But, very importantly, there are lots of cases where it is _not_ appropriate so to do disregard. When there is a specific threat (not just an abstract chance of error), and has a non-negligible probability of occurring, then it is something that one has good prima facie reason to take seriously. And when one could likely find some not-unbearably-expensive way of minimizing or mitigating that threat, then one has a prima facie reason both to find it & deploy it. Note that this is what goes on across other fields of inquiry all the time.

So, whenever you see me (or another xphile) use a phrase like "real epistemic danger", or "a decent immunity to non-truth-tracking biases", and so on, you should assume that what I have in mind is this latter sort of thing. I take it that those who run the expertise defense have in mind an argument along these lines: the x-phi results that may indicate a substantial likelihood of specific foibles in ordinary folks' philosophical cognition, nonetheless do not make non-negligible the likelihood that trained philosophers' cognition suffer from the same specific foibles, because the trained philosophers are experts and the ordinary folks aren't. And what I'm saying in this post is that it's really a rather extraordinary form of expertise that is needed in those premises -- not to rule out any and all epistemic risks, which I agree would be an unreasonable demand, but even for the more modest and appropriate task of ruling out the specific, real epistemic dangers that it looks like we philosophers might actually face.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Ah, the new comment-moderation scheme, though a good one, does lead to an increased chance of "comment-crossing". My response above to Daniel also should suffice as a response to Jonathan.

Chris, that's an interesting hypothesis (and it's all hypothesis-wrangling at this point, about the politicians). One thing to look at would be whether it is, as Yglesias seems to suspect, the electorally somewhat vulnerable who one sees doing this sort of maneauvering more than the electorally safe. Also, it's important to remember that an electorally safe district _for a party_ need not be electorally safe _for a candidate_ -- such districts may perhaps breed just as much gamemanship from people afraid of primary challenges.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Jonathan, Daniel, and Justin: I think we can all agree that the important issue is one of *degree*. On one side, absolute freedom from illegitimate sources of distortion. On the other side, nothing but being blown about willy-nilly. The truth is somewhere in the middle, of course, and the issue is *where* in the middle. It's hard to have evidence about that without evidence that directly compares philosophers' and non-philosophers' intuitions under various sorts of distortive pressure. (Fiery Cushman and I have a *little* evidence on that re trolley problems and it doesn't look good for philosophers. Hopefully, we will have something circulatable soon.)

There's also the community-level response (see Longino 1990 on community-level objectivity in science). Even if individual philosophers are biased in all kinds of crazy ways, there *might* still be community-level mechanisms that separate the wheat from the chaff. (Maybe you talk about this somewhere, Jonathan, and I'm just forgetting?)

[Max Seeger]

The expertise defense is often being treated as a general answer to the restrictionist challenge – both by its proponents as well as its opponents. I believe that the expertise defense may be a reasonable answer to some of the x-phi findings, and a rather poor answer to other findings.

E.g.: Consider the claim by Weinberg/Nichols/Stich (2001) that the Gettier intuition varies with cultural background. The expertise defense, in this context, would have to claim something like this: philosophers, qua experts, are not susceptible to this kind of bias. If we further accept the thesis which motivated WNS’s study, namely that there are fundamental cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, then for the philosopher to claim that she is not subject to this kind of variation may really amount to a super-duper-expertise claim.

But now consider a different study: Swain/Alexander/Weinberg (2008) purport to show that the anti-reliabilist Truetemp-intuition may be subject to the order effect. Subjects presented with a clear case of knowledge first are more likely to judge the Truetemp case as a case of non-knowledge then subjects presented with a clear case of non-knowledge first. In this case it seems quite reasonable to me to say that philosophers are not susceptible to the ordering effect. For, what would it even mean that philosophers suffer from the same bias? Should we fear that those who do share the anti-reliabilist Truetemp intuition are likely to do so because they happened to first encounter the thought experiment shortly after having considered a clear case of knowledge? I take it that this cannot be the challenge. Rather, the study is supposed to show how epistemically fragile intuitions are. But, doesn’t the fact that philosophers generally agree on the Truetemp case show that philosophers here really do have some expertise and are not susceptible to whatever bias has afflicted the study’s stubjects?

My general idea is that the expertise defense may work in some cases and not in others. I believe that there is no single general answer to the restrictionist challenge, or better even: there is not one sinlge general restrictionist challenge, but different kinds of challenges. If this is true, it seems that a great part of the debate suffers from a lack of distinction. Even though the distinctions have been made – e.g. intra-subjective vs. inter-subjective incoherence – most discussions of possible answers to the x-phi challenge are undertaken in general spirit. Or in any case, this is my impression from reading around in the literature. Perhaps someone can correct me and point me to discussions where the challenge and possible answers to it are being discussed more fine grained. Back to the point: the expertise defense need not be a super-duper-expertise defense once its application is limited to a reasonable scope.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

@Eric - Totally with you on the interest of the community-level question here. I believe that we do mention that possibility in the introduction to the expertise paper, but it's not something that has been discussed at any length in the literature. I do think that such an approach is going to be the most likely candidate, but it's clearly one whose success (or not) will not be evaluable from the armchair.

@Max - I think that your initial observation is astute. The debate has indeed taken the form that you suggest it has, and I think that that's because, in a very important way, the debate so far hasn't _really_ about the question, "Is philosophers' use of intuitions sound or not?" Rather, it has mostly been about the slightly different question, "Given the x-phi results, can philosophers still presume their use of intuitions to be sound _without substantially appealing to any further scientific work_?" So the arguments of the defenders will, of necessity, be cast at a rather general and abstract level, and I and my co-authors have been responding to those arguments in the form they have taken. And it is because the debate is cast at that level, that the defenders really need an appeal to super-duper-expertise: one generally can only establish that a given population is substantially free from these sorts of biases, by using scientific methods. This all makes for a very different debate than those over the more specific theses like the ones you envision -- specific theses which, once formulated clearly, will generally not be of a sort that can be well-addressed from the armchair. Scientific defenses of the armchair will have a much wider space of moves available than are available to armchair defenses of the armchair.

(For what it's worth, I would much rather we were all having the sorts of discussions you are urging us to have. But we have to pry folks out of their armchairs, first, if only so that they can take a closer look at where they've been sitting.)

Now, I'm not sure what you mean by "epistemically fragile", but what we have in mind is, in part, pretty close to the move that you dismissed: "Should we fear that those who do share the anti-reliabilist Truetemp intuition are likely to do so because they happened to first encounter the thought experiment shortly after having considered a clear case of knowledge?" Yep, we definitely should fear things along those general lines; just go back and read that first Ariely link, about doctors and default biases, if you think that this sort of thing sounds preposterous, because it's far more plausible than our armchair psychology will lead us to think. Keep in mind that it will be enough if the _strength_ of that intuition, as ultimately deployed by philosophers, is nontrivially a function of the conditions of early exposure to the case. E.g., maybe those who become externalists experience the intuition as a less forceful seeming (or, a less confidence-worthy judgment, in Williamsonian terms) than those who become internalists do. But you are right that it is not this very particular bias all by itself that should be the total source of concern, but also the likelihood that still other contextual factors might influence our intuitions/judgments inappropriately; and furthermore, this is exacerbated by our current lack of knowledge about where & how we are susceptible to such biases. Where there's smoke, there's likely to be fire; and where there's fire, there's likely to be even more fire, especially if it's a surprise to everyone that there's fire there in the first place.

I would also caution strongly against this sort of reasoning: "But, doesn’t the fact that philosophers generally agree on the Truetemp case show that philosophers here really do have some expertise and are not susceptible to whatever bias has afflicted the study’s stubjects?" First, I don't think we should take ourselves to have much confidence _at all_ as to what "philosophers generally agree on". I have a post I want to write about all the factors that go into what cases and intuitions/judgments about them go into what gets published about and what doesn't. So consensus in the published literature does not come close to entailing consensus in the profession on the whole. (And I have definitely heard anecdotal reports of trained philosophers not sharing the Truetemp intuition.) Second, as I noted, it's enough for my purposes if the strength of intuition gets modified in these ways, so even if all philosophers do have the intuition to a greater or lesser extent, it doesn't follow that context effects haven't been problematic. And third, any consensus in the profession itself might not be epistemically virtuous, since maybe only those with the "right" intuitions -- perhaps by luck of the draw, as to what context they were considering them in initially -- go on with further philosophy coursework. So, no, I would not draw the moral you want to draw from the putative consensus on Truetemp in the available literature.

[Joachim Horvath]

Hi Jonathan,

one thing is still not quite clear to me. Surely, pretty much everyone faces some "real epistemic dangers", even highly respected experts like chemists or biologists. So, would you insist that, say, biologists have to do psychology of biology for a while now until they can get back to doing their actual biological work again?

My deeper worry here is that you simply don't treat all supposed experts equally, in particular that you don't treat philosophers like other experts who want to defend their practice in the face of certain widespread cognitive biases.

Personally, I think that it's enough for this purpose that it is even prima facie plausible that philosophers are experts-of-the-relevant-kind, and that seems very hard to deny. Now, of course if there is a not too resource-consuming way to establish that philosophers really are these kinds of experts (or at least to figure out what their expertise exactly consists in), then we should certainly do the required empirical work. However, the "we" here should definitely not be all professional philosophers, because that would be just crazy. Neither are philosophers trained to do this kind of empirical work, nor is the risk that their current practice is completely misguided high enough to justify anything this drastic. So, if your proposal simply is that a few philosopher, in close collaboration with empirical scientists, do this kind of work, then it seems hard to disagree. But what I would insist is that the majority of philosophers have every right to continue with their (often highly sophisticated and fascinating) armchair work until the empirical case against the philosophical armchair begins to appear really settled and solid. Now, after just a few years of not wholly systematic research by experimental philosophers, I doubt that we are anywhere near this "evidential tipping point" against armchair philosophy. So, there simply is no need and no justification to drag everyone out of their armchairs at this point, but there is also no reason to keep experimental restrictionist from further pursuing their line of research as well. Does this sound reasonable to you?

[Olgalednichenko]

even Darwin used to write down his biases on a piece of paper.

he argued : that he would forget that he will forget: that he may get biased or has biases

cheers
olga lednichenko

ps: do you know Nesher is a state of mind? - no , i am not biased

[John Dell]

Joachim,

when you write that Jonathan doesn't "treat philosophers like other experts who want to defend their practice in the face of certain widespread cognitive biases." Why do you think he should treat supposed philosophical "experts" like supposed scientific "experts"?

On the surface, one obvious difference between the two types of "experts" is the methods they employ. But, the scientific method is designed with the intention of eliminating biases that may negatively impact or skew the results of inquiry. This is why they test the null hypothesis and require repeated measures and so on. Now, I am not suggesting this method is infallible and is *always* immune from the impact of bias. The point, however, is that the scientific experts acknowledge the susceptibility humans have to adulterating biases, and try to prevent the biases from impacting their inquiries.

From what I can tell so far, philosophers of certain stripes are simply denying that their method of inquiry is susceptible to adulterating biases, and their justification for this claim is that they have strong intuitions that they are not affected by bias. But, the use of intuition as a form of justification is the very thing in question! In short, some philosophers use a method that is potentially biased in order to claim that their method is not biased instead of acknowledging the reality of the potential biases and trying to take steps to avoid such adulterating influences on their inquiries.

So there's one possible difference between the two kinds of "experts".

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Hi Joachim,

Seems to me that there are two separate issues in your comment. One is about some putative asymmetric treatment on our part of experts in science, and those in philosophy. And that strikes me as simply false. We can see the inaccuracy of the charge for some of the reasons John just articulated: there are really key differences between what the scientists do and what philosophers (so far) do, not least of which, the scientists take these sorts of worries seriously and take active steps to evaluate how bad they really are, and where they turn out truly problematic, to ameliorate them. Another relevant difference would be scientists don't rely on the same sorts of unaided categorizing judgments to anything like the same extent as evidence for their theories -- and where they do, as in, e.g., parts of ethology or anthropology, it is indeed often seen as something problematic, raising difficult methodological issues, and there are frequent calls for better operationalization, etc. And, furthermore, many of the tools used by scientists are meant to help stay clear of exactly the sorts of worries that we are raising about philosophers' intuitions.

Putting it succinctly: you assert that I "don't treat philosophers like other experts who want to defend their practice in the face of certain widespread cognitive biases." But the difference here is precisely is that scientists tend to actually do the work required to defend their practice, including modifying that practice where appropriate (and the history of science includes a great many such modifications over time). Whereas fans of the armchair on the whole have just engaged in some very sophisticated versions of ducking the issue.

This sets up my response to the other issue, the what-should-we-do-now one: what we should do is take these worries seriously, and take active steps to evaluate how bad they really are, and where they turn out truly problematic, to ameliorate them. I disagree with your assessment of how likely it is that there really are these sorts of problems, because it's just a mistake to think that the x-phi results are the sole reason for worry. The results themselves operate against a backdrop of a wide range of psychological results suggesting that these sorts of ethnicity, context, environment, etc. effects are widespread in human cognition; the x-phi results just bring home that these effects do manifest in tasks that are basically the same as those performed by philosophers making intuition-based arguments. Exactly how such a "taking it seriously" should play out across the profession is not something I have particularly strong views about, other than some sort of pluralism seems to me generally appropriate in such circumstances: it would be best to explore a wide range of responses, ranging from having _some_ people just continuing on as before, if perhaps with somewhat less confidence than they had had; and others looking to see if they could cut back a bit on the use of intuitions, perhaps reining in some of the more excessive deployments, trying to at least make some sophisticated guesses as to where they will be more or less reliable (and we see some of this already, in, e.g., some things that Brian Weatherson has had to say); and others looking to develop more substantially non-intuition-based methods for philosophy; and still others (like Brian Talbot and Jennifer Nagel) looking to use scientific results to help separate the wheat from the chaff; and lots of combinations of the above, and lots of options in-between them. . But the first step is to take the challenge seriously, which your "prima facie plausibility" standard seems to me far, far too weak to satisfy. It sounds to me basically like an excuse to _avoid_ taking it seriously.

[Joachim Horvath]

Hi Jonathan,

first, you are right that there were these two issues in my post, which we might call an "asymmetry worry" and a "how-to-proceed worry".

Concerning the asymmetry worry, it is of course debatable how good scientists really are in taking these PSYCHOLOGICAL obstacles seriously, given how surprising many of these effects were when psychologists first discovered them. For example, the history of philosophy provides lots of examples of confirmation bias, or even flat-out dogmatism (which was one of the main motivations for Kuhn's idea of a paradigm, I guess). So, I am a bit worried that your reading of the history of science is very selective here, and in fact biased towards the virtuousness of actual scientific practice (and, as a flipside, against the virtuousness of actual philosophical practice).
But you also concede that philosophers and other supposed experts should be treated equally insofar as they are doing similar things (either prima or secunda facie), and that seems to answer the asymmetry worry. So we would have to continue this debate by exploring how similar or dissimilar scientific practice(s) and philosophical practice(s) actually are...

With respect to the how-to-proceed worry, I agree that a recourse to the prima facie plausibility of the intuitive expertise of philosophers is (a) not an overly strong epistemic status, and one that could realistically be overturned by further experimental results (but I really think that it is key here to actually test the philosophical experts themselves, instead of merely making speculative inferences from politicians or medical doctors or what have you). I also agree that it is (b) in some sense avoiding the challenge or at least not taking it as seriously as the experimental restrictionist herself. But of course I think that this is actually a good thing, because the challenge is not (yet) as serious as you claim and because only those philosophers will avoid the challenge who are very much committed to armchair philosophy and want to continue doing it because that's what they are best at doing (until the challenge becomes really pressing, of course, if that should actually happen). All in all, then, I guess that I am just much more worried about the potentially devastating consequences that an overly hasty and radical break with our established philosophical practices might have. Philosophy as a whole is more like a supertanker than a speedboat, and before you change the course of a supertanker you should be really, really sure that your new direction is actually safer and more promising than your old one...

[Joachim Horvath]

Sorry, I wanted to write "the history of SCIENCE provides lots of examples of confirmation bias" in my last post, although it is probably true of philosophy as well...

[John Dell]

Joachim,

I am not so sure your worry is well placed when you write: "I guess that I am just much more worried about the potentially devastating consequences that an overly hasty and radical break with our established philosophical practices might have."

What would these potentially devastating consequences look like?

Historically philosophy is hardly something that has not (more or less) walked hand-in-hand with the sciences. As I am sure you are well aware many of the major philosophers going back to the ancients were concerned with empirical matters, and that concern informed their philosophy. For the most part, I think this trend has continued in various degrees up to the present day. So I guess by "established philosophical practices" you mean the purely analytic conception of philosophy that has taken hold in numerous departments over the last 70 years or so (of course the prevalence of such "established practices" is minuscule in the grand philosophical scheme of things).

Now, believe me, I understand you love to do armchair philosophy, and I very much understand the feeling of possibly losing something you care about. It's troubling, no doubt. Nevertheless, I *don't* think you will lose armchair philosophy. Thinking is not going anywhere. But just maybe, *how you think*, needs to change. Recognizing that there is a problem is always the first step.

Really, I think your reasoning on this issue is not totally dissimilar from the following thinking about global warming. For example, we have all really enjoyed the life we lived that involved sending chemicals into the air that are now shown to have effects on our planet that may be devastating for human life. But, I don't think anyone would say that we should wait until Boston is underwater before we should be motivated to change our energy practices. Maybe you think this example is completely disanalgous to your form of reasoning, but I think your charging Jonathan to offer more evidence is very similar to the global warming example. The evidence is out there. You seem to want to see Boston underwater before you agree there is a problem.

What you need for your position to go through is to show that philosophers are somehow in a better position than *human beings*. The problem of biases is a *human* problem, not just a scientists, doctors, or a politicians. Apparently, the only thing that to this point differentiates some philosophers from the rest of this group is that some philosophers think they are more than human (i.e. if philosophers are somehow immune from this human problem, then what else could they be but something more than human; maybe you think philosophers are "super-duper humans").

As it is, I think for you, the affect of biases as a human problem is an "inconvenient truth".

Here's a couple of questions which I am just curious what you think about: *Independent of science*, in the last 70 years or so what have the purely analytic "established" armchair philosophers that you speak of contributed to our understanding of the world and the things in it? Obviously, you think losing this method, as you conceive it, will result in disastrous consequences, but what has this method produced *on its own* to begin with?

[Joachim Horvath]

Hi John,

of course I don't like to give up something I care about, along with pretty much every other human being. But what I really don't like is to give up something that looks like an impressive intellectual achievement just after a few years of serious discussion of its merits and worth. And you are right to point out that I'm talking here about what is somewhat misleadingly referred to as "analytic philosophy". Now, you are also right that armchair philosophy, in some sense, is not going to vanish even if people like Jonathan are right about everything. I guess the reason is pretty much the same why, say, philosophers of biology are rarely seen doing field research in the wild. So, it's really a debate about a certain philosophical methododology here, and not about a piece of furniture.

Your analogy between the debate about the experimental restrictionist challenge and the debate about global warming is an interesting one, but it fails for two reasons. First, the scientific investigation of global warming has been going on for decades now, and - as far as I know - the evidence overwhelmingly points in one direction (by the way, here in Europe this is a complete non-issue). Yet, the investigation of philosophers and their intuitive expertise is only about to begin these days (with Jonathan's forthcoming paper being one of the first systematic treatments of this issue). So, of course I am demanding more evidence in this situation, and I take it that it would be an almost sheepish attitude not to do so. But notice that I am neither dogmatic nor unsatisfiable in this respect, for there is some kind of evidence that I would take very seriously without much ado, namely a direct x-phi study on well-trained professional philosophers and their intuitive evaluation of hypothetical cases. We don't really have anything like that so far (or at best only very little), but without this kind of evidence the experimental restrictionists' case will fail to really convince even open-minded armchair philosophers like myself. Second, I don't have to make any silly claims about philosophers being "super human" or so, because we know for sure that there actually are human experts who are highly immune to many psychological biases in their respective domain of expertise (even if not anywhere else), e.g. world-class chess grandmasters. For this reason, I really want to know for sure that philosophers are not like chess grandmasters with respect to performing thought experiments until I am ready to concede that the armchair is broken and in bad need of an experimental fix. Call this stubborn, if you like, but please don't call it an unwillingness to acknowledge inconvenient truths, because that just begs the question in favor of your own restrictionism.

Finally, what has recent armchair philosophy "contributed to our understanding of the world and the things in it"? Quite a bit, I take it. For example, a better understanding of knowledge, reference, the relationship between mental and physical properties, modality, truth etc. I could continue for a while, but if that doesn't already convince you, then probably nothing will.

[John Dell]

Hey Joachim,

Thanks for the response. My brain is a bit shot right now, but I will not be able to make a more detailed comment for another day or so, so I wanted to get back to you with a little something now.

I think you are right to push on my global warming analogy. What I want to think more about and get back to you on is whether or not I think you are correct about your chessmaster claim (or the general claim that "there actually are human experts who are highly immune to many psychological biases in their respective domain"). I am not so sure this claim is correct, and I am pretty sure there is plenty of evidence to its contrary. Maybe I am missing something here. Can you refer me to some solid evidence that supports your position? On the surface, I would say that even the chessmaster is susceptible to *human bias*. I'm imaging a chessmaster who was brought up on a certain style of opening (say the Reti or Grunfeld) and because of this his theoretical position about chess openings is biased in a certain way that prevents him from seeing that other opening are equally valuable. In fact, there is tons of chess theory that is highly debatable, and I imagine its possible that at least some of this debate is driven by certain "starting points" that bias even the masters in favor of certain tactics. But I need to think more about this particular example.

If I am reading you correctly, I think for you to maintain (1) in your two reasons you give for rejecting the global warming analogy you need to have (2) go through. That is, you need it to be the case that susceptibility to biases is not a *general* human problem and that some experts in their domain of expertise are not susceptible to biases. If you get this claim through then I think you can rightly claim that you need more evidence that philosophers *in their domain* are or are not susceptible to bias. But again, I am not so sure (2) is correct even for chessmasters.

Finally, concerning my question about the contribution of the armchair method, it wasn't just about what the method has contributed, but about what you think will be lost should the method need to be revised. I imagine you would not claim that we will no longer be able to inquire into the things you listed above without the armchair method. So my question for you (maybe better phrased this time) is what do you think we will lose if the armchair method is rendered dubious? I should also say, to show my hand a little bit, that if you listed some of the things above because you think the armchair method has moved us closer to understanding the necessary and sufficient conditions for things like knowledge and truth then I would very much doubt such a claim because I am skeptical of the prospects of such endeavors. As I am right now, I find something like the prototype view of concepts much more appealing.

I'll try to get back to you soon about your claim concerning experts and immunity to bias in their domain of expertise; that is, if someone else does not address the claim first.

[John Dell]

Hey Joachim,

I hope to hear your answers to some of the questions I asked in the last post.

Looking back over what I wrote there I actually think I got out most of what I wanted to say. But let me take a stab at making my position a little more clear. For me, this issue of expertise turns on whether cognitive biases are a global problem or if there are some domains where certain individuals can mitigate the impact of these biases.

As should be clear at this point, I take the problem of cognitive biases to be a global (or as I put it earlier a "human") problem, and I think biases are things we must be on our guard against no matter our familiarity with the subject matter. Now, that is not to say that being an expert in some domain cannot limit a person's susceptibility to *some* biases. However, the thrust of my worry comes from the sheer number of cognitive biases. So I might grant that say, a chess expert has a reduced disposition to manifest _loss aversion_, but that does not mean that same expert won't be prone to _impact bias_. So its the prevalence of the cognitive biases that I think makes it a global problem. And this is why I think that no matter the form of expertise *everyone* must try (as much as possible) to avert the impact of biases in their cognitive lives. It is simply false to assert that because a person is an expert he is not subject to bias, he may be less of a victim to some biases, but there are still plenty more that he may not be immune to. A person immune to *all* biases, even in his own domain of expertise, is a super-duper person indeed.

That is also part of the reason why I think Jonathan is correct in his worry about "super-duper expert intuiters". I think to be justified in relying on an intuition as a decisive form of judgment or as sufficient evidence for endorsing some proposition (as opposed to say a launching point for more inquiry) you would need to be free from an extraordinary amount of biases. Sure, this may be *conceptually* possible, but I have my doubts about its *psychological* possibility. [Maybe you think this position is too strong, if so I would be interested in hearing why.]

Basically, I think given the sheer number of cognitive biases we are *all* subject to, the onus is on the person desiring to claim some kind of expertise to prove that his form of expertise (intuition in this case) is sufficiently isolated from enough adulterating biases to render his form of expertise dependable.

I hope this helps to clarify my position a little and provides some reasons for why I am skeptical that philosophers are expert intuiters. As much as anything, my skepticism is driven by the hope that "philosophical expertise" will amount to something much much more than being really good inuiters because I do not consider intuitions to track the truth in an epistemically desirable way (the history of philosophy, cross cultural studies, and the feminist literature seem to make this later point pretty clear).

[Joachim Horvath]

Hi John,

sorry that it took me a while to respond!

So, there are all these countless biases around, you say. And probably you are right that not even the best experts will be free of all these biases. But the only thing that follows is that no human expert is perfectly reliable or infallible, not even in her own domain of expertise. Nevertheless, some experts do a pretty good job (like world-class chess grandmasters), and that is all we should require of human experts.

So, if we really follow you here and demand of every supposed expert to prove her expertise before we trust her judgment, we are straight on the way to skepticism. For, don't we at least have to be experts on cognitive biases if we want to avoid such biases effectively? Otherwise, trying to avoid these biases might actually make things worse. Now, you might say: "But that's science, and science is different!" However, this would simply concede the point that there actually are some trustworthy experts around who were able to become experts without proving their expertise beforehand. My claim is simply that it is prima facie plausible that philosophers qua thought experiment intuiters also belong to this group. And what I demand is just some compelling evidence that directly defeats this prima facie plausibility (in other words, a sufficient number of experimental studies on well-trained professional philosophers).

[John Dell]

Hey Joachim, I think you have misrepresented my position a little. I don't think I ever claimed anything so strong as to "demand of every supposed expert to prove her expertise before we trust her judgment..." (though I do think an account of expertise is a very important component to our discussion which we have not addressed).

Here's what I wrote above, "So its the prevalence of the cognitive biases that I think makes it a global problem. And this is why I think that no matter the form of expertise *everyone* must try (as much as possible) to avert the impact of biases in their cognitive lives. It is simply false to assert that because a person is an expert he is not subject to bias, he may be less of a victim to some biases, but there are still plenty more that he may not be immune to. A person immune to *all* biases, even in his own domain of expertise, is a super-duper person indeed."

The point of this passage is not that every supposed expert must prove their expertise, it is that every supposed expert (if they are acting in an epistemically responsible way) must take steps to avoid the impact of bias as much as possible. And the reason for this is because we are all subject to bias no matter our expertise. Yes, I think the scientific method is designed in a way to mitigate the impact of bias. But what mitigates the impact of bias on intuitions? It would be a terrible mistake to *assume* that the intuitive method is free from bias and so do nothing to avoid the impact of such things.

In addition, my claim about whether someone is justified in relying on an intuition was not a claim about inuiters needing to be completely free from bias to have reliable grounds for thinking their intuitions are tracking the truth (whatever that is). My position is that by their nature intuitions seem to be especially prone to bias, and because of that a person employing intuitions as *a reliable epistemic method* would need to be free from numerous biases.

I think the strongest line you take is when you write "For, don't we at least have to be experts on cognitive biases if we want to avoid such biases effectively? Otherwise, trying to avoid these biases might actually make things worse." You are definitely picking out a weak point in my position here. But I don't think it's implausible to suggest that having a certain level of awareness and familiarity with our tendency to commit various biases is sufficient to attenuate some of the effects of such biases without going all the way to expertise. Really, that is all I'm proposing; first, you gain familiarity with the bias (or biases) and two, you take steps to avoid their impact. The tricky thing about biases is that they have an affect without your awareness. So on what grounds can you claim biases are not negatively impacting experts intuitions unbeknownst to them? That's my worry.