Intuitions, Philosophy, and Experiment

Herman Cappelen has provocatively argued that philosophers don't generally rely upon intuition in their work and thus that work in experimental philosophy that aims to test people's intuitions about philosophical cases is really beside the point. I have a simple argument against this view.

First: I define "intuition" very broadly. A judgment is "intuitive", in my view, just in case it arises by some cognitive process other than explicit, conscious reasoning. By this definition, snap judgments about the grammaticality of sentences, snap judgments about the distance of objects, snap judgments about the moral wrongness of an action in a hypothetical scenario, and snap folk-psychological judgments are generally going to be intuitive. Intuitive judgments don't have to be snap judgments -- they don't have to be fast -- but the absence of explicit conscious reasoning is clearest when the judgment is quick.

This definition of "intuition" is similar to one Alison Gopnik and I worked with in a 1998 article, and it is much more inclusive than Cappelen's own characterizations. Thus, it's quite possible that intuitions in Cappelen's narrow sense are inessential to philosophy while intuitions in my broader sense are essential. But I don't think that Cappelen and I have merely a terminological dispute. There's a politics of definition. One's terminological choices highlight and marginalize different facets of the world.

My characterization of intuition is also broader than most other philosophers' -- Joel Pust in his Stanford Encyclopedia article on intuition, for example, seems to regard it as straightforward that perceptual judgments should not be called "intuitions" -- but I don't think my preferred definition is entirely quirky. In fact, in a recent study, J.R. Kuntz and J.R.C Kuntz found that professional philosophers were more likely to "agree to a very large extent" with Gopnik's and my definition of intuition than with any of six other definitions proposed by other authors (32% giving it the top rating on a seven-point scale). I think professional psychologists and linguists might also sometimes use "intuition" in something like Alison's and my sense.

If we accept this broad definition of intuition, then it seems hard to deny that, contra Cappelen, philosophy depends essentially on intuition -- as does all cognition. One can't explicitly consciously reason one's way to every one of one's premises, on pain of regress. One must start somewhere, even if only tentatively and subject to later revision.

Cappelen has, in conversation, accepted this consequence of my broad definition of "intuition". The question then becomes what to make of the epistemology of intuition in this sense. And this epistemological question is, I think, largely an empirical one, with several disciplines empirically relevant, including cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy, and study of the historical record. Based on the empirical evidence, what might we expect to be the strengths and weaknesses of explicit reasoning? And, alternatively, what might we expect to be the strengths and weaknesses of intuitive judgment?

Those empirical questions become especially acute when the two paths to judgment appear to deliver conflicting results. When your ordinary-language spontaneous judgments about the applicability of a term to a scenario (or at least your inclinations to judge) conflict with what you would derive from your explicit theory, or when your spontaneous moral judgments (or inclinations) do, what should you conclude? The issue is crucial to philosophy as we all live and perform it, and the answer one gives ought to be informed, if possible, by empirically discoverable facts about the origins and reliability of different types of judgments or inclinations. (This isn't to say that a uniform answer is likely to win the day: Things might vary from time to time, person to person, topic to topic, and depending on specific features of the case.)

It would be strange to suppose that the psychology of philosophy is irrelevant to its epistemology. And yet Cappelen's dismissal of the enterprise of experimental philosophy on grounds of the irrelevance of "intuitions" to philosophy would seem to invite us toward that exactly that dubious supposition.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

[Comments on this post are now closed.  Please post any continuing comments on the Splintered Mind cross-post.]

Comments

[Moti Mizrahi]

I think that even if you grant Cappelen his narrower definition of “intuition,” his claims about philosophy fly in the face of actual philosophical practices.

As I understand it, Cappelen defines “intuition” as a proposition that is supposed to be foundational in the same way that perceptual propositions are thought to be foundational. Then he argues that, when philosophers talk about intuitions, they are not talking about foundational propositions that cannot be defeated by further evidence and arguments.

This is a brilliant move: define “intuition” in such a way that it turns out not to refer to anything any philosopher actually does and/or says. But this move fails. It is clear to me that when Jackson claims that Mary learns something new upon her release, when Chalmers claims that zombies are conceivable, when Nozick claims that one wouldn’t want to be plugged into the experience machine, etc., these philosophers do claim to have foundational insight about the hypothetical cases they present. In other words, they don’t take the judgments they make in response to these hypothetical cases to be the sort of judgments that can be defeated by further evidence and arguments. Rather, they take these judgments as indisputable evidence or basic premises in their arguments.

[Max Deutsch]

Hi Eric,

I’m glad to see a post about Herman’s book on this blog. I think it is one of those rare books in philosophy that is right about almost everything.

Herman’s argument that philosophers don’t treat intuitions as evidence works just fine if you replace ‘intuitions’ with ‘snap judgments.’ Are you saying it doesn’t? Then which of the many philosophical arguments Herman reviews are such that the philosophers presenting them treat snap judgments as evidence? Or do you have other arguments and philosophers in mind? Which?

I think the only responsible way to reply to Herman’s argument is to argue that he has misunderstood the arguments he reviews, or has wrongly taken them to be representative, or has failed to consider other arguments that are equally representative. Saying that judgments that do not arise by explicit, conscious reasoning are essential to cognition (and so to philosophical cognition) is not a reply to Herman. Nor is saying that the psychology of philosophy is relevant to the epistemology of philosophy. Herman doesn’t deny these things.

He does say that xphi is a big mistake. That’s because he takes many xphi projects to assume, falsely, that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence. Many of them do assume that, don’t they?

At one point in the post you say that the issue of resolving conflicts between one’s explicit theory and one’s spontaneous judgments is “crucial” to philosophy. Is that an empirical claim about how philosophy is actually practiced? If so, what are the specific cases you have in mind? What does the claim mean, anyway? Is it crucial that, in cases of this kind of conflict, and on the way to resolving it, one treats the fact that some of the judgments are spontaneous as evidence for the truth of those judgments? Herman has an argument against the claim understood in that way. I don’t see that you’ve offered a reply.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks, Moti, for that comment. I'm somewhat inclined to agree with you, but I also think it depends in part on how strongly one reads "Rock". If it's a violation of "Rock" to think that such claims don't profit from any argumentative support and are supposed to be swallowed bald by everyone, I don't think Chalmers and friends would go that far. But that interpretation of Rock would make Cappelen's characterization of intuition very problematically narrow indeed.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks, Max, for your very helpful comment! What you say fits fairly well with how Herman has replied to me in email exchanges.

One apparent take-home message of Cappelen's book is that x-phi is a waste of time, if one is interested in the epistemology of philosophy. And since x-phi (broadly construed!) is our best attempt at empirically understanding the psychology of philosophy and Cappelen does not (that I recall, please correct me if I'm mistaken) propose an alternative method of empirically understanding the psychology of philosophy, then the reader is invited to the conclusion that empirical approaches to the psychology of philosophy are a waste of time if one is interested in the epistemology of philosophy. To my way of thinking that thought is so plainly wrong that we can can use it as a starting point for a reductio.

Consider Cappelen's treatment of trolley problems. He argues that since Thomson and Foot call our shared assessments of those cases into doubt and provide arguments for and against them, those assessments can't be Rock, and so they lack that feature of intuitions. This argument only works on the assumption that the relevant sense of "intuition" is so strong that the act of calling an intuitive judgment into doubt and seeking arguments pro and con undercuts its very status as an intuitive judgment. If one favors my approach to intuition instead, Cappelen's discussion here is mostly beside the point.

It seems to me quite there that there is *some* sense of "intuition" in which the conclusion that you should not push one person in front of a trolley to save five others is (for most people) more intuitively appealing than the conclusion that you should push the person; and it seems also clear to me that that intuitive appeal is not irrelevant to how attractive we find various moral theories. And from those facts, it seems to follow that studying the psychology behind that is not irrelevant to the epistemology of philosophy. Cappelen's terminological choices and argumentative focus masks these truths, I think.

[Taylor M.]

I agree that Cappelen approaches ruling out in advance that philosophers rely on intuitions. You don't even have to read the case studies to know that Rock and the others won't hold up under much scrutiny.

He suggests, following Williamson, that evidence neutrality causes philosophers to be tempted to psychologize the data, and in the next breath says that when philosophers talk of the 'concept of P' or 'intuition that P' etc. this is actually just a verbal tic and they are really talking about P all along. But this predicts that philosophers should just empiricize the evidence much of the time, not consistently psychologize it. Not even psychologists have a tendency to psychologize the data in this sense. This suggests that either philosophers do not seek neutral evidence or this transparency thesis is false.

His approach is to go from an unsuccessful attempt at understanding how philosophers use intuitions and then concluding that experimental philosophy is a Big Mistake.

Better, I think, to ask: How do philosophers use intuitions? How have they in the past? What if anything played this role before philosophers referred to intuitions as such? How can someone who is convinced that philosophy relies on intuitions and proceeds accordingly do so with so much success? These would be more interesting than to know that Rock is false.

[Max Deutsch]

Hi Eric and Moti,

It’s bad misreading of Herman to say that some very narrow definition of ‘intuition’ is the engine driving the arguments in his book. He lists several features that others have taken to be marks of the intuitive but he doesn’t single out any one of these as _the_ intuition-making feature. The idea is instead that you can take your pick and pick more than one if you like, but none of these features plays any evidential role in the arguments he reviews. Herman carefully argues for this conclusion, argument by argument.

Are there arguments with respect to which Herman’s conclusion is not true? Moti mentions arguments from Jackson, Chalmers, and Nozick. Eric cites Foot and Thomson on trolley case arguments. But what are the grounds for saying that these philosophers are relying on intuitions as evidence in their arguments? You both say that it “seems clear” that some of them are. That doesn’t count for much, does it? It seems clear to me that many of the philosophers you cite aren’t. What now? Now we should look and see. Fortunately, Herman has done a lot of the looking for us already. He discusses Chalmers, Foot, and Thomson in a fair bit of detail, providing quotations and interpretations and so on, and concludes that, nope, no reliance on intuitions as evidence there. If you think he’s wrong, you should say why. It’s no good to just assert that he’s clearly wrong. Maybe Moti is on to something with Jackson and Nozick. Maybe, but he offers no evidence at all. Where, in their arguments, does one find Jackson or Nozick relying on “foundational insight” about their hypothetical cases? Show us where.

I don’t understand your objection, Eric, to Herman’s take on Foot and Thomson on trolley cases. He points out that they _argue_ for their judgments about such cases and hence are not treating the judgments as though they (the judgments) have the “Rock” feature, i.e. are such that they don’t need backing arguments. This point seems perfectly straightforward to me. It doesn’t depend on any bad or narrow definition of ‘intuition,’ as you suggest, though one thing that people (such as Moti) sometimes say is that intuitive judgments are supposed to have the Rock feature. As I said, Herman also argues that various other supposed intuition-making features are likewise irrelevant to the kinds of arguments Foot and Thomson make when appealing to trolley cases. Has he missed some important intuition-making feature? What is it? Is the fact that certain judgments have that feature treated as evidence in Foot’s or Thomson’s arguments? What, in the relevant texts, shows that this is so?

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Max, I agree that Cappelen is repeatedly clear that he is aiming for a weak characterization of intuition and that none of the three features are necessary. But his arguments typically require that one accept *either* Rock or some commitment to special phenomenology or some commitment to reliance on conceptual competence alone. I think one might reasonably decline to take on *any* of those three commitments -- and this is especially clear when one sees how his arguments work, e.g., what textual evidence he thinks is sufficient to undermine Rock.

Burden-of-proof disputes are tiresome and not rhetorically very compelling, but here's how I see it. Given the initial plausibility, which I think most members of the philosophical community would accept, that there's some reasonable sense of "intuition" on which it is, for example, unintuitive to think one should push one person in front of a trolley to save five, and that this unintuitiveness plays at least some (defeasible!) epistemic role in our philosophical judgments, both normatively and descriptively, Capellen needs strong arguments to show that this is not so. His arguments might succeed against those who regard at least one of his three diagnostic features of intuition as a necessary feature of intuitions, but they don't succeed against my own preferred approach to intuition.

Cappelen does address approximately my concern a few times in the book, e.g., on p. 162 in connection with the trolley problem, but I don't think that reply is sufficient for his case. For example, note the first sentence of the reply on p. 162. It ends with "... what justifies p in C." What he needs for his response to work, at least if it's repurposed to undercut my view, is really something more like "... the only thing that justifies p in C." But once the claim is phrased in that way, it's much less clearly an acceptable common ground claim.

[Moti Mizrahi]

Thanks for the follow-up comment, Max.

You write: “Show us where.” Here is one example from Jackson (1982, p. 130): “It seems just obvious that [Mary] will learn something about the world.”

Since Jackson says nothing else in support of this claim, other than that *it seems just obvious*, I take it that he takes this claim as a basic premise in his argument against physicalism.

For more examples, please look here (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2012/11/intuition-mongering.html) and here (http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/intuition-what-intuition.html).

If Cappelen's argument is supposed to be an inductive generalization from a sample (rather than based on a narrow definition of "intuition," as you seem to claim):

1. Here are some philosophical arguments that don't rely on intuitions as evidence.
2. (Therefore) Philosophical arguments don't rely on intuitions as evidence.

then he needs to show that his sample is representative. Perhaps the arguments in his sample were selected randomly and the sample is not biased. In that case, the examples I have mentioned raise some doubts about that.

And besides, who said that all philosophical arguments are appeals to intuition?

[Angel Pinillos]

Hi Everyone. Very interesting discussion.

I am sympathetic to Eric's post and comments. But I just want to say something about the scope of Cappelen's argument (sorry if this is tangential). I think that Cappelen's views on intuitions do not seem applicable to the "positive" x-phi approach---where researchers use x-phi techniques to gather evidence in support of (first order) philosophical theories (experimental epistemology is a good example of this. See E. Schwitzgebel, W. Buckwalter, J. Stanley, C. Sripada, J. Knobe, J. Schaffer, C Starmans, O. Friedman and many others).

I don't think that the viability of this project depends on any particular view about intuitions or even that they exist. It just requires that the judgments of the folk (or that they make such and such judgments) *can*, in certain cases, give support for first order philosophical theories. I take it that this last claim is not very controversial in philosophy.

I wonder what Cappelen would say about the philosophical practice of appealing to common sense or to what ordinary people say---because it seems to me that once you accept that this is a legitimate practice, at least some parts of experimental philosophy are vindicated.

Angel

[Chandra Sripada]

I want to agree with Herman, but also Eric, and also pick a needless fight with Angel. :)

There is a sense in which intuitions don't play any *distinctive* evidential role in philosophy. All there are judgments of various sorts and appending 'intuitively' to the way we describe some judgments doesn't alter the evidential role or status of these judgments. This is all agreeing with Herman. But as I see it, granting this has little bearing on whether XPhi, especially certain kinds of XPhi, is viable.

Consider the following claims:
(1) When we judge that p in case C, it turns out we are responding to certain morally irrelevant features of the case, and therefore the judgment ought to be discounted.

(2) When we *intuitively* judge that p in case C, it turns out we are responding to certain morally irrelevant features of the case, and therefore the judgment ought to be discounted.

By my lights, adding ‘intuitively’ in (2) is doing no real work, which aligns well with Herman’s view.

But in order for XPhi to be a viable research program--at least certain projects within Xphi--all that needs to be true is that psychology, or empirical science more broadly, is evidentially relevant for assessing claims like (1). To me it is clear that psychology is indeed relevant. This doesn’t constitute ‘psychologizing the evidence’ in Williamson’s sense. It just reflects the obvious truth that information about the mechanisms by which we form judgments (and especially the features of the world our judgments respond to) are relevant to their epistemic status.

That’s why even if Herman is right that intuitions don’t play any distinctive role in philosophy, Eric is right that the psychology of judgment construed broadly is still relevant to the epistemology of philosophy, and XPhi has a job to do.

The needless fight with Angel is this: I just plain disagree with the positive program that tries to figure out whether the folk agree with some philosophical claim. I don’t think that is a good project for XPhi, though it may be a great project for ‘folk anthropology’, which I take to be a very different thing. I guess this debate is neither here nor there for the present discussion, but since you said I did positive program stuff, I wanted to say something about this. :)

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Chandra, your comments about Herman's and my views seem very sensible to me. I do think the term "intuitively" can do some work, and that it's epistemically worth marking the etiology of our judgments and impulses to judge in a way that reflects a distinction of at least roughly the sort that "intuitive" is meant to capture; but a tactical retreat to a position like yours is also appealing, since that's where I think the biggest metaphilosophical issues reside.

[Angel Pinillos]

Hi Chandra,

Not sure if we disagree. it depends on what you mean by "philosophical claim" :-)
You said: "I just plain disagree with the positive program that tries to figure out whether the folk agree with some philosophical claim."

I would agree with you if the "philosophical claim" in question is some complicated and highly abstract statement about some philosophical topic. But if the "philosophical claim" is some simple ground level claim like "Jones knows that the bank will be closed tomorrow", then this can be useful information to philosophers. The folk are pretty good at mind reading, including attributing knowledge to others. Hence, they can be a reliable source of true statements about these things. I think you would have to be a skeptic about our ordinary competence to attribute mental states to deny this. But this is all you need for positive x-phi.

[Angel Pinillos]

Chandra,

Also, let me quote you (and J. Stanley) from your paper "Empirical Tests of Interest-Relative Invariantism":

"Recent studies in experimental philosophy have tested the claims of IRI. After critically discussing prior studies, we present the results of our own experiments that provide strong support for IRI."

Your project is a paradigm instance of positive X-phi, as I understand it, since IRI is a thesis in epistemology.

I don't think positive x-phi should be characterized as the project of trying to figure out if the folk believe in Moral Relativism, Pragmatic Encroachment, Libertarian Free Will etc. This is way too narrow. And I would probably share your reservations about this more narrow project (though I still think it can be philosophically valuable in some cases).

[Chandra Sripada]

Angel, that's a low blow quoting my own words. :)

I don't want to digress from Herman's book so I will keep this brief. I am not a skeptic about folk competence and I do think it would be bad for a philosophical theory if it made appeals to common sense that turned out, on careful study, to diverge from folk opinion. But I think that almost never happens, because from the armchair we have a pretty reliable grasp of folk opinion. That is, I think Billy, Anna, and David are pretty much spot on here: www-personal.umich.edu/~dunaway/TheFolkProbablyDo.pdf

XPhi can have a lot of very useful missions. But by my lights, testing philosophers' claims about common sense is not one of them.