Following Jonathan Ichikawa and Ben Jarvis, I think examples in philosophical works should be thought of as small fictions. In particular, they’re a type of genre fiction. The genre is the same one, broadly, that fables and parables fall into. (This way of thinking about thought experiments makes Aesop an important figure in the Western philosophical canon, which isn’t a bad result I think.) Like any kind of genre fiction, there are important interpretative constraints on these fictions. If you present the story in a different ‘mode’, it should be, and will be, interpreted differently.

The way in which fables/parables/thought experiments should be interpreted has some particularly quirky features.

At least some of the time, realism isn’t important. We don’t object to Aesop’s stories because they feature talking animals. We don’t object to parables if the story doesn’t really make sense from the perspective of non-central characters. (The striking effect we get when retelling a familiar biblical or mythical story from the perspective of a non-central character is something Nick Cave has made good use of over the years.) And we shouldn’t object to thought experiments because they require a curious series of coincidences. Indeed, the best fables/parables/thought experiments are often quite unrealistic because everything about the back story is so ‘neat’. They don’t have characters like Ulysses’ M’Intosh who simply don’t fit into the story, and people simply know, in a way that doesn’t leave the possibility of doubt even open, the things that are stipulated as true.

These stories are meant to have a point, or a moral. The intended point guides interpretation of the story. We’re meant to interpret the story in a way that makes it a fitting illustration of the moral. It would be wrong to interpret the story of the fox and the grapes as one in which the fox gets evidence that the grapes are sour and therefore leaves. And that would be wrong in part because the point is about our attitude towards what we cannot have.

The same thing is true in philosophical experiments I think. It would be wrong to interpret the Gettier example as one in which the subject has independent evidence for the justified true belief that isn’t known, or in which they aren’t justified in inferring the target proposition because the evidence for it is from a source they have independent reason to doubt. It isn’t even really necessary to state this in the example, because once we know it’s an attempt to show that justified true belief without knowledge is possible, general principles of interpretation will fill in the details.

But that means we have to know what principle the example is meant to show. And that’s why I suspect there’s a deep problem here for experimentation on the examples. We suspect that telling people the point that an example is meant to show will seriously interfere with how they evaluate the example. (I assume this is why subjects in existing surveys are not normally told what hypothesis is being tested.) But not telling people the intended point of the example will interfere with how they interpret the example.

I suspect the best way out of this problem is to investigate people who do know the intended point of the example, and hence who know how it is meant to be interpreted. But I don’t think they are suitable subjects for a controlled experiment.

This point is related to the worry that it takes a bit of training to be able to distinguish between different hypotheses that the thought experiment might be intended to show. But I suspect it goes a little deeper. In principle we could explain the distinctions without telling people the intended outcome of the experiment, and hence ‘contaminating’ it. Not so if the intended outcome is an essential part of interpreting the story being told.

Having said all that, I want to strongly agree with something that Alan White said in the previous thread. Experimental work on subjects who aren’t familiar with the debate can tell us a lot about how people interpret these thought experiments. And that can be incredibly useful for communicating the results and arguments, either to colleagues in other disciplines, or to students. I know that’s not what experimental philosophers are aiming to show, but I think it’s a valuable side-effect of their work. Indeed, if I’m right about thought experiments being genre fictions, and the genre being one philosophical training makes you much more familiar with, we’re probably all making lots of mistakes about how people interpret our examples. Experimental work is an incredibly good way of correcting these misimpressions.

To be sure, I know that experimental philosophers are aiming much higher than merely clarifying philosophical examples. But I think those of us who are sceptical of some experimental work should not overlook its values that aren’t affected by extant criticism.

Three qualifications before I start.

First, I’m really interested in odds-sensitivity, not stakes-sensitivity. I think you get some stakes-sensitivity effects when you have to decide whether to bet $20 against a few seconds work. For instance, you might double check on your phone something we’d ordinarily say you knew, because the act of checking has a positive expected return. I think that’s a case of long odds defeating knowledge. That doesn’t mean I think of losing $20 as a high stakes situation of course.

Second, I’m primarily interested in the way in which various things are constitutively dependent on stakes. If the stakes raise, then I collect more evidence, and then my credence/belief/knowledge/evidence changes, that doesn’t in itself mean the kind of sensitivity at issue here is displayed. I also think that ‘thinking through’ a question is often a way of collecting more logical/mathematical/epistemological evidence. So this kind of causal dependency of belief etc on stakes is not what’s at issue here, but is surely a central feature of our epistemic life. Any theory that said that for ordinary humans, stakes raising doesn’t have a causal impact on how much we collect and think through evidence is surely too absurd to be taken seriously.

Third, it’s very important to distinguish various ways in which beliefs can be strong. There are plenty of pairs of propositions p, q such that:

• There are odds that I would regard as favourable for a bet on q, but not for a bet on p. In that sense, my credence in q is higher than my credence in p.
• In the ordinary sense, I believe p but not q, so in the ordinary sense, I have a stronger degree of belief in p than in q.

Here’s one instance of that. Let p be that in the weekend’s election, the seat of La Trobe was won by a college friend of mine, and q be that this particular lottery ticket will lose.

This means that phrases like ‘degree/strength of belief/confidence/credence’, are systematically ambiguous. By ‘credence’ I mean the state that bears a close relationship to betting behaviour, and by ‘belief’ I mean the state such that someone who believes p takes p for granted when making theoretical or practical decisions.

Having said that, here’s what I think is stakes-sensitive.

• Credences are not stakes-sensitive, since credences are defined in terms of dispositions over decision possibilities that include high stake situations.
• Beliefs are stakes-sensitive, since in high stakes situations, less is taken for granted by rational actors.
• Evidence is stakes-sensitive, since in high stakes situations, different sources are rationally relied upon.
• Knowledge is stakes-sensitive for at least both of the last two reasons.
• Fixing credence, knowledge is still stakes-sensitive since of course credences don’t vary with stakes.
• Fixing belief, knowledge is still stakes-sensitive.

In my original paper on pragmatic encroachment I hinted that the last claim is false. But I’ve changed my mind. I think that in cases where the agent is wrong about what the stakes are, or even have mistaken credences about stakes, knowledge can be affected by stakes even fixing everything else. Those cases are rare, and haven’t been much discussed in the literature. (They certainly haven’t been tested in any experiments.) But I think they are important for getting the details of stakes-sensitivity right.

I have a number of thoughts on points arising out of that thread, but in the interests of being orderly, and of self-promotion, I’ll post them to new entries on the blog. (Comments are turned off here because you can always post on the previous thread.)

As some of the contributors note, it’s easy to overstate the trend that’s going on here. It’s not that for the 20th Century, philosophers used only armchair methods, and with the dawning of the 21st century they are going back to engaging with the sciences. When I was in grad school in the 90s, it was completely common to rely on psychological studies of all of uses, especially studies on dissociability, on developmental patterns, and on what was distinctive about people with autism or with Capgras Syndrome. And the influence of Peter Singer on work in ethics meant that purely armchair work in ethics was out of the question, whatever one thought of Singer’s conclusions.

This was hardly a distinctive feature of philosophy in south-eastern Australia. Indeed, we were probably more armchair-focussed than contemporary American philosophers. As Ernie Sosa notes in the entry linked above, 20th century metaphysics is shot through with arguments from results in 20th century physics. The importance of objective chance to contemporary nomological theories is obviously related to the role of chance in different branches of physics and biology, and modern theories of it involve a lot of attention to various sciences. And I’ve lost count of the number of debates I’ve been in in philosophy of language where appeal has been made at one stage or other to cross-linguistic data, which is presumably not armchair evidence unless we assume that the person in the armchair knows every human language. So it’s a bit of a stretch to say, as Joshua Knobe does, that in that time “people began to feel that philosophy should be understood as a highly specialized technical field that could be separated off from the rest of the intellectual world.” I’m really not sure which of the great philosophers of the 20th century could be characterised this way. (Perhaps if you included mathematics in philosophy and not the “rest of the intellectual world” you can get a couple of great 20th century philosophers in. But I doubt it would get much beyond that.)

That’s not to say there’s nothing new that’s been happening in the last fifteen years or so. In fact I think there are three trends here that are worth noting.

One purely stylistic, and actually rather trivial, trend is that philosophers are now a bit more inclined to ‘show their workings’. So if I want to rely on Daniel Gilbert’s work on comprehension and belief, I’ll throw in a bunch of citations to his work, and to the secondary literature on it, in part to give people the impression that I know what’s going on here. You won’t see those kind of notes in, say, J. L. Austin’s work. But that’s not because Austin didn’t know much psychology. I suspect he knew much much more than me. But because of very different traditions about citation, and because of differences in self-confidence between Austin and me, his philosophy might look a bit further removed from empirical work.

A more interesting trend is picked up by Ernie Sosa – philosophers are doing a lot more experiments themselves than they were a generation ago. This is presumably a good thing, at least as long as they are good experiments!

The university that Ernie and I work at, Rutgers, has a significant causal role in this. We encourage PhD students to study in the cognitive science department while they are at Rutgers, and many of them end up working in or around experimental work. That’s not to say I’m at all responsible for this – I’m much more sedentary than my median colleague. But many of my colleagues have done a lot to encourage students interested in experimental work.

The third trend, and this one I’m less excited about, is the reliance on survey work in empirical work designed to have philosophical consequences. It seems to me that surveying people about what they think about hard philosophical questions is not a great guide to what is true, and isn’t even necessarily a good guide to what they think. We certainly wouldn’t take surveys about whether people think it should be legal for an Islamic community center to be built around the corner from here to be significant to political theory debates about freedom of religion.

A slightly more interesting result comes from a survey that Matthew Yglesias posted this morning. If you trust Gallup, only 26% of Americans believe in “the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future”. This is a more than a little nuts, at least as interpreted literally. I know that I had blueberries with breakfast, and I can confidently and reliably predict that the Greens will not win the Australian election currently underway. And I know these things in virtue of having a mind, and in virtue of how my mind works. There’s the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future in action!

Of course, the 74% of people who apparently denied that the mind has the power to know the past and predict the future probably don’t really deny that I have these powers. The survey they were asking was about paranormal phenomena generally. And I left off part of the question they were asked. It asked whether they believed in clairvoyance, which they ‘clarified’ as the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future. Presumably at least some of the people who answered ‘no’ (or ‘don’t know’) interpreted the question as not being about the power of the mind to know stuff through perception, memory and inference, but through some more extraordinary method.

It’s in general extremely hard to understand just what qustion people are answering in surveys. And this makes it hard to know how much significance we should place on different surveys. This matters to some live puzzles. For instance, as Jonathan Schaffer recently wrote, there is an “emerging consensus in experimental philosophy, according to which … the magnitude of the stakes does not affect intuitions about knowledge.” (By ‘the stakes’ he means the stakes faced by a person about who we’re asking whether they know that p, when the person has to make a decision to which p is relevant.) This consensus is largely because the experimenters asked subjects whether certain fictional characters, some facing trivial decisions and some facing quite momentous decisions, knew that p, where p is something that would be important in their deliberations. Generally, they didn’t find a difference in the responses.

But there is quite a bit of evidence, including a lot of experimental evidence (PDF), that differences in stakes in this sense really do matter to cognitive states. In particular, what it takes to have settled the question to one’s own satisfaction of whether p is true, depends on what is at stake, and if you ask them the right way, survey respondents agree that it depends on what is at stake. Assuming, as everyone in this debate does, that knowledge requires settling questions to one’s own satisfaction, this means we have empirical evidence that stakes matter to knowledge. What does this mean for the consensus that Schaffer reports? I suspect it means, like in the Gallup survey, that different people are interpreting the survey questions differently, but there are lots of alternative explanations. In any case, I’d want a lot more evidence than surveys though before I overturned a well established result in experimental psychology.

It’s easy enough to describe and evaluate these cognitive states. D1 and D2 have both made judgments. Both of those judgments are about the identity of the murderer. D1’s judgment tracks the truth, but not the evidence. D2’s judgment tracks the evidence, but not the truth.

We can expand this story without many complications. Assume that the evidence about the evidence is not at all misleading. The evidence supports the proposition that the evidence supports the proposition that the gardener did it. D1, as you may expect, believes the evidence supports the proposition that the butler did it, and D2 believes the evidence supports the proposition that the gardener did it.

It’s easy enough to say something about these judgments as well. D1’s judgment tracks neither the evidence nor the facts. D2’s judgment tracks both the evidence and the facts. These judgments are not, in the first instance, about the identity of the murderer. Rather, they are about the epistemic significance of the evidence. So we have a few different arguments, by Leibniz’s Law, that D1’s belief that the butler did it is distinct from his belief that the evidence supports the proposition that the butler did it. And D2’s belief that the gardener did it is distinct from her belief that evidence supports the proposition that the gardener did it.

Things get trickier when the evidence is less one-sided, as the following example shows.

D3 and D4 are investigating whether the chef was an accomplice to the murder. The evidence supports this to degree 0.7. That is, the evidential probability that the chef was an accomplice given the available evidence is 0.7. But the evidence D3 and D4 have suggests that the evidence supports the chef being an accomplice to degree 0.95.

Now some people will say that what I’ve supposed in the previous paragraph is incoherent. That shouldn’t stop us treating it as a supposition. The supposition that there’s a largest prime entails all propositions, but we can sensibly suppose it. More directly, I think there are plenty of examples where something like the previous paragraph could be true. Assume, for example, that D3 and D4 had a rather bad statistics professor in detective school, and this professor told them that a certain statistical method was usable in cases like this, when in fact it was not. Using the method would increase the apparent probability that the chef is the accomplice from 0.7 to 0.95. D3 and D4 aren’t statistics experts, so their evidence suggests that this method works. But in fact, since the professor was wrong, the method doesn’t really increase the likelihood that the chef was the accomplice.

Let p be the proposition that the chef was the accomplice, and E the evidence D3 and D4 have. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that D3 and D4 have correctly identified E. Then consider the following four attitudes:

1. D3’s credence of 0.95 in p.
2. D4’s credence of 0.7 in p.
3. D3’s belief that E supports p to degree 0.95.
4. D4’s belief that E supports p to degree 0.7.

State 1 does not track the evidence; state 3 does. So by Leibniz’s Law, states 1 and 3 must be different states. Similarly, states 2 and 4 must be different states.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the evidential significance of cognitive states like states 1 through 4. (Short answer: whatever significance there is will generally be screened by the evidence the state is based on.) I’ve usually called this work on the evidential significance of judgments. I think this is an OK bit of terminology, though it’s a bit tricky to call states 1 and 2 judgments. After all, we normally think of judgments as having propositional content, and the content of the judgment characterising the state. But there’s no way to do that with both 1 and 2. If we say that the content of the judgment is p, then we can’t distinguish a state like 1 from a state like 2. (I think that’s not a terrible result, but it is odd.) If we say the content of the judgment is that p is supported by E to a certain degree, then we have no way to distinguish a state like 1 from a state like 3. And we proved in the previous paragraph that they were distinct. If we say the content of the judgment is p, we have to say that judgments come in degrees. If we say that the content of the judgment is a proposition about the force of E, we violate Leibniz’s Law. It’s bad to be illogical, so I adopt the first of these options.

There’s another argument for 1 and 3 being separate states, namely that they have separate contents. But I don’t think that’s overly compelling on its own. After all, it isn’t quite clear what the content of 1 is. In the previous paragraph I argued that it’s p, but that argument rests on the Leibniz’s Law argument. So I think the Leibniz’s Law argument does all the work here.

If D3 says, “Almost certainly, p”, is she expressing state 1 or state 3? I think she could be expressing either of them. That’s to say, “Almost certainly, p” is a reasonable enough way of expressing 1, and a reasonable enough way of expressing 3. In the past I’ve gone on at some length defending broadly cognitive accounts of statements like “Almost certainly, p”, arguing that they must be interpreted as expressions of state 3. But I no longer think there are good arguments for that position.

The main argument for such a position is a variant on the general Frege-Geach argument against expressivism. If we thought that expressions like “Almost certainly, p” only ever expressed states like 1, then we wouldn’t be able to give them truth-conditions (apart from p) and hence we’d have a hard time embedding them in more complex sentences. But if we think that whenever such an expression is, say, the antecedent of a conditional it gets interpreted as having the same meaning as the content of the belief in state 3, we don’t have any problem with explaning embedding. So I now think the force of an utterance like “Almost certainly, p” just varies. Sometimes it expresses a belief about evidential probabilities, and sometimes it expresses a credence.

The grant includes funding for a PhD position, but applications for that position are due within a couple of weeks. The full details for that position are below the fold.

AHRC Project Doctoral Studentship, Metaphysical Indeterminacy

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds invites applications for an AHRC-funded doctoral studentship, tenable from October 2010.

The award will be held as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Metaphysical Indeterminacy’. The successful applicant will engage in research on a topic in the philosophy of indeterminacy, such as the metaphysics of indeterminacy, the logic or philosophy of language of vagueness, etc. The research undertaken by the award holder will contribute to the larger project, directed by Drs Elizabeth Barnes, Ross Cameron and Robert Williams. The chosen candidate will benefit from contact with national and international experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language and related fields through the programme of international visitors, seminars and workshops funded by the project.

Studentship Information

The studentship is tenable for up to 3 years (full-time) from 1 October 2010. Renewal of the studentship each year is subject to satisfactory academic progress.

AHRC regulations require that applicants must meet UK residency criteria or be ordinarily resident in the EU. EU candidates are normally eligible for a fees-only award, unless they have been ordinarily resident in the UK for 3 years immediately preceding the date of the award. Applicants should normally have, or be studying for, a Master’s degree in Philosophy. Further details concerning eligibility are available via the AHRC website. (PDF link)

Full awards cover academic fees at the standard UK rate and a maintenance grant for full-time study.

Applications

The closing date for applications is Friday 27th August 2010. You should also arrange for two academic references to be sent to us by this date.

Applications should be made using the standard postgraduate research degree application form, which available for download (Word doc link). The following documents should be submitted with your application: 500 word PhD proposal; a copy of your degree transcripts (or a transcript of your marks to date if you are currently completing a degree); a sample of written work, consisting of a philosophical essay on a question of your choice, not less than 3000 words in length; CV.

All applications and references should be sent to Jenneke Stevens, Postgraduate Secretary, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, email: J.M.Stevens@leeds.ac.uk, tel: +44 113 343 3263.

Intending applicants should contact Dr Ross Cameron for information about the studentship.

• Superfast, who is super fast.
• Three-Legs, who only has three good legs.
• Magoo, who can’t see well enough to run straight.

They discover the same evidence, and that evidence includes the existence of a genie. The genie will make it the case that if S believes at 3 o’clock that Three-Legs will win, then Three-Legs will win. And the genie will make it the case that if T believes at 3 o’clock that Magoo will win, then Magoo will win. (If both S and T form these beliefs, the genie will cause Three-Legs and Magoo to dead-heat. Otherwise the genie will ensure that there is at most one winner.) The non-supernatural evidence all points in favour of Superfast winning. S and T both have evidence that neither of them is the kind to usually form beliefs in response to what meddling genies do, so both of them have compelling reason to discount the possibility that the other will cause the genie to effect the race.

S and T consider the evidence, then get together at 3:01 to compare notes. S has formed the belief that Superfast will win. T has, uncharacteristically, formed the belief that Magoo will win. At this point it is clear what S should do. Her evidence, plus what she has learned about T, entail that Magoo will win. (We’re assuming that S knows that the genie is good at what he does.) So S should believe that Magoo will win.

This is a problem for several theories of disagreement.

The Equal Weight View says that in cases of peer disagreement, the disagreers should split the difference (or something close to it). But that’s not true. S should defer entirely to T’s view.

The Right Reasons View says that in a case of peer disagreement, the rational agent should stick to her judgment, and the irrational agent should defer. But in this case precisely the opposite should happen.

Someone might deny this by arguing that T’s belief is not irrational. After all, given what T knows, her belief is guaranteed to be true. You might think that this is enough to make it justified. But I don’t think that’s right. When T forms the belief that Magoo will win, she has no evidence that Magoo will win, and compelling evidence that Magoo will lose. It’s irrational to form beliefs like this for which you have no evidence. So T’s belief is irrational.

To back this up, imagine a chemist a few hundred years ago who has little evidence in favour of the oxygen theory, and a lot of evidence in favour of the phlogiston theory. The chemist decides nonetheless to believe the oxygen theory, i.e., to believe that oxygen exists. Now there’s a good sense in which that belief is self-verifying. The holding of the belief guarantees that it is true, since the chemist could not have beliefs if there were no oxygen. But this does not make the belief rational, since it is not justified by the evidence.

Even if you doubt all this, the Right Reasons View is still I think false in this case. If both parties are rational, then the Right Reasons View implies that a rational agent can either stick with their belief, or adopt their peer’s belief. (Or, if some in-between belief is rational, adopt it. But this won’t always be true.) That’s not true in this case. It is irrational for S to hold on to their rational belief in the face of T’s disagreement.

My preferred ‘screening’ view of disagreement gets the right answer here. I think every disagreement puzzle is best approached by starting with the following kind of table. Here p is the proposition that Superfast will win, and E is the background evidence that S and T possess.

I think that the evidential force of rational judgments is screened off by their underlying evidence. So this table is a little misleading. Really it should look like this.

Except now E is misclassified. Although E is generally evidence for p, in the presence of T’s judgment that Magoo will win, it is evidence that ¬p. (This is just a familiar instance of evidential holism.) So the table in fact looks like this.

And clearly this supports S judging that ¬p, and in fact that Magoo will win.

Before thinking about cases like this one, I had thought that the screening view entailed the Right Reasons View about disagreement. But that isn’t true. In some cases, it implies that the person who makes the rational judgment should defer to the person who makes the irrational judgment. Fortunately, it does that just in cases where intuition agrees!

• Ishani has posted a paper on Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice.
• The TeX for Philosophers Blog, which has lots of good stuff for TeX newbies, and for more advanced users.
• Alison Fernandes has a good guide for applying to US and UK graduate schools. It is written largely from the perspective of people applying from Australia, but a lot of it should carry over to other students. I think that she puts a bit too much emphasis on talking to faculty members, and too little on talking to graduate students, at the later stages of the application. (I.e., after you’ve been accepted and are trying to decide where to go.) But I agree with most of it, and think it’s an incredibly useful guide.
• Some of the Arché people seem excited by the game theory course I’ve promised to run next year.

Finally, here are some things people might be interested in applying for:

• The G. Higgins Lectureship in the History of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.
• Visiting Scholarships at the Northern Institute of Philosophy.
• The Wagner Fellowship in Philosophy of Risk at Pitt.

	Online ISSN: 1747-9991    Print ISSN: 1747-9991 Philosophy Compass Volume 5, Issue 7,2010. Early View (Articles Available Online in Advance of Print) Journal Compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
	Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art
516-524	Recent Continental Philosophy and Comedy Bernard Freydberg Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00309.x
	History of Philosophy
525-534	Newton’s Empiricism and Metaphysics Mary Domski Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00307.x
	Legal & Political
535-550	Pornography Lori Watson Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00292.x
	Logic & Language
551-567	De Se Attitudes: Ascription and Communication Dilip Ninan Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00290.x
568-578	Contexts in Formal Semantics Christopher Gauker Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00305.x
	Metaphysics
579-590	The Puzzles of Material Constitution L. A. Paul Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00302.x
591-601	The Controversy over the Existence of Ordinary Objects Amie L. Thomasson Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00303.x
	Mind & Cognitive Science
602-610	Explanation in Psychiatry Dominic Murphy Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00304.x
	Philosophy of Religion
611-623	Skeptical Theism Justin P. McBrayer Abstract Published Online: 27 Jun 2010 DOI 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00306.x

]]> http://tar.weatherson.org/2010/07/16/philosophy-compass-volume-5-issue-7/feed/ 0 http://tar.weatherson.org/2010/06/11/intuition-and-style/ http://tar.weatherson.org/2010/06/11/intuition-and-style/#comments Sat, 12 Jun 2010 00:00:25 +0000 Brian Weatherson http://tar.weatherson.org/?p=2724 Cian Dorr writes:

But very often, ‘intuition’ talk is playing no such distinctive role. Often, saying ‘Intuitively, P’ is no more than a device for committing oneself to P while signaling that one is not going to provide any further arguments for this claim. In this use, ‘intuitively …’ is more or less interchangeable with ‘it seems to me that …’. There is a pure and chilly way of writing philosophy in which premises and conclusions are baldly asserted. But it’s hard to write like this without seeming to bully one’s readers; one can make things a bit gentler and more human by occasionally inserting qualifiers like ‘it seems that’. It would be absurd to accuse someone who frequently gave in to this stylistic temptation of following a bankrupt methodology that presupposes the erroneous claim that things generally are as they seem.

That seems entirely right to me. Or, as I might have said, it is entirely right.