Search Results

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (Centrality) is widely accepted both in philosophical methodology or metaphilosophy and philosophy at large. This introductory chapter provides an overview and taxonomy of views about what intuitions are and what role they play in philosophical practices such as the method of cases, thought experimentation and conceptual analysis. It outlines two key arguments that can be appealed to in favor of Centrality: the first is based on how philosophers use “intuitions”-vocabulary, and the second on the kind of judgements that philosophers’ make about cases. Part I of the book explores the first argument and Part II the second.

Some so-called moderate rationalists such as Bealer present a controversial picture of philosophy: methodological rationalism. In addition to claiming that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence, the methodological rationalist maintains that philosophers seek necessary a priori truths and the method of cases or thought experiments figure centrally in their discovery. A wide range of philosophers opposed to this conception of how philosophy should be done nonetheless consider it—to varying degrees—an adequate description of how philosophy is done. This chapter considers in detail this descriptive picture of philosophy, and offers a taxonomy of different normative attitudes one might have towards it. In later chapters it will be argued that we should not go along with the rationalist in her description of how philosophy is done in the first place.

Many areas of philosophy rely on the method of cases: Philosophers consider actual or hypothetical situations (which cases or thought experiments describe) in order to determine what facts hold in these situations and to bring them to bear on philosophical controversies. Surprisingly, however, the characterization of the method of cases is controversial. Chapter 1 defends a particular characterization of the method of cases and identifies some of the roles it plays in contemporary philosophy. Alternative characterizations, which appeal to notions such as metaphysical or epistemological analyticity, conceptual competence, or intuition, are rejected. Only a minimalist characterization, according to which cases elicit everyday judgments, is philosophically adequate—it does not rely on empty notions or on notions useless to characterize the method of cases—and descriptively adequate—it captures how philosophers really use cases.

The chapter examines Timothy Williamson’s and Herman Cappelen’s attempts to defend the method of cases in its traditional, “armchair” form, against the “cognitive diversity” and “calibration” objections. The aim of the chapter is to continue the work of Chapter One of exposing the internal difficulties that have presented themselves for those wishing to defend the method, and to begin to work toward establishing the book’s basic contention that the method of cases rests on substantive and (therefore) challengeable presuppositions about language. More specifically, the chapter argues that Williamson’s and Cappelen’s defense of the method rests entirely on the claim of continuity between our employment of words outside philosophy and what we do with them when we ask the theorist’s questions and give our answers to them.

This chapter raises three objections to animalism. First, if it isn’t an account of what we essentially are then the “too many persons” argument is ineffectual, since “animal” could be a phase sortal. If it is an account of what we essentially are then this needs independent argument, not provided by the “too many persons” argument. Second, the “too many persons” argument threatens animalism, once we distinguish an animal and the brain that is its organ of mentation. Third, animalism has a problem with “remnant” persons, e.g. the person who comes into existence when my head is severed from my destroyed body and lives for a little time, as in a gruesome variant on the guillotine. It looks as if the animalist must say that a person comes into being merely as a non-causal upshot of the destruction of non-neural tissue. Various replies on behalf of animalism are considered and rejected.

There is little question that experimental philosophy constitutes one of the most significant developments in analytic philosophy in the last couple of decades. What is less clear is what its philosophical significance is, or has been. Whereas its proponents tend to present it as a way of moving forward in philosophy, I would argue that its singular contribution thus far has been that of pressing analytic philosophers to reflect on their favored method of inquiry, thereby helping to bring out fundamental problems with that method. More specifically, the present book argues that the new experimental movement and the responses to it by traditional, “armchair” philosophers have helped to make clear that what is known in contemporary analytic philosophy as “the method of cases”—that is, the widespread philosophical practice of theorizing on the basis of the “application” of terms to “cases”—rests on substantive and challengeable assumptions about language.

This chapter distinguishes the clusters of psychologically real heuristics that govern our use of terms—the “psi-concepts”—from the “phi-concepts” or meanings that are the semantic determinants of the extensions of the terms in question, and hence of the truth-conditions of the sentences that contain those terms. Concerning the psi-concepts the chapter proposes a new, empirically motivated, and philosophically consequential amendment to both the theory-theory and the prototype theory, namely the generic encoding hypothesis: the heuristics which typically guide our use of terms by exploiting prevalence, cue-validity, and causal explanatory structure are properly formulated in generic terms. The chapter then explores the philosophical consequences of the generic encoding hypothesis, exploring its destructive impact on the method of cases (with particular attention to its use in the philosophy of personal identity), philosophical analysis, the “normativity of meaning,” and the idea that we know how to use terms by grasping meanings.

Gettier cases describe situations where an agent possesses a justified true belief that p, without, at least according to mainstream analytic epistemology, knowing that p, while the “Gettier intuition” is the judgment that a protagonist in a Gettier case does not know the relevant proposition. Our goal in this chapter is to show that we can make the Gettier intuition compelling or underwhelming by presenting it in different contexts. We report a surprising order effect whereby people find the Gettier intuition less compelling when a case describing a justified but false belief is presented before a Gettier case. We also report a surprising framing effect: two Gettier cases that differ only in their philosophically irrelevant narrative details elicit substantially different judgments. Finally, we discuss the metaphilosophical implications of these effects.

The conclusion underscores the difference between the method of cases as commonly practiced and ordinary language philosophy. The latter proceeds by inviting us to project ourselves imaginatively into situations of significant speech—situations in which the words would actually be used; the former invites us to “apply” our words to “cases” from a metaphysically detached position in which nothing but a philosophical theory hangs on what we say. But, as argued in this book, apart from being put to some particular use or another, in a context suitable for that use, our words mean, and say, nothing determinate. The Conclusion accordingly proposes that in deploying the method of cases, we are going, and getting, nowhere with our words. It ends with a few thoughts about how that sort of philosophical idleness may be avoided.