Experimental philosophy without intuitions: an illustration of why it fails
- PDF / 193,913 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 251 Views
Experimental philosophy without intuitions: an illustration of why it fails Herman Cappelen1,2
Accepted: 12 October 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Machery’s book is an effort to show how experimental philosophy can be valuable without the perephenelia of intuitions. I argue that the effort fails. Keywords Intuitions Experimental Philosophy Methodology Conceptual engineering
The experimental philosophy movement started out as a criticism of what it took to be the core of philosophical methodology: the practice of constructing cases (or thought experiments) and then eliciting intuition about those cases. According to this view of philosophical methodology, intuitions are used as evidence for or against philosophical theories. A good theory of knowledge, justice, freedom, or reference (for example) should be consistent with intuitions we have about cases (thought experiments). The experimental philosopher’s core idea was this: if philosophy is based on intuitions about cases, we need to check what intuitions people have, what influences those intuitions, and whether they track truth reliably. So they conducted experiments to check on that—hence the name. The results were discouraging. They appeared to show that intuitions about cases varies across subjects and are easily influenced by irrelevant factors. They concluded that the standard methodology was flawed and that this undermines an enormous amount of work done in philosophy. & Herman Cappelen [email protected] 1
Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong
2
The University of Hong Kong, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, Room 10.10, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
123
H. Cappelen
In the first chapter of Edouard Machery’s new book he rejects this way of understanding X-phi. He endorses the views of some of the most ardent critics of X-phi. Machery agrees with Cappelen (2012) and Deutsch (2015) that the X-phi movement made a fundamental mistake when it described standard philosophical methodology as relying on intuitions about cases. And he agrees with the critics of X-phi that intuitions play no role in philosophical practice. However, he doesn’t agree with Cappelen and Deutsch that this makes X-phi pointless. His book is an effort to show how X-phi without intuitions can still be philosophically significant. It’s a bit like how you might think about acupuncture: you might think there’s something to the practice of acupuncture even though the classical theory of why acupuncture works is false. If so, you reject the view that the Qi (or life force) is moved around so-called meridians by needle pricks, but nonetheless think that the practice of sticking needles into people can be useful. You reject the theory of acupuncture, but preserve the practice. Machery’s attitude towards experimental philosophy is similar: the theoretical scaffolding of X-phi (as we find it in Machery et al. 2004, Knobe and Nichols 2008, Nagel 2012, among many others), is false. The appeal such authors make to intuitions (both when describing their experiments and when criticizing
Data Loading...
