Philosophizing out of bounds
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Philosophizing out of bounds Jennifer Nado1
Accepted: 12 October 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction The experimental philosophy studies that began to emerge in the first years of the twenty-first century were catalysts to a lot of methodological anxiety. Participants’ responses to thought experiments appeared to be sensitive to all sorts of funny things, such as cultural background or socioeconomic status, or how a vignette was framed. Such studies seemed to compel experimentalists towards a dramatic, pessimistic conclusion: the intuitions on which philosophical method rests are too unreliable to serve as evidence for philosophical conclusions. The armchair must burn. It’s been about two decades since then, and the so-called ‘negative program’ of experimental philosophy has gotten a lot more sophisticated. There are more studies now, of course—one only needs to look at Machery’s incredibly useful literature survey to see that—but there’s also been much more attention paid to exactly how the experimentalists’ arguments should be construed. Machery’s book is an exemplary contribution to this ongoing project of sharpening the experimentalist critique. One criticism of the initial, ‘naı¨ve’ formulation of the experimentalist argument which I suspect looms large in Machery’s mind is due to Timothy Williamson.1 Williamson has pressed against the notion of ‘intuition’ that undergirds naı¨ve experimentalism, noting that the cognitive capacities that underlie ‘intuitive’ judgment are not particular to philosophy. They simply reflect, for instance, an 1
See Williamson (2007, 2015).
& Jennifer Nado [email protected] 1
University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong
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J. Nado
ability to apply concepts—and are thus plausibly shared with much of the bulk of everyday cognition. This overlap between philosophical and quotidian judgment has dire consequences for any attempt to reject use of ‘intuition’ wholesale—by such lights, even judgments like ‘I know where I left my keys’ ought to be deemed verboten. There have been a handful of attempts to prevent the sceptical collapse that Williamson takes experimentalism to invite. One early suggestion, due to Weinberg (2007), was to move away from unreliability as the basis of anti-intuition critique to some feature which ordinary judgment purportedly lacks (Weinberg’s proposed substitute was ‘hopelessness’). A later proposal, offered by both Alexander and Weinberg (2014) and by myself (Nado 2015), was to note that the activity of philosophical theory-building is simply much more error-sensitive than our ordinary, day-to-day cognitive tasks. More broadly, there has been a marked tendency in experimentalist writing to drop the ‘intuition’ category in favour of less loaded terms such as ‘philosophical judgment’—though doubtless this latter has also been fuelled by recent arguments by Cappelen (2012) and Deutsch (2015) (among others) that deny that intuition plays a significant role in philosophical method. Machery’s own revamp of naı¨ve experimentalism likewise eschews the
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