Jonathan Weinberg

In the past, experimental philosophers have explored the psychological underpinning of a number of notions in philosophy, including free will, moral responsibility, and more. But prior to this chapter, although a number of philosophers have speculated on how ordinary folks might, or should, think about the liar paradox, no one had systematically explored the psychological underpinnings of the Liar itself. The authors take on this task. In particular, the chapter investigates the status of a liar sentence, L = ‘Sentence L is false’. The thesis, arrived at by interpreting the data the authors have accrued, is that reflective thinkers (some of whom possess a modicum of philosophical expertise) judge L to be neither true nor false (as opposed to false or true), and the authors see this as some evidence for the claim that L _is_ neither true nor false.

Some philosophers have recently expressed scepticism about naturalistic functional role/‘boxological’ methodology in philosophical aesthetics, contending that they are explanatorily otiose. Some other philosophers, working within that methodology, have argued for the existence of a ‘make-desire’ box, in which imaginative desires are entertained. Weinberg argues for the efficacy of this naturalistic methodology by demonstrating how, properly deployed, it can be used to make a principled case rejecting any such imaginative analogue of desire.

There are two ways of understanding experimental philosophy's process of appealing to intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical claims: the positive and negative programs. This chapter deals with how the positivist method of conceptual analysis is affected by the results of the negative program. It begins by describing direct extramentalism, semantic mentalism, conceptual mentalism, and mechanist mentalism, all of which argue that intuitions are credible sources of evidence and will therefore be shared. The negative program challenges this view by questioning if there can be in fact a shared intuition about a specific hypothetical case, as conflicting intuitions are as likely to arise. The chapter then discusses other issues raised by the negativists such as the limits of surveys and the proper domain problem.

Some things are very hard to imagine, and not necessarily because they are complicated or hard to understand. This phenomenon of "imaginative resistance" has been examined by many philosophers in recent years, and we presented an account of its cognitive architecture in an earlier work. This paper explores an interesting aspect of this psychological phenomenon that has thus far garnered little attention: some authors, in the right circumstances, can deploy techniques that render what would typically be unimaginable into the imagined stuff of fiction. In this paper we extend our earlier account of the cognitive architecture of imaginative resistance to accommodate, and offer an empirically-motivated explanation for, the various ways in which authors may circumvent or overcome blocks to the imagination.

The psychology of the ‘Gettier effect’ appears robust—but complicated. Contrary to initial reports, more recent and thorough work by several groups of researchers indicates strongly that it is in fact found widely across cultures. Nonetheless, I argue that the pattern of psychological results should not at all be taken to settle the epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge. For the Gettier effect occurs both intermittently and with sensitivity to epistemically irrelevant factors. In short, the effect is noisy. And good principles of model selection indicate that, the noisier one’s data, the more one should prefer simpler curves over those that may be more complicated yet hew closer to the data. While we should not endorse K=JTB at this time, nonetheless the question ‘Is knowledge really just justified true belief?’ ought to be treated as once again in play.

We offer a philosophical account of the middlebrow as a theoretical category to do explanatory and critical work in aesthetics. On our account, the middlebrow ought to be understood as aspirational popular art. That is, it is art which aspires both to be popular (in a distinctive sense), and at the same time to be something more than popular. Although, as we will discuss, there are many different sorts of “something more” to which middlebrow art may aspire, and this suggests that there are different kinds of middlebrow art, the aspiration itself provides the category with substantial unity.

In Religion as Make-Believe, Neil Van Leeuwen offers a novel and attractive hypothesis for why religious “beliefs” act so differently from paradigm beliefs — namely, that they are a fundamentally different kind of mental attitude. Van Leeuwen argues that these religious attitudes are better understood as akin to the imaginative states associated with make-believe. We argue, contra Van Leeuwen, that religious beliefs really are a species of belief, fundamentally of the same sort as ordinary beliefs; but they are sustained by different, less evidence-sensitive processes than ordinary beliefs.

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense

This article examines the philosophical methodology of intuitions beginning with an argument developed by Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen over the descriptive adequacy of what Cappelen calls “methodological rationalism”, and their own preferred view, “intuition nihilism”. Based on inadequacies in both accounts, it offers a descriptive take on intuition-deploying philosophical practice today via what it calls “Protean Crypto-Rationalism”. It then describes the epistemic profile of the appeal to intuition, listing four key aspects of the basic shape of intuition-deploying philosophical practice: primacy of cases, flexibility of report format, freedom of stipulation, and interpretation-hungry. It also considers several sources of error for intuitions featured in at least the informal methodological lore of philosophy, namely: misconstruals, modal confusions, pragmatics/semantics confusion, and “tin ear”. Finally, it explores the problem of methodological ignorance and inferential demand, particularly the typical practices of philosophical inference that operate on the premises delivered by appeal to intuitions.

Throughout the 20th century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers. (e.g., Cohen 1999, DeRose 1995, Hill 1996, Klein 1981, Lewis 1996, McGinn 1993, Nozick 1981, Schiffer 1996, Unger 1975, Williams 1996) Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defense is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises. A number of authors have suggested that the intuitions undergirding these skeptical arguments are universal – shared by everyone (or almost everyone) who thinks reflectively about knowledge. In this paper we will offer some evidence indicating that they are far from universal. Rather, the evidence suggests that many of the intuitions epistemologists invoke vary with the cultural background, socioeconomic status and educational background of the person offering the intuition. And this, we will argue, is bad news for the skeptical arguments that rely on those intuitions. The evidence may also be bad news for skepticism itself – not because it shows that skepticism is false, but rather because, if we accept one prominent account of the link between epistemic intuitions and epistemic concepts, it indicates that skepticism may be much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have taken it to be.

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally

It has become increasingly popular to respond to experimental philosophy by suggesting that experimental philosophers haven’t been studying the right kind of thing. One version of this kind of response, which we call the reflection defense, involves suggesting both that philosophers are interested only in intuitions that are the product of careful reflection on the details of hypothetical cases and the key concepts involved in those cases, and that these kinds of philosophical intuitions haven’t yet been adequately studied by experimental philosophers. Of course, as a defensivemove, thisworks only if reflective intuitions are immune from the kinds of problematic effects that form the basis of recent experimental challenges to philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. If they are not immune to these kinds of effects, then the fact that experimental philosophers have not had the right kind of thing in their sights would provide little comfort to folks invested in philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. Here we provide reasons to worry that even reflective intuitions can display sensitivity to the same kinds of problematic effects, although possibly in slightly different ways. As it turns out, being reflective might sometimes just mean being wrong in a different way

The larger philosophical world has on the whole turned from a mix of averted gaze and outright antipathy toward x‐phi, to a mix of grudging acceptance and enthusiastic embrace. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is relevant, and that it is dangerous, and explains some ways that people can do more to remain both. Experimental philosophy's semi‐official sigil of the burning armchair has advertised its dangerousness for the past decade and a half as well. The chapter explains that it is a threat that is every bit as potently present in positive program x‐phi as it is in negative program work. To explore the idea that experimental philosophy's positive contributions will still be primarily negative in nature, the chapter interrogates the passage from Timothy Williamson. It focuses on the wheat‐from‐chaff project of separating signal from noise in the evidence produced by intuitions and the like.

Recent theorists suggest that our capacity to respond affectively to fictions depends on our ability to engage in simulation: either simulating a character in the fiction, or simulating someone reading or watching the fiction as though it were fact. We argue that such accounts are quite successful at accounting for many of the basic explananda of our affective engagements in fiction. Nonetheless, we argue further that simulationist accounts ultimately fail, for simulation involves an ineliminably ego-centred element that is atypical of our experience of fiction. We then draw on recent work in philosophical psychology to articulate a more psychologically plausible account of our emotional engagement with fiction.

A growing body of empirical literature challenges philosophers’ reliance on intuitions as evidence based on the fact that intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and socio-economic status. Our research extends this challenge, investigating Lehrer’s appeal to the Truetemp Case as evidence against reliabilism. We found that intuitions in response to this case vary according to whether, and which, other thought experiments are considered first. Our results show that compared to subjects who receive the Truetemp Case first, subjects first presented with a clear case of knowledge are less willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case, and subjects first presented with a clear case of nonknowledge are more willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case. We contend that this instability undermines the supposed evidential status of these intuitions, such that philosophers who deal in intuitions can no longer rest comfortably in their armchairs.

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in Section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument.

The implications of experimental philosophy, even in its most positive forms, for the a priori status of philosophical knowledge can seem bleak. How could it be possible for philosophical knowledge still to be a priori even when it is gained in part through experiments? This chapter offers a way in which this might indeed be possible. First, two modest ways in which experimental philosophy may aid philosophy without jeopardizing its a priori status are considered, by serving in extra-evidential ways that need not be seen as providing empirical premises to our philosophical deliberations. But it is argued further that even more substantive and direct evidential appeals to experimental philosophy could be consistent with philosophical knowledge being a priori. If we understand apriority less on the negative criterion of not relying on any empirical premises, and more in terms of a positive criterion of relying crucially on our faculty for modal cognition, then we can see how experimental philosophy can offer a form of philosophical knowledge that is still recognizably a priori. The main reason to be interested in the negative criterion in the first place is a fear of “modal enervation”: allowing contingent premises into our evidence set seems to entail that we cannot arrive at robustly modal conclusions based on such premises. But once modal skepticism is rejected, then we can embrace the idea that modal reality will be mirrored in contingent structures in the world—namely, those that underlie our capacity for modal knowledge. Studying those structures experimentally still allows for conclusions that are “modally invigorated.”

Suppose that our norms of epistemic evaluation are meant to promote the goals of diachronic reliability—getting and keeping hold of truths—and dialectical robustness—facilitating fruitful discussions, collaborations, exchanges, and more importantly, disagreements. What implications should these goals have for our norms of justification? This chapter argues for two main upshots. First, we should have a somewhat demanding internalist requirement on justification, but with a few key exceptions—for example, for beliefs that are practically infallible (such as very basic arithmetic beliefs, which are immediately checkable). Second, our two epistemic goals motivate a version of conciliationism about peer disagreement—mutual loss of justification should motivate conflicting parties to deploy resources to resolve their disagreement. But here too there is an exemption; namely, cases where neither party has any resources they could deploy in the near future to help resolve the disagreement.

In this paper, we consider two different attempts to make an end run around the experimentalist challenge to the armchair use of intuitions: one due to Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen, contending that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions, but rather to arguments, in canonical philosophical texts; the other due to Joshua Knobe, arguing that intuitions are so stable that there is in fact no empirical basis for the experimentalist challenge in the first place. We show that a closer attention to philosophical practices reveal, in turn, that we cannot make sense of these philosophical texts as arguments all the way down; and that our methods are so sensitive to error that even a modest amount of instability is enough to raise deep methodological concerns.