Jonathan Weinberg

In his Experiments in Ethics, Appiah focuses mostly on the dimension of naturalism as a naturalism of deprivation - naturalism’s apparent robbing us of aspects of the world that we had held dear. The aim of this paper is to remind him of that naturalism has a dimension of plenitude as well - its capacity to enrich our conception of the world as well. With regard to character, we argue that scientific psychology can help provide a conception of character as dynamic, in a way that may preserve many key aspects of eudaimonistic ethics from the situationists’ challenge. With regard to intuition, we address Appiah’s worry that naturalistic explanations of the sources of our intuitions may leave us feeling that those intuitions have been thereby debunked. We suggest that it may be that feeling of debunking that should itself be debunked

Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be making some empirical assumptions about people’s intuitions and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, though it is far from clear exactly what these empirical assumptions are. Moreover, on what is perhaps the most natural reading, he is making at least one assumption about which many cognitive scientists who study concepts have serious doubts. In the first of our two sections, we will elaborate this theme. Our goal, in that section, is not so much to criticize as to seek clarification. It is a great virtue of this journal’s multiple review format that critics can pose questions to authors, and the authors get to reply. So we hope that in his reply Jackson will help us understand his defense of conceptual analysis by explaining more clearly what his empirical assumptions are; and if he is indeed making an assumption that many cognitive scientists would challenge, we hope he will tell us why he thinks that challenge is misguided. In the second section, our stance will be more critical. There is one empirical assumption about which Jackson is admirably clear and explicit. However, we think there is now good reason to think that this assumption is false.

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.

Philosophical discussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argument in their defense. Philosophers — on both sides of debates over the standing of this practice — have often called the basis for such appeals ‘intuitions’. But, what might such ‘intuitions’ be, such that they could legitimately serve these purposes? Answers vary, ranging from ‘thin’ conceptions that identify intuitions as merely instances of some fairly generic and epistemologically uncontroversial category of mental states or episodes to ‘thick’ conceptions that add to this thin base certain semantic, phenomenological, etiological, or methodological conditions. As this chapter discusses, thick conceptions turn out to have their own methodological problems; some may even leave philosophers in the methodologically untenable position of being unable to determine when anyone is doing philosophy correctly.

This dissertation defends an epistemology that is simultaneously naturalistic---partaking of a consistently scientific worldview---and rationalistic---admitting of the existence of a priori justification. To attain such a naturalistic rationalism , we need to acknowledge that the unconscious structure of our inferential and intuition-producing mechanisms may be relevant to the justificatory status of our cognitions. Such an acknowledgement first requires admitting a limited version of epistemological externalism, which is defended by appeal to an 'analysis-by-imagined-reconstruction'. That is, we explore our norms of justification by imagining how we would re-design those norms ourselves, given our epistemic goals of diachronic reliability and dialectical robustness. These 'DR desiderata' motivate some internalist constraint on justification, to help us keep track of truths and allow us to manage our investigative disputes. But a thoroughgoingly internalist norm is of no use to us, since no agent with our limitations and psychological make-up could satisfy it. Moreover, an externalist loophole would be permissible in circumstances where the truth is stable and where agreement is guaranteed---precisely conditions that attain in many classic cases of a priori justified beliefs, such as in basic mathematical truths. The initial take on this externalist loophole proves to be slightly too broad, since obvious and unchangingly true statements like 'There have been dogs' fall under it as well. An appeal to conceptual truths to tighten that loophole is considered, but rejected as ultimately specious. Rather, in appealing to the computational structure of the underlying psychological mechanisms, we can see that some cognitions are fundamentally rational---produced by mechanisms that we could construe a cognitive engineer with our goals in mind producing just such a design. We have good scientific reason to expect that much---but nowhere near all---of our cognitive psychology does display such rational design, even though it was designed by nature's tinkerings. The resulting framework of NR is then applied to some extant debates philosophical intuitions, and it is argued that we may be legitimately skeptical of some particularly famous philosophical intuitions in both the philosophy of mind and in epistemology

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.