Frank Hofmann

Recently, a new movement of philosophers, called 'experimental philosophy', has suggested that the philosophers' favored armchair is in flames. In order to assess some of their claims, it is helpful to provide a theoretical background against which we can discuss whether certain facts are, or could be, evidence for or against a certain view about how philosophical intuitions work and how good they are. In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with providing such a theoretical background, and I will start discussing in which way experimental philosophy challenges the reliability of philosophical intuitions and how its challenge fits into some more theoretical considerations that also point towards a reliability problem for intuitions. The paper attempts to argue that a certain account of intuitions—the imaginationist account—is available which is well-suited for explicating the expertise reply to the challenge of experimental philosophy

Plato’s Meno problem is the problem of why knowledge is better than true belief which is not knowledge. The paper studies the account of this surplus value of knowledge that recent reliabilist virtue epistemologists like John Greco and Ernest Sosa have proposed: knowledge is true belief from epistemic virtue. I reconstruct the master argument which subsumes the epistemic case under the general case of success from virtue. Five accounts of virtue are presented and discussed critically. The result is that only the fifth account – the refined dispositionalist account of virtue, based on an idea of J.J. Thomson – is viable, for the purposes of accounting for the surplus value of knowledge along the lines of the master argument. However, there is at least one remaining question, namely, of why success from virtue has surplus value in general