Joachim Horvath

The chapter is a general introduction to philosophical methods in the analytic tradition and aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding philosophical methods, an area that lacks systematic treatment in existing literature. It argues that philosophy is a methodical discipline despite its creative and speculative aspects, since philosophical inquiry typically follows standards of argumentation, evidence, and theoretical evaluation. The chapter also makes the first-stab proposal that a method is a structured, ordered procedure deliberately adopted to achieve a specific goal, emphasizing that methods are goal-relative and evaluated in terms of their reliability, efficiency, and adequacy of aims. Further, it distinguishes between individual methods, families of methods, broader methodologies, and methodological issues, and considers the broadly epistemic goals of philosophical methods. The chapter also discusses debates about whether philosophy has distinctive methods (e.g., conceptual analysis or thought experiments), how philosophical methods should be assessed, and how persistent disagreement and limited consensus in philosophy raise concerns about progress and methodological success. It concludes by outlining the volume’s structure, which surveys important methods and methodological approaches in the analytic tradition—including formal methods, argumentation, conceptual analysis, thought experiments, experimental philosophy, and naturalism—offering a guide for newcomers to contemporary debates about philosophical practice

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged kind is largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition.

The traditional epistemological approach towards judgments like BACHELORS ARE UNMARRIED or ALL KNOWLEDGE IS TRUE is that they are justified or known on the basis of understanding alone. In this paper, I develop an understanding-based account which takes understanding to be a sufficient source of epistemic justification for the relevant judgments. Understanding-based accounts face the problem of the rational revisability of almost all human judgments. Williamson has recently developed a reinforced version of this problem: the challenge from expert revisability. This is the problem that even the best candidate judgments for understanding-based justification can be rationally rejected by the relevant experts, who may not even have any disposition or inclination to accept these judgments. However, I argue that expert revisability is fully compatible with the proposed understanding-based epistemology, because expert revisability is true of sufficient sources of epistemic justification in general. A remaining metaphysical worry is that understanding might end up being ‘too thin’ to play the envisaged epistemological role. This worry can be countered with a novel metaphysics of understanding involving second-order dispositions.