I will first give a more detailed outline of the two above-mentioned attempts to undermine the experimentalists’ challenge, which I will then address individu- ally in the succeeding sections. Deutsch [28], [29] and Earlenbaugh & Molyneux [31] defend the idea that we do not appeal to intuitions as evidence in philos- ophy. If this were true, it would be hard to see how experimental philosophy would pose a challenge to philosophical methodology.
Both attempts to undermine the experimentalists’ challenge can be under- stood in the spirit of Timothy Williamson [140], who argues that appealing to psychological states such as intuitions as evidence is an unnecessary practice we should not pursue. Williamson claims that philosophers who appeal to in- tuitions as evidence do so as a consequence of the misguided idea ofEvidence Neutrality.3 Evidence Neutrality is the thesis that
[. . . ] whether a proposition constitutes evidence is in principle un-
2Brown [10, pp. 506-515].
3Williamson [140, pp. 208-215]. Williamson [138] gives an alternative explanation as to
contentiously decidable, in the sense that a community of inquirers can always in principle achieve common knowledge as to whether any given proposition constitutes evidence for the inquiry. [140, p. 210]
In cases where philosophers disagree with their peers on whether a proposition about the world is evidence, they draw on a fact about which mutual agreement is easier to achieve, which is the fact that someone has an intuition.4 The fact
that someone has an intuition then is supposed to count as common evidence. Williamson uses the Gettier Cases as an example:
Arguing from the Gettier proposition that the subject in a Gettier case lacks knowledge, I conclude that knowledge is not equivalent to justified true belief. Now I meet someone who thinks the Gettier proposition [is] a mere cultural prejudice, not itself evidence. In this context, it is not in principle uncontentiously decidable that the Gettier proposition is evidence. Thus the only way to satisfy Evidence Neutrality is by ruling that the Gettier proposition does not constitute evidence. To argue that knowledge is not equivalent to justified true belief, I must go back a step to less contentious premises. What can they be? My opponent allows that Ibelievethe Gettier proposition, and may even admit to feeling an inclination to believe it too (I am not merely idiosyncratic), while overriding it on theoretical grounds. [140, p. 211]
However, Williamson thinks that appealing to psychological states as evidence is a practice we should not pursue.5 The reason is that there is a gap between
psychological states with certain contents and the truth of these contents which is ‘not easily bridged’ and which provokes scepticism. Attempts to psychologise
4According to Williamson [138], intuitions are just beliefs or inclinations to believe, on
which see Chapter 2.
5Williamson does not say that facts about psychological states can never be used as
evidence in philosophy. However, he thinks that they should not be used as evidence in the case of thought experiments as counterexamples to philosophical theories, see [140, chapter 7].
the matter of philosophy (e.g., by holding that we are concerned with our concepts only) do not solve the problem, since ultimately, we are interested in facts about the world and not in facts about our psychological states. We should therefore give upEvidence Neutralityand appeal directly to facts about the world as evidence. I discuss Williamson’s arguments to the effect that we ought not appeal to intuitions as evidence at length in Chapters 4 and 5.
In very much the same spirit, Deutsch argues that we usually or at least in frequently discussed cases do not treat intuitions as evidence. Contrary to the common perception and to what Machery, Mallon, Nichols, & Stich [81] claim, Deutsch thinks that Kripke does not appeal to intuitions as evidence in the G¨odel Case, but to facts about the world and to arguments instead.6 Here
is how Deutsch describes the case:
Kripke offers direct arguments against [. . . ] [the] descriptivist the- ory of meaning, but he also objects to it indirectly by criticizing the theory of reference it entails. Dencapsulates the theory of reference that is a consequence of the descriptivist theory of meaning:
D: An ordinary proper name,n, as used by a given speaker,
S, refers to the object that is the denotation of some/most/all of the definite descriptions S associates withn.
To show thatD is false, Kripke simply describes counterexamples– cases in which a name, as used by a given speaker, does not refer to the denotation of the definite description(s) the speaker associates with the name. Here is one such case, one of Kripke’s own (Kripke, 1972/1980, pp. 83-84): Imagine that G¨odel did not prove the in- completeness of arithmetic but that some other man, Schmidt, did. G¨odel stole the proof from Schmidt and published it under his own name. But now imagine a speaker who uses ‘G¨odel’, but associates
6Deutsch [29] also discusses Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich’s [135] criticism of the claim that
just a single description with it, namely ‘the prover of incomplete- ness.’ To whom does this speaker’s uses of ‘G¨odel’ refer, G¨odel or Schmidt? The answer, Kripke says, is G¨odel, not Schmidt. If Kripke is right,D is false. [28, p. 446]
According to Deutsch, ‘nothing in Kripke’s famous argument against the descriptivist theory of reference for proper names hinges on assuming anything about peoples’ intuitions’.7 Deutsch concludes that whether a counterexample
is intuitive might be psychologically interesting; what matters philosophically is whether it is genuine and hence refutes the respective philosophical theory.
Even more radically, Earlenbaugh & Molyneux argue that there simply is no such practice of treating intuitions as evidence in philosophy and that intuitions only play a rhetorical role in that they function persuasively and give rise to beliefs. Earlenbaugh & Molyneux contrast what they call the ‘evidential-role view’, which is the view that intuitions are used as evidence in philosophy, with what they call the ‘evidential view’, which is the thesis that intuitions in fact are evidence in philosophy.8 Whereas experimental philosophers claim that
intuitions play an evidential-role but deny the evidential view, Earlenbaugh & Molyneux hold that intuitions do not, from the beginning, play an evidential- role at all. They introduce their project as follows:
We argue that intuitionsdo not play an evidential-role in philoso- phy. Hence, we show that any evidential view of intuitions that is motivated by the way intuitions are actually used in philosophy is wrongheaded. This sets us aside, we think, from the traditional de- bate, in which one side argues that they play an evidential-role and so they should, because they are genuine forms of evidence, whereas the other argues that they do, but they should not, because they are not. We argue that they do not, whether or not they should. [31, p. 92]
7Deutsch [28, p. 445].
In what follows, I first show that Earlenbaugh & Molyneux’s arguments against the evidential-role view of intuitions fail. The authors do not succeed in showing that we do not use intuitions as evidence in philosophy (section 3.3). I argue against Deutsch that he uses the wrong criterion to decide whether Kripke appeals to an intuition in his argument (section 3.4). I then show that we may sometimes rely on intuitions as evidence even if we do not appeal to intuitions (section 3.5).
Having shown that the authors fail to establish that intuitions do not play a role as evidence in philosophy, we have to face the experimentalists’ challenge that intuitions are not reliable. In the last part of the chapter I present some arguments to the effect that scepticism about the reliability of intuitions is not warranted (section 3.6).