Is there really any kind of a serious debate in modern philosophy circles regarding whether or not our personal intuitions can be generally trusted?
Yes! The Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction book I linked to is a very brief, up-to-date summary of that debate. The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today, and has been since about 1998.
The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today
But it—at least the “debate over intuitions” that I’m most familiar with—isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology. That is, the standard response to experimentalist critics (at least, in my corner of philosophy) is not to argue that intuitions are “reliable evidence”, but rather to deny that we are using them as evidence at all. On this view, what we appeal to as evidence is not the psychological fact of my having an intuition, but rather the propositional content being judged.
The purpose of thought experiments, on this view, is to enable one to grasp new evidence (namely, the proposition in question) that they hadn’t considered before. Of course, this isn’t a “neutral” methodology because only those who intuit the true proposition thereby gain genuine evidence. But the foolishness of such a “neutrality” constraint (and the associated “psychological” view of evidence) is one of the major lessons of contemporary epistemology (see, esp., Williamson).
A quick review (for the benefit of others): Bugmaster asked: “Is there really any kind of a serious debate in modern philosophy circles regarding whether or not our personal intuitions can be generally trusted?” I replied: “Yes… the debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today.” But Richard is right to say that most of the philosophical debate about intuitions “isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology.” So, I apologize for my sloppy wording.
Now, a few words on intuitionist methodology. When I read the defenders of intuitionist methodology, I’m reminded of something John Doris said in my interview with him (slight paraphrase for clarity and succinctness; see the exact quote at the bottom of the transcript):
If experimentalists say that something is a mistake, then no one will admit they said it. And I’m no different: “Oh, is that false? Then I disagree. That’s not what I really meant.”
When experimentalists pointed out that our brains don’t store concepts as necessary and sufficient conditions, many philosophers rushed to say that philosophers had never been assuming this in the first place. But clearly, many philosophers were making such false assumptions about how concepts worked, since the “classical” view of concepts — concepts as mental representations captured by necessary and sufficient conditions — held sway for quite some time, even after Wittgenstein (1953). (For a review, see Murphy 2004.)
Or, given that experimentalists have raised worries about using intuitions as evidence in general, Ichikawa (forthcoming) now rushes to say that philosophers generally don’t rely on intuitions in a “central” way. (To narrow our discussion, I’ll focus on this, the first article you sent me.) What does Ichikawa mean by this? He distinguishes three metaphilosophical claims:
Intuited contents are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy.
Intuited contents are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy because they are intuited.
Intuition states, or facts about intuition states, are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy.
As far as I can tell, Ichikawa wants to argue that (1) represents philosophical practice better than (2) or (3), and that (1) is not particularly undermined by experimentalist critiques. Have I got that right? (I’ll hold my reply until I hear whether you agree with my interpretation. I found Ichikawa to be unclear on this, though not as unclear as Yudkowsky or Muehlhauser often are in their philosophical writings.)
Yes, that’s the idea. I mean, (2) is plausibly true if the “because” is meant in a purely causal, rather than rationalizing, sense. But we don’t take the fact that we stand in a certain psychological relation to this content (i.e., intuiting it) to play any essential justifying role.
Thanks for following up on this issue! I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of your thoughts.
In that case, I struggle to see why the “defeater critique” wouldn’t seriously undermine practice (1) in most cases. Philosophers can’t simply assume intuited contents p and then move from p to q. We want to know how likely p is to be true, and if our primary reason for thinking p is true is some unreliable cognitive algorithm (rather than, say, hard scientific data or a mathematical proof), then we are left without much reason to be confident that p is true.
Suppose a theist says he knows by Holy Spirit Communication (HSC) that Jesus is magic. An atheist replies, “HSC is not a reliable method. See all this experimental data on people making judgments based on the deliverances of (what they claim is) HSC.” The theist then says, “No, I’m not arguing from the HSC mental state to the conclusion that Jesus is magic. I’m arguing from the HSC contents (that is, from proposition p) to the conclusion that Jesus is magic.”
The atheist would be unimpressed, and correctly so.
In the case you describe, the “HSC content” is just that Jesus is magic. So there’s no argument being offered at all. Now, if they offer an actual argument, from some other p to the conclusion that Jesus is magic, then we can assess this argument like any other. How the arguer came to believe the original premise p is not particularly relevant. What you call the “defeater critique”, I call the genetic fallacy.
It’s true that an interlocutor is never going to be particularly moved by an argument that starts from premises he doesn’t accept. Such is life.
The more interesting question is whether the arguer herself should be led to abandon her intuited judgments. But unless you offer some positive evidence for an alternative rational credence to place in p, it’s not clear that a “debunking” explanation of her current level of credence should, by itself, make any difference.
Think of intuitied judgments as priors. Someone might say, “There’s no special reason to think that your priors are well-calibrated.” And that may be true, but it doesn’t change what our priors are. We can’t start from anywhere but where we start.
What you call the “defeater critique”, I call the genetic fallacy.
Thinking of things in terms of informal fallacies like the genetic fallacy throws away information. From a Bayesian viewpoint, the source of one’s belief is relevant to its likelihood of being true.
The more interesting question is whether the arguer herself should be led to abandon her intuited judgments. But unless you offer some positive evidence for an alternative rational credence to place in p, it’s not clear that a “debunking” explanation of her current level of credence should, by itself, make any difference.
Right; I mostly complain about arguments made solely from intuited contents when the claims are given with far more confidence than can be justified by the demonstrated reliability of human intuitions in that domain.
Thanks. I’m going to be extremely busy for the next few weeks but I will make sure to get back to you on this (and reply to your comment, so you get a notification) at a later time.
My mind kind of boggled after reading your comment. First of all “Experimental Philosophy” sounds almost like an oxymoron. If it was really “experimental”, it would be science, not philosophy. But secondly… debate about the reliability of intuitions, really ? Isn’t this basically a very strong sign that modern philosophy can safely be ignored, just like modern astrology ?
“Experimental Philosophy” sounds almost like an oxymoron. If it was really “experimental”, it would be science, not philosophy.
Neither Philosophy nor Science are clearly delimited concepts that can be defined by a short sentence; like a lot of categories they are fuzzy and may overlap. Some activities called “doing science” are not experimental (abstract Math), and some experimental activities are not usually called “science” (testing a video game).
My mind kind of boggled after reading your comment. First of all “Experimental Philosophy” sounds almost like an oxymoron. If it was really “experimental”, it would be science, not philosophy.
Well it doesn’t matter that much what you call it. Since it is addressing questions are the mainly of interest to philosophers and that philosophers are trying to answer, I think it’s useful to call it “experimental philosophy”.
But secondly… debate about the reliability of intuitions, really ? Isn’t this basically a very strong sign that modern philosophy can safely be ignored, just like modern astrology ?
Most of the reliance on intuitions in philosophy is for doing conceptual analysis, so figuring out what people mean by terms like knowledge, which there may be problems with, but philosophers aren’t relying on intuitions to resolve questions such as what’s going to happen to me me in the future, like astrologists are.
Crowley was surprisingly lucid in methods for someone with a habit of calling himself “The Great Beast 666”; much of his work might be described as what you’d get if you took an empiricist epistemology and applied it to a profoundly anti-reductionist ontology. I’ve gotten some mileage out of his quotes on religious practice elsewhere.
But secondly… debate about the reliability of intuitions, really ? Isn’t this basically a very strong sign that modern philosophy can safely be ignored, just like modern astrology ?
Because in a general sense, ignoring a large and useful body of knowledge out of hand and on the grounds that it triggers intuitive dislikes (esp. when said intuitions are based on a weak strawman interpretation of said discipline) is usually not a good move.
More specific to the argument at hand, why should a debate about reliability of intuitions disqualify philosophy? Do you believe this is a settled debate? And if so, on what grounds is it settled?
The center of the issue is that you can’t answer these questions empirically. What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter? We’ve got to invoke some form of philosophical justification even if it is vague and implicit. I’d prefer a more rigorous framework, as I imagine would most here, and that is what philosophy does and why it is still taken seriously, Eliezer’s exasperation and misunderstanding notwithstanding.
More specific to the argument at hand, why should a debate about reliability of intuitions disqualify philosophy? Do you believe this is a settled debate? And if so, on what grounds is it settled?
The center of the issue is that you can’t answer these questions empirically.
I’m not sure what you mean there. Didn’t Luke just present empirical evidence that our intuitions do vary? That answers the question. Our intuitions vary, therefore any way of conducting philosophy based on assuming they don’t is wrong.
Richard: myron isn’t disputing that it’s wrong to presuppose the uniformity of all intuitions. (Though ‘intuitions vary’ is too crude a way of putting it; do all intuitions vary?) He’s claiming that it’s a straw-man to treat more than a handful of modern philosophers as committed to the uniformity of all intuitions. (It would be helpful at this stage for people on both sides to start quoting prominent philosophers weighing in on this very issue. The argument will get nowhere without shared data.)
And, it bears emphasizing: The question of whether certain sorts of intuitions are reliable is partly independent of the question of whether intuitions vary anthropologically. Some mathematical logicians disagree about whether ¬∀x(Fx) intuitively implies ∃x(¬Fx), but very few mathematicians conclude from this disagreement that our mathematical intuitions never give us insight into the truth.
1) Sometimes you can still get useful work done with wrong assumptions (e.g. Newtonian Physics)
2) Bugmeister was talking about rejecting modern philosophy, which isn’t the same as only rejecting “any way of conducting philosophy based on assuming they don’t [vary]”.
The center of the issue is that you can’t answer these questions empirically. What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter? We’ve got to invoke some form of philosophical justification even if it is vague and implicit.
Or we can just toss out the questions as meaningless.
According to Luke, this is not a strawman, but in fact a correct representation of the current state of affairs. I myself am not sure whether that’s the case.
What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter?
I don’t know what you mean by “settle”, but Luke does present several pieces of strong evidence against the proposition that our intuitions can be trusted.
According to Luke, this is not a strawman, but in fact a correct representation of the current state of affairs.
It is correct if you go by a select set of quotes that, from what I can tell, have been chosen specifically to support a presupposed position, i.e., philosophers don’t think about obvious problems which have been intimately entwined with moral and ethical philosophy for hundreds of years.
Obviously I don’t feel that this is correct, or that the quotes given are representative of what they’re being made to represent.
I don’t know what you mean by “settle”, but Luke does present several pieces of strong evidence against the proposition that our intuitions can be trusted.
Sure. And presenting “strong evidence” in a reasoned back-and-forth is the point of philosophy, since every position has evidence which (it considers to be) strong support. This is why the debate is necessary, unless, as I wrote elsewhere, you presuppose there is only one privileged interpretation of the existing data.
If you believe that then I’d refer you to the debate around underdetermination and IBE in philosophy of science for a healthy re-orientation of your worldview.
Yes! The Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction book I linked to is a very brief, up-to-date summary of that debate. The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today, and has been since about 1998.
But it—at least the “debate over intuitions” that I’m most familiar with—isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology. That is, the standard response to experimentalist critics (at least, in my corner of philosophy) is not to argue that intuitions are “reliable evidence”, but rather to deny that we are using them as evidence at all. On this view, what we appeal to as evidence is not the psychological fact of my having an intuition, but rather the propositional content being judged.
The purpose of thought experiments, on this view, is to enable one to grasp new evidence (namely, the proposition in question) that they hadn’t considered before. Of course, this isn’t a “neutral” methodology because only those who intuit the true proposition thereby gain genuine evidence. But the foolishness of such a “neutrality” constraint (and the associated “psychological” view of evidence) is one of the major lessons of contemporary epistemology (see, esp., Williamson).
A quick review (for the benefit of others): Bugmaster asked: “Is there really any kind of a serious debate in modern philosophy circles regarding whether or not our personal intuitions can be generally trusted?” I replied: “Yes… the debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today.” But Richard is right to say that most of the philosophical debate about intuitions “isn’t about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology.” So, I apologize for my sloppy wording.
Now, a few words on intuitionist methodology. When I read the defenders of intuitionist methodology, I’m reminded of something John Doris said in my interview with him (slight paraphrase for clarity and succinctness; see the exact quote at the bottom of the transcript):
When experimentalists pointed out that our brains don’t store concepts as necessary and sufficient conditions, many philosophers rushed to say that philosophers had never been assuming this in the first place. But clearly, many philosophers were making such false assumptions about how concepts worked, since the “classical” view of concepts — concepts as mental representations captured by necessary and sufficient conditions — held sway for quite some time, even after Wittgenstein (1953). (For a review, see Murphy 2004.)
Or, given that experimentalists have raised worries about using intuitions as evidence in general, Ichikawa (forthcoming) now rushes to say that philosophers generally don’t rely on intuitions in a “central” way. (To narrow our discussion, I’ll focus on this, the first article you sent me.) What does Ichikawa mean by this? He distinguishes three metaphilosophical claims:
Intuited contents are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy.
Intuited contents are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy because they are intuited.
Intuition states, or facts about intuition states, are (often) taken as important evidence/reasons/data/input in armchair philosophy.
As far as I can tell, Ichikawa wants to argue that (1) represents philosophical practice better than (2) or (3), and that (1) is not particularly undermined by experimentalist critiques. Have I got that right? (I’ll hold my reply until I hear whether you agree with my interpretation. I found Ichikawa to be unclear on this, though not as unclear as Yudkowsky or Muehlhauser often are in their philosophical writings.)
Yes, that’s the idea. I mean, (2) is plausibly true if the “because” is meant in a purely causal, rather than rationalizing, sense. But we don’t take the fact that we stand in a certain psychological relation to this content (i.e., intuiting it) to play any essential justifying role.
Thanks for following up on this issue! I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of your thoughts.
In that case, I struggle to see why the “defeater critique” wouldn’t seriously undermine practice (1) in most cases. Philosophers can’t simply assume intuited contents p and then move from p to q. We want to know how likely p is to be true, and if our primary reason for thinking p is true is some unreliable cognitive algorithm (rather than, say, hard scientific data or a mathematical proof), then we are left without much reason to be confident that p is true.
Suppose a theist says he knows by Holy Spirit Communication (HSC) that Jesus is magic. An atheist replies, “HSC is not a reliable method. See all this experimental data on people making judgments based on the deliverances of (what they claim is) HSC.” The theist then says, “No, I’m not arguing from the HSC mental state to the conclusion that Jesus is magic. I’m arguing from the HSC contents (that is, from proposition p) to the conclusion that Jesus is magic.”
The atheist would be unimpressed, and correctly so.
In the case you describe, the “HSC content” is just that Jesus is magic. So there’s no argument being offered at all. Now, if they offer an actual argument, from some other p to the conclusion that Jesus is magic, then we can assess this argument like any other. How the arguer came to believe the original premise p is not particularly relevant. What you call the “defeater critique”, I call the genetic fallacy.
It’s true that an interlocutor is never going to be particularly moved by an argument that starts from premises he doesn’t accept. Such is life.
The more interesting question is whether the arguer herself should be led to abandon her intuited judgments. But unless you offer some positive evidence for an alternative rational credence to place in p, it’s not clear that a “debunking” explanation of her current level of credence should, by itself, make any difference.
Think of intuitied judgments as priors. Someone might say, “There’s no special reason to think that your priors are well-calibrated.” And that may be true, but it doesn’t change what our priors are. We can’t start from anywhere but where we start.
Thinking of things in terms of informal fallacies like the genetic fallacy throws away information. From a Bayesian viewpoint, the source of one’s belief is relevant to its likelihood of being true.
(Edit 9/2/13: A good example of this is here.)
Right; I mostly complain about arguments made solely from intuited contents when the claims are given with far more confidence than can be justified by the demonstrated reliability of human intuitions in that domain.
Can you cite a specific paper on book chapter which makes the kind of argument you’re suggesting here?
Jonathan Ichikawa, ‘Who Needs Intuitions’
Elizabeth Harman, ’Is it Reasonable to “Rely on Intuitions” in Ethics?
Timothy Williamson, ‘Evidence in Philosophy’, chp 7 of The Philosophy of Philosophy.
Thanks. I’m going to be extremely busy for the next few weeks but I will make sure to get back to you on this (and reply to your comment, so you get a notification) at a later time.
My mind kind of boggled after reading your comment. First of all “Experimental Philosophy” sounds almost like an oxymoron. If it was really “experimental”, it would be science, not philosophy. But secondly… debate about the reliability of intuitions, really ? Isn’t this basically a very strong sign that modern philosophy can safely be ignored, just like modern astrology ?
Neither Philosophy nor Science are clearly delimited concepts that can be defined by a short sentence; like a lot of categories they are fuzzy and may overlap. Some activities called “doing science” are not experimental (abstract Math), and some experimental activities are not usually called “science” (testing a video game).
Well it doesn’t matter that much what you call it. Since it is addressing questions are the mainly of interest to philosophers and that philosophers are trying to answer, I think it’s useful to call it “experimental philosophy”.
Most of the reliance on intuitions in philosophy is for doing conceptual analysis, so figuring out what people mean by terms like knowledge, which there may be problems with, but philosophers aren’t relying on intuitions to resolve questions such as what’s going to happen to me me in the future, like astrologists are.
There was a fellow in the early 20th century who labeled his religious writings with the catch-phrase, “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion.”
Crowley was surprisingly lucid in methods for someone with a habit of calling himself “The Great Beast 666”; much of his work might be described as what you’d get if you took an empiricist epistemology and applied it to a profoundly anti-reductionist ontology. I’ve gotten some mileage out of his quotes on religious practice elsewhere.
So did L. Ron Hubbard, doesn’t mean that either of them was right. But at least your guy didn’t extort money from his followers, AFAIK...
Among other issues, there clearly are productive philosophers out there who are producing good work. Bostrom is a popular example here at LW.
No.
Why not ?
Because in a general sense, ignoring a large and useful body of knowledge out of hand and on the grounds that it triggers intuitive dislikes (esp. when said intuitions are based on a weak strawman interpretation of said discipline) is usually not a good move.
More specific to the argument at hand, why should a debate about reliability of intuitions disqualify philosophy? Do you believe this is a settled debate? And if so, on what grounds is it settled?
The center of the issue is that you can’t answer these questions empirically. What observation(s) could you ever make that would settle the matter? We’ve got to invoke some form of philosophical justification even if it is vague and implicit. I’d prefer a more rigorous framework, as I imagine would most here, and that is what philosophy does and why it is still taken seriously, Eliezer’s exasperation and misunderstanding notwithstanding.
I’m not sure what you mean there. Didn’t Luke just present empirical evidence that our intuitions do vary? That answers the question. Our intuitions vary, therefore any way of conducting philosophy based on assuming they don’t is wrong.
Richard: myron isn’t disputing that it’s wrong to presuppose the uniformity of all intuitions. (Though ‘intuitions vary’ is too crude a way of putting it; do all intuitions vary?) He’s claiming that it’s a straw-man to treat more than a handful of modern philosophers as committed to the uniformity of all intuitions. (It would be helpful at this stage for people on both sides to start quoting prominent philosophers weighing in on this very issue. The argument will get nowhere without shared data.)
And, it bears emphasizing: The question of whether certain sorts of intuitions are reliable is partly independent of the question of whether intuitions vary anthropologically. Some mathematical logicians disagree about whether ¬∀x(Fx) intuitively implies ∃x(¬Fx), but very few mathematicians conclude from this disagreement that our mathematical intuitions never give us insight into the truth.
1) Sometimes you can still get useful work done with wrong assumptions (e.g. Newtonian Physics)
2) Bugmeister was talking about rejecting modern philosophy, which isn’t the same as only rejecting “any way of conducting philosophy based on assuming they don’t [vary]”.
Or we can just toss out the questions as meaningless.
According to Luke, this is not a strawman, but in fact a correct representation of the current state of affairs. I myself am not sure whether that’s the case.
I don’t know what you mean by “settle”, but Luke does present several pieces of strong evidence against the proposition that our intuitions can be trusted.
It is correct if you go by a select set of quotes that, from what I can tell, have been chosen specifically to support a presupposed position, i.e., philosophers don’t think about obvious problems which have been intimately entwined with moral and ethical philosophy for hundreds of years.
Obviously I don’t feel that this is correct, or that the quotes given are representative of what they’re being made to represent.
Sure. And presenting “strong evidence” in a reasoned back-and-forth is the point of philosophy, since every position has evidence which (it considers to be) strong support. This is why the debate is necessary, unless, as I wrote elsewhere, you presuppose there is only one privileged interpretation of the existing data.
If you believe that then I’d refer you to the debate around underdetermination and IBE in philosophy of science for a healthy re-orientation of your worldview.