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Intuitions as Evidence, Philosophical Expertise and the Developmental Challenge

Steve Clarke
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Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics , Charles Sturt University and Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford Published online: 14 Jun 2013. To cite this article: Steve Clarke (2013): Intuitions as Evidence, Philosophical Expertise and the Developmental Challenge, Philosophical Papers, 42:2, 175-207 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2013.806287

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Philosophical Papers Vol. 42, No. 2 (July 2013): 175-207

Intuitions as Evidence, Philosophical Expertise and the Developmental Challenge

Steve Clarke
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Abstract: Appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy are challenged by experimental philosophers and other critics. A common response to experimental philosophical criticisms is to hold that only professional philosophers intuitions count as evidence in philosophy. This expert intuitions defence is inadequate for two reasons. First, recent studies indicate significant variability in professional philosophers intuitions. Second, the academic literature on professional intuitions gives us reasons to doubt that professional philosophers develop truth-apt intuitions. The onus falls on those who mount the expert intuitions defence to meet these objections because it is implicitly being claimed that training and practice caused professional philosophers to acquire reliably accurate intuitions and we are owed an account of how this transformation takes place. A possible response to this situation is to attempt to reform philosophical practice to improve the quality of intuitions. Another possible response, advocated here, is to avoid appeals to intuitions as evidence.

1. Introduction Appeals to intuition are endemic to contemporary analytic philosophy. Some philosophers report having intuitions that do not require any particular context to elicit.1 More commonly though, analytic philosophers try to elicit intuitions by constructing careful thought experiments. Imagine that you fall unconscious and wake up to find your circulatory system plugged into that of a famous violinist who has a serious kidney disease, such that if you disconnect yourself from him at any time in the next nine months he will die. According to Thomson (1971, 49), if you were to find yourself in this scenario you would find the view that you ought not to unplug yourself to be outrageous, even
1 For example, Audi (2004, chapter five), in the spirit of W.D. Ross, intuits the truth of various principles expressing moral obligations without conducting thought experiments.
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though unplugging yourself would result in his death. Relying on this intuition she draws out lessons, via analogy, for the ethics of abortion.2 Nozick (1974, 42-45) invites us to consider the possibility that there is an experience machine, created by Superduper neuropsychologists, which can enable someone to experience a convincing simulation of any of lifes experiences. According to Nozick, We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realising that we would not use it (1974, 44). Specifically, we learn that we care about living in contact with reality (1974, 45). Gettier (1963) presents two examples of a formulaic thought experiment in which one has true beliefs that are justified, but the relationship between the truth of ones beliefs and ones justification for holding them is accidental. When we consider such cases, Gettier asserts, it becomes apparent that even though justified true beliefs are present, knowledge in not. So knowledge is not merely justified true belief. The widespread philosophical practice of describing thought experiments and expecting that others will share ones intuitions about those thought experiments invites many questions. One question is, what exactly are intuitions? A very influential answer, which will be accepted for the purposes of this paper, is that intuitions are intellectual seemings (e.g., Bealer 1998, 207; Levy 2006, 569).3 Others have construed intuitions as spontaneous judgments (e.g., Weinberg et al.

2 Cappelen disputes the widespread view that Thomson is relying on intuition as evidence for the claim that the view that you ought not to unplug yourself is outrageous. He characterises Thomson as instead assuming that this is common ground among participants in the debate (2012, 153). This characterization of Thomsons argument strikes me as unconvincing. Thomson specifically describes the view that one ought not to unplug as being based on a plausible-sounding argument (Thomson 1971, p. 49). Philosophers sometimes take it as common ground that a plausible-sounding argument is also a sound argument, but I am unfamiliar with any instances of a philosopher taking it as common ground that a plausible-sounding argument is unsound, or indeed outrageous. 3 Similarly, Alexander and Weinberg define an intuition as an intellectual seeming of opaque origin (2007, 75, note 1).

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2001, 432; Goldman and Pust 1998, 179) and there are also other ways of defining intuition, most of which emphasise spontaneity or immediacy (Smythe and Evans 2007, 234-5).4 Another question is, why is it assumed by philosophers that intuitions will be shared? Possible answers are that intuitions are indicative of the ways in which we apply theories to possible cases and we share many theories, especially folk theories (Jackson 1998, 31); and that we have nonsensuous perceptions (intuitions) of at least some aspects of the same shared reality (Smythe and Evans 2007, 236). Sometimes, when appeals to intuitions are made in philosophy these are intended as heuristic devices, operating in the context of discovery, to adopt Poppers language, which can be used to guide our search for evidence. The fact that we find a proposition intuitive might be because we recognise the inchoate structure of a valid argument with acceptable premises, and when that argument is explicated we will have the evidence we need to support that proposition. Often though, philosophers who appeal to intuitions take it that intuitions are themselves a form of evidence.5 It is not always clear what such philosophers take intuitions to be evidence of. Sometimes philosophers who appeal to intuitions as evidence only take these to be evidence of the ways in which we employ concepts. But in many cases philosophers who appeal to intuitions as evidence take their philosophical intuitions to be evidence about the nature of this or that aspect of reality. Philosophers who appeal to intuitions as evidence that knowledge is not merely
4 Recently Kuntz and Kuntz (2011) surveyed 282 professional philosophers asking them to provide a rank preference ordering of seven distinct accounts of intuition, current in the literature, according to their understanding of how accurately these fit with the methods of appealing to intuition used in philosophy. 5 According to Pust, standard philosophical analysis is a method driven by the evidential appeal to particular case intuitions (2000, 1). According to Goldman, The evidential weight accorded to intuition is often very high, in both philosophical practice and philosophical reflection (2007, 1). Deutsch and Cappelen have both recently argued that the view that intuition plays an evidential role in philosophy is a misrepresentation of actual philosophical method, but both concede that it is a misrepresentation that is very common within philosophy (Deutsch 2010, 448; Cappelen 2012, 1).

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justified true belief often do not take themselves to be merely locating evidence about our concept knowledge. Instead they take themselves to be locating evidence about the nature of knowledge itself. And philosophers, who appeal to intuitions as evidence that particular acts are morally permissible or impermissible, such as the act of unplugging the famous violinist in Thomsons (1971) thought experiment, often do not take themselves to be locating evidence about the ways in which we happen to conceive of morality. Rather, they take themselves to be locating evidence about what really is morally permissible and impermissible. While the default view in the literature appears to have been that all intuitions about philosophical matters have evidential value, some philosophers have taken restrictive views about which intuitions can count as evidence. Bealer suggests that only a subclass of intuitions has evidential value in philosophy. These are intuitions that present themselves as necessary, which he refers to as rational intuitions (1998, 207). Weinberg et al. report a suggestion due to Philip Kitcher, which is that the intuitions that have evidential value in philosophy are Austinian intuitions. These are the sort of intuitions that people develop after a lengthy period of reflection and discussionthe sort of reflection and discussion that philosophy traditionally encourages (2001, 453). A further question is, whose intuitions about philosophical cases are of evidential value? A traditional answer, which Alexander and Weinberg (2007) refer to as intuition populism, is everybodys intuitions.6 However, this answer is increasingly being abandoned by defenders of intuitions-as-evidence in favour of the view that only professional philosophers intuitions can be relied upon as evidence. In this paper I will examine and then contribute to a recent debate that has broken out about the reliability of professional philosophers intuitions. I will show that the appeal to professional philosophers intuitions as a form of
6 An explicit endorsement of this traditional view can be found in Jackson (1998, 37).

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reliable evidence is not currently viable; and I will consider how we might respond to this situation. First though, we need to situate the debate within its broader context. 2. The Enemies of Intuitions-as-evidence and Professional Philosophers Intuitions Although the practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence is very widespread in contemporary philosophy it has always had its detractors. An influential one is Hintikka (1999). According to him, appeals to (the equivalent of) intuitions as evidence in philosophy in the past due to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and others, were underwritten by theories, which we now reject, that, if true, would explain how (the equivalent of) intuitions can have evidential value. However, contemporary appeals to intuition as evidence lack proper theoretical underwriting (1999, 130-1). Hintikka is right. Prominent recent defences of appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy, such as Audi (2004), Huemer (2005) and Pust (2000), all consider various objections to the possibility that intuitions can be evidence and show how it might be possible for intuitions to be a reliable form of evidence despite these objections. They all do very good jobs of explaining how it might be possible that intuitions can serve as evidence but none does more than gesture towards a positive theory telling us why we should believe that intuitions actually are a reliable source of evidence. In the last decade a second challenge to the use of intuitions as evidence in philosophy has arisen as a result of work by the burgeoning experimental philosophy movement.7 It had been assumed, somewhat naively, by many of the philosophers who have advocated consulting intuitions about philosophical issues, that peoples intuitions about key

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7 Not all experimental philosophers who have studied intuitions are opposed to its continued use as evidence in philosophy. Liao (2008) distinguishes between radical experimentalists such as Weinberg (2007) who advocate the rejection of the use of intuitions as evidence and moderate experimentalists (e.g., Knobe and Nichols 2008) who aim to improve the accuracy of our intuitions.

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philosophical thought experiments would be much the same.8 This easy assumption has been shown to be unviable, as a result of several recent studies conducted by experimental philosophers, which demonstrate that ordinary intuitions about philosophical issues differ significantly in response to variations in cultural background and educational level (Weinberg et al. 2001), in gender (Stich and Buckwalter 2011; Buckwalter and Stich forthcoming), in some personality traits (Feltz and Cokely 2009), in the formulation of questions that trigger different affective states (Nichols and Knobe 2007) and in the order in which thought experiments are presented (Swain et al. 2008). None of these factors are ordinarily thought of as being philosophically relevant, so, prima facie, all of the studies mentioned serve to undermine the credibility of ordinary intuitions about philosophical issues as reliable sources of evidence. The mere fact that philosophical intuitions vary from subject to subject is not in itself a reason to dismiss philosophical intuition as a source of reliable evidence. Sosa (2007) points out that visual perception, which we consider reliable, is also variable as it is subject to a variety of distorting factors, but we do not take this as a reason to suppose that visual perception should be rejected as a source of reliable evidence. However, in the case of philosophical intuitions our problem is compounded by the fact that currently we are very unclear about the number of distorting factors that bedevil ordinary philosophical intuition. Have experimental philosophers found all of these or have they only found the tip of the iceberg? Furthermore, we are very unclear about the scope of the effects of those distorting factors that we know about. By contrast, we are familiar with the factors that significantly distort ordinary visionmirages, druginduced hallucinations, the distorting effects of water on light and so on,

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8 Explicit statements of this assumption are somewhat hard to come by. Bealer asserts (without supporting evidence) that the on balance agreement among our elementary concrete-case intuitions is of the most impressive general facts about human cognition (1998, 214). Miller tells us that Strawson and the other ordinary language Analytic philosophers of that generation assumed that intuitions were homogeneous (2000, 235).

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and we are familiar with the scope of their effects.9 Evidential sources that are subject to significant distortion can be rendered reliable for individuals, but only if we know how to avoid situations in which significant distortion occurs, or know how to account for the influence of significant distorting effects. We know how to do both of these things in the case of visual perception but we currently know how to do neither of them in the case of philosophical intuition. The variability of philosophical intuitions between different groups of people is problematic for the defenders of intuitions-as-evidence because it either indicates the presence of distorting factors or it indicates the sheer irregularity of ordinary philosophical intuition. However, it is worth noticing that a lack of variation in the philosophical intuitions of different people would not necessarily entitle us to conclude that their intuitions are a reliable source of evidence. An alternative possibility is that particular consistent philosophical intuitions are subject to the systematic influence of biasing factors. De Brigard (2010) argues that the intuition that Nozick (1974) seeks to elicit in the experience machine thought experiment may be explained away by appeal to status quo bias. Our persistent preference for the status quo leads us to prefer reality because the status quo for us is reality. However, if the status quo for us were the experience machine then our intuitions would be very different. If this line of argument is successful then it undercuts the conclusions that Nozick (1974) draws about the experience machine thought experiment, regardless of whether some or all of us actually have the intuition that he seeks to elicit. Recent challenges to the method of appealing to intuitions as evidence in philosophy by experimental philosophers have provoked a variety of responses.10 One particularly influential line of response is to
9 Weinberg (2007, p. 324) argues similarly. It is worth noting that there are some aspects of the distortion of visual perception which we do not understand well. For example, we understand how visual illusions lead to the distortion of perception of the length and angle of lines but we do not fully understand how the same illusions lead to a distorted perception of shapes (Henriques et al. 2005). 10 For a recent summary and discussion of many of these see Horvath (2010).

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argue that experimental philosophers have been examining the intuitions of the wrong group. Instead of examining the philosophical intuitions of the folk they should be examining the philosophical intuitions of professional philosophers. Professional philosophers have superior intuitions about philosophical matters than the folk, because they are experts in philosophy, or so Hales (2006), Ludwig (2007), Hofmann (2010), Horvath (2010) and Grundmann (2010) assure us. It is not entirely clear who counts as a professional philosopher and it is not entirely clear what the scope of their expertise is. Does a philosopher who specialises in aesthetics have intuitions that are superior to the folk about all philosophical issues, or only those that arise in the context of debates about aesthetics? For that matter does a philosopher who specialises in 19th Century philosophy have expert intuitions that are reliably elicited in late 20th Century thought experiments? Despite concerns about the scope of expert intuitions in philosophy it looks like the appeal to expert intuitions has a certain obvious plausibility because we do value the intuitions of relevant experts over those of the folk in many contexts. We trust the intuitions of professional mathematicians over those of the folk when we are faced with mathematical problems and we trust the intuitions of medical professionals over those of the folk when faced with medical problems. Reasoning by analogy, it seems that we should trust the intuitions of professional philosophers over those of the folk when considering philosophical problems. An advantage of appealing to the intuitions of professional philosophers rather than those of the folk, is that this appeal appears to square well with philosophical practice. Although some philosophers describe their method as one that involves consulting folk intuitions, when working out which philosophical position to adopt on this or that issue, in their actual practice professional philosophers almost never go out and consult the folk. This awkward fact can be explained, in part, along lines suggested by Frank Jackson (1998, 37), as resulting from the widespread assumption among philosophers that their own individual

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intuitions are representative of folk intuitions. But the insulation of contemporary philosophical practice from contact with folk intuitions is also manifested in other ways. When philosophers hold particular intuitions, but are inclined to doubt that these are the right intuitions to hold, they could go and consult philosophically untrained members of the public to try to confirm their intuitions, but they appear to do this rarely, if ever. The usual practice amongst the many philosophers whom I am familiar with, upon finding themselves in this situation, is to consult other professional philosophers. Furthermore, philosophers often seem to be very dismissive of the intuitions of the philosophically untrained. Kornblith (2007) provides an example which illustrates this attitude very nicely. He notes that beginning philosophy students often reject the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief and express the intuitively derived view that knowledge is simply justified belief (which may be either true or false). If philosophers genuinely held that folk intuitions had evidential value then they would take this philosophically uninformed view as the basis for philosophical analysis. But the professional philosophers I am familiar with hardly ever react in this way. They are much more likely to respond to the beginning student by pointing out the theoretical advantages of analysing knowledge as justified true belief, by accusing the beginning students of theoretic confusion, or by informing them that they are using the term knowledge in a different way from the rest of us (Jackson 1998, 32). This attitude might be consistent with the view that folk intuitions have evidential value, if philosophers had devoted serious effort to analysing knowledge without appealing to the truth criterion. But examination of the philosophical literature on the analysis of knowledge suggests that serious efforts of this kind are very rare indeed.11 The vast majority of the philosophers I am familiar with
11 I have only been able to find a single attempt in the philosophical literature to define knowledge as simply justified belief. This was in a paper by Jerry H. Gill (1985) which appeared in 1985 and has not been the subject of further significant philosophical discussion. Recently Hazlett (2010) has argued for a non-factive account of ordinary

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dismiss folk intuitions when these diverge from their own intuitions, precisely because these diverge from their intuitions, and not because they have tried and failed to develop those folk intuitions into systematic philosophical positions. However, the view that we should prefer the intuitions of professional philosophers to those of the folk faces an important line of objection. According to Goldman and Pust (1998) the commitment of philosophers to explicit theories can have a distorting influence on their intuitions and non-philosophers are not generally affected by this distorting influence:
If the person experiencing the intuition is a philosophical analyst who holds an explicit theory about the nature of F, this theory might warp her intuitions about specific cases For this reason, philosophers rightly prefer informants who can provide pre-theoretical intuitions about the targets of philosophical analysis, rather than informants who have a theoretical stake or axe to grind (1998, 183).

My response to this objection is that while the distorting influence of theory on intuitions is a matter of serious of concern, informants who can provide the pre-theoretical intuitions that Goldman and Pust (1998) recommend we seek are extremely thin on the ground. Goldman and Pust (1998) appear to view most people who are not trained in philosophy as a collection of intellectual ingnues possessing pure intuitions uncontaminated by philosophical theorising. But even if ordinary folk possess intuitions that are not affected by explicitly articulated philosophical theories, it seems implausible to think that many would possess intuitions that are not affected by philosophical theorising that is not explicitly articulated. The influence of philosophical theorising that is not explicitly articulated is omnipresent in contemporary societies. Religion is extremely widespread and is often a source of less-than-properly articulated metaphysical and ethical

attributions of the term knows. He does not, however, infer that knowledge is best analysed as mere justified belief. Rather, he infers that traditional epistemology and ordinary language epistemology (as we might call the theory of knowledge attributions) would both be best served by going their separate ways (2010, 522).

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theorising. Most versions of Christianity and Islam involve, inter alia, a realist metaphysics, presuming a world which is distinct from the minds of the individuals that inhabit it, and which would continue to exist even if those individuals were to cease to exist. Unsurprisingly, many folk intuitions about metaphysical topics appear to be ones that tell in favour of this sort of realist metaphysics over antirealist alternatives. Such intuitions are not pre-theoretical in any interesting or important sense. They are thoroughly infected by the less-than-properly articulated philosophical theorising that is part and parcel of a religious upbringing. And there are many other social institutions, apart from religions, that have been known to infect ordinary folk with less-than-properly articulated philosophical theory. These include schools, political parties and military organisations. Now a defender of appeals to folk intuitions, following Goldman and Pusts (1998) line of reasoning, might respond by conceding that folk intuitions are not immune from theory contamination but insist that nevertheless they are less prone to theory infection than professional philosophers intuitions, as the folk tend to dabble less in theorizing than philosophers do. This may be right, but professional philosophers may also be better at resisting the influence of theory on their intuitions. Consider an analogous debate about the theory-mediation of observation. Experimental scientists, who are experts at making observations through microscopes, telescopes and so on, are observers who, for the most part, are thoroughly indoctrinated in scientific theories. But it does not follow that they are biased observers. Experimental scientists can be trained to set aside theoretical commitments when making observations using scientific instruments.12 Experimental scientists do not set aside all of their theoretical commitments when making scientific observations; their work depends on the veracity of theories that explain the functioning of their instruments, so they cannot and should not set these aside.

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12 Of course there is no guarantee that such training will be successful for all experimental scientists.

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However, as long as we have well-grounded theories explaining why microscopes, telescopes and so on work, this need not be problematic. It seems plausible to think that, like experimental scientists making observations, philosophers may be better than the folk are at setting aside their theoretical commitments when consulting their intuitions.13 3. The Case Against Professional Philosophers Intuitions and the Developmental Challenge Whether or not professional philosophers intuitions actually vary less than those of the folk is an empirical question and it is one that experimental philosophers have begun to examine. Four relevant studies have recently been undertaken. The first is due to Vaesen et al. (manuscript). They have conducted a study of over 800 trained philosophers and discovered that linguistic background has a distinct influence on intuitions about what counts as knowledge. In particular they found that the intuitions of philosophers whose native language is English differ dramatically from those whose native language is Dutch, Swedish or German.14 A second relevant study is due to Schulz et al. (2011). They build on earlier work by Feltz and Cokely (2009) that established that the presence of the global personality trait of extraversion predicts the presence of compatabilist intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in (folk) research subjects. This finding has been replicated in a study of 121 German philosophers. It seems that philosophical expertise does not prevent aspects of ones personality from significantly biasing certain philosophical intuitions that currently play a key role in debates that are central to contemporary philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Another relevant study, this time of moral judgments, has been carried out by
13 Kornblith (2007) argues similarly. 14 In order to rule out the possibility that some of their subjects were merely copying the utterances of authoritative figures in philosophy, Vaesen et al. (Manuscript) devised new thought experiments about knowledge and asked their subjects to consider these, rather than well known thought experiments such as the Gettier cases. They reasoned, correctly in my view, that if philosophers have generally accurate intuitions about philosophical cases, then they should be able to apply this ability to novel cases.

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Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012) involving over 300 subjects trained in philosophy and many more non-philosophers. Schwitzgebel and Cushman (2012) presented related pairs of well-known thought experiments (e.g., a pair of scenarios that have previously been invoked in discussion of the doctrine of double effect) to their research subjects and asked them for their moral judgments of these. The judgment of both groups of subjects was shown to be influenced significantly by order effects. When subjects were subsequently asked whether or not they endorsed moral principles relevant to the thought experiments, the endorsements of the subjects trained in philosophy were shown to be influenced significantly by order effects.15 The fourth relevant study is due to Tobia et al. (forthcoming). Tobia et al. examined the propensity of subjects contemplating two wellknown thought experiments in moral philosophy to express actorobserver bias (responding differently to a thought experiment when it is presented in the first person from how they would respond if it was presented in the third person). They found evidence of significant actorobserver bias in the responses of a group of 62 professional philosophers who were presented with one thought experiment, and also in the responses of a group of 49 professional philosophers who were presented with the other thought experiment. Significant actor-observer bias was also found when the same case studies were presented to non-philosophers.16 As well as learning from studies of professional philosophers intuitions we can learn from the extensive academic literature on expertise. This might not be a useful body of literature to look for relevant information about expert intuitions in philosophy if expertise in other fields did not involve appeals to intuition. But expertise across a great variety of disciplines depends crucially on intuition. Klein (1998, 31-44) studied expert decision making amongst firefighters, nurses and

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15 Interestingly, the endorsements of the non-philosophers were shown to be much less influenced by order effects than those of the philosophers. 16 Curiously, for both thought experiments, the direction of actor-observer bias amongst the professional philosophers was the reverse of that found amongst the non-philosophers. Tobia et al. (forthcoming) do not attempt to explain this odd finding.

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naval officers. He found that in all of their respective areas of expertise these professionals made frequent use of intuition. One reason why experts might employ intuition is that they sometimes need to make decisions under severe time pressure and dont have time to deliberate. Another is that consciousness is a limited resource, so we can make more decisions in a given time period if we make some of them intuitively offline rather than by deliberating (Norretranders 1998). A further reason is that some of the complicated decisions that we make appear to be made better if they are made intuitively. This is particularly likely to be the case when decisions we make involve weighing a variety of different factors (Dijksterhuis et al. 2006; Kleinmuntz 1990). Weinberg et al. (2010) have delved in depth into the empirical literature on expertise and on the basis of their investigations they argue against the view that professional philosophers have reliable expert intuitions. They consider three hypotheses that might underwrite the claim that professional philosophers have superior philosophical intuitions to the folk. These are: (i) that philosophers have superior conceptual schemata than the folk, (ii) that philosophers employ more sophisticated theories than the folk, and (iii) that philosophers possess superior cognitive skills than the folk. They examine the empirical literature on expertise that is relevant to all three hypotheses in detail and point out significant difficulties that this body of work raises for all of them (Weinberg et al. 2010, 336-49). Weinberg et al. (2010) have received critical responses from Horvath (2010) and Williamson (2011).17 Williamson (2011) and Horvath (2010) both take Weinberg et al. (2010) to be arguing that, in the face of evidence from the academic literature on professional expertise about the unreliability of intuitions in other professions, the onus is upon philosophers to show that they have accurate intuitions. They both reject this onus; although each author has slightly different reasons for their

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17 An article by Grundmann (2010) is directed primarily at responding to Weinberg (2007), but it also contains some critical discussion of Weinberg et al. (2010).

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stand. Horvath accuses Weinberg et al. (2010) of making many attempts to shift the burden of proof on the armchair philosopher in an arguably illegitimate way (Horvath 2010, 469). He also informs us that Weinberg et al. (2010) do not present any empirical evidence against the claim that philosophers are superior in terms of their conceptual sensitivity and interpretive competence. The challenge is already met here he continues, because there simply is no specific challenge in the first place (Horvath 2010, 469). Williamson reasons by analogy in an attempt to override the challenge he perceives Weinberg et al. (2010) to issue. He notes that Weinberg at al. (2010) concede that philosophers are expert in some tasks such as informal argumentation. He then argues that Since they have produced no evidence that philosophical training is less efficacious for thought experimentation than for other cognitive tasks for which they have acknowledged that it produces genuine expertise, such as informal argumentation, they have produced no evidence for treating the former more sceptically than the latter (2011, 215). Both Horvath (2010) and Williamson (2011) have misread Weinberg et al. (2010). Weinberg et al. (2010) do intend to raise doubt about our current entitlement to presume that professional philosophers have expert intuitions. However, they do not use the phrase burden of proof anywhere in their article and they do not intend that the burden of proof be on the armchair philosopher any more than it is on their opponent, in advance of relevant evidence being located. While Weinberg et al. (2010) hold that philosophers cannot take it for granted that they are expert intuiters, they explicitly state that this is not to say that we can assume that they are not experts in such a sense either (2010, 335). They are agnostics about philosophers expert intuitions,18and their concern is to shift us philosophers from a comfortable reliance on the expertise defence to an agnostic position. As they put things, The main point of our paper is to point out that playing the expertise card is not at all
18 Their agnosticism is shared by Brown (forthcoming, section 3.2).

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the trump in this debate that some philosophers have thought (2010, 350).19 In my view Weinberg et al.s (2010) agnosticism about the accuracy of professional philosophers intuitions is far too concessive. To see why, we need to attend to a particular aspect of the empirical literature on expertise that Weinberg et al. (2010) discuss, but which they do not particularly focus their attention on. Following Shanteau (1992), Camerer and Johnston (1991), and other authors, Weinberg et al. (2010) note that the acquisition of accurate expert intuitions depends on features of the task in question as well as the learning environment in question. Accurate expert intuitions can and do develop, but they only appear to develop when experts receive clear, reliable information about when intuitions are accurate and when they are inaccurate, and this feedback needs to be received in a timely manner (Weinberg et al. 2010, 340-3; Dawes 1994, 118-121).20 In areas of professional life in which such feedback is available, such as accountancy, astronomy and the judging of livestock, the intuitions that professionals develop generally appear to be accurate ones (Shanteau 1992). In areas of professional life in which such feedback is not readily available, such as financial planning, psychotherapy and clinical psychology, the intuitions that professionals develop do not generally appear to be accurate ones (Dawes 1994). The evidence for the correlation between appropriate feedback and the development of accurate intuitions goes well beyond the above examples. Shanteau (1992) examined 27 domains of professional expertise and collected evidence of good expert performance in 12 of these, evidence of poor expert performance in 12 of these, and evidence of partially good expert performance (experts were good at some tasks
19 Unlike Horvath (2010) and Williamson (2011), Grundmann (2010) does not misread Weinberg et al. (2010). See Grundmann (2010, 495). 20 According to Dawes feedback needs to be immediate, systematic and subject to a minimum of probabilistic distortion (1994, 120). I have followed Weinberg et al. (2010) in using the term reliable rather than systematic as it is not clear to me that feedback needs to be entirely systematic in order to be worth relying upon.

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but not others) in three of these domains. In all of these cases, the presence of good performance amongst experts correlated with appropriate feedback and poor performance correlated with the absence of appropriate feedback. So, we have a very good prima facie reason to think that if members of any profession, including philosophers, do not receive appropriateclear, reliable and timelyfeedback, enabling them to correct those intuitions that are inaccurate, then they will be unable to develop reliably accurate intuitions. Shanteaus (1992) results have been widely accepted and the view that the development of professional expertise requires appropriate feedback is now a mainstream one amongst academics studying professional expertise (e.g., Kahneman and Klein 2009, 522-3). Weinberg et al. (2010) may not have identified a specific challenge, but contra Horvath (2010), there is a specific challenge to the claim that philosophers possess accurate expert intuitions that the proponent of the expertise defence needs to meet and which the skeptic about expert intuitions in philosophy does not need to meet. Because of this state of affairs the burden of proof falls very clearly on the proponent of expert intuitions as evidence in philosophy to provide good reasons for us to accept that professional philosophers can have reliably accurate intuitions. This challenge is a developmental challenge: All of the defenders of the view that professional philosophers possess reliably accurate philosophical intuitions also appear to accept that the folk may well not have reliably accurate philosophical intuitions. Every professional philosopher started out as a non-philosopher, so defenders of this view are implicitly claiming that reliably accurate intuitions are acquired by a group of people who most probably started out with unreliable intuitions.21 We are owed an
21 It has been suggested to me that there is another possibility to be considered. Perhaps some minority of the population just happens to have reliably accurate philosophical intuitions, while the majority do not, and perhaps philosophical training serves to weed out those who lack reliably accurate philosophical intuitions, rather than enabling the acquisition of reliably accurate philosophical intuitions? This line of thought strikes me as an instance of special pleading for professional philosophy, as no similar claim seems to be made about the processes by which professional intuitions are manifested in any other profession. More

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explanation of how this transformation happens. Now it might be replied that, although defenders of the position that professional philosophers have reliable philosophical intuitions are committed to the view that philosophical training does lead to the acquisition of reliable intuitions in some or other way, we can be confident that this does happen and so the onus is not upon these defenders to spell out how this happens. To make this reply credible we would need some good reason to underwrite this assertion of confidence and it would seem that this will be hard to find given that the evidence from academic studies of professional expertise goes in the opposite direction. More formally, we can spell out an inductive argument grounded in this evidential basis, which the defender of the view that professional philosophers have reliable philosophical intuitions needs to overcome, as follows: Premise 1: In all (of a significant number of) examined domains where accurate professional intuitions have been acquired, clear, reliable and timely feedback is available to enable intuitions to be improved. Premise 2: Clear, reliable and timely feedback is unavailable to enable philosophers intuitions to be improved. Conclusion: Therefore, it is very unlikely that professional philosophers have developed accurate professional intuitions. While Premise 1 is grounded in a body of well-studied empirical literature, Premise 2 is controversial and is liable to be disputed, so let me offer the following considerations in its defence: The feedback that
importantly, there is no evidence in its favour, other than the bare point that some people appear to have an aptitude for philosophy and others do not. If someone wanted to develop this line of defence of the accuracy of philosophical intuitions in professional philosophy then they would need to locate evidence to substantiate the claim that some subset of the (philosophically untrained) population has reliably accurate intuitions, as well as the claim that professional philosophical training selects for this subset of the population and/or against other members of the population.

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philosophers receive about their intuitions is of a restricted kind. When a nurse has an intuition that a patient is in danger of an imminent heart attack she can ask other nurses if they share her intuition or not, and get feedback from them; but more importantly she can (and will) receive direct feedback from the environment. Either the patient does or does not go on to have an imminent heart attack. Learning whether or not her intuitions track reality enables her to train her future intuitions and improve these. In the case of philosophical intuitions, however, direct feedback from the environment is typically unavailable. We cannot directly discover what knowledge really is or what morality really demands. So we make do with reports from other philosophers (and non-philosophers if we seek out their feedback) about whether or not they share our intuitions about these subjects. 22 The only feedback we typically receive in response to reports of our philosophical intuitions comes in the form of reports of the intuitions of other philosophers; and it is difficult to see how this feedback could be employed in philosophical training to cause hitherto unreliable intuitions to become reliable. One source of difficulty here is that, as we saw earlier in this section, the intuitions of professional philosophers have been shown to be susceptible to various biases; so it would seem very difficult to utilise reports of the intuitions of other philosophers as correcting devices to help us rid our own philosophical intuitions of bias. A second problem is that because, as Hintikka (1999) has pointed out, we lack a reputable theory explaining how any philosophical intuitions can serve as evidence, we lack a good reason to think that altering our intuitions to make them conform more closely to some or all of the intuitions of other professional philosophers enables us to increase the propensity of our intuitions to represent aspects of reality accurately. We cannot rely on the intuitions of other philosophers as a guide to improving the accuracy of our philosophical intuitions; and given that
22 I am not claiming that direct feedback from the environment is available to all professions other than philosophy. There may well be other professions that face the same challenges as philosophy here.

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this is all we have to rely on, we have no reason to think that we can render previously unreliable philosophical intuitions reliable and thereby meet the developmental challenge. It is possible that philosophers acquire reliable intuitions in a very different way from other professionals and it is tempting for philosophers to relax and assure ourselves that this must happen some way or other. However, we need to keep in mind that there is compelling evidence that the members of several major professions have so far failed to acquire reliable intuitions. These include financial analysts, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists (Dawes 1994).23 Like philosophers, these professionals appear to lack accurate reliable feedback from the environment, enabling them to improve their intuitions. And like many philosophers, many members of these professions sincerely believe that they do make reliable judgments on the basis of accurate intuitions. Many clinical psychologists sincerely believe that they can judge which students are best suited for academic programs, which employees are best suited to particular jobs and which parolees are likely to reoffend. Unfortunately, the available evidence suggests that clinical psychologists are unable to perform any of these tasks reliably (Dawes 1994, 82-91).24 Given that many members of other professions appear to be deluded in believing that they possess accurate expert intuitions we should take the possibility that many philosophers are similarly deluded very seriously. How might the defender of the view that professional philosophers have accurate expert intuitions attempt to respond to the above line of argument? I see three possibilities. The first is to identify a different causal pathway by which philosophical training leads to the acquisition of accurate intuitions other than that of developing accurate intuitions in response to clear, reliable and timely feedback. The second is to show
23 Also political experts (Tetlock 2005) and baseball recruiters and managers (Lewis 2003). 24 Similarly, there is evidence that the intuitions of expert psychotherapists are no better than those of the untrained (e.g., Smith and Glass 1977; Strupp and Hadley 1979). For more on the shortcomings of financial analysts see De Bondt (1991) and Malkeil (1999).

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that the inductive argument spelled out above is flawed. The third is to develop a yet stronger countervailing argument in favour of the conclusion that professional philosophers can and do develop reliable expert intuitions. Williamson (2011) can be interpreted as trying to take this last route, arguing that because philosophical training does produce clear improvements in some cognitive tasks, such as the development of informal argumentation, we have some grounds to induce that it also does so in the case of philosophers ability to conduct thought experiments. However, Williamson is not actually trying to defend reliance on intuitions as evidence. He is attempting to defend the use of thought experiments in philosophy and he does not proceed by defending the evidential value of the intuitions elicited in thought experiments. His approach to defending philosophical methodology is an alternative to the traditional approach of trying to defend reliance on intuitions as evidence which will be discussed further in Section 5. 4. Improving Expert Intuitions? One common response to the critical literature about the varying quality of intuitions across different areas of expertise is to concede that expert intuitions in particular professions are currently unreliable but argue that professional practices can be reformed and consequently that the intuitions of members of those professions can be improved (e.g., Anders Ericsson 2006; Kirkeben 2009, Skovholt et al. 1997). All the critics have shown, it is sometimes argued, is that in some professions there are significantly many professionals who currently lack reliable intuitions. But we should not assume that these particular professions are doomed never to improve. Rather, we should try to devise strategies to improve practices in those professions, so as to enable reliably accurate intuitions to be acquired by expert practitioners. The most obvious (but perhaps not the only) way to improve practices in professions whose members lack reliable intuitions would be to ensure that the feedback that professionals receive regarding their intuitively based judgments is clear, reliable and timely. In some cases this might be

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done by collecting better information and presenting it to professionals in a timely manner so as to enable them to improve their intuitive judgments. Psychotherapists who make predictions about behaviour on the basis of intuition that are often inaccurate are often unaware that their predictions are often inaccurate (Dawes 1994, 41-2). If it is possible to provide them with clear, reliable and timely information about their predictive successes and failures then it may be possible for them to improve their intuitively derived predictions; and the same goes for clinical psychologists and financial analysts. Could we improve practices in philosophy to enable the provision of clear, reliable and timely feedback, and thereby enable intuitions to be improved? Our problem is that the feedback we currently receive is in the form of reports of the intuitions of other philosophers, which has not been shown to be reliable, rather than any direct evidence about the actual subject matter that we wish to improve our intuitions about; and we lack a good theory explaining how reports of such intuitions can serve as evidence about the subject matter we actually care about. In the absence of such a theory it is hard to know how to go about attempting to reform our practices. I do not wish to dismiss outright the possibility that philosophical practices could be suitably reformed, but as we currently have no idea how to go about doing this it is difficult to see how we could go about making effective reforms. 5. Doing Without Intuitions as Evidence? I do not want to rule out the bare possibility that a demonstration that philosophers intuitions can be a reliable source of evidence might be forthcomingperhaps after professional practices in philosophy have been suitably reformed. But if the reasoning above is correct, the prospects of this being produced are dim and we should seriously think about reforming philosophical practice so as to avoid appeals to intuitions as evidence. Given that the practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence is entrenched in contemporary analytic philosophy, I expect that this suggestion will meet widespread resistance. Indeed, when I

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make this suggestion to other members of the profession it is often resisted vigorously. A not uncommon form of such resistance is to claim that appeals to intuitions-as-evidence are so important to analytic philosophy that we simply cannot do without them if we are to do analytic philosophy at all.25 As far as I can see, such claims about the importance of appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy are exaggerated. The most important activity that analytic philosophers engage in, in my view, is the construction of rigorous arguments; and our ability to conduct this activity is unaffected by abandoning appeals to intuitions as evidence. Some philosophical arguments contain appeals to intuitions as evidence as premises but many do not. In particular, naturalistic philosophical arguments typically involve appeals to the empirical evidence that the natural sciences provide as premises and usually do not also require appeals to intuitions as evidence. Philosophical arguments that do appeal to intuitions as premises need not be abandoned altogether. Instead they can be recast as hypothetical rather than categorical arguments; valid arguments that might possibly be sound, if evidence could be found to support currently unsubstantiated premises. Recently, a few philosophers have begun to doubt whether traditional analytic philosophy is really as beholden to appeals to intuitions-asevidence as it is often portrayed as being. One of these is Deutsch who has examined influential arguments by Gettier, Kripke and Evans that are often upheld as exemplars of philosophical arguments grounded in appeals to intuitions as evidence (Deutsch 2009; 2010). Either many contemporary philosophers have misinterpreted Gettier, Kripke and Evans, he argues, or the appeals to intuitions-as-evidence that they actually make are superfluous to their arguments, which are best understood as straightforward counterexamples to theories.26 If Deutsch
25 23.5 % of philosophers who participated in a recent survey endorsed the view that intuitions are essential to justification in philosophical methods (Kuntz and Kuntz, 2011). 26 Deutsch (2009; 2010) accepts that these counterexamples are intuitive, but argues that their intuitiveness is not the reason why they succeed as genuine counterexamples.

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(2009, 2010) is right then we may be giving up less by abandoning appeals to intuitions as evidence than appearances suggest. Another is Cappelen (2012) who has examined no less than ten well-known instances of philosophical argumentation that are usually taken to involve appeal to intuition. He argues that, despite appearances, none of these arguments actually rely on appeals to intuitions as evidence (2012, 130-187).27 So far at least the approach taken by Deutsch and by Cappelen, to convince us that traditional analytic philosophy does not need to rely on intuitions, to the extent that is widely believed, has been ad hoc; proceeding one well-known argument at a time. A systematic approach to a similar goal has been taken by Williamson (2004; 2005; 2007; 2009a; 2009b; 2011) who defends the widespread use of thought experiments in philosophy and argues that, contrary to received opinion, the force of these does not rely on their ability to elicit intuitions. Thought experiments on Williamsons view are:
fairly straightforward modal arguments, typically valid ones, with counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims as premises. We assess the premises by the same offline methods as for other claims of the same sort. There is no special mystery about philosophical thought experiments. In particular there is no need to postulate a special phenomenon of intuition. We need only judgments and dispositions to judgment (2009a, 433).28

Williamsons line of inquiry is worthy of further investigation. If he is right then he has freed a key method in philosophy, the method of conducting thought experiments, from the need to respond to Hintikka (1999) and others and tell us why we should accept that philosophical intuitions can be evidence. And it seems at least possible that he is right.

27 In my view, however, at least one of Cappelens ten instances does rely on intuitions as evidence. See note 2. 28 Williamsons views are not dissimilar to the view that intuitions are a heuristic device that can tell us where to look for evidence. A proposition might be experienced as seeming intuitive, on Williamsons account, because it is judged to be true, as a result of offline reasoning involving an assessment of counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims.

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It is plausible to think that we do acquire implicit knowledge of many counterfactuals as we learn to make our way in the world, so the appeal made is a credible one. Also, Williamsons views make sense of our tendency to prefer the opinions of professional philosophers to those of the folk when drawing conclusions in the context of thought experiments. Professional philosophers are vastly more experienced at assessing counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims in the context of philosophical thought experiments than the folk are. Of course, whether or not professional philosophers actually are better at assessing counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims in the context of philosophical thought experiments than the folk are is a question that is best answered with the aid of empirical studies. Although Williamson is a defender of the methods of traditional armchair philosophy, he does not see these methods as being sharply distinct from the methods of the sciences and does not deny that philosophy needs to take account of the findings of experimental philosophers (2011). The ability of philosophers, as well as ordinary people, to conduct thought experiments is subject to empirical investigation. The results of the recent studies discussed in Section Three suggest that the relevant abilities of significantly many philosophers are compromised by cultural background, personality traits, order effects, and actor-observer bias. However, it may be possible to improve our ability to handle counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims, so these results should not be taken as a decisive basis to reject a Williamson-style defence of a form of expertise in philosophy.29 Williamson holds that we can know whether philosophically relevant counterfactual conditionals are true or not in many cases. He focuses his discussion on the Gettier intuition and shows how this can be accounted for with the use of modal claims which we can plausibly know (2005; 2007, 179-207). According to Williamson, his analysis can easily be
29 For further discussion see Weinberg (2009) and Williamson (2009b).

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generalised to very many counterexamples that have been deployed against philosophical analyses (2005, 4). Knowledge of the Gettier counterexample may be explicable as a result of relatively mundane counterfactual conditionals and possibility claims. Standard examples of Gettier cases involve mundane claims about the number of coins in peoples pockets, the time that a broken watch shows, and so on. However, other thought experiments appear to depend on accepting the truth of highly exotic modal claims. Possible worlds in which people are able to choose to use Nozickian experience machines seem very remote from this one and it is very hard to see why counterfactual conditionals that support Nozicks conclusions should be counted as knowledge as opposed to mere speculation. Williamson is optimistic about the extent of our modal knowledge, but it is not obvious that we should share his optimism. Critics such as Ichikawa (2009) argue that many counterfactual conditionals are too difficult to know to do the work that Williamson requires of them. These include Gettier cases that arise when one happens to be positioned awkwardly in modal space (2009, 436). Unfortunately, there is a lack of consensus in philosophy regarding key issues in the epistemology of modality, so it is hard to know how far Williamsons approach to defending traditional armchair philosophy can take us.30 Coupled with an optimistic view of the extent of our modal knowledge it can be used to recast and thereby defend most, if not all, contemporary appeals to intuitions in philosophical thought experiments.31 However, if it is coupled with a circumspect view of the extent of our modal knowledge it can be used to recast most of the appeals to intuitions in thought experiments that are currently made in philosophy, but can only be used to thereby defend a minority of these. What is needed, if this line of
30 For a recent survey of work in the epistemology of modality see Vaidya (2007). 31 Nozick develops an evolutionary argument for the conclusion that human modal knowledge is distinctly limited (2001, 120-125). He links this argument to appeals to intuition in philosophy. Despite having appealed to our intuitions about a famous thought experiment 27 years earlier (Nozick 1974, 42-45), he tells us that intuition is an extremely frail reed upon which to build philosophy (2001, 125).

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defence of the method of appeal to thought experiments in philosophy is to be properly developed, is greater knowledge of the extent to which our ability to assess counterfactual and possibility claims in the context of philosophical thought experiments is reliable, or can be made reliable. The most obvious way to acquire this knowledge is by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie our assessments of such counterfactual and possibility claims. 6. Concluding Remarks Philosophers are not currently warranted in appealing to their professional intuitions as a source of evidence and they will not be warranted in doing so until good reasons to believe that these tend to be truth-apt is provided. The onus falls squarely on philosophers who claim that professional philosophers intuitions are evidence to meet this challenge because they are implicitly claiming that they have acquired reliably accurate intuitions as a result of philosophical training and practice, but studies of the acquisition of accurate expert intuitions suggest that philosophers cannot have done this, in virtue of their failure to receive reliable feedback in response to expressions of their intuitions during the course of their training and subsequent professional practice. Furthermore, recent studies of expert intuitions in philosophy suggest that these vary in ways that are inconsistent with them being reliable sources of evidence. Philosophers who are accustomed to appealing to their intuitions-asevidence will not welcome my conclusion. Thats no surprise. Clinical psychologists who pronounce about which parolees are likely to reoffend, which employees are best suited for particular jobs and so on do not welcome having it pointed out that empirical studies suggest that they have no special intuitive ability to make such determinations and financial planners do not welcome having their intuitive abilities questioned either. A possible response to the current situation is to try to reform philosophical training and practice to enable philosophers to improve the reliability of their intuitions. But, as we saw, there are good

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reasons to doubt that this is a feasible response. Another possible response, which I advocate, is to give up appeals to intuitions as evidence. As we have seen this response would not be as damaging to philosophical practice as it is sometimes portrayed. Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University and Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford stclarke@csu.edu.au; stephen.clarke@philosophy.ox.ac.uk References
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