Philosophical Thought Experiments as Excercises in Conceptual Analysis

Nimtz, Christian

doi:10.1163/9789042030190_012

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(21 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There are a lot of concerns one might raise with Williamson's arguments against ST (see e.g. Nimtz 2009) but even if these arguments succeed it is far from obvious what their import is for BT. Williamson (2007: 130-3) appears to assume that if one's understanding of a truth is not sufcient for assent then one's understanding cannot be the basis of one's assent to that truth and, hence, cannot in turn be the basis of one's knowledge of that truth.…”

Section: Rational Intuitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On (i), Williamson frequently suggests that, if correct, his idea that thought-experiment judgements are based on a general capacity to handle counterfactuals undermines the idea that rational intuitions have a crucial role to play in the epistemology of such judgements. However, I think Malmgren (2011) and Nimtz (2010) have shown that this is incorrect because (roughly) this idea is still consistent with there being very different cognitive processes or resources involved in the formation of different counterfactual judgements. In which case, the correctness of this idea cannot be used to support the conclusion that any particular kind of cognitive capacity or resource – e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…rational intuition – is not required to explain the formation or epistemic properties of some class of counterfactual judgements. Similar problems also undermine Williamson's attempts to argue from the correctness of this idea to the insignificance of the a priori versus a posteriori distinction, see Nimtz (2010: 201–3). Williamson's specific view of what counterfactual captures the content of the Gettier intuition is inconsistent with E4 because he identifies this content with a clearly contingent and a posteriori counterfactual.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Evidence and Intuition

Cath

2012

Episteme

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many philosophers accept a view – what I will call the intuition picture – according to which intuitions are crucial evidence in philosophy. Recently, Williamson (2004, 2007: ch. 1) has argued that such views are best abandoned because they lead to a psychologistic conception of philosophical evidence that encourages scepticism about the armchair judgements relied upon in philosophy. In this paper I respond to this criticism by showing how the intuition picture can be formulated in such a way that: (i) it is consistent with a wide range of views about not only philosophical evidence but also the nature of evidence in general, including Williamson's famous view that E = K; (ii) it can maintain the central claims about the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy made by proponents of the intuition picture; (iii) it does not collapse into Williamson's own deflationary view of the nature and role of intuitions in philosophy; and (iv) it does not lead to scepticism.

show abstract

Section: Rational Intuitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Evidence and Intuition

Cath

2012

Episteme

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…led to the rise of so-called experimental philosophy (e.g., Knobe and Nichols 2008;Horvath and Grundmann 2012), and to even more debates about the nature of conceptual analysis (e.g., Nimtz 2012), the role of thought experiments within it (e.g., Williamson 2007;Nimtz 2010;Malmgren 2011;Grundmann and Horvath 2014), the epistemic status of counterfactual conditionals, which are central for the latter (e.g., Williamson 2007), and about the notion of conceptual truth (e.g., Nimtz 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophical methods under scrutiny: introduction to the special issue philosophical methods

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This special issue (short: S.I.) is dedicated to the study of philosophical methodology. Until recently, the debate about philosophical methods in analytic philosophy primarily focused on the method of conceptual analysis, linguistic intuitions, thought experiments, and empirical methods. The result of an analysis of a concept is typically taken to be an explicit definition that consists of a list of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for its fulfillment. Yet, such a list is only a result of a conceptual analysis if it is true by virtue of the meaning of its parts and if this truth can be recognized a priori with the aid of linguistic intuitions (e.g., Grice 1958). We can test definitions by conducting thought experiments that enact the specified conditions (e.g., Mach 1973; Jackson 1998, ch. 2; Nimtz 2012). This method of conceptual clarification has been criticized in several respects. For instance, Willard van Orman Quine challenged one of its presuppositions, namely the analytic/synthetic distinction (Quine 1951). Hilary Kornblith argued that its aim of specifying individually necessary and jointly sufficient condition cannot be reached (Kornblith 2007; see also Chalmers and Jackson 2001). Longstanding debates about concepts like knowledge are thus rather a gimmick than fruitful philosophical work (Kornblith 2014). Lynne Rudder Baker aimed to show that empirical considerations are involved in seemingly a priori analyses (Rudder Baker 2001), and it has been debated whether conceptual analysis is knowledge expanding (for this debate see, e.g., Balcerak Jackson and Balcerak Jackson 2012; Balcerak Jackson 2013). In recent years, it has also been argued that conceptual analysis should not be carried out by individual philosophers. Instead, folk intuitions need to be elicited by means of quantitative research. Such arguments B Insa Lawler

show abstract

Two‐Dimensional Semantics

Nimtz¹

2017

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Philosophical Thought Experiments as Excercises in Conceptual Analysis

Cited by 5 publications

References 18 publications

Evidence and Intuition

Evidence and Intuition

Philosophical methods under scrutiny: introduction to the special issue philosophical methods

Two‐Dimensional Semantics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About