The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions: Running Hot and Cold on Truetemp

Abstract

A growing body of empirical literature challenges philosophers' reliance on intuitions as evidence based on the fact that intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and socio-economic status. Our research extends this challenge, investigating Lehrer's appeal to the Truetemp Case as evidence against reliabilism. We found that intuitions in response to this case vary according to whether, and which, other thought-experiments are considered first. Our results show that compared to subjects who receive the Truetemp Case first, subjects first presented with a clear case of knowledge are less willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case, and subjects first presented with a clear case of non-knowledge are more willing to attribute knowledge in the Truetemp Case. We contend that this instability undermines the supposed evidential status of these intuitions, such that philosophers who deal in intuitions can no longer rest comfortably in their armchairs.

A Naturalistic Approach to the Generality Problem

“…A further thought is that the Rosch theory may actually turn out to be helpful in this connection as providing a theoretical framework 29 A further worry raised by Goldman in our personal communications centered on the issue whether the agreement observed in people's responses may be subject to instability, e.g. dependent on the order in which the examples were presented, analogously to how Swain, Alexander and Weinberg (2008) found the order of examples to be significant in how people judged Gettier cases. In order to eliminate any doubts of this nature, Jönsson was careful to construct his experiment so as to eliminate any dependence of the results on the order in which examples were presented.…”

Armchair‐Friendly Experimental Philosophy

“…We will label this move the Questionable Evidence Challenge. Even in the absence of demographic variation, and even if philosophers are well aware of how the folk think, it is argued that philosophically significant intuitions may be inappropriately sensitive to such apparently irrelevant considerations as the order in which cases are presented (Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg 2008), the font in which they are written (Weinberg et al 2012), and details of the temporal framing of the case (Weigel 2011). Summing up this family of problems, Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg write, "these kinds of intuitional sensitivity are both unwelcome and unexpected, and the very live empirical hypotheses of their existence create a specific kind of methodological challenge to armchair intuitional practices in philosophy" (2014,133).…”

How not to test for philosophical expertise

“…Such arguments depend crucially on evidence from psychology and experimental philosophy, showing that people's intuitions are sensitive to a host of things which seem irrelevant to the truth of philosophical theories. For instance, intuitions about moral permissibility and knowledge-possession seem to be sensitive to the order in which the intuiter encounters test cases (Petrinovich and O'Neill 1996;Swain et al 2008;Lanteri et al 2008;Lombrozo 2009;Liao et al 2011;Wiegmann et al 2012) or whether the intuiter imagines herself as a bystander or actor in a test case (Nadelhoffer and Feltz 2008).…”