The Myth of the Intuitive

The Myth of the Intuitive

Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method

Max Deutsch

A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 
Deutsch, Max, 1971–
The myth of the intuitive : experimental philosophy and philosophical method /
Max Deutsch.
 pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-02895-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Methodology.  2. Philosophy—Research.  3. Intuition.  I. Title.
B53.D484 2015
121’.3—dc23
2014034368
 
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix

1 Varieties of Xphi, Pragmatic Distortion, and the No-Theory Theory

of Intuitions  1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Positive versus Negative Xphi: Some Sample Studies  2
1.3 The Negative Xphi Critique  17
1.4 Pragmatic Distortion  21
1.5 The No-Theory Theory of Intuitions  24

2 Intuitions and Counterexamples  33

2.1 Introduction 33
2.2 The State/Content Ambiguity of “Intuition”  35
2.3 Two Case Studies: Gettier and Kripke  39
2.4 More General Methodological Misrepresentations  52
2.5 Evidence for the Evidence  55

3 The Relocation Problem and Williamson on “Judgment

Skepticism” 59
3.1 Introduction 59
3.2 The Relocation Problem and a Sketch of a Solution  61
3.3 Williamson on “Judgment Skepticism”  63

4 The Evidence for the Evidence: Arguing for Gettier Judgments  73

4.1 Introduction 73
4.2 Arguing for Intuitions  74
4.3 Arguing for Gettier Judgments  78
4.4 Inventing Thought Experiments and the Order of Explanation
Objection 95
vi  Table of Contents

5 More Evidence for the Evidence and the Relocation Problem

Redux 101
5.1 Introduction 101
5.2 More Evidence for the Evidence  103
5.3 The Relocation Problem Redux  122

6 Other Replies to Xphi: The Expertise and Multiple Concepts

Replies 129
6.1 Introduction 129
6.2 The Expertise Reply  134
6.3 The Multiple Concepts Reply  145
6.4 The Right Reply  153

Conclusion: Armchairs versus Lab Coats?  157

Notes 163
References 183
Index 189
Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming, and my greatest debt is to those
who have given me the time I needed to finish it. First and foremost, I
thank my wife, Ann Baldoni, and my daughters, Rita Louise and Sadie Fran-
ces. To the rest of my supportive family, Hong Kong University and my
colleagues there, and my editor at MIT Press, Phil Laughlin: Thanks for
keeping the faith.
I first started thinking about experimental philosophy and the role of
intuitions in philosophical method in conversations (and heated argu-
ments) with the world’s best experimental philosophers. I thank Jonathan
Weinberg, Stephen Stich, and especially Ron Mallon for this early inspira-
tion. Later, Edouard Machery was kind enough to argue with me over issues
in the experimental philosophy of language. Much later, Herman Cappelen
visited Hong Kong and galvanized me with his own critical take on experi-
mental philosophy. Still later, my graduate student Phoebe Chan helped
me see things through fresh eyes. When the book was nearing completion,
I benefited from long discussions of my views with Dan Marshall, Jenny
Nado, Don Tontiplafol, and Lam Ka Ho.
Simple encouragement was needed just as often as philosophical input,
and I am grateful to have gotten plenty from many friends and family.
For this, thanks especially to Linda Jangaard, Jill Pipher, Stan Jonasson, Jeff
Hoffstein, Jim Baldoni, Nancy Baldoni, Emily Baldoni, John Madsen, Simon
Greenoff (the Lamma Socrates), Tara Goodwin, Ester Wensing, Kieran Col-
vert, Carolyn Primrose, Neil Ballantyne, John Weaver, Susannah Howard,
Liz Gower, Hans DeVries, Brad Christensen, Dave Hungerford, James Chow,
Ed Young, and Rajeev Balasubramanyam.
Many philosophers influenced my thinking about the ideas in this
book. Special thanks go to my favorite philosopher, Harry Deutsch, who
viii Acknowledgments

supported me every step of the way and always thought of the best objec-
tions. Thanks also to David Sosa, Patrick Hawley, Joe Lau, Jiwei Ci, Timothy
O’Leary, Chad Hansen, Alexandra Cook, Johanna Wolff, David McCarthy,
Jonathan Ichikawa, Timothy Williamson, Colin McGinn, Joel Pust, Kelly
Trogdon, Dan Robins, Michael Johnson, Paisley Livingston, Jay Newhard,
Michael Veber, John Collins, Michael Devitt, Eric Schwitzgebel, Hilary
Kornblith, and Wong Pak Hang.
Two anonymous reviewers for MIT Press read the manuscript and offered
detailed criticism. I hereby thank them for the opportunity to make the
book better. Thanks also to Judith Feldmann at the MIT Press for meticu-
lous copyediting.
I dedicate the book to the memory of my grandfathers: Robert Deutsch,
poet and scholar, and Olaf Jangaard, fisherman.
Introduction

This book is an examination and defense of the methods of analytic phi-

losophy through the lens of a recent empirical challenge to the soundness
of those methods. The challenge is raised by practitioners of a new kind of
philosophy known as experimental philosophy, a.k.a. xphi, and concerns the
extent to which analytic philosophy relies on intuition; in particular, the
challenge concerns the extent to which analytic philosophers treat intu-
itions as evidence in arguing for philosophical conclusions.
Experimental philosophers—xphiles—say that analytic philosophers
place a great deal of evidential weight on people’s intuitions about hypo-
thetical cases and thought experiments. As an example of the sort of thing
xphiles have in mind, consider Harry Frankfurt’s (1969) well-known objec-
tion to the view that one is morally responsible for an action only if, at the
time of acting, one could have done other than perform that action. This
view about moral responsibility held considerable sway in philosophical
discussions of free will for decades before Frankfurt published his objection,
which takes the form of the following thought experiment:
Suppose someone—Black, let us say—wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black
is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid
showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones is about to make up his
mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is an excel-
lent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide to do something other than
what he wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide to do
something else, Black takes effective steps to ensure that Jones decides to do, and
that he does do, what he wants him to do. Whatever Jones’s initial preferences and
inclinations, then, Black will have his way. … Now suppose that Black never has to
show his hand because Jones, for reasons of his own, decides to perform and does
perform the very action Black wants him to perform. In that case, it seems clear,
Jones will bear precisely the same moral responsibility for what he does as he would
x Introduction

have borne if Black had not been ready to take steps to ensure that he do it. (Frank-
furt 1969, 835–836)

The idea that xphiles have about this kind of maneuver in analytic philoso-
phy is this: Frankfurt is treating the intuition that Jones is morally respon-
sible as the evidence, or as the source of evidence, for the claim that he,
Jones, is morally responsible. And he, Frankfurt, is then using that claim—
that Jones is morally responsible—to object to the view that one is morally
responsible only if one could have done otherwise, since, as it seems in
Frankfurt’s story, Jones could not have done otherwise.
Assume for the moment that this is indeed what Frankfurt is up to in con-
structing the thought experiment involving Black and Jones. Now, one may
ask, should Frankfurt proceed in the way we are now supposing he does? In
particular, should he treat the intuition that Jones is morally responsible as
evidence for the claim that Jones is morally responsible? The answer seems
to depend on two issues: First, it depends on whether it really is intuitive
that Jones is morally responsible. Second, it depends on whether, if it is
intuitive, its intuitiveness counts as good evidence for the claim.
And here is where xphi comes in; for, as xphiles have rightly pointed
out, both of these are empirical issues, testable by methods familiar from
the social sciences. To test the first, we could devise a survey that presented
subjects with Frankfurt’s thought experiment and asked them to indicate
whether they intuit that Jones is morally responsible. To test the second,
we could use the first survey but divide our subject pool along different
demographic lines. Depending on the demographic, and depending on the
results we get, we might then be in a position to say that intuitions about
the thought experiment should not be treated as evidence.
Imagine, for example, that we discover in this fashion that whether one
intuits that Jones is morally responsible depends on one’s socioeconomic
status. That, it seems, would be cause for skepticism about the evidential
worth of intuitions about the case. For yours or my socioeconomic status
seems completely irrelevant to whether Jones is morally responsible. If our
intuitions about whether he is are sensitive to this irrelevant factor, then
that is grounds for holding that our intuitions about the case are not good
evidence for what is true in the case.
Designing and running experiments such as these is exactly what xphiles
have been doing for the past fourteen years or so. There are now hundreds
of studies testing people’s intuitions about a wide range of philosophical
Introduction xi

cases and thought experiments drawn from nearly every philosophical

subdiscipline.
The very first example of xphi, a paper published in 2001 by Jonathan
Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, called “Normativity and
Epistemic Intuitions,” reports findings on, among other things, people’s
intuitions about a famous thought experiment from epistemology due to
Edmond Gettier (1963). More so even than Frankfurt’s thought experiment,
Gettier’s is widely believed to refute the theory it was designed to challenge,
the so-called justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge.
The JTB theory has roots in Plato’s Theatetus, and was explicitly held, as
Gettier noted in 1963, by leading epistemologists in the 1950s, such as A.
J. Ayer and Roderick Chisholm. The theory is easy to state. It is the theory
that one knows something just in case one has a justified true belief in that
thing. For example, according to the JTB theory, Ed knows there is life on
other planets if, and only if, (a) Ed believes there is life on other planets, (b)
Ed is justified in believing there is life on other planets, and (c) it is true that
there is life on other planets.
Gettier argued that there are counterexamples to the JTB theory. In par-
ticular, he argued that there are cases in which someone justifiably and
truly believes something and yet fails to know it. Gettier presented two
counterexamples. Here is the first, just as Gettier presented it in 1963:
The 10 Coins Case

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith
has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:

d.  Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him
that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins
in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:

e.  The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the
grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justi-
fied in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the
job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposi-
tion (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false.
In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes
that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally
xii Introduction

clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the num-
ber of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in
Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket,
whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. (Gettier 1963, 122)

Most epistemologists—indeed, most analytic philosophers regardless of spe-

cialization—who know of the 10 Coins Case, or know of one of the dozens
of variations discussed in the literature, believe them to be just what Gettier
says they are: cases in which someone justifiably and truly believes, yet fails
to know. That is, they believe they are counterexamples to the JTB theory,
and hence that Gettier has refuted the JTB theory by presenting them.
I certainly believe this. If you did not already believe it yourself, perhaps,
having been exposed to Gettier’s presentation of the 10 Coins Case, you do
now. You should, I think. When I want to convince people that there are
answers to philosophical questions (and there are many people, sadly, who
claim to believe that philosophical questions are literally unanswerable), I
tell them about the JTB theory and say, “Philosophers have demonstrated
that the JTB theory is false.” Then I present them with the 10 Coins Case
and say, “See? Told you so.”
Does Gettier’s 10 Coins Case evidentially rely or depend on intuitions?
Believing that the case amounts to a counterexample to the JTB theory
involves having considered the case and having judged that Smith does
not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
But some philosophical methodologists—philosophers interested in the
methods philosophers employ in attempting to answer philosophical ques-
tions—say that, in addition, this judgment that many of us make after hav-
ing considered the case is, or is supposed to be, an intuitive one, and this
fact, namely that the judgment is intuitive, matters to how, and indeed to
whether, Gettier refuted the JTB theory with the 10 Coins Case. They say,
in particular, that the intuition that Smith does not know is treated, by
Gettier and others who think the case qualifies as a counterexample to the
JTB theory, as the evidence that it is true that Smith does not know. Every
xphile paper that comments on Gettier 1963 says this, but even the entries
on “Intuitions” and “The Analysis of Knowledge,” written by non-xphiles
in the highly regarded Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, suggest that intu-
itions about Gettier’s cases are meant to play this crucial evidential role in
Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory.
I confess that it is something of a mystery to me why anyone would say
or suggest such things. I have read through Gettier’s presentation many
Introduction xiii

times and have found literally nothing that would indicate that intuiting
that Smith does not know matters in any way to his argument against the
JTB theory. There is certainly nothing there to suggest that Gettier him-
self thinks so. I think—and I think that metaphilosophical attitudes about
Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory illustrate this perfectly—that the
idea that philosophy relies on intuitions as evidence is a myth, an endur-
ing and fairly widely held, yet entirely false, belief about the methods of
philosophy.
In one way or another I will be elaborating on this idea throughout the
book. It is its central idea, and the idea from whence its title derives. But put
it aside for the moment and pretend that these strange things people say
about the role of intuitions in Gettier’s argument are true. If the intuitive-
ness of the judgment that Smith does not know plays a significant eviden-
tial role in the argument against the JTB theory, then of course it makes a
good deal of sense to find out whether it really is intuitive, to whom, how
the intuitions pattern, how strong they are, and so on.
This is one thing that the original xphi paper (Weinberg, Nichols, and
Stich 2001) made a start on. Well, sort of. They did not test intuitions about
the 10 Coins Case, specifically; they tested a different variation. And they
cast their net fairly widely, testing a whole host of epistemic intuitions, not
just intuitions about Gettier cases. Later in the book, I will return, several
times, to Weinberg et al.’s groundbreaking paper. For now, I want to focus
on just one of its elements, the result they got concerning intuitions about
Gettier cases.
The result they got is that not everyone shares the Gettier intuition.
Whether one intuits that an agent in a Gettier case knows appears to
depend on one’s cultural background. They put their variation to (English-
speaking) Western, East Asian, and South Asian subject groups and found
that, while a clear majority of Western subjects intuited otherwise, clear
majorities of subjects in their Asian pools intuited that the agent in their
variation really does know. That is, majorities of their Asian subjects intu-
ited in a way consistent with the JTB theory, while majorities of their West-
ern subjects, as expected, intuited in a way inconsistent with it.
It thus appears from their results that intuitions about Gettier cases vary
along a dimension they should not if we are going to treat such intuitions
as evidence for the claims that are their contents. Earlier, I imagined col-
lecting data to the effect that socioeconomic status affects intuitions about
xiv Introduction

Frankfurt’s case concerning moral responsibility. Weinberg et al.’s data

reflect a real-life example of this phenomenon: a case in which a factor—
cultural background, in the case of Weinberg et al. 2001—that is irrelevant to
the truth of an intuition can affect whether that intuition is had.
At one point in their paper, Weinberg et al. say that if their results regard-
ing their South Asian subject groups are robust, then “it seems that what
counts as knowledge on the banks of the Ganges does not count as knowl-
edge on the banks of the Mississippi!” (Weinberg et al. 2001, 444). Reading
this as implying that what is knowledge in the one place is not knowledge
in the other makes the claim deeply implausibly relativistic, and Weinberg
et al. (except for maybe Stich) know it. If anything is clear in this area, it is
that, if agents in Gettier cases lack knowledge, that is a matter that does not
depend on which river’s banks one stands upon.
However, if analytic philosophers take intuitions to be the evidence for
what is true in Gettier cases, then the cross-cultural data really are quite
troubling. For the data suggest that the evidence is no good. If the evidence
is no good, how should we view Gettier’s “refutation” of the JTB theory? We
should, it seems, withdraw the claim that the JTB theory has been refuted.
Xphi has come along and given us a reason to suspend judgment on the
question of whether the JTB theory has been refuted—so much, then, for
holding up Gettier’s argument as a clear case of a philosophical refutation.
This discouraging conclusion follows, however, only if we follow xphiles
in thinking that intuitions about Gettier cases are treated as the evidence
for what is true in the cases. Indeed, a much more discouraging conclusion
would follow, since, in the aftermath of the publication of Weinberg et al.
2001, xphi has veritably taken off, and there is now a large body of data
appearing to show that, very often, intuitions that philosophers have about
a given thought experiment or case are not widely shared. Indeed, even
some intuitions philosophers would take to be the best possible candidates
for intuitions likely to be widely shared have turned out, on experimental
test, not to be so. More disturbingly, xphiles appear to have found that,
with respect to a fair number of different philosophical cases and thought
experiments, in a range of philosophical subdisciplines, people’s intuitions
vary relative to a variety of demographics that are completely irrelevant to
the truth of the intuitions.
This would be bad news for analytic philosophy, except that, as a mat-
ter of fact, analytic philosophers do not treat intuitions about thought
Introduction xv

experiments and cases as evidence. There is no such method. The belief

that there is such a method is just a myth, a part of metaphilosophical
folklore that I call the myth of the intuitive. Analytic philosophy is chock-full
of hypothetical examples and thought experiments, of course, but analytic
philosophers argue for their claims about what is or is not true in these cases
and thought experiments. It is these arguments, not intuitions, that are,
and should be, treated as evidence for the claims.
This is a theme that I will return to again and again throughout the book:
instead of appealing to intuitions, analytic philosophers argue for their
claims about their thought experiments and hypothetical cases. This really
ought to be taken as the banal truth that it is; of course they argue for those
claims. That is what philosophers do; they argue for philosophical claims.
Think again about Frankfurt’s case concerning moral responsibility.
What, according to Frankfurt, entitles him (and the rest of us) to the judg-
ment that his Jones character is morally responsible? You were asked earlier
to accept that the answer is: the intuitiveness of the claim. But that is not
the answer that Frankfurt actually gives, and there is no reason to think
that it is implicit in Frankfurt’s discussion. (He does not use the term “intu-
ition” or its cognates, for example.) My guess is that, if Frankfurt had rested
his argument on an intuition about his thought experiment, his paper
would not have achieved anywhere near the importance and influence it
has deservedly achieved.
So what is Frankfurt’s answer? In the passage immediately following the
presentation of the Black/Jones thought experiment, Frankfurt presents the
following argument:
It would be quite unreasonable to excuse Jones for his action or withhold the praise
to which it would normally entitle him, on the basis of the fact that he could not do
otherwise. This fact played no role at all in leading him to act as he did. He would
have acted the same even if it had not been a fact. Indeed, everything happened just
as it would have happened without Black’s presence in the situation and without his
readiness to intrude into it. (1969, 836)

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Frankfurt’s paper contains several dif-
ferent yet related arguments for the judgment that Jones is morally respon-
sible (and against the view that one is morally responsible for an act only if
one could have done otherwise).
What do these arguments have to do with who intuits what? In a
word: nothing. It is simply a mistake to think that Frankfurt’s argument
xvi Introduction

evidentially depends on intuitions about the Black/Jones case, and it is a

worse mistake to think that Frankfurt has shown the view he targets is false
only if the intuition that Jones is morally responsible is widely shared or
does not vary relative to factors irrelevant to the intuition’s truth. In gen-
eral, and as is the case in Frankfurt’s argument, philosophical arguments
involving thought experiments and hypothetical cases do not treat intu-
itions about them as evidence for what is true in them. And they certainly
do not need to. Why should they need to? Frankfurt’s rejection of a once
widely held view about moral responsibility, with its appeal to reasons and
argument, is cogent and compelling without any appeal to intuitions, and
it is representative of good arguments in analytic philosophy generally.
What about Gettier’s 10 Coins Case refutation of the JTB theory of
knowledge? Like Frankfurt, Gettier offers a clear argument for his judgment
about his thought experiment. He gives reasons for thinking that his Smith
character does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in
his pocket. I am going to save my discussion of this argument for later, but
I will say now—and you can check this for yourself—that the argument is
not hidden. Gettier’s argument for the judgment that Smith does not know
is right there in his presentation of the 10 Coins Case, quoted above. It is
hard to miss, actually. And it’s a good argument too, which is why Gettier’s
refutation of the JTB theory of knowledge is widely regarded as just that—a
refutation.
Gettier’s and Frankfurt’s presentations of their thought experiments are
representative of such presentations in philosophy generally. Philosophers
argue for their judgments about thought experiments and cases. It appears,
then, that it really is simply a myth that philosophers employ a method, in
reasoning about thought experiments and cases, whereby they make evi-
dential appeals to intuitions. The role of intuition in philosophy has been
greatly exaggerated. As a result, the data collected by xphiles in intuition
surveys are mostly irrelevant to analytic philosophical method.
Debunking the myth of the intuitive and demonstrating that analytic
philosophers give arguments for their judgments about thought experi-
ments and cases are two main components of the reply to the kind of xphi
exemplified by Weinberg et al. 2001 that I will develop in the central chap-
ters of this book. There are now several examples of this kind of “negative”
xphi (described as such because of the negative claims its proponents make
concerning intuitions and analytic philosophical method), and one goal of
Introduction xvii

the book is to give negative xphi a fair hearing. What, exactly, is the form of
the argument against more traditional modes of philosophizing that nega-
tive xphiles make? Does this argument, which I will call the negative xphi
critique, really depend, as I have suggested, on false claims about the eviden-
tial role of intuitions? Are there important methodological lessons to draw
from negative xphi, even if, as I will argue, the negative xphi critique misses
its target by miles?
Importantly, xphiles are not wholly to blame for misattributing the
mythical method of appealing to intuitions to analytic philosophers.
Somehow, the idea that intuitions about thought experiments and cases
count, or are treated as counting, as an important source of evidence for
the truth about the cases is a popular metaphilosophical view, even among
non-xphile analytic philosophers, and even though the view is false, as
I will argue throughout the rest of the book. Still, xphiles have recently
played a large role in perpetuating the myth of the intuitive. My hope is
that this book will make them at least reconsider their reasons for doing
so. Xphiles who criticize analytic philosophy for its reliance on intuitions
about thought experiments are making a mistake. This book explains why.
I hasten to add that I think that xphi is one of the most interesting and
valuable developments in recent philosophy. This book is a polemic against
a particular view of the relation between xphi and analytic philosophy,
namely the negative xphi view that some of the xphi data on intuitions
present a serious challenge to the arguments and methods of analytic phi-
losophy. This view is held by only a subset of those who self-describe as
xphiles, and I am by no means out to condemn everything that is or might
be called xphi. In fact, I think collecting data on people’s philosophical
intuitions in the careful and scientifically informed way that many xphiles
do is an extremely worthwhile project. Cross-cultural xphi, perhaps espe-
cially concerning moral intuitions, has real potential for fostering cross-cul-
tural understanding and respect. Intracultural xphi has a similar potential
benefit, for it is useful in all sorts of ways to know when, where, and why
we, within a single culture, differ in our basic philosophical outlook.
We should welcome the new kid on the block. Perhaps most obviously
because xphi has breathed new life into methodological discussions of ana-
lytic philosophy, inspiring many philosophers to reflect carefully on their
practice and describe it as accurately as they can. Even those of us who,
for what we take to be good, considered, philosophical reasons, are critical
xviii Introduction

of elements of the movement owe it to its inventors and practitioners to

admit that they have played an extremely important role in focusing our
attention on the philosophy of philosophy. If not for xphi, there would
be far less good work being done on methodological issues; this should be
stressed more often than it is by xphi’s critics.
I am annoyed by casual dismissals of xphi as not “real philosophy,” and
want to make it clear, here at the outset, that this attitude is no part of
my own anti-xphi stance. I do not think that results of xphi intuition sur-
veys can be used to legitimately criticize analytic philosophy’s methods,
but the thought that they can be used in that way is clearly a philosophical
thought. Of course, conducting an intuition survey is not, all by itself, a
philosophical activity, but there is more to xphi than simply conducting
the surveys. One must design the surveys, interpret their results, and think
carefully about the results’ philosophical implications, all of which requires
a great deal of distinctively philosophical thinking. By my estimate, the
average xphi paper has a significant and sophisticated amount of philo-
sophical content; there is no reason to deny that xphi is philosophy.
That said, I think that, as whole, the xphi movement can be fairly criti-
cized for paying lip service to the idea that philosophy should be “empiri-
cally informed.” Philosophy should be empirically informed; there can be
no serious question about this. But there is only so much mileage to be
gained from xphi’s survey methodology and its almost exclusive focus on
intuitions. The survey method is reasonably scientifically respectable, and
most xphiles apply it competently and carefully, but it has a severely lim-
ited reach. At best, the method will reveal only what various subject groups
believe or intuit about the survey questions. As a rule, however, philosophers
are interested in the answers to the questions xphiles pose in their surveys
and, with the exception of a number of misguided philosophical method-
ologists, they do not behave as though they believe that people’s intuitions
about the answers are evidentially linked to what the answers are.
The book is organized as follows.
In chapter 1, I describe the distinction between “positive” and “nega-
tive” xphi and present the results of five recent xphi studies. As we will
see, even some of the studies that fall most clearly into the positive xphi
camp have generated results that could be taken to have negative xphi sig-
nificance. It is important, in any case, to give some feel for the range of
questions that xphi has explored. As I said earlier, independently of the
xx Introduction

which is the problem, roughly, that my view of philosophical method sim-

ply relocates appeals to intuition without eliminating them.
The negative xphi critique has inspired two main replies from those
philosophers who think that the myth of the intuitive is no myth at all
and that negative xphiles are correct in holding that there is extensive and
avowed reliance on intuitions as evidence in analytic philosophy. In chap-
ter 6, I argue that, given their shared assumptions about the role of intu-
itions, proponents of these replies—what I call the multiple concepts and
expertise replies—are in far worse shape than their xphile opponents; the
replies are weak, verging on desperate.
It is common to hear the dispute between negative xphiles and defenders
of analytic philosophy characterized as a dispute over the extent to which
philosophy can be pursued “from the armchair.” In the conclusion, I argue
that this characterization misleadingly suggests that xphi has produced a
new challenge to the view that a significant amount of philosophy is (and
so should be regarded as) a priori. Even if the negative xphile critique suc-
ceeded, there would be no grounds for overarching skepticism about the a
priori. To the extent that a defense of armchair methods can be a demon-
stration that there was nothing to defend them from in the first place, the
book closes with just such a defense.
Introduction xix

failure of the negative xphi critique, much of the work being done in xphi’s
name is valuable and interesting. Hopefully, the discussion in chapter 1
will bolster this point. Chapter 1 also contains my rendition of the negative
xphi critique, a section in which I discuss a phenomenon I call pragmatic
distortion, which I take to pose a significant difficulty for getting accurate
data about people’s intuitions via xphile intuition surveys, and my (very
minimalistic) account of the nature of intuitions.
In chapter 2, I point out that there is a true reading of “Many philosophi-
cal arguments treat intuitions as evidence.” This goes a long way, I argue,
toward explaining the appeal of the myth of the intuitive. However, I also
argue that this true reading does not support taking the myth to be true,
nor, consequently, does it in any way justify the negative xphile critique.
In addition, chapter 2 discusses the functioning of philosophical counter-
examples, taking Gettier’s anti-JTB theory counterexamples and Kripke’s
counterexamples to descriptivist theories of reference as case studies. The
chapter also includes criticism of a variety of more or less general method-
ological claims, made by both xphiles and non-xphile philosophers.
The short chapter 3 describes and criticizes some of Timothy William-
son’s metaphilosophical views. Williamson is known for charging xphiles
(among others) with views that commit them to a form of skepticism he
calls judgment skepticism. I argue that this charge does not stick.
In chapter 4, I show that Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory appeals to
reason and argument at every stage; there is no appeal to intuitions, and,
in particular, no appeal to or reliance on intuitions in his arguments for
his claims about his thought experiments. I draw attention, in chapter 4,
to the fact that much of the “Gettierology” literature includes additional
arguments for taking Gettier’s claims about his thought experiments to be
correct. I also offer a reply to an objection to the effect that this badly
misunderstands these arguments, which are, according to the objection,
abductive arguments that take as premises Gettier’s claims about his thought
experiments.
In chapter 5, I continue the “arguments, not intuitions” theme of chap-
ter 4, showing that Kripke’s claim about his famous Gödel Case is supported
by a variety of arguments, none of which have anything to do with who
intuits what. There is also a brief discussion in chapter 5 of other “intuition-
free” arguments in philosophy. In chapter 5, I also offer a solution to a
problem, introduced briefly in chapter 3, that I call the relocation problem,
1  Varieties of Xphi, Pragmatic Distortion, and the
No-Theory Theory of Intuitions

1.1 Introduction

One goal of this chapter is to present several xphi studies and describe how
their results either have been or might be used to challenge traditional ana-
lytic philosophical arguments or methods.1 Understanding the challenges
involves examining a few of the extant xphi studies in at least some detail.
However, xphi comes in different varieties, and the challenges they pose
differ considerably. In this book, I will focus mainly on that variety now
known as negative xphi, and the results of most of the studies I will describe
later have been or could be used to argue for the sorts of conclusions that
are characteristic of xphi’s negative branch.
Negative xphi distinguishes itself from more positive varieties by taking
a more pessimistic stance toward traditional philosophical argument and
method. Negative xphi’s stance is not simply that traditional philosophy
makes empirically undersupported or just outright mistaken claims about
what intuitions people have. There are now many xphi studies that, using
survey methods, attempt to shed light on whether various groups of peo-
ple have this or that intuition. Much of the xphi relevant to the free will
debate is of this kind, for example; one of the burning issues in the area is
whether people are “natural compatibilists” who have intuitions that sug-
gest an implicit commitment to compatibilism between determinism and
free will and/or moral responsibility. But, while negative xphi involves col-
lecting data about intuitions and “intuitional diversity” (that is, diversity in
intuitions between different groups of people), this is really only a means
to an end, which is both to call certain traditional philosophical arguments
into question and, most importantly, to raise a worry about the epistemic
value of the philosophical intuitions negative xphiles take to be involved in
2  Chapter 1

those arguments. There is a sense in which negative xphiles do not much

care about who has which intuitions; they are mostly concerned with caus-
ing trouble for those who do care.2 Positive xphi, on the other hand, does
not quite condemn the use of intuitions, though it can be quite critical of
traditional philosophical arguments and conclusions, namely those that it
takes to be dependent on explicit or implicit claims about who has which
intuitions.
Another goal of this chapter, then, is to describe some of the existing
xphi challenges, focusing in particular on what I will call the negative xphi
critique. This will involve some comparison and contrast with other, more
positive, xphi projects, and three of the studies I will discuss are studies
conducted by negative xphiles’ more positive-minded brethren.
Several critics of xphi argue that it is plagued by methodological difficul-
ties. For the most part, I view these criticisms as not very philosophically
interesting. However, there is one exception to this having to do with a
phenomenon I call pragmatic distortion. This is discussed in section 1.3.
I will also say something in this chapter about intuitions and the philo-
sophical use of the term “intuition.”3 What I will say will fall far short of
analyzing intuitions or precisely defining “intuition” as it is used in philos-
ophy. As I said in the introduction, a central issue of this book is the role of
intuition in philosophical argument—in particular, whether intuitions are
treated as evidence in philosophy. However, I think that trying to clearly
characterize or analyze intuitions, or precisely define “intuition,” actually
hinders the attempt to understand this role. I therefore adopt what I call
the no-theory theory of intuitions, a (non-) theory that attempts to give only
as much content to “intuition” as is needed to fruitfully discuss certain
methodological issues that arise in philosophy. Another aim of this chapter
is to explain how I can get away with writing a whole book about intuitions
without ever saying in any very precise way what intuitions are. The dis-
cussion of the no-theory theory in section 1.5 explains how this can be so.

1.2  Positive versus Negative Xphi: Some Sample Studies

My plan, in this section, is to describe some of the varieties of xphi that are
now being practiced. However, I am not very interested in the kinds of fine-
grained divisions in which xphiles themselves are (naturally) interested, so
I will not be providing an exhaustive or detailed catalog.4 Rather, my aim
Varieties of Xphi  3

is to give a sense of the ways in which different varieties of xphi raise dif-
ferent sorts of challenges to more traditional philosophical argumentation
and methods. In the next section, I will abstract away from the details and
present the most interesting of these challenges, namely the negative xphi
critique. This critique, in one way or another, will be the impetus and target
of the material in the chapters that follow.
One issue about categorization that I will mention here in order to put
it to one side is the extent to which some examples of xphi have nothing
much to do with intuitions or their role in traditional philosophical argu-
ment. The fact is that, in one way or another, most current xphi does touch
on intuitions and their role. Almost everything written under its banner
thus far contains reports of survey-style experimentation on people’s philo-
sophical intuitions. However, xphi is a burgeoning movement, and many
different sorts of projects are now billing themselves as xphi. Whether
“xphi” is defined narrowly as concerned with experiments on intuitions,
or more broadly to include other sorts of experiments, matters very little
to me. However, the examples of xphi that I will discuss, and the problems
I will raise for these examples, all have to do with the intuition-centered
variety of xphi.
My discussion of the varieties of (intuition-centered) xphi and the dif-
fering challenges they raise will be woven into presentations of the stud-
ies themselves. In every case, my descriptions of the studies will be fairly
brief and I will not linger long over the studies’ experimental design; nor
will I discuss in detail effect sizes or how the data reported in the studies
were gathered and analyzed. These are important issues, and some critics of
xphi think that its main weakness is methodological. The surveys’ designs
are problematic, these critics say, or confounds make the results difficult
to interpret, or this or that statistical test ought or ought not be used in
data analysis. These criticisms must be addressed by xphiles, but (with the
exception having to do with the semantics–pragmatics distinction that I
will discuss later in section 1.3) they are criticisms that have little to do with
the relation between xphi methods and traditional philosophical ones.
Xphi methods would face these criticisms regardless of how relevant xphi
is to traditional philosophical investigation. Since this book concerns the
relation between xphi and more traditional styles of philosophizing, these
methodological criticisms of xphi have little bearing on its main topic. I
will therefore mostly ignore them.5
4  Chapter 1

1.2.1  Two Studies on Intuitions about Gettier Cases

In the introduction, I said that xphiles appear to have discovered that not
everyone shares “the Gettier intuition.” What is the Gettier intuition? It
is simply the judgment that agents described in stories such as Gettier’s
10 Coins Case do not know the relevant proposition. In Gettier’s story, the
relevant proposition is that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his
pocket, and the agent in the story is Smith, a fictional character created by
Gettier. One “has the Gettier intuition” relative to the story if, after one
reads the story, one judges that Smith does not know that the man who will get
the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Later, we will have reason to return to these straightforward-seeming
claims about the Gettier intuition and what it is to have it. The term “intu-
ition” harbors an important ambiguity, and, hence, so does the term “the
Gettier intuition,” and this fact has significant methodological conse-
quences that I will describe in chapter 2. There are also some philosophers,
hostile to xphi, who are skeptical about whether any clearly identifiable
kind of judgment is deserving of the label “intuition.” I will discuss this
view later in this chapter. For now, I will assume that these brief remarks
about the Gettier intuition suffice to provide a decent grip on what the Get-
tier intuition is and what it means for it not to be universally shared.
Of course, “the Gettier intuition” really names a class of judgments, not
a single judgment about a single case, so perhaps it is better to say that the
discovery xphiles made is that there is at least one Gettier intuition that not
everyone shares. And the particular Gettier intuition it was discovered that
not everyone shares is not the intuition about the 10 Coins Case I rehearsed
in the introduction. The xphiles who made the discovery used a different
case, one I will present a couple of paragraphs hence. Still, these cases, Get-
tier’s original, as well as the one xphiles tested, belong to a single kind—they
are all Gettier cases. Have xphiles discovered variability in intuitions about
Gettier cases—that is, with respect to the entire class? Not directly, no. As
I said, the discovery concerns variability in intuitions about a single Get-
tier case. But Gettier cases are described as such for a reason; all of the cases
share certain features. Given this, I think it is fair to describe the xphiles’ dis-
covery as the discovery of variability in Gettier intuitions. It is of course an
open empirical question whether variability will appear for other particular
instances of the Gettier intuition, relative to other particular Gettier cases,
but there is currently more evidence that it will than that it will not.
Varieties of Xphi  5

What unifies Gettier cases and Gettier intuitions into single categories?
When I teach undergraduate epistemology courses, I define Gettier cases
as those in which an agent justifiably and truly believes that p but fails to
know that p. To say that there are Gettier cases is, on this simple definition,
to imply that the content of the Gettier intuition is true. So long as the Get-
tier intuition is true, as I believe it is, there is nothing wrong with saying
that there are Gettier cases, understood as defined by the simple definition.
However, part of what is at issue in debates over the role of intuitions in
philosophical argument is whether intuitions, or the having of them, are
treated as evidence for the truth of their contents. Fruitfully discussing this
issue requires neutral descriptions of the “cases” the intuitions concern,
including Gettier cases.
One feature that every Gettier case appears to share is that the agent in
such a case justifiably believes p, and p is true, but it is, in some sense, a mat-
ter of luck that the agent truly believes that p. In Gettier’s 10 Coins Case, for
example, Smith gets it right and believes, truly and with justification, that
the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, but it is clear that
his getting it right is due to luck. By sheer coincidence, Smith himself hap-
pens to have ten coins in his pocket (and, though presumably not by sheer
coincidence, will himself get the job). Later, when it comes time to respond
to xphi challenges, I will return to this structural feature of Gettier cases,
for the reply that I will make to those challenges, as they apply to Gettier’s
argument against the JTB theory of knowledge, exploits the fact that Gettier
cases, along with many other cases and thought experiments in philoso-
phy, often have these unifying structural features. For now, we can char-
acterize Gettier cases relatively neutrally as those in which an agent has a
justified true belief that p, but the belief is only luckily true. I will say more in
subsequent chapters about epistemic luck and its relevance to understand-
ing the functioning of Gettier’s cases, and, beyond this, to understanding
the functioning of cases and counterexamples in philosophical argument
more generally.
I have said that xphiles appear to have discovered that not everyone
shares the Gettier intuition. But the xphiles in question did more than
just this. There have always been those Frank Jackson (2011) describes as
“Gettier holdouts”—people who have professed to lack the intuition many
philosophers report having when they consider the cases. The interesting
twist that xphiles have added is that whether one has the Gettier intuition
6  Chapter 1

appears to be at least partly dependent on culture. It has been shown that

some East Asian and South Asian subject groups tend not to have the Get-
tier intuition. This fascinating and surprising result was, as I noted in the
introduction, first reported by Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, and Ste-
phen Stich. Their 2001 paper is the first example of negative xphi, and I will
say more about why it counts as such in a moment.
Until recently, it seemed correct to say that Westerners, by contrast, do
tend to have the Gettier intuition. In Weinberg et al. 2001, this contrast
seems clear; clear majorities of Western subjects surveyed in the early study
do, while clear majorities of East Asian and South Asian subjects do not,
have the Gettier intuition. In light of new findings, however, this is now
a matter that is somewhat more difficult to judge. A 2012 paper by two
psychologists, Christina Starmans and Ori Friedman, is a study of what its
authors describe as the “folk conception of knowledge.” In it, Starmans
and Friedman present a variety of Gettier cases to Western subjects. Their
equally surprising result is that their subjects tended not to have the Gettier
intuition. In fact, in their studies, clear majorities of their subjects lacked
the Gettier intuition.
I am not entirely sure what general conclusion should be drawn from
consideration of the results of both studies combined. I will assume here
that there is still some evidence from the Weinberg et al. 2001 study that
there are cross-cultural differences in intuitions about Gettier cases, and
that, to the extent that results reported in Starmans and Friedman 2012
bear on the issue, they show only that, with respect to some Gettier cases at
least, the degree to which Westerners have the Gettier intuition seems to be
less than we might have expected, given only the results reported in Wein-
berg et al. 2001. Perhaps, had East Asians and South Asians been surveyed
in their study, Starmans and Friedman would have found an even higher
percentage in these groups of subjects intuiting that agents in Gettier cases
know. Simon Cullen (2010) reports replicating the original Weinberg et al.
2001 finding with respect to Western subjects, so perhaps this is some addi-
tional evidence that cross-cultural differences in Gettier intuitions exist. As
I said earlier, it is of course possible that different patterns, cross-culturally
and intraculturally, will appear relative to different specific Gettier cases.
Weinberg et al. 2001 and Starmans and Friedman 2012 used different spe-
cific Gettier cases, so it is possible that different specific cases provoke dif-
ferent patterns of reactions. Even this would be an interesting meta-xphi
Varieties of Xphi  7

result, since it is widely believed among philosophers that most Gettier

cases have the same basic structure.6
In the Weinberg et al. 2001 study, the authors presented their subjects
with the following vignette:
Weinberg et al. 2001 Gettier Case

Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks
that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently
been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is
a different kind of American car. (Weinberg et al. 2001, 444)

Subjects were then asked to say whether they thought Bob really knows that
Jill drives an American car or only believes that she does. This was a “forced
choice” question and the only answer options were these two. Table 1.1
displays the results reported in Weinberg et al. 2001.
How do these results bear on Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory
of knowledge? Well, in arguing against the JTB theory, Gettier appeals to
cases, such as the 10 Coins Case, that are similar to the case Weinberg et
al. tested. One way to pose the challenge raised by the results is to say that
whether a person will intuit that an agent in a Gettier case knows the rel-
evant proposition appears to depend on a factor that is irrelevant to the truth
of that intuition. This should lead us, or so one might think, to question
whether we are properly justified in intuiting, and then believing, what
we do about the cases. The intuitions seem sensitive to something—in this
case, culture—that has nothing to do with the truth of those intuitions. It
seems implausible in the extreme that whether Bob, from the Weinberg
et al. 2001 Gettier case, knows that Jill owns an American car, or Smith,
from Gettier’s 10 Coins Case, knows that the man who will get the job
has ten coins in his pocket, are matters that are culturally relative. Given
that there is a single, nonrelative answer to whether the agents in the cases
know, but given also that what one intuits the answer to be depends on a

Table 1.1

Weinberg et al. 2001

Gettier Case Really Knows Only Believes

Westerners 26% 74%

East Asians 53% 47%
South Asians 61% 39%
8  Chapter 1

truth-irrelevant factor such as culture, caution seems like the responsible

epistemic attitude to adopt; we ought to suspend our belief in the truth of
the Gettier intuition, pending gathering more evidence that will tip the
scale in one direction or the other.
In other words, the results from Weinberg et al. 2001 can be used to fash-
ion a negative xphi argument that appears to challenge Gettier’s more tradi-
tional philosophical argument against the JTB theory. Post-1963 it seemed,
and has seemed until very recently, that we could safely claim that there
are cases in which agents justifiably and truly believe that p but fail to know
that p. Now, however, given intuitional diversity along truth-irrelevant lines
relative to Gettier cases, there appear to be grounds for suspending belief
in this claim. If that is true, then contrary to what has been maintained in
analytic philosophy for the last fifty years, Gettier has not refuted the JTB
theory of knowledge. For, given the diversity result, we cannot claim to be
justified in believing (if we do so believe) that there can be agents who jus-
tifiably and truly believe p while failing to know that p.
Later, I will return to the question of what general moral negative xphiles
draw from studies such as the Gettier case studies described in Weinberg et
al. 2001. Let me now turn to the Starmans and Friedman 2012 study, which
is intended by its authors as an example of positive xphi, though it too
trades in intuitions about Gettier cases.
In the Starmans and Friedman study, the authors presented their sub-
jects with, among others, the following vignette:
Starmans and Friedman 2012 Gettier Case

Peter is in his locked apartment reading, and is about to have a shower. He puts his
book down on the coffee table, and takes off his black plastic watch and leaves it on
the coffee table. Then he goes into the bathroom. As Peter’s shower begins, a bur-
glar silently breaks into the apartment. The burglar takes Peter’s black plastic watch,
replaces it with an identical black plastic watch, and then leaves. Peter is still in the
shower, and did not hear anything. (Starmans and Friedman 2012, 274)

Subjects were then asked several questions about the vignette, one of which
asked subjects to fill in the blank in the following “Gettier question”:

Peter ________ (Really knows/Only thinks) that there is a watch on the table.

A full 71 percent of their subjects selected “Really knows” in answer to the

Gettier question. In several other somewhat different Gettier cases, Star-
mans and Friedman found a similar result: strong majorities of their subjects
Varieties of Xphi  9

ascribed knowledge in Gettier cases; that is, these majorities appeared to

lack the Gettier intuition.
What bearing does Starmans and Friedman’s result have on Gettier’s
argument against the JTB theory? Among philosophers, it is widely held
that Gettier’s argument depends, in part, on the intuitiveness of Gettier’s
counterexamples to the JTB theory. One way of understanding Starmans
and Friedman’s result is to see it as challenging the belief that the counter-
examples are intuitive. So there is a way of taking Starmans and Friedman
2012 as a challenge to Gettier’s argument: Gettier’s argument, some would
say, requires that most people do or would have the Gettier intuition. But
most people do not have the Gettier intuition. At any rate, Starmans and
Friedman’s study has generated empirical evidence that points in this direc-
tion. This is not quite negative xphi, as I use the label, since the underlying
view is not that intuitions about Gettier cases are of little or no value. It
is rather that intuitions perhaps are valuable but that false claims about
what is or is not intuitive are presupposed by Gettier’s argument. It is posi-
tive xphi with a negative message: to the extent that Gettier’s argument
depends on the claim that people do or would have the Gettier intuition,
the argument is undermined by Starmans and Friedman’s empirical results.
However, the stated aim of Starmans and Friedman 2012 is simply to
explore the “folk conception of knowledge.” So it can be viewed as positive
xphi with a less critical aim too; its authors are simply empirically investi-
gating how and when knowledge ascriptions are made, and this, it might
be thought, reveals something important about not just the “folk concep-
tion” of knowledge, but also about knowledge itself. A possible positive
xphi view is that Starmans and Friedman’s work points in the direction of
a theory of knowledge much closer to the JTB theory than has, since 1963,
been deemed plausible.

1.2.2  A Study on Intuitions about Intentional Action

The most famous study in the whole of the xphi literature is one that
reports Joshua Knobe’s (2003) discovery of a striking asymmetry in people’s
intuitions about intentional action. Knobe discovered that whether certain
outcomes (in particular, unintended side effects) of an agent’s action are
good or bad has an influence on whether people will intuit the outcome
to have been produced intentionally by the agent. In Knobe 2003, he pre-
sented different groups of subjects with either the “Harm” or “Help” ver-
sion of the following vignette:
10  Chapter 1

Knobe 2003 Harm/Help Case

The vice president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We
are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also
harm [help] the environment.” The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at
all about harming [helping] the environment. I just want to make as much profit as
I can. Let’s start the new program.” They started the new program. Sure enough, the
environment was harmed [helped]. (Knobe 2003, 191)

Eighty-two percent of subjects given the Harm version of the vignette

answered that the chairman harmed the environment intentionally. By
contrast, only 23 percent of subjects given the Help vignette intuited that
the chairman helped the environment intentionally (ibid., 192).
How might Knobe’s results bear on traditional philosophical arguments?
Knobe himself professes little interest in this question and takes his work to
be concerned primarily with the ways in which people think about inten-
tional action.7 So, for him, the effect he has discovered is interesting in
mainly a constructive way: the empirical discovery that our intuitions
about intentional action are apparently influenced by evaluative consider-
ations should guide our theorizing about the mind.
However, Knobe’s result can be easily taken to challenge traditional phil-
osophical views. For example, some philosophers, including Knobe’s earlier
self, think not only that people tend to judge as they do in the Harm/Help
scenarios, but also that they are correct in so judging; that is, some phi-
losophers maintain that the chairman really does harm the environment
intentionally in the Harm case even though he really does not help the
environment intentionally in the Help case. That is a view about inten-
tional action itself, not just the way we think about it. And it is controver-
sial; many philosophers who work on the theory of action would deny it,
citing arguments in support of theories that would deem the outcome of
the chairman’s decision in both the Harm and Help cases as brought about
unintentionally. If one takes people’s intuitions about the Harm and Help
cases as evidence for what is true in those cases, then one will be inclined
to see Knobe’s data as a challenge to such theories of intentional action.
Again, however, I should stress that, even understood in this way,
Knobe’s work does not qualify as negative xphi as I use the label. Negative
xphiles make trouble for traditional arguments by showing that intuitions
vary along dimensions that are irrelevant to their truth. We saw a clear case
of this earlier, when examining the sort of challenge to Gettier’s argument
Varieties of Xphi  11

against the JTB theory stemming from Weinberg et al. 2001. There, the
upshot was that intuitions about Gettier cases ought not be trusted. The
interpretation of Knobe’s results we are now considering treats intuitions
about his scenarios differently. For to take Knobe’s results to reveal some-
thing important about intentional action itself is to take the intuitions
Knobe uncovered at face value, as revealing what is true in those scenarios.
It is not to impugn a method that treats intuitions as evidence; it is rather to
highlight the fact that the application of this method might be thoroughly
empirical.
Interestingly, there is a way of interpreting Knobe’s study that takes it
to be a relatively clear example of negative xphi. As I said, many philoso-
phers believe that evaluative facts about outcomes cannot have any bearing
on whether the action that produced that outcome was performed inten-
tionally. Suppose that is right. Then, what we have, given Knobe’s results,
is precisely variation in intuitions along a dimension—in this case, facts
about the evaluative properties of outcomes—that does not matter to the
truth of the intuitions. So, despite Knobe’s own intentions, his results could
quite easily be adopted for use in a negative xphile argument, one whose
conclusion is that some intuitions about intentional action, such as those
elicited by considering the Harm and Help scenarios, cannot be relied on as
evidence in theorizing about intentional action.

1.2.3  A Study on Intuitions about Reference

In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke famously argues against a view in the
philosophy of language, which I will call descriptivism, according to which a
proper name’s referent (the object to which the name refers) is that object,
if any, “picked out” by the definite descriptions that users of the name
associate with it.8 Part of Kripke’s argument involves appeal to the results
of thought experiments such as his well-known Gödel Case, in which he
imagines (contrary to fact, of course) that a man named “Schmidt” discov-
ered the proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic, and that Gödel stole the
proof from Schmidt and published it under his own name. However, most
speakers in Kripke’s imagined circumstances associate just one description
with the name “Gödel,” namely “the man who proved the incompleteness
of arithmetic.” According to descriptivism, these speakers therefore refer
to Schmidt when using the name “Gödel,” but this, Kripke claims, is the
wrong result. In his imagined scenario, speakers who use “Gödel” refer to
12  Chapter 1

Gödel, the man who stole the proof. Such speakers misattribute the proof’s
discovery to him.
Or so Kripke says. In their 2004 paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style,”
Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich argue
that the alleged antidescriptivist upshot of Kripke’s Gödel Case is chal-
lenged by cross-cultural experiments they performed on people’s intuitions
about the reference of proper names. In one of their experiments, Machery
et al. presented subjects with the following vignette, closely modeled on
Kripke’s original Gödel Case:
Machery et al. 2004 Gödel Case

Suppose that John has learned in college that Gödel is the man who proved an
important mathematical theorem, called the incompleteness of arithmetic. John is
quite good at mathematics and he can give an accurate statement of the incomplete-
ness theorem, which he attributes to Gödel as the discoverer. But this is the only
thing that he has heard about Gödel. Now suppose that Gödel was not the author of
this theorem. A man called “Schmidt” whose body was found in Vienna under mys-
terious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend
Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work, which
was thereafter attributed to Gödel. Thus he has been known as the man who proved
the incompleteness of arithmetic. Most people who have heard the name “Gödel”
are like John; the claim that Gödel discovered the incompleteness theorem is the
only thing they have ever heard about Gödel. When John uses the name “Gödel,”
is he talking about:

(A) the person who really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic?

or

(B) the person who got hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work?
(Machery et al. 2004, B6)

What they found is that Westerners were far more likely than East Asians to
give the “Kripkean” answer, namely (B). Figure 1.1 gives the percentages of
(B) answers given by the different subject groups.9
In certain places, Machery et al. treat their results as a challenge to
Kripke’s antidescriptivist arguments simply because the results suggest that
descriptivism is not as counterintuitive as was once believed. Since plenty
of East Asian English-speaking subjects appear to have intuitions consis-
tent with descriptivism, it cannot be claimed that antidescriptivism is the
intuitive view. This, it seems to me, is to take the results to have primarily
positive xphi implications; the goal is simply to show that antidescriptivist
intuitions are not universally shared.
Varieties of Xphi  13

100

90
Pr opor t ion of Kr ipk e a n An sw e r s

80

70

60 58
55
Westerners
50
Easterners
40
32
29
30

20

10

0
Gödel Case Tsu Ch'ung Chih Case

Figure 1.1
From Edouard Machery, “Expertise and Intuitions about Reference,” Theoria 72
(2011): 37–54. Used with permission.

However, in other places, Machery et al. make it clear that they intend
their work to be an example of negative xphi. And negative xphiles, remem-
ber, are not content simply to show, via empirical study, that this or that
judgment is or is not the intuitive one. Instead, negative xphiles aim to
show that certain intuitions vary in ways they should not, if they are to be
regarded as evidence for what they are intuitions about. Since intuitions
about reference vary with respect to a factor that should not matter to their
truth—namely culture—these intuitions cannot be trusted. This is the cen-
tral negative xphi message of Machery et al. 2004.

1.2.4  A Study on Intuitions about the Truetemp Case

One is a reliabilist about knowledge if one thinks that true beliefs that are
reliably produced suffice for knowledge. In 1990, Keith Lehrer argued that
there are counterexamples to reliabilism about knowledge. One of the most
famous of these is his case of Mr. Truetemp. The case, in brief, is this: With-
out his knowledge, Mr. Truetemp has had a tiny computer implanted in his
brain. The computer has two effects: it highly reliably gauges the tempera-
ture in Mr. Truetemp’s environment and it causes Mr. Truetemp to believe
that it is whatever temperature the device has gauged. So, Mr. Truetemp
14  Chapter 1

has, because of the implanted computer, highly reliable and accurate beliefs
about the temperature. But, Lehrer says, these beliefs do not amount to
knowledge on Mr. Truetemp’s part of what temperature it is. So reliabilism
is false.
In 2008, a group of experimental philosophers, Stacey Swain, Joshua
Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg, put intuitions about Truetemp-style
cases to empirical test. Their interesting hypothesis was that intuitions
about such cases might vary with respect to the order in which other cases
were presented to subjects. In particular, they hypothesized that subjects
who encountered a clear case of non-knowledge before being presented with
a Truetemp case would be more likely to intuit that the agent in the True-
temp case knows than they would if presented with the Truetemp case first.
Likewise, they hypothesized that, if presented with a clear case of knowl-
edge first, subjects would then be less likely to intuit that the agent in the
Truetemp case knows.
Here are three cases used by Swain et al. 2008 to test these hypotheses.
The first is a Truetemp case closely modeled on Lehrer’s (1990) original; the
latter two are cases they used to test for the “order effect,” the first their
clear case of non-knowledge, the second their clear case of knowledge.
Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg 2008 Truetemp Case

One day Charles was knocked out by a falling rock; as a result his brain was “re-
wired” so that he is always right whenever he estimates the temperature where he
is. Charles is unaware that his brain has been altered in this way. A few weeks later,
this brain rewiring leads him to believe that it is 71 degrees in his room. Apart from
his estimation, he has no other reasons to think that it is 71 degrees. In fact, it is 71
degrees. (Swain et al., 2008, 154)

Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg 2008 Clear Non-knowledge Case

Dave likes to play a game with flipping a coin. He sometimes gets a “special feeling”
that the next flip will come out heads. When he gets this “special feeling,” he is right
about half the time, and wrong about half the time. Just before the next flip, Dave
gets that “special feeling,” and the feeling leads him to believe that the coin will land
heads. He flips the coin, and it does land heads. (154)

Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg 2008 Clear Knowledge Case

Karen is a distinguished professor of chemistry. This morning, she read an article

in a leading scientific journal that mixing two common floor disinfectants, Cleano
Plus and Washaway, will create a poisonous gas that is deadly to humans. In fact,
Varieties of Xphi  15

the article is correct: mixing the two products does create a poisonous gas. At noon,
Karen sees a janitor mixing Cleano Plus and Washaway and yells to him, “Get away!
Mixing those two products creates a poisonous gas!” (155)

Swain et al.’s hypotheses were borne out: their subjects’ intuitions about
whether Charles, in their Truetemp Case, knows that it is 71 degrees were
strongly influenced by which cases they encountered first. If they encoun-
tered Dave in the Clear Non-knowledge Case first, subjects were far more
likely to attribute knowledge to Charles in the Truetemp Case than they were
if they were instead first exposed to Karen in the Clear Knowledge Case.
Swain et al. draw a clear negative xphi conclusion: Intuitions about
Truetemp-style cases cannot be trusted or relied on as evidence, for they
are sensitive to a factor that is obviously irrelevant to their truth, namely
the order in which one encounters such cases when one is considering a
range of more or less similar cases. To the extent that Lehrer’s antireliabilist
argument depends on intuitions about his Truetemp case, the argument is
undermined, Swain et al. maintain.

1.2.5  A Study on Intuitions about Moral Responsibility and Determinism

Compatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism hold that, even
if the world is deterministic, moral responsibility is possible. Compatibilism
is threatened by powerful arguments for incompatibilism, but incompati-
bilists have also sometimes claimed that compatibilism is counterintuitive.
Xphiles, smelling blood, have rushed in with surveys. Is compatibilism
counterintuitive? This is an empirical question, one that xphiles have
recently begun exploring experimentally.
Early results seemed to favor the view that compatibilism is not coun-
terintuitive.10 However, matters are somewhat less clear since the publica-
tion of an influential paper by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe (2007),
which seems to show that whether subjects intuit that moral responsibility
is possible in a deterministic world depends on how affect-laden the descrip-
tions of the relevant cases are. In their experiment, Nichols and Knobe first
described a deterministic universe, “Universe A,” to their subjects as follows:
Imagine a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is completely
caused by whatever happened before it. This is true from the very beginning of the
universe, so what happened in the beginning of the universe caused what happened
next, and so on right up until the present. For example one day John decided to have
French Fries at lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by
16  Chapter 1

what happened before it. So, if everything in this universe was exactly the same up
until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have
French Fries. (Nichols and Knobe 2007, 669)

Then, one group of subjects was given the following, highly affect-laden
vignette:
Nichols and Knobe 2007 Determinism and Responsibility Case

In Universe A, a man named Bill has become attracted to his secretary, and he de-
cides that the only way to be with her is to kill his wife and 3 children. He knows
that it is impossible to escape from his house in the event of a fire. Before he leaves
on a business trip, he sets up a device in his basement that burns down the house
and kills his family. (670)

Subjects were then asked to answer the following question: Is Bill fully mor-
ally responsible for killing his wife and children? No less than 72 percent of
subjects who read the story about Bill intuited that, yes, Bill is fully morally
responsible for killing his wife and children.
However, another group of subjects, who were also given the descrip-
tion of Universe A, did not receive the vignette about Bill, but were instead
simply asked the following, not-affect-laden question: “In universe A, is
it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?”
(670). And here, the results were dramatically different; a full 86 percent of
the subjects intuited that, no, it is not possible for a person in universe A to
be fully morally responsible for his or her actions.
Nichols and Knobe treat their experiment as an example of positive xphi.
Their goal is to figure out what intuitions people have about determinism
and moral responsibility, and why. As to why, one possibility they float is
that high affect distorts one’s ability to competently assess responsibility;
the negative emotions triggered by the story of Bill interfere with subjects’
ability to accurately ascribe responsibility.
However, as Nichols and Knobe themselves come close to recognizing
(see their discussion of the “philosophical implications” of their experi-
ment at 667–668), this explanation also points toward a negative xphile
conclusion, namely that intuitions about determinism and responsibility
should not be treated as evidence for the truth of compatibilism (or incom-
patibilism, for that matter) because these intuitions are sensitive to a factor
that is irrelevant to their truth. In this case, the truth-irrelevant factor is
the relative level of affect-inducing language used in framing the vignettes.
Varieties of Xphi  17

1.3  The Negative Xphi Critique

Negative xphi, properly so-called, involves the (alleged) discovery of what I

will call truth-irrelevant variability in philosophical intuitions. Of the five cases
canvassed above, three fall clearly into the category of negative xphi (Wein-
berg et al. 2001, Machery et al. 2004, and Swain et al. 2008) though, as
we saw, even in cases in which the authors have more positive xphi aims,
the results of their experiments can often be viewed as having negative
xphi import, precisely because the experiments appear to uncover truth-
irrelevant variability in philosophical intuitions. This is true of the results
reported in both Knobe 2003 and Nichols and Knobe 2007.
Negative xphiles think that truth-irrelevant variability in philosophi-
cal intuitions is bad news for traditional philosophical and arguments and
methods, but why? And how? Obviously, part of their idea is that, if intu-
itions vary along truth-irrelevant lines, then those intuitions should not be
relied on as evidence. If intuitions about Gettier cases, cases involving the
reference of names, or Truetemp cases are sensitive to factors that have no
bearing on the truth or falsity of the intuitions, then we should not treat
those intuitions as evidence for what is true about the cases, let alone as
evidence for the philosophical theories that make predictions about what is
true in these and similar cases.
By analogy, imagine a thermometer in a room that reads 23 degrees,
but only if the Rolling Stones are blaring out of a pair of stereo speakers
also in the room. Otherwise, it reads, say, 27 degrees. Assuming that the
Stones blaring is irrelevant to what temperature it is in the room, it would
seem that the readings of the thermometer should not be trusted. Likewise,
say negative xphiles, for the deliverances of intuition about at least some
philosophical cases; they should not be taken as guides to the truth about
those cases.
However, I take it that negative xphiles think that their critique’s conclu-
sion is not just that our intuitions about the cases for which truth-irrelevant
variability has been discovered ought not be trusted or treated as evidence.
They also think that this deals a serious blow to the arguments from which
the cases are drawn. So, for example, Machery et al.’s criticism of Kripke is
not simply that, given the discovered cross-cultural intuitional variability,
intuitions about the Gödel Case should not be treated as evidence for what
is true in the case. The criticism is also that Kripke’s claim about the case,
18  Chapter 1

and so one of his arguments against the descriptivist theory of reference,

is undermined by their discovery. Their discovery shows, they think, that
Kripke and the rest of us should suspend judgment on whether “Gödel”
refers to Gödel in the case and hence should suspend judgment on whether
Kripke’s Gödel Case–based argument against descriptivism is sound.11
As I say, I take this to be part of the negative xphile critique, but it involves
an additional assumption about the structure of the kinds of arguments
that negative xphiles aim to criticize, one about which negative xphiles are
rarely explicit. This additional assumption is not captured simply by the
claim that the arguments in question rely on intuitions about the relevant
cases as evidence for what is true in those cases. After all, evidence comes in
amounts, often from a variety of sources, and in varying levels of quality.
Suppose one held that, while intuitions about the Gödel Case are evidence
for the truth about the case, they are only a little bit of not very good evi-
dence.12 On such a view, it will not follow from the variability results that
there is reason to suspend judgment on Kripke’s claim about the Gödel
Case or on the soundness of its containing argument. That will depend on
whether one thinks there is other, better evidence for these things. In my
example involving the thermometer and the Rolling Stones, we would be
right to suspend judgment concerning what temperature it is in the room
only if the thermometer’s readings are the only source of evidence concern-
ing the room’s temperature.
So it seems that in order to cook up the variability results into a genu-
ine challenge to the epistemic status of the arguments they target, nega-
tive xphiles must assume not just that intuitions about cases are treated by
philosophers as evidence but also that they are treated by philosophers as
essential evidence (where a kind of evidence is essential just in case conclu-
sions to which one is entitled on its basis are ones to which one would not
be entitled in its absence), perhaps even as the only evidence that might
entitle one to claims about what is true in the cases.
Strictly speaking, this is optional. Negative xphiles could say merely that
their results show that intuitions about cases are not evidence for the truth
about them, leaving it open that there is plenty of evidence for traditional
philosophers’ claims about the cases that is independent of intuition. How-
ever, this would be inconsistent with much of their rhetoric, and it would
make their critique far less interesting. If the critique is meant to show only
that a perhaps not very important source of evidence for the truth about
Varieties of Xphi  19

thought experiments and cases is untrustworthy, the right reaction is to

shrug our shoulders. So the form of the negative xphile critique is, I take it,
something like the following:13
The Form of the Negative Xphile Critique

1.  An argument in analytic philosophy, call it argument A, treats what is

true in a thought experiment or hypothetical case as a premise and treats
intuitions about this putative premise, p, as essential evidence for p’s truth.
2.  However, intuitions about p display truth-irrelevant variability.
3.  Hence, we are entitled neither to p, nor, consequently, to taking argu-
ment A as a sound argument for A’s conclusion.

I assume that most negative xphiles will say that several traditional argu-
ments serve as instances of “argument A,” Gettier’s anti-JTB argument,
Kripke’s antidescriptivist argument, and Lehrer’s antireliabilism argument
included. However, a question remains about how far the critique extends;
that is, there is a question about how much of that part of traditional
philosophy that is alleged to rely on intuitions about cases is called into
question by the discoveries xphiles have been making. Should we say, for
example, that the discovered variability poses a threat only to those spe-
cific arguments that are alleged to appeal to the specific intuitions that
have been tested (and about which truth-irrelevant variability has been dis-
covered)? Or are we, right now, in a position to say that there is a threat
to an entire philosophical practice (the supposed practice of appealing to
intuitions about cases) or that a whole source of essential philosophical evi-
dence (the deliverances of intuition) has been revealed not to be a genuine
source of evidence?
Negative xphiles tend to say that the critique has a broader target than
just the arguments (allegedly) based on the specific intuitions that have
been tested, and for which the relevant sort of variability has been discov-
ered. Swain et al. are admirably clear on this issue:
[We] found that intuitions about the Truetemp Case vary depending on whether,
and which, other cases are presented before it. Such variability calls into question
the legitimacy of using the intuitions generated by the Truetemp Case as evidence
against reliabilism. But it is unclear what about this case makes it susceptible to
these effects, which raises questions about the reliance on intuitions about thought-
experiments more generally, especially given that this is not the only case called into
question by empirical research. We take the growing body of empirical data impugn-
20  Chapter 1

ing various intuitions to present a real challenge for philosophers who wish to rely
on intuitions as evidence. (Swain et al. 2008, 153)14

The issue of just how much skepticism about the use of intuitions as evi-
dence in philosophy is warranted, given the negative xphile results, is an
interesting one, but, for my purposes, the critique need have no broader a tar-
get than just the arguments that are said to appeal to intuitions that negative
xphiles have actually tested. For I will argue that the negative xphile critique
fails to hit even the relatively narrow targets it needs to hit if it is to do any-
thing like call entire practices, methods, or sources of evidence into question.
The reason it fails to hit even the narrow targets is that, as a matter
of fact, the traditional philosophical arguments toward which negative
xphiles direct their critique do not, in any relevant sense, depend on treating
intuitions as evidence. So, obviously, even if the critique shows that there
is some sense in which some intuitions cannot be justifiably regarded as
evidence, that will not matter to whether the arguments are good, cogent,
compelling arguments for their conclusions.
For example, Lehrer’s (1990) argument against reliabilism, the focus of
Swain et al. 2008, does not treat intuitions about the Truetemp Case as evi-
dence—not, at any rate, in any sense would make Swain et al.’s apparent
discovery of truth-irrelevant variability with respect to such intuitions a
threat or challenge to the argument. Of course, Lehrer’s argument depends
on it being true that agents in Truetemp cases do not know the relevant
propositions. But that is a different matter. What is true in the cases is one
thing; whether people intuit what is true in the cases is another, completely
different thing. Furthermore, if one actually bothers to read Lehrer’s text,
one will see that he offers not just an argument against reliabilism but also a
(subsidiary) argument for the view that Mr. Truetemp does not know. There
simply is no appeal to intuitions as evidence in Lehrer’s presentation of the
original Truetemp Case.15
This is to jump ahead a little, since my intention in this section is mainly
to lay out the negative xphile critique in a perspicuous way. My full reply to
the critique will be developed as the book unfolds. For now, suffice it to say
that even if negative xphiles are right that some philosophical intuitions vary
along truth-irrelevant dimensions, this will matter to traditional philosophi-
cal practice only if that practice involves treating intuitions as evidence. But
negative xphiles are wrong—badly wrong—about the practice; it does not
treat intuitions as evidence in any sense that will sustain their critique.
Varieties of Xphi  21

1.4  Pragmatic Distortion

In fact, there is some reason to be skeptical even of the claim that nega-
tive xphiles have discovered any instances of truth-irrelevant variability in
intuitions in the first place. The reason is that, in a fair number of cases,
the questions they ask their subjects in their surveys, or the answer choices
they provide, are affected by a phenomenon I will call pragmatic distor-
tion. And where there is pragmatic distortion, drawing conclusions about
what intuitions subjects have in response to xphi survey questions is not
at all straightforward. This is a problem; for, as we have seen, negative xphi
involves attributing varying philosophical intuitions to various subject
groups. If, because of pragmatic distortion, negative xphiles cannot univo-
cally interpret their subjects’ responses, then their claim to have discovered
truth-irrelevant variability in those responses is undermined.
In the philosophy of language, it is standard to draw a distinction
between the semantic meaning of a sentence, S, and those meanings that
are not semantic (i.e., not encoded by the meanings of the words of S along
with the way these word-level meanings are “put together”) but are, or can
be, communicated by utterances (or inscriptions) of S. These other contents
or meanings are pragmatic meanings of utterances of S. Whether S is true
depends on whether its semantic meaning is true. The truth or falsity of a
merely pragmatic meaning does not have implications with respect to the
truth or falsity of the sentence, S, itself. A common example is irony. If I
utter the sentence “Frank is a genius” in a tone dripping with irony, I might
communicate to an audience that Frank is not a genius, but the sentence I
utter is not true if Frank is not a genius; it is true if (and only if) Frank is a
genius.
However, it is not always obvious when a meaning is merely a pragmatic
meaning and when it is instead semantic. Hence, sometimes people are
misled; they mistake the truth or falsity of a pragmatic meaning for the
truth or falsity of a sentence’s semantic meaning. And this has implica-
tions for what conclusions we can draw from the results of xphi intuition
surveys. If the questions asked in the surveys, or the answer choices offered,
give rise to pragmatic meanings, then, before we can conclude that there is
any genuine variability in intuitions, we must first rule out the possibility
that different subjects are reacting to different meanings, some to prag-
matic meanings, and some to semantic ones.
22  Chapter 1

An interesting line of thought concerning the experiments in Knobe

2003, for example, is that to describe an outcome as not intentionally pro-
duced by an agent, A, typically carries the pragmatic meaning (though does
not logically imply) that A is not responsible or blameworthy for produc-
ing the outcome.16 If this is right, then subjects presented with Knobe’s
Harm case might answer “yes” to the question, “Did the chairman harm
the environment intentionally?” only because they think that to answer
“no” would be to say that the chairman is not responsible or blamewor-
thy for harming the environment, something they wish to avoid. But now
compare the responses of subjects such as these with subjects who think
both that the chairman did not harm the environment intentionally, and
that he is nevertheless responsible/blameworthy for the harm. These sub-
jects answer “no” to Knobe’s survey question. So, on the surface, it seems
as though intuitions vary between the two groups with respect to the Harm
Case. At a deeper level, however, it seems, rather, that the two groups are
responding to different meanings of “The chairman did not harm the envi-
ronment intentionally,” the first to a pragmatic meaning regarding the
chairman’s responsibility/blameworthiness for the harm, and the second to
the sentence’s semantic meaning. Given this, it is at best unclear that the
groups’ responses to Knobe’s survey question indicate variability in intu-
itions about the Harm Case. But if it is not possible to tell from the survey
results alone whether there is variability in intuitions, then, of course, it
is impossible to tell from those results whether there is variability in intu-
itions along truth-irrelevant dimensions.17
In earlier work (Deutsch 2009), I argued that the results of Machery et
al.’s (2004) experiment on intuitions about reference are distorted by prag-
matic factors. A use of the sentence, “When John uses the name “Gödel”,
he is talking about the man who stole the proof,” arguably suggests, with-
out entailing, that John intends, when using “Gödel,” to refer to the man
who stole the proof. If that is right, then some subjects, when evaluating
that sentence for truth, might be misled if they think that John lacks the
relevant intention. Other subjects, on the other hand, might believe (rec-
ognize) that the sentence is true even if they share the belief that John
lacks that intention, for they might think that John is talking about who-
ever is named “Gödel,” and that person, they take it, is, in Machery et al.’s
vignette, the man who stole the proof. So here again it seems that what
might appear to be variable answers to a single question could instead be
Varieties of Xphi  23

consistent answers to different questions. Hence, whether Machery et al.’s

results reveal variability in peoples’ intuitions about reference is less than
perfectly clear.18
The two examples we have looked at so far involve what might be called
sentence-level pragmatic distortion. The survey questions or answer choices
carry pragmatic meanings that they would carry even outside of the context
of their use in the surveys. However, as Simon Cullen (2010) has reminded
us, pragmatic distortion can be generated by the context of the survey itself.
A good example of this, and one that Cullen discusses, is the case of Swain et
al. 2008. Remember that Swain et al.’s experimental setup involves present-
ing subjects with several different vignettes together, ordered in differing
ways. Cullen argues that presenting these vignettes together and in their
differing orders can suggest to subjects that the experimenters are implicitly
asking for comparisons. Subjects who get the Swain et al. 2008 Clear Knowl-
edge Case before the Swain et al. 2008 Truetemp Case might interpret the
question they are asked about the latter as asking for a comparison with
the former. Perhaps they understand the question along something like the
following lines: “Is Charles (from the Swain et al. 2008 Truetemp Case) a
less clear example of someone who knows something than Karen (from the
Swain et al. 2008 Clear Knowledge Case)?” Here there is no sentence-level
pragmatic meaning; rather, the pragmatic meaning (the comparative under-
standing of the question about Charles) is generated by the setup of the
survey along with various expectations and beliefs on the part of the subjects
concerning the experimenters’ purposes. In any case, clearly, someone who
understands the question in this comparative way might well answer dif-
ferently from someone who takes the question of whether Charles “really
knows” as the noncomparative question it appears to be on its face.
It is important to be clear about why this is problematic, given Swain et
al.’s negative xphi purposes. It is not that the kind of pragmatic distortion
generated by their experimental setup prevents them from drawing conclu-
sions about their subjects’ intuitions. Cullen sometimes puts it this way,
unfortunately, saying that there is a difference between survey responses
and intuitions. Xphiles can and have replied that there is no good reason to
deny that the survey responses are (verbalizations of) intuitions.19 Further-
more, there is nothing wrong with saying that they are intuitions about the
cases that generate them. But if a sentence, in a context, communicates two
or more meanings, then a subject’s assent or dissent to the sentence cannot
24  Chapter 1

be interpreted univocally; we cannot tell, in such a case, whether the assent

or dissent is assent or dissent to the sentence’s semantic meaning or to
one or another pragmatic meaning instead. We can assume that a subject’s
assent or dissent to a survey question expresses an intuition about the cases
the questions concern. But, in the presence of pragmatic distortion, we can-
not tell which intuitions these are.20
If negative xphiles do not know which intuitions their subjects are
expressing via their survey responses, then their inference to the conclu-
sion that there is systematic variability in those intuitions is difficult to jus-
tify. The phenomenon of pragmatic distortion thus threatens to block the
negative xphile critique at its very first step. However, although I have been
arguing in this section that pragmatic distortion poses a genuine problem
that xphiles should take steps to correct, there is a sense in which object-
ing to negative xphi solely on grounds to do with pragmatic distortion
misgauges the depth of the negative xphile critique. After all, experimen-
tal design can be improved on; pragmatic distortion can be lessened or
eliminated. And, to indulge in a little empirical speculation, my guess is
that negative xphiles are on to something; eventually, good experiments
will show that there is, indeed, truth-irrelevant variability in at least some
philosophical intuitions.21 We should ask, therefore, what this does, would,
or will mean for more traditional philosophical practice and argument. To
that end, I propose to put aside the objection stemming from the phe-
nomenon of pragmatic distortion. Supposing that there are the instances of
truth-irrelevant variability in intuitions that negative xphiles claim, what
follows? This will be the topic of the remaining chapters of this book.

1.5  The No-Theory Theory of Intuitions

I have spoken in this chapter of variability in intuitions or intuitive judg-

ments and of how that variability is used by negative xphiles to challenge
the ways in which philosophers have traditionally argued for their philo-
sophical views. And I have said that these topics will take center stage in the
rest of the book. And yet I have made no general claims about what makes
an intuition an intuition; I have offered no theory of intuitions—none, at
any rate, meant to reveal the nature or essence of intuitions.
In part, this is because I did not have to. In each of the cases I discussed, it
was clear what the intuitive judgment relative to the case under discussion
Varieties of Xphi  25

was. In the Gettier cases, it was, in the Weinberg et al. 2001 study, the judg-
ment that Bob really knows that Jill owns a Ford, and, in the Starmans and
Friedman 2012 study, it was the judgment that Peter really knows that there is
a watch on the table. In the Machery et al. 2004 study on Gödel cases, it was
the judgment that John uses “Gödel” to talk about the man who stole the proof.
In the Knobe 2003 study, it was the judgment that the chairman intentionally
helped/harmed the environment. And so on. And those are just a few of the
intuitive judgments that xphiles have tested.
Of course, many judgments of a similar kind are identifiable in tradi-
tional philosophical argument as well. Indeed, the examples that xphiles
have tested are, in most cases, drawn more or less directly from more tradi-
tional philosophical texts. The judgment that two agents might be microphys-
ically identical but instantiate different mental states; the judgment that there
are agents who are not free to do otherwise than perform a certain act, and yet are
morally responsible for that act; the judgment that it is not morally permissible
to push a fat man off a bridge to his death even if doing so will stop a speed-
ing trolley and save the lives of five people tied to its track—these are further
examples of judgments that philosophers working in various areas have
labeled as intuitions.22 Demonstrating these judgments is possible, and
knowing what is thereby demonstrated is sufficient for understanding and
assessing the claim that these judgments are used as evidence in traditional
philosophical argument; a theory of the nature of intuitions is simply not
needed. The term “these judgments” in the previous sentence has a rea-
sonably clear reference. Call those judgments “intuitions.” “Are intuitions
used as evidence?” or “What is the role of intuitions in philosophical argu-
ment?” now have reasonably clear senses and may be fruitfully discussed.
No theory of intuition-hood is required.
I do not mean to imply that there is nothing that unifies these examples
of intuitive judgments. They are all judgments about hypothetical cases or
thought experiments, for example. And they are all judgments to the effect
that something described in the case or thought experiment has or lacks
some philosophically significant property. That all of the example judg-
ments are of this kind provides a way of lengthening the short list I gave
above. If a judgment concerns a hypothetical case or thought experiment,
and concerns, more specifically, whether something described in the case or
thought experiment has or lacks some philosophically significant property,
then it is likely an intuition in the sense relevant to the debate over the role
26  Chapter 1

of intuitions in philosophy. In other words, there is a certain commonality

between the examples, one that can be used to identify further examples.
Perhaps, on some uses of “theory,” listing the examples and citing this
commonality suffices for having a theory of intuitions. However, philoso-
phers who theorize about intuitions usually have something more in mind.
In fact, they usually have not just something more, but also something
quite different in mind. Attempts at developing a theory of intuitions usu-
ally involve attempting to specify individually necessary and jointly suffi-
cient conditions on being an intuition. Such attempts are attempts to reveal
the nature or essence of intuitions, or to conceptually analyze intuitions. My
examples-plus-commonality account is very different from this kind of the-
ory of intuitions. Also, by wide consensus, being an intuition, in the sense
relevant to philosophy, has something to do with the psychological features
of the relevant judgments. That is, something is an intuition just in case it
has certain psychological features, and one cannot say what intuitions are,
in the sense of revealing their nature, without specifying these psychologi-
cal features. For example, it is sometimes said that intuitions are spontane-
ous or noninferential, where it is implied that these psychological features
are part of what makes the judgments that possess them intuitions. Here,
again, my account is different; I am agnostic about what psychological fea-
tures intuitions do or must possess, for the reason that nothing more than
agnosticism is called for. Most of the questions about the role of intuitions
in philosophy can be asked and answered without taking a stand on the
issue of to which psychological kinds intuitions belong.
Of course, the fact that a theory of the (psychological) nature of intu-
itions is not required for understanding the role of intuition in philosophi-
cal argument is hardly a reason, all on its own, not to provide one. Perhaps,
although having examples of the kinds of judgments people have in mind
when they speak of intuitions is, as I have suggested, sufficient for ask-
ing and answering the questions that concern me in this book, a fuller,
more complete story would include a full-blown conceptual analysis of
intuitions.
The trouble is that, like many other attempts at conceptual analysis, an
accurate analysis is turning out to be very difficult to come by. For every
proposed analysis of intuition, a host of problems arise, usually including
a variety of intuitive counterexamples. This is a familiar pattern in phi-
losophy, but, in this case, it holds a touch of irony, since xphile critics of
Varieties of Xphi  27

philosophy are dubious about the prospects for precisely this sort of “arm-
chair” conceptual analysis. One would hope that their criticism could be
made and understood without first engaging in a lot painstaking concep-
tual analysis concerning the nature of intuitions. As I have already said,
I think it can, and that is a good thing, since, as I have also already said,
conceptually analyzing intuitions is difficult.
Even simple, allegedly necessary properties, such as being spontaneous
or noninferential, are problematic. For example, it is hard to believe that
the issues over the argumentative role of intuitions would be settled in
one fell swoop if it turned out that virtually no philosophical judgments
are made spontaneously. Being noninferential seems an essential element
of nearly everyone’s account, but problems arise here too. John Rawls’s
method in political philosophy is supposed to depend on intuitions, for
example, but he explicitly says that the relevant judgments are our consid-
ered moral judgments. In addition, as Williamson and others have pointed
out, many ordinary perceptual judgments are noninferential, at least in the
sense of not being the products of conscious, explicit inference.
Or consider the disagreement between George Bealer, on the one hand,
and Timothy Williamson, Peter Van Inwagen and David Lewis, on the
other. Bealer (1996) proposes that an intuition is an “intellectual seeming,”
which he takes to be a sui generis mental state, not analyzable in more famil-
iar mental state terms, such as belief or judgment. Bealer likens intuitions
to “perceptual seemings,” in which it perceptually appears to one that p.
Such perceptual seemings are not amenable to analysis in terms of belief or
judgment, or dispositions to believe or judge. For one thing, such analyses
get their phenomenology wrong. There is something it is like to experience
the bent stick illusion, in which a straight stick submerged in water visu-
ally appears to be bent, something that cannot be fully captured in terms
of the perceiver’s beliefs or dispositions to believe. Likewise, according to
Bealer, we experience purely intellectual seemings—intuitions—in which
it appears to us that p, but not under any perceptual mode. But these, too,
cannot be analyzed in terms of beliefs or judgments. In addition, Bealer
thinks that philosophical intuitions present their contents as necessarily true.
Williamson, on the other hand, taking his cue from Lewis (1983) and
Van Inwagen (1997), who, in the former case, identifies intuitions with
beliefs, and, in the latter case, with beliefs or inclinations to believe, denies
that that he undergoes any Bealerian intellectual seemings and claims that,
28  Chapter 1

for his part, he is “aware of no intellectual seeming beyond [his] conscious

inclination to believe the Gettier proposition” (Williamson 2007, 217). He
goes on to say that paradigmatic cases, such as one’s judgments regard-
ing the Gettier cases, “provide no evidence of intellectual seemings, if the
phrase is supposed to mean anything more than intuitions in Lewis’s or
Van Inwagen’s sense” (ibid.). Furthermore, Williamson suggests that Beal-
er’s account faces counterexamples, since, as he argues, the negation of the
contingent, and not even seemingly necessary, proposition that there are
mountains is regarded as philosophically counterintuitive in certain meta-
physical discussions.
The overall dispute strikes me as very difficult to settle. Like Williamson,
when I introspect my judgments about Gettier cases, I find no evidence
for a special, sui generis intellectual seeming. On the other hand, the view
that intuitions are “just” beliefs or judgments, or inclinations to believe
or judge, seems incorrect, at least if the proposal is meant to imply that
believing (judging) that p or being inclined to believe (judge) that p suf-
fices for intuiting that p, for there are clear counterexamples to this suffi-
ciency claim.23 Also, although it strikes me as correct to deny, as Williamson
does, that intuitions must present their contents as necessary, his reason for
denying this does not seem especially good, for it is unclear whether truth-
fully claiming that a proposition is counterintuitive implies that the nega-
tion of that proposition is intuitive. Plausibly, it sometimes means, more
simply, that it conflicts with widely held views, which may or may not be
intuitive, such as the view that there are mountains.
However, sorting these issues out and arriving at a satisfactory general
theory of the nature of intuitions is an unnecessary detour, if one’s con-
cern is with the role of intuitions, and especially their evidential role, in
philosophical argument. We have examples of what are supposed to be the
contents of intuitions, such as the proposition that Gettier’s Smith charac-
ter does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his
pocket. Must we settle the question of whether this proposition is cognized
as a belief, “merely” or “just” a judgment, an inclination, or an intellectual
seeming before asking whether cognizing it in that way qualifies as evidence
for epistemological theorizing? Must we first decide whether all philosophi-
cal intuitions must present their contents as necessary before asking that?
No. The issue of the state’s role and evidential status can be discussed, and
Varieties of Xphi  29

perhaps settled, well in advance of settling these other questions concern-

ing categorization.
There is an additional reason for avoiding insisting that intuitions are,
say, beliefs, as opposed to intellectual seemings (or vice versa), in advance
of closely examining the question of whether various examples are, or
should be, treated as evidence in philosophical theorizing. For suppose that
we discover, in the course of this examination, that intuitions (in the exam-
ples-plus-commonality sense) are not, and need not be, treated as evidence
in philosophical theorizing. In that case, adopting an account that treats
intuitions as mere beliefs, judgments, or inclinations to believe or judge, à
la Williamson, Lewis, and Van Inwagen, is much more plausible. For, while
it would be very implausible to think that merely believing p, let alone
merely being inclined to believe p, qualifies as evidence for p itself, if there
is no constraint telling us to look for a mental kind such that p being the
content of instances of that kind could qualify as evidence for p itself, then
there is no bar to adopting an account of intuitions that takes them to be
mere beliefs or inclinations to believe. On the other hand, if, by examining
examples of some of the judgments some philosophers have labeled intui-
tive and their role in philosophical argument, we discover that philosophy
does depend on treating these judgments as evidence, then we would be
under some pressure to identify intuitions with some more suitable mental
kind (though, for my part, sui generis intellectual seemings do not seem any
more suitable, as possible evidence for their contents, than mere beliefs,
judgments, or inclinations).
So, developing a theory of the nature of intuitions is not necessary for
understanding their role in philosophical argument; the project of develop-
ing such a theory is fraught with difficulties anyway; and we have a positive
reason not to develop such a theory in advance of examining intuition’s
argumentative role. These add up to a reason to do no more by way of
identifying the relevant class of judgments than to point out several exam-
ples, as I have done, and trust that the reader will be able to recognize an
intuitive judgment when he or she encounters one. Since the relevant sub-
ject matter—intuitions—has been identified, but by means of something
that falls far short of a conceptual analysis of the kind that that is often
tried, I call this approach the no-theory theory of intuitions. It offers enough,
without offering too much, of an account of intuitions. It offers enough of
an account because it allows for fruitful discussion of the argumentative
30  Chapter 1

role of intuitions. It offers not too much of an account because it does not
invite the potentially endless cycle of counterexample-and-theory-revision
endemic to many attempts at conceptual analysis.
Since it has these virtues, I recommend it to all participants in the debate
over intuitions and their role. In particular, I think xphiles, especially nega-
tive xphiles, would be wise to adopt the no-theory theory. This is because
they have sometimes been accused, with some justification, of not speci-
fying a suitable or clear target for their critique. Sometimes, this accusa-
tion hinges on the fact that xphiles have adopted an analysis of intuitions
that is, according to the accusers, flawed. For example, many xphile papers
describe intuitive judgments as spontaneous or relatively spontaneous. If
one does not think that the speed with which one judges could possibly
matter very much to the sorts of judgments made in philosophy or to the
argumentative role these judgments play, then one will be inclined to shrug
off challenges in xphile papers in which this feature of intuitions is empha-
sized. That reaction is easily avoided by adopting the no-theory theory. The
same is true for disputes over whether intuitions are noninferential or non-
perceptual, involve intellectual seemings, present their contents as necessarily
true, are the result of conceptual competence, are fallible, or some combination
of these. Adopting the no-theory theory allows someone interested in the
role of intuitions in philosophy simply to sidestep these questions.
However, the no-theory theory does assume that we have examples of
intuitive judgments about which those party to the debate over their role
can agree; that is, these parties can agree that the examples are examples of
intuitive judgments. In a recent book arguing that philosophy does not rely
on intuitions, Herman Cappelen (2012) appears to deny this. He objects to
an attempt, by Anna-Sara Malmgren (2011), to identify intuitive judgments
by appeal to paradigmatic examples. In the relevant section of his book,
Cappelen discusses the issue of whether the ways in which philosophers
speak of intuitions amounts to speaking of some single, coherent, and uni-
fied kind, or whether, instead, philosophers’ use of “intuition” and cognate
terms is so all over the map that there is no one thing that philosophers
mean when engaging in “intuition-talk.” Cappelen makes a good case for
the latter; the way philosophers talk about intuitions is a terrific mess. And,
to some extent, Malmgren (2011) can be read as denying this.24 However,
on its own, the point about the disparateness, or perhaps even incoherence,
of “intuition talk” does not count against the possibility of identifying
Varieties of Xphi  31

examples of intuitive judgments. People can say all sorts of disparate and
even inconsistent things about what makes something an example of a
certain kind without that preventing the identification of things that are
supposed to be instances of the kind. And there are instances of judgments
that most philosophers will agree are supposed to count as intuitive. I listed
several such examples earlier, and Malmgren lists her own.
Cappelen (2012) raises two objections. First, he says that, in fact, there is
no agreement over the examples or paradigms. His main argument for this
is that, in recent methodological discussions of Gettier cases, disagreement
emerges over exactly what the intuitive judgment relative to the cases is
supposed to be. Since “the Gettier judgment” is supposed to be one of our
clearest paradigms, Cappelen concludes that there are no clear paradigms.
Second, Cappelen says that even if several paradigms can be adduced, with-
out some way to expand the list, the paradigms are useless.
The recent methodological discussions of Gettier cases involve an
attempt to generalize over specific judgments about specific Gettier cases.
Part of what is at issue in those discussions is whether there is some general
form of judgment such that each specific Gettier judgment counts as an
instance of the form.25 When I say Gettier judgments are examples of intui-
tive judgments, I mean the specific judgments about the specific cases. Pre-
sumably, this is also what Malmgren means (though she too tries to specify
the general form of Gettier judgments). There cannot be any serious dispute
over what, in Gettier’s original paper, the specific cases are, nor can there be
any serious dispute over which judgments philosophers think are the intui-
tive ones, relative to those cases. These specific judgments can be taken as
paradigms of the intuitive. So Cappellen’s first objection misses its mark.
Cappellen’s second objection is that identifying the paradigms is useless
if there is no way to expand the list, but that expanding the list cannot be
done except by appealing to the sorts of controversial features that show up
in conceptual analyses of intuition and over which philosophers disagree.
But useless for what? For Cappellen, it seems that identifying the paradigms
is useless if one wants to make sense of the ways in which philosophers talk
of intuitions. But, as I suggested above, identifying paradigmatic intuitive
judgments makes sense of intuition talk in the following minimal way: it
identifies the range of judgments about which philosophers make their dis-
parate and sometimes inconsistent claims. In any case, there does appear to
be a relatively uncontroversial commonality between these judgments, and
32  Chapter 1

so there is a way to “project out,” as Cappellen puts it, from the paradigms:
the examples are all judgments about hypothetical cases and thought
experiments. So Cappellen’s second objection also misses its mark.
The no-theory theory makes enough sense of intuition talk for the main
methodological question of this book—What is the argumentative role of
intuitions in philosophy?—to be asked, and its answer pursued. That is all
that I need or require. I am officially agnostic about whether being nonin-
ferential, for example, is necessary for being intuitive. For my purposes in
this book, questions such as this need not be settled. It is enough to have
examples of the sorts of judgments that many philosophers would agree
are intuitive, even though they might disagree over what it means, exactly,
to describe them as such. One caveat: at certain points in the book, it will
be necessary to consider whether certain assumptions about the nature of
intuitions are being made by others in order to argue for this or that conclu-
sion about their argumentative role in philosophy. For example, as I will
argue later, part of the force of the negative xphi critique derives from the
assumption that traditional philosophy treats intuitive judgments as nonin-
ferentially justified. When I use “intuitive” or “intuitive judgment” in a way
that goes beyond the sense given to these terms by the no-theory theory, I
will flag these uses and explain the rationale behind them.
2  Intuitions and Counterexamples

2.1 Introduction
In the previous chapter, I argued that the phenomenon of pragmatic dis-
tortion casts some doubt on whether xphiles have discovered genuine
instances of truth-irrelevant variability in philosophical intuitions. How-
ever, even if empirical research has, so far, failed to properly confirm it, it
is, I think, a fair bet that better methods and more research will, at the end
of the day, reveal that intuitions about a variety of philosophical cases and
thought experiments really do differ along truth-irrelevant demographic
lines. Although I am skeptical of its philosophical significance, even I am
prepared to admit that we have, right now, fairly conclusive evidence that
people’s intuitions about the reference of proper names are culturally vari-
able. And I think that the evidence for saying that there is such variability
in intuitions about Gettier cases is strong, though not quite conclusive. But
I am also willing to bet that the evidence will grow stronger in the near
future.
The interesting question to ask is what will or should follow for philoso-
phy and its methods as the evidence for truth-irrelevant variability in intu-
itions mounts. As I described their position in chapter 1, negative xphiles
think that if there is such variability (and they think there is strong evidence
for such variability already) then that poses a serious challenge to some of
the methods and arguments of contemporary analytic philosophy. They
think that the variability results show that we should suspend judgment on
some of the claims made in contemporary analytic philosophy concerning
what is true in a variety of thought experiments and hypothetical cases.
This, you will recall, is the conclusion of what I described in the last chapter
as the negative xphi critique. I have said that I think the conclusion of the
negative xphi critique is mistaken; now it is time to begin arguing for this.
34  Chapter 2

There is a tendency among negative xphiles to describe their position

in overly general and ambiguous ways. One hears that the challenge is to
the “use of intuitions” in philosophy, or to philosophers “relying on intu-
itions.” But the negative xphi critique is designed to challenge intuitions of
a certain special sort, namely intuitions about (a somewhat limited range of)
thought experiments and cases, and the challenge is raised against the view
that intuitions of this sort are treated as evidence for, specifically, the truth of
the contents of those very intuitions. Given this specificity, it is misleading to
describe negative xphi as raising a challenge against philosophy’s (alleged)
reliance on, or use of, intuitions. Even if the critique can be extended in the
way I described in chapter 1, so as to call into question the entire (alleged)
practice of relying on intuitions about thought experiments and cases, that
still falls short of challenging the practice of relying on or using intuitions,
since, for one thing, there might be other sorts of intuitions relied on in
that practice—intuitions about general claims or principles, for example.
For another thing, there might be ways of relying on an intuition, even
when the intuition in question is one concerning a philosophical thought
experiment or case, that do not involve treating the intuition as evidence
for its own content.
Formulating the claim they mean to criticize in overly general and
ambiguous ways can make it appear as though negative xphiles have at
least identified a plausible target—a true claim about a practice in which
philosophers actually engage. Indeed, as I will explain below, I think that
there is a true interpretation of the following claim, which I will label the
evidence claim (about intuitions) (EC):

(EC)  Many philosophical arguments depend on treating intuitions about

thought experiments and cases as evidence.

However, in the only and quite specific sense that negative xphiles can
intend (EC), given what their variability results are results about, (EC) is
not true; that is, in that specific sense, it is not true that many philosophical
arguments depend on treating intuitions about thought experiments and
cases as evidence.
In my experience, saying this, even in the qualified and careful way I just
have, comes as a surprise, and not just to xphiles. The myth of the intuitive
is now an entrenched metaphilosophical view, so much so that “philoso-
phers treat intuitions as evidence” or “arguments in philosophy rely on
Intuitions and Counterexamples  35

intuitions as evidence” strikes many philosophers as obviously true. But,

properly understood—that is, in the way that negative xphiles must mean
them—such claims are unsurprisingly false. The trick is arriving at a proper
understanding of them. Several things stand in the way of this, including:

(i)  A rarely acknowledged ambiguity in “intuition.”

(ii)  Insufficient attention paid to the ways in which analytic philosophers
actually argue.
(iii) Metaphilosophical work that mischaracterizes or obscures analytic
philosophy and its methods.
(iv)  Lack of clarity about what counterexamples are.

What follows, in subsequent sections of the chapter, is an attempt to clear

these obstacles away.

2.2  The State/Content Ambiguity of “Intuition”

Many philosophers, analytic and xphile alike, simply assume that (EC) is
univocally true. Some would go so far as to say that, ultimately, all philo-
sophical arguments depend on treating intuitions as evidence, and that
there is no troubling or suspicious ambiguity in this assumption. I am going
to argue that these ideas are mistaken, but there is a problem with deny-
ing (EC) outright. The problem is that there is a state/content ambiguity in
“intuition” that makes (EC) itself ambiguous. On one reading, the claim is
true. On the reading xphiles intend, however, it is false.
The negative xphi critique is unfairly bolstered by the fact that there is a
true reading of (EC). Since it has a true reading, it can be difficult to see how
one might object to the negative xphi critique by denying it. I think this
goes a long way toward explaining why the line against negative xphi that I
will develop here has been tried only rarely.1 For someone who has the true
reading in mind, the claim that “Many philosophical arguments depend on
treating intuitions as evidence”—(EC), that is—seems unassailable.
What are the true and false readings, and on what grounds do I base my
claim that the true reading is true and the false reading false? Let me work
up to the answer by elaborating on the view that there is a state/content
ambiguity in “intuition.”
Other related terms display a similar ambiguity. “Judgment,” for exam-
ple, may refer to the act or state of judging, or to the (propositional) content
36  Chapter 2

of such an act or state. “Belief” is ambiguous in this way too. It may refer
to a certain kind of psychological state, or to the content of a state of that
type. The state/content ambiguity of such terms affects the interpretation
of the phrases and sentences in which they appear. “The judgment that 2
+ 1 = 3” may be used to denote the act of judging that 2 +1 = 3, or the con-
tent of that act, namely that 2 + 1 = 3. “The belief that there is life on other
planets” picks out a “propositional attitude” of a specific type, but it can
also be used to speak directly about the content of the attitude, as in “The
belief that there is life on other planets is likely false,” where the intended
meaning is simply that it is likely false that there is life on other planets.
If “intuition” is ambiguous in this way, and can be used on some occa-
sions to refer to the act or state of intuiting and on others to the content
of such an act or state, then phrases and sentences involving the term will
inherit this ambiguity. “The intuition that p,” for example, may be used to
refer the act or state of intuiting that p, or simply to p. William Lycan (1988)
draws a distinction between intuitings, conceived as psychological events of
a certain type, namely those we describe as “intuiting that something is so,”
and intuiteds, conceived as the propositional contents of these psychologi-
cal events. “Intuition,” Lycan says, is ambiguous between an understanding
that takes it to refer to an intuiting and one that takes it to refer to an intu-
ited.2 I agree; there is a clear ambiguity here. Given its existence, we must
take care in evaluating claims about the role of intuitions in philosophy.
Doing so will require carefully disambiguating their state versus content
(intuiting versus intuited) interpretations.
Take the case of (EC): “Many philosophical arguments treat intuitions
as evidence.” One can understand this as asserting either (EC1) or (EC2):

(EC1)  Many philosophical arguments treat the fact that certain contents
are intuitive as evidence for those very contents.

(EC2)  Many philosophical arguments treat the contents of certain intu-

itions as evidence for or against other contents (e.g., the contents of more
general principles).

(EC1) involves the “state” reading of “intuition.” According to (EC1), it is

the fact that certain contents are intuitive—that they are the contents of a
special type of psychological state—which is said to be evidentially impor-
tant in many philosophical arguments. Given my adoption of what I called
in chapter 1 the “no-theory theory of intuitions,” I am agnostic about the
Intuitions and Counterexamples  37

nature of this psychological state, and so agnostic about what intuitiveness

amounts to. But the point I am now making does not require that I say
what intuitiveness amount to; the point is just that (EC1) is a reading of
“Many arguments in philosophy treat intuitions as evidence” according to
which intuitiveness, whatever it is, is held to be evidentially relevant.
(EC2), on the other hand, involving the “content” reading of “intu-
ition,” does not say that philosophical arguments treat the fact that cer-
tain contents are intuitive as having evidential weight. Rather, (EC2) says
merely that many philosophical arguments depend on treating the contents
of intuitions—the propositions intuited—as having evidential bearing on
the contents of related claims and principles. Again, I should repeat that I
am officially agnostic about what it means, precisely, to say that these con-
tents are contents of intuitions. But my agnosticism does not interfere with
the point I am now making, which is simply that there is a reading of (EC)
according to which the claim it makes is that certain contents—which hap-
pen to be widely regarded, at least among philosophers, as intuitive—are
treated as evidence for or against other contents.
To the extent that we can get a grip on what it means to be intuitive sim-
ply by pointing to paradigmatic examples of propositions widely regarded as
intuitive (as the no-theory theory of intuitions recommends), (EC2) really
does seem an unassailable assumption concerning philosophical method.
In any case, I certainly do not mean to deny (EC2) when denying “Many
philosophical arguments depend on treating intuitions as evidence.” Indeed,
(EC2) is, in my view, the main ground of the appeal of the myth of the intui-
tive; philosophers are attracted to the view that arguments in philosophy
treat intuitions as evidence because there is a fairly clear sense in which they
do treat intuitions as evidence, namely the sense given by (EC2).3
We see confirmation of (EC2) in nearly every case in which a philoso-
pher constructs a counterexample to a generalization or theory. In such a
case, the argument depends on one content, the proposition describing
the counterexample, being treated as evidence against a related content,
the proposition describing the generalization or theory. And the counterex-
ample is often, at least to some people,4 an intuitive counterexample. That
is, the proposition describing the counterexample is often the content of
at least some people’s intuitions. So, (EC2) is fine; philosophical arguments
do very often depend on treating the contents of intuitions as evidence for
or against other contents.5
38  Chapter 2

When I deny that philosophical arguments treat intuitions as evidence,

I mean to deny (EC1), not (EC2). According to me, very few philosophi-
cal arguments treat the fact that p is intuitive as evidence for p itself. In
fact, I do not know of a single philosophical argument in which it is clear
that there is an explicit or implicit appeal to the intuitiveness of p as evi-
dence for p itself. If I am right, any challenge to philosophical method
that involves assuming (EC1) can be blocked. This is how I think the nega-
tive xphi critique can be answered. Negative xphile critics of philosophical
method wrongly assume (EC1).6
The discussion so far has been somewhat abstract. My reply to negative
xphi comes out most clearly against a backdrop of specific examples, and
I propose, in the next section, to make things more concrete by returning
to two of the philosophical arguments considered earlier: Gettier’s (1963)
argument against the JTB theory of knowledge and Kripke’s (1980) argu-
ment against the descriptivist theory of reference for proper names. Both
are paradigmatic cases of arguing by counterexample in recent analytic phi-
losophy, and I will argue that it is clear, in both cases, that the arguments do
not treat intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence, and thus that the nega-
tive xphi challenge to these arguments, and to philosophy more generally,
can be met. Before moving on, however, I should address, in a preliminary
way, the fact that (EC1) appears to be accepted not just by xphiles, but by a
fair number of more traditional, analytic philosophers as well.
For example, Joel Pust (2000) has written an entire book that is, in
essence, a defense of (EC1). And Pust is not alone. Alvin Goldman (1986,
2007) endorses a similar metaphilosophy, and George Bealer (1998),7 Lau-
rence Bonjour (1985), and Frank Jackson (2000) have all voiced support
for something quite close to (EC1). Later, in section 2.4, I will examine the
metaphilosophies of some of these philosophers in more detail. For now,
suffice it to say that (EC1) is not an unpopular metaphilosophical view;
indeed, a good handful of philosophers explicitly accept it.
In addition, there are more than a few hints that many philosophers
would endorse (EC1), even if they never explicitly do. Support for this
assessment comes from the frequency with which one hears, in philosophy,
that this or that generalization or theory must be rejected, or at least viewed
with some suspicion, if it has “counterintuitive consequences.” It is dif-
ficult to understand this as anything other than an endorsement of (EC1):
it is bad for a theory to have counterintuitive consequences, presumably
Intuitions and Counterexamples  39

because the fact that the consequence is counterintuitive is evidence against

its (i.e., that very consequence’s) truth, and, hence, against the theory from
which it follows.8
Despite explicit endorsement of (EC1) in various metaphilosophies, I
reject it. I reject it, despite its endorsement by others, for the simple reason
that it is one thing to say that philosophical arguments treat intuitions as
(EC1) says they are treated, but quite another for intuitions actually to be
treated in that way. In other words, some philosophers are methodologi-
cally confused. Sometimes they are confused to the point that, even when
explicitly addressing the question of how philosophy is done, they mis-
characterize their own methods. I think Pust, Goldman, Bealer, Bonjour,
and Jackson are all guilty of this confusion.
An appropriate test of this claim would be to look at the ways in which
philosophers actually argue. Does (EC1) correctly characterize their argu-
ments? Do arguments in philosophy depend on treating intuitions in the
“state” sense as evidence? By closely examining two famous (and represen-
tative) arguments in analytic philosophy, Gettier’s argument against the
JTB theory of knowledge and Kripke’s argument against the descriptivist
theory of reference for proper names, I argue in the next section that the
answer is “no.” (EC1) mischaracterizes the role of intuitions in philosophy.

2.3  Two Case Studies: Gettier and Kripke

There are several reasons for taking Gettier and Kripke as case studies. First,
as we saw in chapter 1, both Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory of
knowledge and Kripke’s argument against the descriptivist theory of refer-
ence for proper names are targets of recent xphi critiques. Second, although
they concern issues in separate areas of philosophy (Gettier’s argument is
epistemological while Kripke’s is semantic), both arguments share a struc-
ture, a structure they in turn share with an enormous range of other argu-
ments in every branch of analytic philosophy. This shared argumentative
structure allows methodological conclusions about Gettier’s and Kripke’s
arguments to generalize to arguments in metaphysics, ethics, action theory,
philosophy of mind, and so on. Third, it is quite common to hear mislead-
ing claims about the role that intuitions play in Gettier’s and Kripke’s argu-
ments. If it can be shown how, in the cases of these arguments specifically,
the claims are misleading, that ought to go a long way toward convincing
40  Chapter 2

philosophers that similar claims about other arguments in philosophy are

likewise misleading.
In chapter 1, I argued that considerations to do with pragmatic distortion
suggest that Weinberg et al.’s (2001) study of Gettier case intuitions does
not establish that there are significant cross-cultural differences between
Westerners and East Asians with respect to intuitions about Gettier cases. I
also argued that data from Machery et al.’s (2004) study on intuitions about
reference fail to reveal that East Asians are more attracted than Westerners
to a descriptivist theory of reference for proper names. I will argue in this
section that even if these earlier claims are wrong, and there are, indeed,
significant cross-cultural differences of the sort Weinberg et al. and Mach-
ery et al. say there are, this fact has no bearing on the quality or cogency
of Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments. To assume otherwise is to assume,
wrongly, that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments are of the (EC1) type. It is to
think, mistakenly, that the arguments depend on treating intuitions in the
“state” sense as evidence.
Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments are both putative refutations-by-coun-
terexample. I will argue that these refutations succeed if the counterexam-
ples they present are genuine. Whether the counterexamples are intuitive,
and for whom, is irrelevant to their argumentative role. The main point of
the present section will be that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments do not, and
do not need to, appeal to the intuitiveness of the counterexamples they
involve; the arguments would (or could) be successful refutations, even
if the counterexamples were highly counterintuitive, or if intuition were
agnostic with respect to them. As a matter of fact, they are intuitive coun-
terexamples for at least many Western readers, but this is not one of their
logically essential features.
Though the main claim will be that appeals to the intuitiveness of the
Gettier’s and Kripke’s counterexamples are not required, I also think that
textual evidence supports the important point that neither Gettier nor
Kripke says or suggests that they themselves take the intuitiveness of their
counterexamples to be necessary to their refutations. In other words, close
attention to how Gettier and Kripke actually argue fails to reveal any explicit
or implicit commitment to using intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence.
My focus will be on the original texts in which Gettier’s and Kripke’s refu-
tations appear. Later in the book, I will consider several other thought exper-
iments and cases, and will focus there, too, on the original presentations
Intuitions and Counterexamples  41

made by their inventors or discoverers. One might object that this focus is
too narrow; if we want an accurate picture of philosophical practice as a
whole, should not the scope of the investigation be broader? Perhaps it is
proper to include textbook or “pop philosophy” presentations of famous
philosophical thought experiments, or even the ways in which philoso-
phers render famous cases in informal conversations with other philoso-
phers at the dinner table or the bar.
This objection strikes me as wrongheaded. The important methodologi-
cal question is: What methods are employed by good philosophers, ones
who, by fairly wide consensus, have made interesting and important philo-
sophical progress, increasing, in a significant way, our body of philosophical
knowledge? Textbooks and works of pop philosophy are mostly rehashings
of much harder work already done by others. Philosophical conversations
at the bar often rely on thumbnail sketches and various other shortcuts that
do not reflect core methods of the discipline. The core methods of the dis-
cipline, and of any discipline, are reflected most clearly by the most clearly
successful examples of discovery and progress in the discipline. A focus on
such examples in philosophy is thus entirely appropriate.
In any case, surely the best place to look for insight into the function-
ing of specific thought experiments or counterexamples is to the original
presentations. Could there be a better source for insight into how Gettier
refuted the JTB theory of knowledge, or Kripke refuted the descriptivist the-
ory of reference for proper names, than Gettier’s and Kripke’s own work on
the subject? The idea that pop philosophy or textbook renditions deserve
equal consideration seems misguided; whether these sorts of renditions
accurately reveal the methods Gettier and Kripke employ depends on what
methods Gettier and Kripke employed, as revealed in their own work.9
Before moving on, it will be useful to remind ourselves of Gettier’s and
Kripke’s targets. What are they arguing against? Gettier targets the JTB
theory of knowledge, one consequence of which is the generalization that
every justified true believer is a knower. Though this is strictly a conse-
quence of the theory, not the theory itself, it will be convenient to label
it simply as the “JTB theory of knowledge.” Somewhat more formally, the
targeted generalization is the following:

The JTB Theory of Knowledge

For every subject, S, and every proposition, p, if S justifiably and truly be-
lieves that p, then S knows that p.
42  Chapter 2

Kripke’s argument targets a generalization implied by the descriptivist the-

ory of reference. In Kripke’s case, the targeted generalization is that a proper
name refers to the object satisfying the definite descriptions users of the
name associate with it. Again, it will be convenient to label what is strictly a
consequence of descriptivism, not descriptivism itself, as the “descriptivist
theory of reference.” More formally, the generalization targeted by Kripke’s
argument is the following:

The Descriptivist Theory of Reference

For every proper name, N, and every object, x, if users of N associate definite
descriptions with N that are satisfied by x, then N refers to x.

The question now is: How do Gettier and Kripke argue against these gener-
alizations? An answer that no philosopher would dispute is that they do so
by presenting (alleged) counterexamples, in the form of hypothetical cases,
to the generalizations.10 In fact, Gettier and Kripke each present a variety of
counterexamples against his respective target. I will focus here on just one
counterexample from Kripke, his famous Gödel Case, which will be familiar
from chapter 1’s discussion of Machery et al. 2004, and one counterex-
ample from Gettier. Since the way in which philosophers actually argue, as
opposed to how various commentators take them to argue, matters to my
criticism of negative xphi, I will focus on one of Gettier’s original (1963)
cases, the well-known 10 Coins Case (presented in the introduction), not
the variation on Lehrer’s (1965) Nogot/Ford Case used in the study reported
in Weinberg et al. 2001.
Though it is uncontroversial that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments
involve counterexamples based on hypothetical cases, such as the Gödel
and 10 Coins cases, it strikes me as very poorly understood just what is and
is not involved in presenting this sort of counterexample to a philosophical
theory or generalization. It is common, even outside of experimental phi-
losophy circles, to misrepresent putative refutations-by-counterexample as
depending on the intuitiveness of the counterexample, and thus as depend-
ing on intuitions in the (EC1) “state” sense.
In the hope of correcting this common misrepresentation, I will first, in
section 2.3.1, quote Gettier and Kripke at length, presenting their counter-
examples in their own words. This will show that there is nothing in their
presentations to suggest that either Gettier or Kripke appeals to intuitions
in the “state” sense as crucial evidence for any of their arguments’ premises.
Then, in section 2.3.2, I will describe how commentators on Gettier and
Intuitions and Counterexamples  43

Kripke have nevertheless conveyed the impression that their arguments do

depend on intuitions in that sense. Section 2.3.3 briefly takes up the ques-
tion of whether the fact that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments rely on purely
hypothetical cases is methodologically significant. In section 2.4, I connect
the misunderstandings of Gettier and Kripke described in earlier sections
to more general misunderstandings of philosophical methodology, particu-
larly concerning the nature and functioning of counterexamples.

2.3.1  The 10 Coins Case and the Gödel Case

Gettier 1963 presents two counterexamples to the JTB theory of knowledge.
Both are quite well known, and I have already presented the 10 Coins Case
in the introduction. However, since I am concerned, now, to show that
Gettier himself does not say or suggest that his anti-JTB arguments are of
the (EC1) type, it will be useful to rehearse the case again, just as Gettier
presents it. This repeats the long quotation from Gettier 1963 that appeared
in the introduction; however, given the passage’s importance, I hope the
reader will forgive its repetition here:
The 10 Coins Case

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith
has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:

d.  Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him
that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins
in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:

e.  The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the
grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justi-
fied in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the
job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposi-
tion (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false.
In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes
that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally
clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the num-
ber of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in
Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket,
whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. (Gettier 1963, 122)

Notice that there is no mention of intuitions or the intuitiveness of any proposi-

tion in Gettier’s presentation.11
44  Chapter 2

Let us now turn quickly to one of Kripke’s counterexamples to the

descriptivist theory of reference. Kripke 1980 contains many appeals to
hypothetical cases, though only a handful of these are intended as direct
counterexamples specifically to the descriptivist theory of reference for
proper names.12 One of these is the Gödel Case, presented below, just as
Kripke (1980) presents it. Again, my aim is show that the counterexample,
as presented by its discoverer, does not rely on psychological facts about
what is intuitive. Here is the case:
The Gödel Case

Let’s take a simple case. In the case of Gödel that’s practically the only thing many
people have heard about him—that he discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.
Does it follow that whoever discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is the refer-
ent of “Gödel”?
Imagine the following blatantly fictional situation. (I hope Professor Gödel is
not present.) Suppose that Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man
named “Schmidt,” whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstanc-
es many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow
got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel. On the view in
question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name “Gödel,” he really means to
refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the unique person satisfying the description,
“the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.” Of course you might
try changing it to “the man who published the discovery of the incompleteness of
arithmetic.” By changing the story a little further one can make even this formula-
tion false. Anyway, most people might not even know whether the thing was pub-
lished or got around by word of mouth. Let’s stick to “the man who discovered the
incompleteness of arithmetic.” So, since the man who discovered the incomplete-
ness of arithmetic is in fact Schmidt, we, when we talk about “Gödel,” are in fact
always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not. We simply are not.
(Kripke 1980, 83–84)

Note that, as was true in Gettier’s presentation, in Kripke’s too, there is no

mention of intuitions.
So neither Gettier nor Kripke explicitly appeals to intuitions. What do
they do instead? Gettier, on the question of whether his protagonist, Smith,
knows (e) that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, says
that, although it is clear that Smith justifiably and truly believes (e), “it is
equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true” (Gettier 1963, 122;
emphasis in original). He does not say that it is intuitive that Smith does not
know; he says straight out, and emphatically, that Smith does not know.
Likewise, Kripke insists that, in the circumstances he imagines in his story
Intuitions and Counterexamples  45

about Gödel and Schmidt, we “simply are not” referring to Schmidt when
we use the name “Gödel” (Kripke 1980, 83). It is not that it is intuitive
that we are not talking about Schmidt; it is that we are not talking about
Schmidt, period.13 Facts about which propositions are intuitive appear to
play no role at all. Instead, in both cases, it looks as though Gettier and
Kripke are appealing to facts that are not purely psychological—the fact
that Smith does not know (e) in Gettier’s case, and the fact that we simply
are not referring to Schmidt when using “Gödel” in Kripke’s case—in order
to refute their target theories.
Looking back at the original presentations makes it puzzling how one
could be left with the impression that Gettier and Kripke adopt a method
that clearly treats intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence. Not once does
either say that he is treating the intuitiveness of his counterexample as evi-
dence for the counterexample’s truth. In fact, the question of (evidence for)
the truth of the counterexamples, to the extent that it occurs to Gettier and
Kripke, does not seem to strike them as something that might be seriously
disputed. The original presentations rather make it appear as though each
argument is simply the rejection of a generalization of the form “All Fs are
Gs” on the basis of a counterexample of the form “There is an F that is not
a G.” There is certainly no explicit appeal to a premise of the form “It is
intuitive that there is an F that is not a G.” So why believe, as perhaps some
xphiles do, that the best representation of the arguments’ form requires
such a premise?14
Perhaps the answer is that representing the arguments that way would at
least make sense of xphi methodology. For if Gettier or Kripke had appealed
to the intuitiveness of the counterexamples as evidence that the counter-
examples are genuine, that would provide the xphi intuition surveys with
their point. For then xphiles could say they are merely testing a hypothesis
that Gettier and Kripke themselves take to be essential to their refutations.
It would make sense to find out whether the counterexamples really are
intuitive, if Gettier or Kripke had said that they must be. But, in fact, nei-
ther says anything of the kind.

2.3.2  Misrepresenting Gettier and Kripke

Despite textual evidence to the contrary, the belief that Gettier’s and
Kripke’s arguments treat intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence persists.
For example, many philosophers would accept (G) as a straightforward
46  Chapter 2

characterization of the way in which Gettier is supposed to have refuted

the JTB theory:

(G)  Gettier refuted the JTB theory by presenting cases in which a subject
has a justified true belief that p, but it is intuitive (or intuitively true) that the
subject does not know that p.

And many philosophers would accept (K) as a straightforward characteriza-

tion of the way in which Kripke is supposed to have refuted the descriptivist
theory of reference:

(K)  Kripke refuted the descriptivist theory by presenting cases in which it

is intuitive (or intuitively true) that a speaker uses a proper name, n, to refer
to x even though the definite descriptions the speaker associates with n are
not satisfied by x.

However, someone cognizant of the state/content ambiguity of “intu-

ition,” and who has examined the original presentations of the 10 Coins
and Gödel cases, ought to be leery of characterizations such as these. To the
extent that (G) suggests that Gettier’s anti-JTB argument requires that we
find it intuitive that the agents in his cases fail to know despite justifiably
and truly believing, the characterization misrepresents Gettier’s argument.
Similarly, to the extent that (K) suggests that Kripke has refuted descriptiv-
ism only if his cases are intuitive counterexamples to descriptivism, it too
is a misrepresentation. Gettier refuted the JTB theory, if he did, and Kripke
refuted descriptivism, if he did, by presenting counterexamples, full stop.
Whether these counterexamples are intuitive for anyone is a separate, and
purely psychological, matter.
As an example of a (G)-like mischaracterization of Gettier, consider
George Bealer’s (1996) description of Gettier versus the JTB theory:
At one time many people accepted the doctrine that knowledge is justified true belief.
But now we have good evidence to the contrary, namely our intuitions that situations
like those described in the Gettier literature are possible and that the relevant people
in those situations would not know the things at issue. (1996, 122; emphasis added)

Like (G), Bealer’s description strongly suggests (though does not come right
out and say) that a condition on Gettier having refuted the JTB theory is
that “our intuitions” are a certain way. This is wrong. If Gettier provided
evidence against the JTB theory, this evidence is that “situations like those
described in the Gettier literature are possible and that the relevant people in
Intuitions and Counterexamples  47

those situations would not know the things at issue” (1996, 122). Whether
we have intuitions to that effect simply does not matter to whether Get-
tier’s counterexamples are genuine.
As an example of a (K)-like misrepresentation of Kripke, consider Mach-
ery et al.’s (2004) description of Kripke versus the descriptivist theory of
reference:
Despite numerous disagreements, philosophers agree that theories of reference for
names have to be consistent with our intuitions regarding who or what the names
refer to. Thus, the common wisdom in philosophy is that Kripke (1972/1980) has
refuted the traditional descriptivist theories of reference by producing some famous
stories which elicit intuitions that are inconsistent with these theories. (2004, B2; empha-
sis added)

As with Bealer’s description of Gettier, Machery et al.’s description of Kripke

fairly strongly suggests that Kripke’s method involves appeal to intuitions
in the “state” sense.15 And, again, the suggestion is incorrect. Kripke’s coun-
terexamples do not depend on whether they “elicit” anyone’s intuitions.
He has refuted the descriptivist theory of reference just in case his coun-
terexamples involve proper names that refer to objects other than those
picked out by the definite descriptions users associate with the names.
Whether these counterexamples are intuitive is a separate, psychological
question that has no bearing on whether they are genuine refutations of
descriptivism.
In the previous section, I argued that, in their presentations of the 10
Coins and Gödel cases, neither Gettier nor Kripke appeal to facts about
what is intuitive. I am now arguing that this is just as it should be. The
psychological question of whether the counterexamples are intuitive is
independent of the logical question of whether the examples are counterex-
amples. And it is only this logical question that is relevant to whether Get-
tier and Kripke succeed, with the 10 Coins and Gödel cases, in refuting the
JTB theory of knowledge and the descriptivist theory of reference.
I have several times contrasted intuitive counterexamples with genuine
ones. The distinction is helpful for understanding my complaint against
negative xphi. It is precisely failing to keep questions about whether an
alleged counterexample is genuine separate from questions about whether
an alleged counterexample is intuitive that allows negative xphi to gain a
foothold. Xphiles such as Machery et al. (2004) and Weinberg et al. (2001)
think they have solid evidence that what is intuitive to Westerners is not
48  Chapter 2

intuitive to other cultural groups. This leads them to suppose that they
have evidence that, even by philosophy’s own standards, Gettier’s alleged
counterexamples to the JTB theory of knowledge, and Kripke’s alleged
counterexamples to the descriptivist theory of reference, are not genuine.
But this mistakes intuitiveness for genuineness.
By “genuine counterexample,” I mean simply a possible case that falsi-
fies the generalization or theory in question. If Gettier has discovered pos-
sible cases of agents who justifiably and truly believe p, but fail to know p,
such as the Smith character from the 10 Coins Case, then he has refuted
the JTB theory of knowledge. Likewise, if Kripke has discovered possible
cases in which a name refers to x even though the definite descriptions
users associate with the name are not satisfied by x, as appears to be true in
his Gödel Case, then Kripke has refuted the descriptivist theory of reference
for proper names. Some people, having read and been convinced by Get-
tier’s and Kripke’s writings, have what they would describe as “intuitions”
whose contents are precisely the propositions that Gettier and Kripke cite
against their targets—intuitions that, if true, imply the falsity of the JTB
theory of knowledge and the descriptivist theory of reference. Thus, there
are, for such people at any rate, “intuitive counterexamples” to these theo-
ries. But the existence of such people and their intuitions is independent
of the existence of genuine counterexamples to the theories. There could
be genuine counterexamples, even if no proposition qualified as an intui-
tive counterexample.16 And, of course, there could be intuitive propositions
that, if true, would falsify a theory, but which are not true and, hence, not
genuine counterexamples to the theory.
When discussing the 10 Coins and Gödel cases above, I urged that, to
the extent that there is a method common to the way in which Gettier
and Kripke argue against their targets, the method is simply that of reject-
ing a generalization of the form “All Fs are Gs,” on the grounds that there
is at least one F that is not a G. There is nothing objectionable about this
method; rational enquirers everywhere attempt to falsify generalizations by
unearthing counterexamples.
There is some acknowledgment by xphiles, incredulous though it is, of
this “no intuitions” account of refutation-by-counterexample in analytic
philosophy. Alexander and Weinberg (2007), commenting on a “no intu-
itions” account due to Timothy Williamson (2004, 2007) that is similar in
some respects to mine, write,
Intuitions and Counterexamples  49

Timothy Williamson has also developed a more radical response to the restrictionist
[i.e. negative xphi] threat: rejecting the picture of philosophical practice as depend-
ing on intuitions at all! He argues that our evidence … is not any sort of mental
seeming, but the facts in the world. He compares philosophical practice to scientific
practice, where we do not take the perceptual seemings of the scientists as our evi-
dence, but the facts about what they observed. Similarly, then, we should construe
Gettier’s evidence to be not his intellectual seeming that his case is not an instance
of knowledge, but rather the modal fact itself that such a case is not an instance of
knowledge. (2007, 72)

I am in complete agreement with Williamson’s view as described, and his

comparison between evidence in philosophy and evidence in science is
helpful, at least up to a point. It is certainly true that scientists do not in
general take the fact that they have observed thus-and-so as evidence for or
against scientific theories. It is instead what they observe (thus-and-so itself)
that properly plays that role (unless, of course, the scientific theory in ques-
tion makes predictions about the observational acts of scientists). There is
a sense in which the comparison between science and philosophy is too
narrow, however, since science has no monopoly on the method of testing
generalizations against putative counterexamples, and drawing the com-
parison between just philosophy and science encourages one to think of
philosophy as simply the “more theoretical” end of science.
This latter thought is another theme of Williamson’s, what he describes
as the “unexceptional nature of philosophy” (2007, 4). I am not sure that it
is right to claim this sort of unexceptionalism for philosophy. But it is clear
that there is a way in which philosophy is unexceptional relative not just
to science, but also to every other domain about which we reason. Reason-
ing in general involves rejecting generalizations on the basis of counterex-
amples. And these counterexamples have contents that may be, and very
often are, entirely nonpsychological.17
For example, I might object to my daughter’s claim that all her toys
are put away by pointing to a toy left out of the toy box. There is nothing
especially scientific about the method I employ in doing so, but it is true
nonetheless that the method does not appeal to “seemings” of any kind.
The evidence against my daughter’s generalization is the (proposition con-
cerning the) errant toy. If there is a toy not in the toy box, then my daugh-
ter’s generalization is false; there is a genuine counterexample to it. There is
no crucial difference between the method I use in arguing against the view
that all the toys are put away and the method Gettier and Kripke employ
50  Chapter 2

in their anti-JTB and antidescriptivist arguments. In neither case are intu-

itions in the “state” sense—what Alexander and Weinberg, following Bealer
(1996, 1998), describe as “intellectual seemings”—appealed to, and in nei-
ther case does the method require verification of its credentials via a link
with scientific practice (though scientists often present counterexamples to
generalizations, of course). The method of refutation-by-counterexample
predates science and is used in every intellectual discipline. But it is also
used in every context in which reason is applicable, from schoolyard squab-
bles to disputes over the consequences of quantum physics.

2.3.3  Necessary Generalizations and Hypothetical Counterexamples

Someone might object to my claim that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments
are not crucially methodologically different from other arguments in which
generalizations are rejected on the basis of counterexamples. This appear-
ance is due, the objection might continue, to a misrepresentation of my
own. Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments are based on purely hypothetical cases,
and no purely hypothetical case will suffice to refute a contingent generaliza-
tion. My presentation above, especially the way in which I have expressed
Gettier’s and Kripke’s targets, makes it appear as though the generaliza-
tions they seek to refute are ordinary, contingent generalizations, and this
impression is reinforced by the examples with which I compared them, for
example, the generalization about my daughter’s toys.
It is true that my specification of the target generalizations did not
explicitly mention their alleged necessary character. This was to avoid com-
plications that would have drawn attention away from the main conclu-
sion thus far, namely that the common belief that Gettier’s and Kripke’s
arguments depend evidentially on intuitions in the “state” sense is mis-
taken. The modal status of the counterexamples and the generalizations
they are meant to counter is independent of that conclusion, as I will argue
more fully in a moment.
Another complication that would have been distracting if mentioned
earlier involves saying in precisely what sense the descriptivist theory of
reference is supposed to entail a necessary generalization about names and
reference. There is no corresponding difficulty in the case of the JTB theory
of knowledge. Gettier was arguing against the generalization that, necessar-
ily, every justified true believer is a knower. So a merely possible case, such
as the 10 Coins Case, in which a justified true believer fails to know, suffices
Intuitions and Counterexamples  51

to refute it. But Kripke’s target is not the view that, necessarily, a name refers
to whichever object is denoted by the descriptions users associate with
the name. No descriptivist would accept this necessary generalization as
a consequence of her view, nor would Kripke accept that the alternative
to descriptivism he proposes, the so-called causal-historical view of refer-
ence, implies that names necessarily fail to have their references fixed by
description. Kripke admits that descriptive names are possible. In fact, he
thinks they are actual, though very rare. So how can a purely hypothetical
case, such as the Gödel Case, suffice to refute the descriptivist theory of
reference?
The simplest plausible answer is that there is a necessary generalization
that descriptivists would accept as a consequence of their view, which is
refuted by hypothetical cases such as the Gödel Case. For reasons we have
already been through, this generalization is not what I labeled the “descrip-
tivist theory of reference” above, but it is in the neighborhood. The relevant
generalization involves the notion of an ordinary proper name, where it is
assumed that this category can be specified independently of whichever
theory of reference correctly applies to such names. Perhaps, for example,
one could draw up a list of the names that appear in a language, “Gettier,”
“Kripke,” “Gödel,” “Smith,” and so on, and define an ordinary proper name
as one that functions semantically just as the majority of names on the list
function. Descriptivists would, it seems to me, accept that, on their view, it
is necessary that, if a name is an ordinary proper name, in the sense defined,
then its reference is fixed by description. This allows for the possibility of
nonordinary names that do not have their references fixed by description
and, at the same time, opens the door to refutation by purely hypotheti-
cal counterexample. For if “Gödel,” as used in Kripke’s Gödel Case, is an
ordinary proper name, but does not have its reference fixed by description,
then the purely hypothetical Gödel Case refutes the descriptivist theory of
reference.
Even if, as I have now admitted, the more accurate renditions of Get-
tier’s and Kripke’s putative refutations take them to involve (allegedly)
necessary generalizations and purely hypothetical counterexamples, it is
unclear how this might support the claim that there is some crucial meth-
odological difference between Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments and cases in
which a contingent generalization is rejected by an actual, not hypotheti-
cal, counterexample.18 In any event, the fact that an argument appeals to
52  Chapter 2

what is true with respect to a hypothetical case surely does not imply that it
depends evidentially on facts about people’s psychological states. And my
objection to the view that Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments depend on such
facts does not turn on supposing that the generalizations they target are
contingent or that the counterexamples are not hypothetical.

2.4  More General Methodological Misrepresentations

Given the state/content ambiguity of “intuition,” it is sometimes unclear

whether a philosopher who says that intuitions “matter” to Gettier’s and
Kripke’s arguments intends to say something other than that the contents of
various intuitions matter. For, remember, there is nothing wrong, accord-
ing to me, with describing philosophical arguments as depending on the
contents of various intuitions. I have been complaining about (EC1), not
(EC2), and I allow that both Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments are of the
(EC2) type. Gettier’s 10 Coins Case refutation of the JTB theory of knowl-
edge depends on the truth of the content of the intuition that his Smith
character does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in
his pocket. And Kripke’s Gödel Case refutation of the descriptivist theory of
reference depends on the truth of the intuition that, in Kripke’s fiction, uses
of “Gödel” refer to Gödel, not Schmidt.
But, as we have seen, there is a tendency to tie the cogency of Gettier’s
and Kripke’s arguments to the intuitiveness of the counterexamples, and
this, I have argued, is a mistake. This tendency is perhaps symptomatic of
a tendency toward more general misconceptions of philosophical method.
I mentioned earlier the frequency with which one hears that this or that
philosophical theory is to be rejected for having “counterintuitive conse-
quences.” Perhaps we philosophers ought to remove this phrase from our
vocabularies. Philosophical theories must be rejected if they have false con-
sequences, if, that is, there exist genuine counterexamples to them. But a
philosophical theory might have consequences that we intuit to be false,
without actually being false.
These more general misconceptions of philosophical method, ones that
overemphasize the role of intuitions in the “state” sense, have appeared
in recent work that is self-consciously methodological. An especially clear
case of an (EC1)-type account of the role of intuitions in philosophy can be
found in a recent paper by Alvin Goldman (2007):
Intuitions and Counterexamples  53

One thing that distinguishes philosophical methodology from the methodology of

the sciences is its extensive and avowed reliance on intuition. … To decide what is
knowledge, reference, identity, or causation (or what is the concept of knowledge,
reference, identity, or causation), philosophers routinely consider actual and hypo-
thetical examples and ask whether these examples provide instances of the target
category or concept. People’s mental responses to these examples are often called
“intuitions,” and these intuitions are treated as evidence for the correct answer.
(2007, 1)

From his talk of “mental responses” being used as “evidence for the correct
answer,” it is clear that Goldman thinks that philosophers think of intu-
itions in the “state” sense as essential evidence for their theories. Indeed,
he appears to think this is just obvious. I have been arguing that this is
a mistake. In contrast with Goldman, I think it is very difficult to find
a case of an argument in philosophy that depends on “people’s mental
responses” as evidence. Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments, which Goldman
clearly has in mind, are not such cases, as I have argued. So where are we
supposed to find this “extensive and avowed reliance on intuition”? If we
focus on just that part of philosophy that involves attempts to refute gen-
eralizations on the basis of counterexamples, it strikes me that Gettier’s
and Kripke’s arguments are paradigmatic instances of the type. There is
surely no obvious reason why the method of offering counterexamples to
the epistemological or semantic theories that interest Gettier and Kripke
should be different in some important respect from the method of offering
counterexamples to metaphysical or ethical theories. It would be peculiar
if, while Kripke’s counterexamples to the descriptivist theory, for example,
require no backing via an appeal to their intuitiveness, counterexamples to,
say, utilitarianism do require it. If I am right, and the generalization versus
counterexample method we see in the work of Gettier and Kripke does not
evidentially depend on the intuitiveness of any principle or proposition,
then it is safe to assume that the method, as it appears in the work of others
in different areas, does not evidentially depend on this either.
Methodological confusions infect not just implicit construals of coun-
terexamples in accounts of the functioning of specific philosophical argu-
ments, but also in explicit definitions of counterexamples. As an example,
consider Brian Weatherson’s (2003) recent definition of “counterexample”:
“Let us say that a counterexample to the theory that all Fs are Gs is a pos-
sible situation such that most people have an intuition that some particular
thing in the story is an F but not a G” (2003, 2; emphasis added). The “let
54  Chapter 2

us say” makes it appear as though the definition is intended as stipulative,

and, if so, I have no complaint. Weatherson may use words as he pleases,
of course. But his definition runs together precisely the two things that
need separating, if we are to have a clear view of the nature of a philosophi-
cal counterexample, namely (a) the issue of whether a possible case genu-
inely falsifies a theory (I call such cases “genuine counterexamples”) and
(b) the issue of whether “most people have an intuition” that a case falsifies
a theory. There is a genuine counterexample to the generalization that all
Fs are Gs just in case there is an F that is not a G. How many people intuit
that there is an F that is not a G has no bearing on whether the generaliza-
tion is true or false. The generalization that all elephants are pink would be
false—there would exist genuine counterexamples to it—even if there were
no people around to intuit anything.
Weatherson is not the first to tie the definition of “counterexample” to
people’s intuitions. In the preface to their volume on intuitions, Michael
DePaul and William Ramsey, describing Socrates’s method in Plato’s dia-
logues write,
We see Socrates encounter someone who claims to have figured out the true essence
of some abstract notion, be it piety, justice, or knowledge. Characteristically, the
person puts forward a definition or analysis of the notion in the form of necessary
and sufficient conditions that are thought to capture all and only instances of the
concept in question. Socrates then refutes his interlocuter’s definition of the concept
by pointing out counterexamples, that is, situations where the proposed definition
yields a result that conflicts with our intuitive judgments about the concept in question.
(DePaul and Ramsey 1998, vii; emphasis added)

There are two misleading ideas here. One of these, which will have to wait
until chapter 5 for full debunking, is the idea that Socrates, as represen-
tative for a long-standing methodological style still present, DePaul and
Ramsey say, in contemporary analytic philosophy, is interested primarily in
concepts. This is wrong, both of Socrates and of contemporary analytic phi-
losophers. Gettier is not interested in epistemological concepts, at least not
primarily, and Kripke is not primarily interested semantic concepts. Rather,
both are primarily interested in the phenomena that certain epistemologi-
cal and semantic concepts characterize, knowledge in Gettier’s case and ref-
erence in Kripke’s. As for Socrates, although I am no expert, on my reading
of the dialogues, Plato’s protagonist is interested in things like piety, justice,
and knowledge—themselves, not merely our concepts of these things.
Intuitions and Counterexamples  55

The other misleading suggestion in the quote from DePaul and Ramsey
is the suggestion that it is a condition on there being a counterexample to
a “proposed definition” that the definition “yields a result that conflicts
with our intuitions.” This is the same mistake Weatherson makes. It is a
mistake to say that a definition of justice faces counterexamples only if
it yields results that conflict with our intuitions. Rather, such a definition
faces counterexamples if, and only if, there are examples of injustice that
count as just by the definition, or examples of justice that do not count as
just by the definition. The definition’s accuracy is independent of whether,
and how many, people have intuitions that conflict with the definition.
Once again we see unwarranted assumptions about the argumentative
role of intuitions in the “state” sense creeping into philosophers’ concep-
tions of their own method. It is no surprise, then, to find xphiles mak-
ing these same assumptions. Indeed, most of the misleading quotations
in the preceding paragraphs come from analytic, not experimental, phi-
losophers. So xphiles can hardly be blamed for assuming that analytic phi-
losophers adopt methods that involve empirical speculation about people’s
intuitions. In fact, as eminent a philosopher as Frank Jackson (2000) is on
record urging that “serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various
[philosophical] cases,” of just the sort that xphiles have been busy conduct-
ing, are a necessary component of philosophical theorizing (2000, 36–37).
Whether xphiles are to blame for it or not, however, it is a mistake. An
opinion poll might reveal whether or not a given proposition is intuitive or
widely believed, but, if I am right, and intuitions (in the “state” sense) are
not, and need not be, treated as evidence in philosophical theorizing, then
it is at best unclear how the results of xphi intuition surveys are supposed to
pose a challenge to philosophy as it has been traditionally practiced.

2.5  Evidence for the Evidence

Perceptive, clear-thinking xphiles might agree with a number of the claims

I have made in this chapter. They would certainly agree, for example, that
intuitions in the “content” sense are treated as evidence in philosophy. They
might also agree that philosophical counterexamples are best described as
propositions that entail the falsity of the generalizations they “counter,”
and thus are not typically propositions that make reference to people’s psy-
chological states. They may even agree that a refutation-by-counterexample
56  Chapter 2

in philosophy, or elsewhere, can be successful, regardless of whether any

person or group has any particular intuitions in the “state” sense. But they
might continue to insist that whether people have such intuitions is never-
theless relevant to arguments such as Gettier’s and Kripke’s, and that people
having these intuitions is treated as being relevant by a large swath of ana-
lytic philosophers.
Relevant how? I suspect that many xphiles would answer that whether
people have intuitions that conflict with a philosophical theory is treated
as relevant by being treated as bearing on the question of whether we know
that the contents of such intuitions are true. For it is one thing for there
to be a genuine counterexample to a theory, but quite another for us to
know that a proposition put forward as a genuine counterexample is true.
Gettier says there are, possibly, people who justifiably and truly believe p
who nevertheless fail to know that p. If he is right, there are genuine coun-
terexamples to the JTB theory of knowledge. But how do we know he is
right? One answer is that we know this by checking to see whether Gettier’s
counterexamples are intuitive.
If this is the right answer, or if it is at least the answer presupposed by
analytic philosophers, then some of what I have argued in this chapter may
appear to not get to the heart of the issue of the role of intuitions in phi-
losophy. Perhaps the direct evidence against the JTB theory of knowledge is
the not-purely-psychological fact that Gettier’s Smith character, from his 10
Coins Case, does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins
in his pocket. But, xphiles might fairly ask, “How do we know that this is
indeed a fact?” If the answer toward which analytic philosophers incline is
that we know this because it is intuitive, then intuition surveys telling us
whether it really is intuitive would be appropriate, maybe even required.
This question, which I call the “evidence-for-the-evidence” question,
has not yet been fully dealt with. I have rejected (EC1), and I have argued
that Gettier’s and Kripke’s refutations do not, and need not, treat intuitions
in the “state” sense as evidence. But I have not yet answered the question of
how we know, in philosophy, whether a counterexample is genuine.
Williamson (2007), whose views on philosophical method are, as I
have noted, broadly similar to mine, thinks this question is wrongheaded.
We must be allowed, Williamson thinks, to assume we know, for exam-
ple, that Gettier’s Smith character justifiably and truly believes but does
not know. Disallowing the assumption that we know, at the beginning of
Intuitions and Counterexamples  57

philosophical inquiry, that various counterexamples are genuine encour-

ages philosophers to “psychologize” evidence in philosophy, and this, in
turn, risks skepticism about judgment in general, and hence risks total
intellectual paralysis.
This marks a significant difference between Williamson and me. The
evidence-for-the-evidence question is perfectly legitimate, I think, and the
threat of total judgment skepticism is bogus. The right answer to the evi-
dence-for-the-evidence question is not that intuitions in the “state” sense
count as our evidence-for-the-evidence, nor is it to insist, with Williamson,
that there is no legitimate such question in the first place. The answer is
instead that further arguments play this role. To stick with the 10 Coins Case,
the answer to the question of how we know it is a genuine counterexample
is that we know this by assessing arguments for the truth of the claim that
it is. If there is a good argument for the conclusion that the 10 Coins Case
is a genuine counterexample, then, by knowing the argument, we know its
conclusion.
As we have already seen in the long passage from Gettier 1963 that I
quoted in the introduction and again in this chapter, Gettier himself pro-
vides just such an argument. Later, in chapters 4 and 5, I will return to this
argument and its significance, discussing, in addition, the arguments that
Kripke gives for the conclusion that the Gödel Case is a genuine coun-
terexample to the descriptivist theory of reference, along with a host of
other arguments that have been offered in analytic philosophy for judg-
ments about thought experiments and cases. The main upshot, as I will
demonstrate, is that, when it comes to providing evidence for judgments
about thought experiments and cases, philosophy trades in arguments, not
intuitions.
This claim—that it is arguments, not intuitions, that serve as evidence
for judgments about cases—naturally leads to a question that might as well
be called the “evidence-for-the-evidence-for-the-evidence” question: what
is the evidence for the premises of the arguments that I take to count as
the evidence for judgments about thought experiments and cases? Lurking
behind this question is a potential problem for my view of philosophical
method: it looks as though intuitions in the “state” sense might have to be
let in somewhere in the “chain” of evidence for a judgment about a thought
experiment or case. If so, then intuitions in the “state” sense would appear
to play a fundamental role in philosophical method after all. Perhaps all
58  Chapter 2

the fuss I will soon make about the arguments that philosophers give for
their judgments about thought experiments and cases simply relocates the
inevitable appeal to intuitions in the “state” sense.
In chapter 3, I call this problem the relocation problem, and I sketch a solu-
tion, one more fully developed later, in chapter 5. The bulk of chapter 3 is
given over to examining Williamson’s case for the view that arguments for
judgments about thought experiments and cases are not required, because
demanding them leads to a debilitating form of skepticism.
3  The Relocation Problem and Williamson on “Judgment
Skepticism”

3.1 Introduction

The main goal of this chapter is to assess one of Timothy Williamson’s com-
plaints against negative xphi, namely that it leads to an untenable form
of skepticism he calls “judgment skepticism.” As I read him, Williamson
takes what I called “the evidence-for-the-evidence question” at the end of
chapter 2—the question of how we know that certain philosophical coun-
terexamples are genuine—as illegitimate, or at least as illegitimate if viewed
as a demand for an inference that might support the conclusion that this or
that counterexample is genuine. On Williamson’s view, part of the problem
with negative xphi is precisely that it raises the evidence-for-the-evidence
question. In effect, negative xphiles reject one possible answer, namely that
it is our intuitions that serve as the evidence-for-the evidence, and leave the
question of what does serve wide open. But Williamson does not think that
our knowledge of, for example, the counterexamples used to refute the JTB
theory of knowledge comes via argument or inference. Instead it is a basic
kind of philosophical evidence—evidence that requires no evidence of its
own. Furthermore, seeking inferential reasons for supposing that proposi-
tions of this sort are true, leads, Williamson says, to judgment skepticism.1
I will argue that these views of Williamson’s are wrong. It is standard
practice in philosophy to argue for judgments about the thought experi-
ments and cases from which many philosophical counterexamples derive.
So, as a matter of fact, such judgments are not treated as a basic kind of
evidence. In my view, the idea that judgments about thought experiments
and cases count as basic evidence, or are noninferentially justified, is a lin-
gering remnant of the myth of the intuitive in Williamson’s thinking. In
some ways, Williamson qualifies as a powerful opponent of the myth; for
60  Chapter 3

example, he is hostile, and rightly so, to the notion that intuitions in the
“state” sense play an evidential role in philosophical reasoning. Despite this,
some elements of his overall methodological stance strike me as wedded,
still, to some of the views in that package of mistaken views that constitute
the myth, the view that thought experimentation involves noninferential
judgment being one of these. Furthermore, I will argue that the charge of
risking an overarching skepticism about judgment does not stick; nothing
in the negative xphi critique opens negative xphiles to such a charge, and,
more generally, there is nothing wrong with raising the question of what
sorts of inferential reasons we might have for supposing that this or that
judgment about a thought experiment or case is true. In particular, raising
this question does not lead to a destructive form of skepticism. In other
words, the evidence-for-the-evidence question is perfectly legitimate.
As I admitted at the end of chapter 2, sometimes we philosophers need
to determine whether an alleged counterexample is the real McCoy. I
argued in chapter 2 that there might be counterexamples to a philosophical
theory regardless of whether they count as the contents of anyone’s intu-
itions. Gettier refuted the JTB theory of knowledge, if his judgment about
the 10 Coins Case is correct; and his judgment might be correct, regardless
of whether anyone shares the judgment. But there is a legitimate question
left open here: how do we know that Gettier refuted his target theory, if,
indeed, he did? If the counterexample is itself properly regarded as evidence
against some more general theory, what is the evidence-for-the-evidence;
that is, what justifies the judgment that it is a genuine counterexample?
I reject the answer that we know this by knowing whether facts concern-
ing intuitions in the “state” sense obtain. Instead, as I have said, philoso-
phers argue for their judgments about counterexamples, and (the premises
of) these arguments are (and are treated as) the evidence for such judg-
ments. In chapters 4 and 5 I will demonstrate this by presenting many clear
examples of philosophers arguing that their counterexamples are genuine.
However, the view that it is arguments, not intuitions, that serve as the
evidence for the genuineness of philosophical counterexamples raises the
following question: what is the evidence for the premises of these argu-
ments? Before turning to Williamson in section 3.3, I briefly, in section 3.2,
reply to the worry raised by this question. The issue is then dealt with more
fully in chapter 5.
The Relocation Problem  61

3.2  The Relocation Problem and a Sketch of a Solution

If the judgment that a counterexample is genuine is justified by argument,

the question arises: what justifies the justifying argument’s premises? If the
answer to this (evidence-for-the-evidence-for-the-evidence) question were
intuitions, then it might seem as though there would be no real gain to
be had by denying that intuitions are the answer to the evidence-for-the-
evidence question, or even by denying, as I did in chapter 2, that they are
the answer to the evidence question. (The evidence question concerning,
for example, the JTB theory’s truth is just: what is the evidence for/against
the theory? And one answer, on the “against” side, is: Gettier’s counterex-
amples.) For it may seem as though these denials succeed only in relocat-
ing the place at which intuitions play an important evidential role, not in
showing that they play no such role at all. To have a name for this problem,
I will call it the relocation problem.
I have three related replies to the relocation problem, which I will briefly
sketch here and expand more fully in chapter 5. First, relocating the appeal
to intuitions, even if that were all that could be done, would be a significant
accomplishment in its own right. For the negative xphi critique depends
heavily on actual empirical results, results that suggest variability in specific
philosophical intuitions, such as intuitions about knowledge in Gettier cases,
or intuitions about reference in cases involving the use of proper names.
In fact, even this description is too general; the data show variability not
in intuitions about Gettier cases or cases involving the reference of proper
names, but in intuitions about a single Gettier case and a single case involv-
ing the reference of a single proper name. If it turns out that the contents
of these specific intuitions about these individual cases can be, and have
been, argued for, and that these arguments are reasonably compelling, then
the negative xphi critique, in its current form, has no real bite; it can be
answered simply by showing that we have good reasons—arguments—that
can be plausibly taken to show that the “Western” judgment regarding the
10 Coins and Gödel cases is correct. In other words, the observation—if
this is really what it is—that, at some point, philosophical arguments must
bottom out in an appeal to the brute intuitiveness of some proposition
or other is not the negative xphi critique of philosophical method. The
negative xphi critique is that various specific empirical results show that
appealing to the intuitiveness of certain specific propositions, such as those
62  Chapter 3

describing Gettier’s and Kripke’s counterexamples, is problematic. A reply

such as mine, which asserts, first, that the arguments to which the criticism
is meant to apply do not and need not appeal to intuitions and, second,
that the premises of these arguments are supported not by intuitions, but
by argument, suffices as a reply to this criticism, even if there is something
to the idea that philosophical arguments must, at least ultimately, appeal to
intuitions. For, so far as I know, there is no empirical evidence at all for vari-
ability in judgments about these ultimate philosophical premises, whatever
they may be, if, indeed, any such premises exist.
Second, it is far from obvious that solving the problem of how our beliefs
about philosophical matters are ever justified requires appealing to ulti-
mate or “foundational” philosophical premises. Even if it did, the idea that
these premises must be intuitive would need to be argued for. Foundation-
alism comes in many varieties, only some of which make a special place for
intuitions.
Third, the issue of whether there are any ultimate philosophical prem-
ises, and whether, if there are, it is their intuitiveness that serves to justify
them, is a difficult and contentious philosophical issue. But what is more
important, given my purposes, is that the issue is very general, in the fol-
lowing sense: It is clear that the problem of understanding philosophical jus-
tification—How should the “regress” of philosophical reasons be stopped?
Must it be stopped? Must it stop with propositions that are intuitive? and so
on—are problems for understanding justification generally speaking. The
problem of justification in philosophy (How are our philosophical beliefs
ever justified?) is just a special case of the problem of epistemic justifica-
tion (How are our beliefs ever justified?). All inquiry, not just philosophi-
cal inquiry, faces the problem of explaining how we ever manage to have
justified beliefs. If the xphi criticism of analytic philosophy encourages us
to seek a solution to this problem, that is all well and good, but, for one
thing, it is not especially clear how variability in the philosophical intu-
itions xphiles are busy studying adds some special urgency to this pursuit,
and, for another, epistemologists were of course already fully engaged in it
long before xphi broke on to the scene.
So, there is an old and fully general problem in understanding epistemic
justification. Philosophers appeal to intuitions in some solutions to this
problem, though it is an open question whether they must. However, as far
as I can tell, xphi and its results have no clear connection to this problem
The Relocation Problem  63

or any potential solution, including those that appeal to intuitions. In any

case, if the relocation problem amounts to a demand to solve the problem
of epistemic justification, then it is not a legitimate worry. Demanding a
solution to the problem of epistemic justification is unreasonable, in the
sense that it demands something that is not fairly demanded only of philo-
sophical justification. As I have said, all inquiry depends on a satisfactory
solution to the problem of epistemic justification; there is no special prob-
lem of justification, one somehow made more visible or pressing by xphiles
and their empirical studies, which applies just to philosophical inquiry.
Later in the book I will have occasion to return to some of these replies
to the relocation problem, especially after examining some of the argu-
ments that have been given for judgments about thought experiments
and cases. The claim that such judgments routinely receive argumenta-
tive support, and so are not defended simply by appeal to intuitions, is an
empirical claim that requires a more thoroughgoing defense than can be
accomplished in this book. Still, I think the examples that I will present in
the next two chapters will show that it is at least extremely unlikely that
analytic philosophy treats intuitions in anything like the way xphiles take
it to.

3.3  Williamson on “Judgment Skepticism”

My case for the claim that philosophy’s methods are free of appeals to
intuitions begins, in the next chapter, with a discussion of Gettier judg-
ments because these are thought by many philosophers, xphile and non-,
to be the clearest cases we have in philosophy of judgments that are brutely
intuitive, where to be “brutely intuitive” is to be held and justified on the
basis of intuition alone. If it turns out that not even Gettier judgments are
brutely intuitive, that will go a long distance toward showing that intu-
itions play a far less prominent role in philosophy than many philosophers
take them to.
An additional reason for beginning with Gettier judgments is that such
judgments serve as a main springboard for Timothy Williamson’s (2007)
work on philosophical method. I have said that, despite broad similarities,
Williamson and I differ in our methodological outlook. One important dif-
ference concerns our attitudes toward the cross-cultural results regarding
Gettier judgments reported in Weinberg et al. 2001.
64  Chapter 3

Williamson’s attitude is that there is a certain sense in which we need

do nothing in the face of these results and the negative xphile critique they
have inspired. According to Williamson, that critique suffers from internal
flaws; it leads to a peculiar form of skepticism that Williamson describes as
judgment skepticism. (Williamson’s argument for this is the topic of the next
section.) Since the critique leads to judgment skepticism and judgment
skepticism is false (indeed, according to Williamson, it is incoherent), we
are free to ignore it and go on making and trusting the Gettier judgments
we are inclined to make and trust.2
If Williamson were right about this, then the move against the nega-
tive xphile critique that I will be developing here would not need to be
made. The move, as I have presented it thus far, is one that responds to
the evidence-for-the-evidence question by invoking (further) arguments,
as opposed to intuitions. For concreteness, consider, once more, the argu-
ment against the JTB theory of knowledge presented in Gettier 1963. Get-
tier argues against the theory by presenting counterexamples, such as the
10 Coins Case. But about these counterexamples, one can ask, “Why think
they are genuine?” This is the evidence-for-the-evidence question with
respect to Gettier’s anti-JTB argument. The evidence, or putative evidence,
against the JTB theory is the counterexamples themselves. The evidence
for this evidence, the answer to the question of how we know, or why we
should think, that the counterexamples are genuine is … what? In my view,
this is a fair question with a fairly obvious answer, namely argument. But
Williamson, with whom I am otherwise in broad agreement, has argued
that the question ought not arise. If Williamson is right, then the move I
offer in defense of philosophical arguments such as Gettier’s anti-JTB argu-
ment and Kripke’s antidescriptivist one, is superfluous; I am capitulating
to an unreasonable demand in offering such arguments. The first order of
business, then, is to determine whether Williamson is right.
How could the demand for an answer to the evidence-for-the-evidence
question be unreasonable or unfair? Of course, it would be unfair to repeat
a demand for evidence over and over again, each time new putative evi-
dence is presented. Explanations and justifications must come to an end, as
it has been rightly said. But negative xphiles have what at least appear to be
legitimate reasons for thinking that some of what many of us have regarded
as evidence in philosophy is not really evidence at all, reasons much more
challenging than an insistence that we justify our premises, and then justify
The Relocation Problem  65

whatever we used to do the original justifying, and then justify our justi-
fications for the original justifications, and so on. Yet, despite the seeming
seriousness of the challenge, Williamson suggests that we are free to ignore
it. On his view, the negative xphi challenge rests on mistaken implicit views
about the nature of evidence, views that lead to a wide-ranging and implau-
sible judgment skepticism.
Williamson describes this peculiar form of skepticism in chapter 7 (“Evi-
dence in Philosophy”) of The Philosophy of Philosophy. Unlike other, more
familiar varieties of skepticism, which target “the distinctive features of
perception, memory, testimony, or inference,” judgment skepticism targets
“our practices of applying concepts in judgment” (Williamson 2007, 220).
Williamson warns that “although, in practice, judgment skeptics are skep-
tical only of a few judgments or concepts at a time, the underlying forms
of argument are far more general” (224). In Williamson’s view, judgment
skeptics have no plausible way to avoid the view that we never knowledg-
ably apply concepts in judgment, but this is a quick road to “total intel-
lectual paralysis,” and seems self-defeating on its face. Williamson likens
judgment-skeptical arguments to a bomb “which, if it detonates properly,
will blow up the bombers and those they hope to promote together with
everyone else” (224).
Although he names no xphile names in his chapter 7, it is clear that
Williamson regards negative xphile arguments as resting on these explo-
sive judgment-skeptical forms. Among the specific examples of judgment
skeptics Williamson cites, which also include “eliminativists” about the
propositional attitudes and so-called mereological nihilists, who, on meta-
physical grounds, deny the existence of macroscopic physical objects such
as baseballs and mountains, is a hypothetical philosopher who thinks that
“the [Western] Gettier judgment is mere cultural prejudice” (211). This is a
strong hint that Williamson has Weinberg et al. 2001 in mind and takes it to
represent a judgment-skeptical position.3 Earlier, in his chapter 6 (“Thought
Experiments”), Williamson mentions Weinberg et al. 2001 explicitly, criti-
cizing that paper for making too much of cross-cultural differences in folk
judgments about Gettier cases. (According to Williamson, the authoritative
judgments are those made by experts, i.e., those with some training in phi-
losophy. I will return to this idea in chapter 6; it marks a further difference
between Williamson and me.) It is thus natural to read Williamson’s chap-
ter 7, in part, as raising a further objection to the negative xphile position:
that position rests on judgment skepticism.
66  Chapter 3

If the forms of argument underlying the negative xphi challenge to ana-

lytic philosophy lead to an extreme and untenable general skepticism such
as judgment skepticism, that would count heavily against the legitimacy of
the challenge. However, Williamson never clearly explains why we should
believe that the xphi challenge depends on these “far more general” judg-
ment-skeptical forms. Soon, I will argue that we should not believe that the
negative xphi challenge leads to judgment skepticism. The xphi challenge
should be resisted, but it is a mistake to accuse the challengers of risking
judgment skepticism.
How, according to Williamson, does one become a judgment skeptic?
What is it that leads one to doubt the success of “our practices of apply-
ing concepts in judgment”? A misconception about the nature of evidence
strikes Williamson as at least one of the culprits. Judgment skeptics tend to
implicitly assume a “dialectical standard of evidence,” one expressed by a
principle Williamson labels Evidence Neutrality.
Evidence Neutrality

Whether a proposition constitutes evidence is in principle uncontentiously decid-

able, in the sense that a community of inquirers can always in principle achieve
common knowledge as to whether any given proposition constitutes evidence for
the inquiry. (Williamson 2007, 210)

Although he thinks it is false, Williamson treats Evidence Neutrality as

though it has a fair amount of initial plausibility, perhaps because it appeals
to our sense of what is fair, dialectically speaking. It seems to me, however,
that a minimal amount of reflection reveals that Evidence Neutrality is far
too demanding a constraint on evidence. I think this makes Williamson’s
diagnosis of judgment skepticism and his assessment of the negative xphile
position doubtful; it may be that Evidence Neutrality leads to judgment
skepticism, but Evidence Neutrality is an unattractive constraint on evi-
dence that should be rejected. Even if some philosophers do accept Evi-
dence Neutrality—and a few recent commentators on Williamson have
argued, wrongly in my view, that it is correct4—the more interesting ques-
tion is whether this is obligatory in particular for the negative xphile posi-
tion, which is my primary concern here. That is, does that position require
an acceptance of Evidence Neutrality? If not, then the charge that Evidence
Neutrality leads to judgment skepticism and is thus to be avoided, while
perhaps true, is not a charge that will stick to the negative xphile position
The Relocation Problem  67

abstractly conceived (though it will stick to those individual negative

xphiles who accept Evidence Neutrality, if any such there be). Though Wil-
liamson does not say so, there are two ways of reading Evidence Neutrality,
a stronger metaphysical reading and a weaker epistemological one. On the
first, metaphysical reading, a community of inquirers being able in prin-
ciple to uncontentiously decide that p constitutes evidence is a condition
on p constituting evidence. This reading is a more straightforward interpre-
tation of the way Williamson formulates the principle, but it strikes me as
especially implausible. On this reading, part of what it is for a proposition
to be evidence is for it to be (in principle) regarded as such. That seems
wrong; surely, in general, evidential relations hold between propositions
independently of the attitudes human agents would or might have.
On the second, epistemological, reading, a community of inquirers
being able in principle to uncontentiously decide that p constitutes evi-
dence is a condition on whether p can be justifiably regarded as constituting
evidence by that community. On this second reading, Evidence Neutrality
is not quite so plainly wrong, but it is still fairly clearly wrong. If it were
right, the bar on what we could justifiably regard as evidence would be set
extremely high. In fact, this reading of Evidence Neutrality, if true, would
threaten to make a great many propositions such that we could not justifi-
ably regard them as evidence, since, for nearly any proposition p, there is
bound to be a skeptic regarding p in our community of inquirers whose
challenge will make the question of whether p not uncontentiously decid-
able. An even more disastrous consequence follows from the first, meta-
physical reading of Evidence Neutrality: given the probable existence of a
skeptic for just about any proposition one picks, very few propositions will
constitute evidence for anything.5
Does this dispense with Evidence Neutrality too quickly? Although Wil-
liamson’s formulation does not rule it out, perhaps a constraint on evi-
dence that allows the presence of unreasonable and unpersuadable skeptics
in our midst to turn what ought to count as evidence into nonevidence is
not the sort of thing a clear-thinking endorser of Evidence Neutrality would
accept. However, it is not especially easy to see how the statement of the
constraint could be weakened to accommodate this thought. Suppose we
insist that the members of the “community of inquirers” be undogmatic
and possess a modicum of rationality. In other words, suppose Evidence
Neutrality requires not in-principle uncontentious decidability, but rather
68  Chapter 3

that sort of decidability between the minimally open-minded and ratio-

nal members of the community. Presumably, this will not rule out skeptics
who offer plausible, or even just plausible seeming, reasons for their skep-
ticism. For example, it will not rule out skepticism of the Cartesian vari-
ety concerning our knowledge of the external world. Cartesian skepticism
is not implausible (indeed, arguments for Cartesian skepticism are some
of the most interesting and powerful arguments philosophy has to offer),
but that fact by itself should not prevent various claims about the external
world from counting as evidence, even in a community of inquirers some
of whose members are Cartesian skeptics.
Williamson is perhaps right that, if a member of a given community of
inquirers accepts Evidence Neutrality (on either reading), then she might be
nudged toward judgment skepticism. For she will be inclined, in that case, to
rule that any proposition about which doubts have been raised by members
of her community either does not constitute evidence, or at least cannot
be justifiably regarded as such. Being so inclined is still some distance away
from accepting any of the specific judgment-skeptical conclusions that Wil-
liamson identifies, however. For example, based on a prior commitment to
Evidence Neutrality, one might hold that, since there are groups of people
who reject the Western judgment about Gettier cases in our community of
inquirers (namely, the East Asians and Indians polled by Weinberg et al.),
the content of that judgment either is not evidence or cannot be justifiably
regarded as evidence. But one might hold this without going so far as to be
outright skeptical that the judgment is true or that its truth can be known.
However, as Williamson points out, once Evidence Neutrality requires one
to rule that the contents of various judgments do not themselves qualify as
(justifiably regarded as) evidence, one is left casting about for propositions
that might satisfy the demands of Evidence Neutrality. For example, if one
cannot justifiably regard the proposition that the Smith character, from Get-
tier’s 10 Coins Case, does not know that the man who will get the job has ten
coins in his pocket as evidence against the JTB theory, then which proposi-
tions could count? Perhaps only propositions that describe one’s own or oth-
ers’ psychological states, for instance the proposition that some people intuit
that Smith does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in
his pocket.6 Putting aside the fact that, while some people do intuit this after
hearing the 10 Coins Case, some might not, and also putting aside a differ-
ent point that Williamson presses, namely that it is not at all obvious that
The Relocation Problem  69

even psychological propositions such as those describing which intuitions

people have satisfy the demands of Evidence Neutrality, one must, after
having been forced “back a step,” as Williamson puts it, to these entirely
psychological premises, now argue from the psychological premises to the
nonpsychological conclusions that interested one in the first place (William-
son 2007, 211). In the Gettier cases, one must seek an argument that takes
one from the psychological premise that people intuit that there are Gettier
cases to the nonpsychological conclusion that the JTB theory is false. This,
Williamson rightly says, is a daunting task. It would be surprising, to say the
least, if nonpsychological, epistemological facts, such as the falsity of the JTB
theory, could be derived from purely psychological premises.7
It is thus reasonably clear how commitment to Evidence Neutral-
ity might lead one to the brink of judgment skepticism. It is even clearer
how Evidence Neutrality leads to another tendency Williamson laments,
namely the tendency to “psychologize” the evidence in philosophy—that
is, to take philosophical evidence to consist in facts about the instantia-
tion of psychological states. In many cases, the only thing uncontentiously
decidable by a community of philosophical inquirers is that various propo-
sitions are, or are not, intuitive. In such cases, Evidence Neutrality rules that
only those propositions qualify as evidence. However, as we saw above, a
minimal amount of reflection shows that Evidence Neutrality, on both its
metaphysical and epistemological readings, is fairly plainly false. I think
that the plain falsity of Evidence Neutrality makes Williamson’s diagnosis
of judgment skepticism implausible. Judgment skeptics—or those philos-
ophers Williamson labels as judgment skeptics, anyway, namely xphiles,
eliminativists, and mereological nihilists—do not seem especially gullible;
why think they would be taken in by as implausible a constraint on evi-
dence as the one expressed by Evidence Neutrality?
Perhaps, at least in the case of the argument for the negative xphile
position, there is a sense in which Evidence Neutrality might appear to be
relevant, since that argument does move from a disagreement in intuitions
to the conclusion that certain propositions cannot be justifiably regarded
as evidence. For example, according to the negative xphile, cross-cultural
variability in intuitions about Gettier cases implies that the Western judg-
ment about such cases cannot be trusted. It may appear, in this case, that
the reasoning is underlain by a commitment to Evidence Neutrality: lack
of uncontentious decidability in the community of inquirers—consisting
70  Chapter 3

in this instance of Western, East Asian, and Indian judges—shows that the
content of the Western Gettier judgment cannot be justifiably regarded as
evidence.
However, this is a superficial and inaccurate picture of the structure of
the negative xphile argument, and it works even less well, it seems to me,
in picturing the structure of arguments for eliminativism or mereological
nihilism.8 The problem, I think, is that Williamson has wrongly assumed
that there must be some common thread between the views he describes
as judgment skeptical, when in fact very different philosophical concerns
underlie these various positions. For example, those who adopt mereologi-
cal nihilism do so for far different reasons than those that lead negative
xphiles to adopt the negative xphile position. In the former case, the rea-
sons have to do with the metaphysics of causation and worries about over-
determination; in the latter case, the reasons have to do with the existence
of variability in intuitions about hypothetical examples. There is no over-
arching view about the nature of evidence, such as Evidence Neutrality,
that unifies these reasons or the views they are meant to support. In any
case, there need not be; mereological nihilists and negative xphiles can
perfectly well argue for their views without relying on any general claims
about the nature of evidence.
As emphasized in chapter 2, in the case of the argument for the nega-
tive xphile position, what is crucial is not disagreement per se, but rather
disagreement of a certain type, namely disagreement in intuitive judgments
and along a dimension (e.g., culture) that ought not to matter to the truth
of the intuitions. (In chapter 1, this was described an as variability of intu-
itions along “truth-irrelevant” lines.) No negative xphile need agree with
Evidence Neutrality in order to make this sort of argument.
Negative xphiles are wrong for a different reason, one that has nothing
to do with their views about the nature of evidence. Instead, their mistake
concerns what sort of evidence is regarded as available by philosophers who
argue by appeal to intuitive propositions. They are wrong in thinking that
the putative evidence for the content of an intuitive philosophical judg-
ment is that the judgment is intuitive. This is the fundamental mistake, the
mistake, as I characterized it in chapter 2, of taking (analytic philosophers
to suppose) that intuitions in the “state” sense are evidence for their con-
tents. Indeed, I have already argued, the negative xphile critique depends
not only on taking analytic philosophers to rely on intuitions in the state
The Relocation Problem  71

sense as evidence, but also on taking them to treat intuitions in the “state”
sense as an essential source of evidence for the contents of those intuitions.
However, as I will show in the next chapter, in many instances, and cer-
tainly with respect to Gettier’s 10 Coins Case and Kripke’s Gödel Case, there
are further arguments, as opposed to mere intuitiveness, that give evidential
support to specific judgments concerning these cases. If I am right, that
is a good thing for the overall anti-xphi stance I share with Williamson.
For, even if Williamson were right that the falsity of Evidence Neutrality
suffices to show that negative xphiles have no reason to deny that we may
justifiably regard the contents of our intuitions as evidence, the question
would remain of whether we can assert that we may justifiably regard them
as such. This is left something of a mystery in Williamson’s book. We judge
as we do about Gettier cases, for example, but is there reason to think we
are right to make these judgments? That is, is there any reason to think
that the judgments are true? Williamson does not answer these questions
and in fact appears to believe that they need not be answered. I think that
they can and should be answered, that the evidence-for-the-evidence ques-
tion, as I described it earlier, can and should be answered as well, and, most
importantly, that intuitions and intuitiveness play no significant role in
answering it.
4  The Evidence for the Evidence: Arguing for Gettier
Judgments

4.1 Introduction

At the end of chapter 2, I raised what I called the evidence-for-the-evidence

question: even if there is no need to treat intuitions in the “state” sense
as evidence in typical cases of refutation-by-counterexample in philoso-
phy, how do we know when an alleged counterexample is the real McCoy?
If the counterexample is itself properly regarded as evidence, what is the
evidence-for-the-evidence; that is, what justifies the judgment that it is a
genuine counterexample?
A possible answer is that we know this by knowing whether facts con-
cerning intuitions in the “state” sense1 obtain. With respect to the 10 Coins
Case, we know it is genuine, according to this answer to the evidence-for-
the-evidence question, just in case many (most?) people intuitively judge
as Gettier does about the case. If this answer were correct, then it may seem
as though, even granting the possibility that Gettier has refuted the JTB
theory with the 10 Coins Case, intuition surveys of the sort conducted by
Weinberg et al. (2001) would still be highly relevant, for in that case they
would have the potential to undermine the claim that we know this pos-
sibility to be actual. In other words, such surveys could potentially show
that we do not know whether the 10 Coins-Case qualifies as a genuine coun-
terexample even if it does. The same could be said about Kripke’s Gödel
Case counterexample to the descriptivist theory of reference: it could be
genuine, and perhaps it is, but if we take Machery et al.’s (2004) data at
face value, and the only evidence-for-the-evidence is the obtaining of psy-
chological facts about intuitions, then maybe we do not know whether it
really is.
74  Chapter 4

In this chapter, I will begin an argument, to be continued in chapter 5,

that this is not the correct answer to the question of how we know that
an alleged counterexample is genuine. Facts about intuitions are not our
evidence-for-the-evidence. Instead, it is argument that plays this role.
Knowing that a counterexample is genuine is to be in possession of a good
argument for that conclusion, and, in a great many cases, there are such
arguments, and they typically do not terminate with premises asserting
that certain propositions are intuitive. We do not know whether the Gödel
Case qualifies as a counterexample to the descriptivist theory of reference
by checking to see how many or which sorts of people judge as Kripke
does about his case. Rather, our evidence-for-the-evidence in this case is
various arguments (some of which are provided by Kripke himself, as we
will see) whose conclusion is that this judgment is correct. This applies
equally to the 10 Coins Case and generalizes, I think, to the practice, taken
as a whole, of offering philosophical counterexamples. We know that the
10 Coins Case qualifies as a refutation of the JTB theory not because most
people do or would intuit that Gettier’s Smith character has a justified true
belief that is not knowledge, but rather because there are good arguments
(some of which are provided by Gettier himself) for the conclusion that he
does. In general, our knowledge of whether a philosophical theory has been
refuted by a counterexample depends on arguments, not intuitions.

4.2  Arguing for Intuitions

Philosophy is argumentative to its very core. This is what we professionals

tell our students: “Focus on the arguments. Do not make a claim without
backing it up with reasons.” Should we tell our students that there is an
exception to this rule; that when one judges that p is true with respect to
some thought experimental scenario, one need not defend the judgment
with reasons? Should we tell them that it suffices in such a case to shrug
and say that one finds p intuitive? No. Even intuitive judgments can be
given argumentative support. They can and should be; the picture of philo-
sophical dispute as, at bottom, merely a case of a clash of intuitions is woe-
fully inaccurate. That is not what real philosophical disputes are like, and
they certainly should not be. Real philosophical disputes involve exchang-
ing reasons for opposing views, even when those views are intuitive ones
derived from consideration of hypothetical cases. There are a great many
The Evidence for the Evidence  75

examples of philosophical disputes in which what is at issue is precisely

whether some intuitive judgment about a hypothetical case is the correct
judgment about the case. Indeed, this is so common that the view that
intuitive judgments in philosophy are just intuitive judgments, where the
force of the “just” is to suggest that such judgments, by their nature, lack
the kind of support that other judgments get (i.e., argumentative support),
is preposterous. In fact, I know of no case in philosophy in which a judg-
ment about a thought experiment is taken to be true on the basis on intu-
itiveness alone. None.
How does this point connect with my complaints about Williamson
and my criticisms of negative xphi? Williamson offers nothing but a nega-
tive defense of the view that the contents of our judgments about thought
experiments and hypothetical cases may count as evidence in philosophy.
He leaves open the question of whether they positively do count. I think
this question can be answered in the affirmative. Judgments about thought
experiments can be given argumentative support, even if the judgment is
intuitive. Arguments for the truth of some intuitive judgment are argu-
ments that reveal that the content of the judgment may qualify as evi-
dence, so long, of course, as that content is evidentially related to the issues
at hand. That such arguments exist—that is, that there are always argu-
ments that can be (and often are, as we will see) given for the truth of some
or another intuitive judgment—shows that, in its current form, the nega-
tive xphi critique is quite weak. Truth-irrelevant variability in the intuition
that p, where this is understood as variability in whether different groups of
people have or lack the intuition that p, will not matter in the slightest. If
there is a cogent and compelling argument for p, then p may perfectly well
be regarded as true and taken as evidence for or against the truth of other,
related propositions.
A situation involving intuitive clashes is not materially different from
that in which there is a simple a clash of belief.2 Two groups may differ in
that one believes p while the other disbelieves p. However, if there is a good
argument for p, and someone or some group of people is in possession of
it, then they may treat p as evidence, regard p as true and known, and so
on. The existence of disagreement between the two groups over p just does
not matter, if there is more evidence to which to appeal than merely that
some people happen to believe p. In fact, it would be quite odd, in a case of
simple disagreement in belief over p, to take the mere fact of disagreement
76  Chapter 4

to license any conclusion about whether and to what extent the believers
or disbelievers in p are justified in believing or disbelieving p.3 To take a
relatively straightforward example, creationists and evolutionists disagree
over the truth of the theory of evolution. But no one would for a moment
think that this fact alone—that is, the fact that there exists this disagree-
ment—shows that there is some epistemological flaw in the belief in evo-
lution (or in creationism, for that matter). The important issue is whether
belief (or disbelief) in the theory of evolution is justifiable. If it is—if, for
example, there are strong, compelling arguments that the theory is true—
then that there is group of people who reject the theory does not matter
even a little bit to the theory’s epistemic credentials. If one is in possession
of a good argument in favor of p, then it is epistemically unimportant that
p is rejected by someone or some group of people.
These points are fairly obvious in cases of simple disagreement in belief.
Such disagreement is unproblematic because it can in principle be resolved
by appeal to reasons and arguments, and these reasons and arguments will
almost never cite psychological facts about how many or which sorts of
people believe or disbelieve the proposition in question. I think that the
same is true of a great many intuitive disagreements; just as in cases of
simple disagreement in belief, intuitive disagreements can and should be
resolved by appeal to reasons and arguments. And, as in cases of disagree-
ment in belief, if one side has a good argument for the intuition that p, then
the fact that others do not intuit p or intuit not-p is epistemically unimport-
ant. To regard intuitive clashes as different, to think that such clashes really
do have serious epistemic consequences, is to treat intuition as an essential
source of evidence regarding the relevant proposition, or perhaps even as
the only source. For, if there were other evidence from a different source
that provided all that was required to decide the issue, the case would col-
lapse into a case of simple disagreement in belief and the only question to
ask would be the straightforward question of which side of the clash has
more evidence in favor of it.
Recognizing that negative xphiles take analytic philosophers to treat
intuitions about thought experiments and cases as the only evidence, or
at least as essential evidence, for what is true in those thought experiments
and cases is important for understanding the overall metaphilosophical
dialectic. My own view is that philosophical arguments never appeal to
the intuitiveness of a judgment about a case in order to justify belief in
The Evidence for the Evidence  77

that judgment.4 This is a somewhat unusual stance, however, and many

philosophical methodologists would view it as wrong. In fact, many such
methodologists who are not especially impressed with the negative xphile
critique of philosophy will nonetheless insist that the intuitiveness of a
proposition p is often at least part of the evidence for p. They might agree
with me that it is rare for p to be endorsed merely because it is intuitive that
p, but they would add that in many cases, and perhaps in all those in which
p is the content of a truth-value judgment about a thought experiment or
hypothetical case, p’s intuitiveness is part of the overall argument for p. For
now, I will leave this issue to one side (my view, again, is that intuitiveness
does not play even a small evidential role in any philosophical argument);
the important thing to note before moving on is that the negative xphile
critique involves taking philosophers to treat intuitions as the only, or at
least as essential, evidence, when it comes to the truth or falsity of judg-
ments about thought experiments.
However, if the intuitiveness of judgments about thought experiments
and cases were all we have to recommend these judgments, and the judges
themselves believed this was so, then we should not find them arguing for
these judgments, for that would suggest that they believe there is more to
recommend the judgments than their mere intuitiveness, namely whatever
premises to which they appeal in the arguments for the judgments.5 But
this is just not so. Philosophers argue for their judgments about thought
experiments all the time, in every case of which I am aware, in every branch
of philosophy. In fact, in the very cases on which negative xphiles have
run studies, this is precisely the situation: An argument involves a thought
experiment and a judgment about that thought experiment, but arguments
are offered in support of the judgment; that is, reasons, different from a
simple appeal to the judgment’s intuitiveness, are given for thinking the
intuitive judgment is true. This, as I say, is very clearly the norm. In both
of the examples that figured heavily in the argument of chapter 2, this
is clearly true: Gettier’s 10 Coins Case argument against the JTB theory
of knowledge and Kripke’s Gödel Case argument against the descriptivist
theory of reference are both arguments of this standard sort. Gettier and
Kripke do not simply announce their intuitions about their cases and pro-
ceed from there. They both argue for the view that their judgments about
the thought experiments to which they appeal are true.
78  Chapter 4

In the next section, I present some of the arguments that have been given
for Gettier judgments in particular. In chapter 5, I will present other thought
experiments and the accompanying arguments that have been presented for
judgments about them. It is important for recognizing the mistaken pre-
suppositions of negative xphi, but also, more positively, for understanding
philosophical method, that we look to actual cases to determine how philos-
ophers reason about thought experiments. As I will show, failing to provide
an argument, or at least a set of considerations, in favor of a judgment about
a thought experiment must be very rare. In any case, there are plenty of
counterexamples—many cases in which intuitive judgments about thought
experiments are supplemented with reasons and arguments.

4.3  Arguing for Gettier Judgments

The first subsection below, 4.3.1, describes and comments on the argument
that Gettier himself gives for the judgments he makes about the original
two cases he presents in “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” The second
subsection below, 4.3.2, describes arguments that have been given by oth-
ers, both for judgments about those original two cases, as well as arguments
for Gettier judgments more generally. My claim—that one never finds cases
of intuitions about thought experiments that do not receive supporting
arguments—should be kept in mind. It is an empirical claim, and fully sub-
stantiating it will take more research and case studies.6 The claim is also one
concerning the whole of analytic philosophy, and my scope will be limited
in the remainder of this chapter to epistemology; in fact, it will be limited
to that small part of epistemology that some philosophers derisively call
“Gettierology.”7 Nevertheless, I think of the examples I will give as present-
ing a challenge to xphiles who think they see heavy reliance on intuition
in analytic philosophy: given that, in several central cases, including cases
involving Gettier judgments, appeals to intuition appear to be entirely
absent, show us cases in which such appeals are clearly meant to be doing
the serious work you say they are.
In the last section of the chapter, 4.4, I argue that if we focus not on the
reception of a thought experiment or a hypothetical case counterexample
but instead on its invention or discovery, we will find far less plausible the
idea that intuitions play a crucial role in arguments involving these thought
experiments and cases. It is true perhaps that, as readers of philosophy, we
The Evidence for the Evidence  79

do find some judgments about thought experiments and cases intuitive,

but as writers of philosophy, we should seriously doubt that this fact has any
serious epistemological or methodological significance.

4.3.1  Arguing for Gettier Judgments: Gettier’s Own Argument

The idea that Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory of knowledge is eviden-
tially based ultimately on intuitions about cases is a very common view in
epistemology and in analytic philosophy generally. Xphiles and analytic
philosophers agree about at least this: if there is an appeal to intuitions as
evidence anywhere in philosophy, it is there in anti-JTB arguments that rely
on Gettier cases. In fact, in looking at recent methodological disputes and
discussions over the import of the negative xphi challenge (in Williamson
2007 and Brown 2011, for example), one gets the strong sense that a lot
hangs on the correct description of Gettier’s refutation. The stakes seem to
be these: If Gettier’s refutation depends on taking intuitions as evidence,
then that is a strong point in favor of the negative xphi critique (given the
cross-cultural differences in intuitions about Gettier cases); whereas, if Get-
tier’s refutation does not depend on taking intuitions as evidence, then that
should suffice to defend the general sort of view to which I am attracted,
namely one according to which intuitions are accorded no, or very little,
evidential status in arguments in philosophy. I may be partly responsible
for this way of viewing the stakes, since, in previous work, and to some
extent even in the last chapter, I have described Gettier’s anti-JTB argu-
ment as a “paradigm” of the sort of argument one finds again and again in
analytic philosophy, namely one that presents a thought experiment and
uses facts about what is true in the thought experiment to argue for more
or less more general claims.8 But I do not think the account I gave earlier of
the stakes is quite right, and I think that Herman Cappelen (2012) is correct
when he says that the almost exclusive focus on Gettier cases is potentially
misleading. It may be that Gettier’s anti-JTB argument is unusual for one
reason or another and thus not a paradigm at all and hence ill-suited for
supporting any general methodological conclusions. In fact, this is what
Cappelen urges. He thinks that xphiles have chosen well—Gettier’s refuta-
tion might be that rare case of an argument in analytic philosophy that
really does bottom out in a brute appeal to intuitions.
I agree that Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory might not be espe-
cially representative of the way in which arguments in analytic philosophy
80  Chapter 4

typically run. One remarkable thing about the paper in which Gettier pre-
sented his famous cases is its length. It is short even given the quite short
average length of papers in Analysis, where it was first published. Most
papers in analytic philosophy are considerably longer and some of this
length is given over, as Cappelen ably demonstrates, to arguing for judg-
ments made about thought experiments. Gettier’s paper does contain con-
siderations that are meant to lend support to the judgments about the cases
described therein, but there is something to the idea that the main function
of the paper is simply to present the cases.
Despite the fact that Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory fails, in this
way, to be paradigmatic or representative, it is still true that if there is an
appeal to intuitions as evidence anywhere in analytic philosophy, then it is
present in Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory. So the stakes are high, but
really only for the negative xphile critique. If Gettier’s refutation is a clear
example of an argument that appeals to intuitions as evidence, that would
show only that a fairly unrepresentative argument in analytic philosophy is
susceptible to that critique; other arguments may be immune. However, if
it turns out that not even Gettier’s refutation is a clear example of an argu-
ment that appeals to intuitions as evidence, then that would show, I think,
that we are very unlikely to find such appeals elsewhere.
It is this latter circumstance that is the actual one: there is no appeal
to intuitions as evidence in Gettier’s refutation. Four points are relevant
here. First, as I showed in chapter 2, the best way to understand Gettier’s
refutation is to view it as involving the presentation of counterexamples to
the JTB theory (or, more precisely, to a generalization implied by the JTB
theory). The evidence against the JTB theory is simply the counterexamples
themselves. One can ask the further, evidence-for-the-evidence question,
namely, what justifies the view that Gettier’s alleged counterexamples are
genuine? But this really is a further question—whether Gettier succeeded in
refuting the JTB theory depends only on whether the counterexamples he
offers are genuine and not at all on whether Gettier, also and in addition
to providing counterexamples, offered evidence for his evidence, that is,
evidence that the counterexamples are genuine.
Second, there are grounds for saying that the exceptionally clear way in
which Gettier presents his counterexamples makes arguing for their genu-
ineness superfluous. For example, I would say that the fact that Gettier’s
Smith character in his 10 Coins Case does not know that the man who will
The Evidence for the Evidence  81

get the job has ten coins in his pocket is obvious, and would be to anyone
who correctly understands the structure of the case, a structure that Gettier
makes very easy for any minimally competent reader to grasp. It is clear,
as Gettier himself puts it, that Smith does not know, and clear also that he
does not know even while justifiably and truly believing. Xphiles might
complain that these adjectives, “clear,” “obvious,” and related terminology
are just more “intuition-talk,” but that is wrong. Being obvious or clear is
different from being intuitive. In ordinary English, to describe a point or
claim as clear or obvious is to comment on how easily one can recognize
that the claim or point is true, namely very, very easily indeed. That might
be something a theorist of intuitions would want to say about intuitive
claims, but the idea that the ease with which one may recognize that a
claim is true counts as evidence in favor of the claim is an odd one. To say
that a claim or point is obvious or clear is to presuppose that it is true. It is
not to cite something—clarity or obviousness—as evidence for the truth of
the claim or point. So when Gettier claims that it is “clear” that his Smith
character does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins
in his pocket, he is not adducing evidence for the claim, let alone evidence
that consists in his or other people’s intuitions. He is instead pointing to
the ease with which one can recognize that the claim is true. It is easy to
recognize this because the case is structured so simply and clearly, the cru-
cial bit of structure being this: Smith bases his belief, in part, on the count
of coins in the pocket of a man who will not get the job, namely Jones.
Anyone for whom this registers should be able to recognize that Smith’s
justified true belief does not, therefore, add up to knowledge. It is clear that
it does not, and that clarity is partly a function of the way the case is struc-
tured and presented.
But only partly, and this brings me to the third point: Gettier provides
a reason for thinking that his judgment about the 10 Coins Case is true. He
answers the evidence-for-the-evidence question concerning the 10 Coins
Case as follows:
But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue
of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins
are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pock-
et, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. (Gettier 1963, 122)

This reason, brief though it is, counts as an argument for the crucial judg-
ment that Gettier makes about the case, namely the judgment that Smith
82  Chapter 4

does not know.9 The argument is straightforward, compelling, and appeals

only to specific stipulations about the 10 Coins Case, which, when taken
together, lead rather directly to the conclusion that Smith does not know.
The fact that this argument is present in Gettier’s very short paper refuting
the JTB theory, which is supposed to be one of the clearest examples we
have of a piece of analytic philosophy that depends on taking intuitions as
evidence—and, indeed, as the only evidence—for judgments about thought
experiments, shows that the view of the nature of analytic philosophy that
takes it to rely heavily on intuitions as evidence is almost certainly mis-
taken. If there are arguments for intuitive judgments about thought experi-
ments in Gettier’s paper, then they are bound to be found in many other
papers in analytic philosophy besides.
And there are arguments in Gettier’s paper for the intuitive judgments
he makes about his thought experiments. I have presented Gettier’s argu-
ment for his judgment about the 10 Coins Case, but to drive the point
home I should add that there is an argument for his judgment about the
other case he presents as well, an argument, that is, for the judgment he
makes about what I will call the Brown in Barcelona Case. Many readers will
already be familiar with this second of Gettier’s cases, so a very brief sketch
here will suffice. Smith (again) has “strong evidence” for the belief that
his friend, Jones (again), owns a Ford. Smith has another friend, Brown,
“of whose whereabouts he [Smith] is totally ignorant.” Selecting the place
name ‘Barcelona’ “quite at random,” Smith forms the following disjunctive
belief:

(h)  Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona.

Smith is justified in believing (h), since (h) follows from his justified belief
that Jones owns a Ford and Smith sees this implication and forms his belief
in (h) precisely because he sees the implication between the proposition
that Jones owns a Ford and (h). Gettier then argues that if two further con-
ditions hold, then Smith’s belief in (h), though true and justified, is not
knowledge:
But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones does not own a Ford,
but is at present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and
entirely unknown to Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really
to be the place where Brown is. If these two conditions hold, then Smith does not
know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is
true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true. (Gettier 1963, 123)
The Evidence for the Evidence  83

Remember, by wide consensus, Gettier’s paper does not contain arguments,

beyond an appeal to their intuitiveness, for the judgments he makes about
his cases. According to this consensus, Gettier presents the cases, records
his intuitive judgments about them, simply asserts that these judgments
are true, and ends by rejecting the JTB theory. I hope it is clear by now that
this consensus is badly mistaken. Gettier gives a powerful (though short)
argument for his judgment about the 10 Coins Case, and another for his
judgment about the Brown in Barcelona Case. I have already reviewed his
argument for his judgment about the 10 Coins Case. The argument for
his judgment about the Brown in Barcelona Case is clear from the pas-
sage I have reproduced: Jones does not own a Ford and “by the sheerest
coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith” Brown really is in Barcelona;
hence, Smith does not know (h).
The presence of these arguments shows that the idea that Gettier relies
only on intuition in support of his judgments about his cases is a myth, a
piece of philosophical folklore. Unfortunately, the myth has had a pow-
erful, lasting, and, in my view, damaging influence on methodological
debates about the nature of analytic philosophy. Somehow, philosophers of
all stripes, not just xphiles, have convinced themselves that Gettier’s refuta-
tion of the JTB theory is representative of analytic philosophy in general,
and that it is representative partly in virtue of the fact that it makes a clear
appeal to intuitions as evidence. But an examination of the paper reveals
that Gettier does not anywhere appeal to intuitions or the intuitiveness of
the judgments he makes about his cases. He relies instead on arguments.
The view that Gettier’s paper contains no arguments for the judgments
about the cases he presents is almost never backed up by quotations from
the paper itself or by evidence of any kind that this is the correct view
of the way in which the paper proceeds. The view is almost always sim-
ply asserted, and the myth perpetuated, without anything approaching
a serious scholarly investigation into the matter. Of course, xphiles have
a vested interest in describing Gettier’s refutation as involving appeals to
intuitions as evidence. So it is unsurprising to find them saying things like
the following:
Examples of this practice in epistemology [of appealing to intuitions as evidence]
abound. Most famous of these examples is Edmund Gettier’s use of two thought-ex-
periments to generate intuitions intended to prosecute the claim that a person knows
that p just in case that person’s true belief is justified. (Alexander and Weinberg
2007, 56–57; emphasis added)
84  Chapter 4

But there is just no evidence anywhere in the paper that the purpose of Get-
tier’s two thought experiments (the 10 Coins and Brown in Barcelona cases)
is to “generate intuitions.” None whatsoever. Alexander and Weinberg con-
tinue to misdescribe Gettier’s method in the rest of the passage:
Gettier’s thought-experiments involve a person who has deduced a true belief q from
a justified false belief that p and, on that basis, formed a justified true belief that q.
According to Gettier, despite now having a justified true belief that q, the person
lacks knowledge that q. Purportedly, when we consider this case, we will have the
intuition that the person whose epistemic position is detailed in the thought-exper-
iment does not know that q. Further, this is to count as sufficient evidence against
the claim that a person knows that p just in case that person’s true belief is justified.
(Alexander and Weinberg 2007, 57; emphasis added)

Ironically, Alexander and Weinberg do gesture at one reason Gettier’s cases

were, at one time, thought to be cases of justified true belief without knowl-
edge. The cases both involve a justified true belief that is deduced from
a justified false belief. This is ironic since, arguably, it is implicit in Get-
tier’s paper that it is at least partly for this reason that it is clear that the
cases are not cases in which Smith knows the relevant propositions.10 But
despite some inkling of this, Alexander and Weinberg go on to say that it
is instead the fact that “we will have the intuition” that the cases are not
cases of Smith knowing that “is to count as sufficient evidence” against the
JTB theory. What makes them say that? Why not take it that it is the fact
that it is the deduction of a justified true belief from a justified false belief
that is to count the former as not knowledge and hence as sufficient evi-
dence against the JTB theory? The reason, of course, is that Alexander and
Weinberg have a stake in imputing appeals to intuition to Gettier’s method.
They are xphiles who want to see the variability of philosophical intuitions
discovered by them and other xphiles as relevant to more traditional philo-
sophical argumentation. Indeed, as negative xphiles, Alexander and Wein-
berg aim to use results in xphi to challenge or cast doubt on conclusions
drawn in more traditional ways. In other words, Alexander and Weinberg
are engaged in a bit of wishful arguing (to have a term for it); to have any
real bite, their challenge to the practice of relying on intuitions as evidence
depends on finding clear examples of the practice, so they describe the
examples “carefully,” in ways that make it appear as though the supposed
practitioners lean heavily on intuitions as evidence. But, at least in the case
of Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory, this really is mere appearance, one
The Evidence for the Evidence  85

generated by their (and others’) inaccurate description and not at all by

what one finds when one looks at Gettier’s paper itself.
So far as I know, there is only one published, explicit objection to the
view I am urging here, the view that Gettier’s paper contains arguments
for his judgments about his cases and does not rely simply and solely on
intuitions.11 In a recent paper arguing that negative xphiles, while right
to attribute to epistemologists a method that takes intuitions as evidence,
have not shown that our epistemic intuitions should not be trusted, Jen-
nifer Nagel writes,
Gettier does not present an explicit argument showing exactly why Smith’s judg-
ment does not amount to knowledge: he does not offer any positive analysis of
knowledge of his own, nor does he specify any necessary conditions on knowledge
which are lacking in this case. But despite neither explaining nor perhaps even
knowing exactly why he feels the way he does about this case, Gettier seems con-
vinced that his intuitions will be felt by others and by himself on other occasions.
(Nagel 2012, 503)

Every sentence in this passage is either mistaken, misleading, or lacking

entirely in textual support.
Nagel’s claim at the end of the passage about Gettier’s state of mind—
that he “seems convinced that his intuitions will be felt by others and by
himself on other occasions”—finds no textual support whatsoever. There is
no mention of intuitions at all in Gettier’s paper, let alone any discussion
of when they will be “felt” and by whom.
Does Gettier present an “explicit argument’” for his judgments about his
cases? It depends a bit on what Nagel has in mind by an explicit argument.
However, as I said above, Gettier does present an argument and clearly indi-
cates that it is an argument for his judgments about his cases. Recall Get-
tier’s argument for his judgment about the 10 Coins Case:
But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue
of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many
coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in
Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. (Gettier
1963, 122)

This is clearly an argument for the claim that Smith does not know that
(e) is true. The conclusion is stated first, before the semicolon, and what
follows the semicolon is the argument’s premise. In fact, the premise is
helpfully preceded by the premise-indicator term, “for”; Smith does not
86  Chapter 4

know (e) for the reason Gettier cites. Nagel seems to think that, even if this
is an argument, it is neither explicit nor is it one “showing exactly” why
Smith does not know that (e) is true. In my view, it is both explicit and does
explain why Smith does not know—explains it exactly, even.
Is this a quibble? Perhaps there is a fairly important methodological
point here: if what we expect when looking for arguments for judgments
about thought experiments and counterexamples are “explicit” arguments
“showing exactly” why a judgment is true, we might find fewer examples
than we would if our criteria were a bit laxer. I do not think it is fair to
characterize Gettier’s arguments for his judgments about his cases as less
than explicit or exact (his arguments are short, but that is different), but,
in general, expecting explicit and exact arguments seems too demanding.
Sometimes, surely, a consideration or two merely suggesting, as opposed
to entailing, that a judgment is true will suffice. In any case, the idea that
judgments about thought experiments receive support only from intu-
itions would not be made more plausible or acceptable if it turned out that
many such judgments fail to be presented with explicit and exact argu-
ments to back them up. That would prove only that the arguments for
these sorts of judgments are not of a particular sort, not that there are no
such arguments at all.
It is true that Gettier does not offer any “positive analysis of knowledge
of his own,” but offering such an analysis is not the aim of Gettier’s short
paper; the aim is rather to argue against the JTB theory. Failing to offer a
positive analysis can hardly be taken as grounds for supposing that he does
not know or cannot explain why his Smith character lacks knowledge, since
knowing or being able to explain this does not require a positive analysis.
Whether he fails to specify “any necessary conditions on knowledge”
that are lacking in his cases, as Nagel claims, is open to debate. It is true that
Gettier does not specify such conditions by laying them out explicitly and
describing them as necessary conditions on knowledge generally. On the
other hand, he does offer a reason, or set of reasons, for thinking that, in
each case, Smith does not know. So, a plausible interpretation of what Get-
tier is doing in his arguments for his judgments about his cases is that he is
indicating (if not strictly specifying) that there are conditions on knowing
that Smith, in each case, has failed to meet.
Of course, later commentators on Gettier’s paper have attempted to
explain in a more general way why Gettier’s Smith character does not know,
The Evidence for the Evidence  87

and these explanations often do take the form of specifications of necessary

conditions on knowledge, ones that go unmet in Gettier’s cases. It is well
known that, to this day, there is no widely agreed on account of knowledge
cast in terms of nontrivial, individually necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions. But that fact—that there is no agreed on full-blown analysis
of knowledge—does not mean that we do not know why the agents in at
least some Gettier cases fail to know. It may be that some necessary condi-
tions on knowledge, unrecognized during the JTB theory’s reign, have been
uncovered in the now fifty years of work on the Gettier problem. However,
methodologically speaking, it does not much matter whether any correct
necessary conditions have been identified. The important thing is that
these conditions, genuine or merely purported, can be, and have been, used
in attempts to justify judgments about Gettier cases. The history of work on
the Gettier problem shows that the picture of epistemology as depending
heavily on intuitions as evidence is badly distorted (as I will argue more
fully in section 4.3.2, below).
One final, related point that I hinted at earlier in connection with
Nagel’s demand for exact arguments is worth elaborating a bit: An argu-
ment that something is not an F (for any predicate F) of course need not
be an argument that the thing in question fails to satisfy some necessary
condition on being an F. Suppose that a very high proportion of cars that
are fuel efficient (but not all fuel-efficient cars) are Japanese. Determining
that a car is not Japanese would then be evidence, though not conclusive
evidence, that the car is not fuel efficient. Put differently, in the imagined
circumstances, being Japanese is not a necessary condition on being fuel
efficient, though failing to be Japanese would be very strong evidence that
a car is not fuel efficient. This sort of situation no doubt sometimes arises
in philosophy when we consider theories and purported counterexamples.
Sometimes an argument that a counterexample is genuine will appeal
to evidence that may be less than fully conclusive. The argument might
proceed, not by identifying some necessary condition that the theory has
missed, but instead by showing that the purported counterexample bears
certain marks that make it very likely, though perhaps not definite, that the
counterexample is genuine. So, offering an argument for the view that Get-
tier’s cases are genuine counterexamples to the JTB theory need not be to
offer an argument that appeals to necessary conditions on knowledge that
are not satisfied in the cases. Pace Nagel, such an argument can fall short
88  Chapter 4

of explaining exactly why they are cases of justified true belief without
knowledge.12
However, as I said above, I think Gettier does offer arguments intended
to explain exactly why his Smith character, in both the 10 Coins and Brown
in Barcelona cases, fails to know. According to Gettier, Smith’s belief, in
each case, fails to satisfy a necessary condition on knowing. Gettier does
not state a general version of the condition, but it is all but explicit in the
passages, quoted above, in which Gettier is arguing for the conclusion that
Smith does not know. In each case, Smith’s justified belief is only luckily
true. It is the presence of this sort of “epistemic luck,” which, in each case,
and according to Gettier, disqualifies Smith’s justified belief as knowledge.
So the purported necessary condition is just this:

Gettier’s Necessary Condition

If S’s belief that p is (also) knowledge that p, then S’s belief that p is not
luckily true.

The passages in which Gettier is arguing that Smith does not know make
it clear that epistemic luck is meant to explain Smith’s lack of knowledge.
In the 10 Coins Case, Smith’s belief is true “in virtue of” a fact that Smith
“does not know,” so, if he gets things right, as he does, that is just luck.
Smith, in the 10 Coins Case, bases his belief on the count of the coins in
the pocket of a man who will not get the job, so, again, getting things right
involves a lucky coincidence. In the Brown in Barcelona Case, the fact that
makes Smith’s belief true (the fact that Brown is in Barcelona) obtains only
by the “sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith”—luck again.
A more detailed picture of what goes wrong in Gettier cases, a more
detailed picture, that is, of why agents in Gettier cases lack knowledge, is
desirable. For example, it would be nice to have an analysis of what it is to
be epistemically lucky, and Gettier does not provide this in his paper (nor,
of course, does he use this terminology). He gives a pair of examples of an
agent, Smith, whose justified beliefs are merely luckily true, but there is
no definition, or general account, of the phenomenon of epistemic luck.
Failing to give an account of epistemic luck does not mean that Gettier’s
argument fails to explain exactly why Smith lacks knowledge, however.
Exact explanations can be in terms of concepts for which we lack analyses.
In any case, contemporary analytic epistemologists are making interesting
progress on analyzing epistemic luck,13 and some of this work can perhaps
The Evidence for the Evidence  89

be put to use in fleshing out Gettier’s argument. But none of this, nor even
whether Gettier was on the right track in diagnosing his own cases, mat-
ters to the important underlying methodological issue, which is just this:
does Gettier argue for his judgments about his cases, or does he instead rely
solely on their intuitiveness? I hope to have shown in this section that the
answer is very clearly that Gettier argues for his judgments. He does so via
an all but explicitly proposed necessary condition on knowledge, one bar-
ring luckily true beliefs from qualifying as knowledge.14

4.3.2  Arguing for Gettier Judgments: The Arguments of Others

The fact that Gettier argues for his judgments about his cases is important
to understanding analytic philosophical methods as they actually are. In
the place we are most likely to find an appeal to brute intuition, Gettier’s
short paper refuting the JTB theory, we find an appeal to argument instead.
However, what if history had been different? What if Gettier had just left it
up to us to intuit whether his cases were cases of justified true belief with-
out knowledge? To make things more vivid: What if Gettier had made an
appeal to brute intuition explicit, perhaps asserting somewhere in his 1963
paper that Smith does not know simply and solely because it is intuitive
that he does not?
I think that, even if Gettier had explicitly adopted a method that treated
intuitions about his cases as evidence for what was true in those cases, this
would not have made much of a difference. For even if Gettier had not
offered any arguments, we could have come along and offered some on his
behalf (or on behalf of the case against the JTB theory, rather). And, as a
matter of fact, and even though Gettier offered his own argument for the
judgment that his Smith character does not know, this is precisely what
happened. Many epistemologists have, since 1963, offered explanations of
why Smith does not know, and why, more generally, agents in Gettier cases
lack knowledge.
Here, I will only briefly run through some of the main examples of this
trend—only briefly, because there is a sense in which what I have in mind
is already familiar to philosophers who know something of the history of
Gettierology, for many philosophers know that this is a history of proposed
replacements for the JTB theory along with counterexamples to nearly
every proposal. It is rare, though, to hear this history described in positive
terms, or in a way that accurately reflects the intuition-free way in which
90  Chapter 4

it actually unfolded. The post-1963 work on the Gettier problem contains

many insights and has made a good deal of progress. It is true that the holy
grail of a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions on knowl-
edge has not been found, but the quest has uncovered what appear to be
important necessary conditions on knowledge, and these have been used
to explain why, in at least a significant range of Gettier cases, the relevant
agents lack knowledge. One perspective, which seems basically right to me,
is that the post-1963 proposals are all attempts to pinpoint more precisely
the kind of epistemic luck that gives rise to Gettier cases. And there has
been a fair amount of success at this; we now know of several different ways
in which a belief can be luckily true and hence disqualified as knowledge.
I should remind the reader, however, that the main methodological
point that I will be making about the post-1963 work on the Gettier prob-
lem is not one that depends in any way on there being genuine progress or
success at uncovering necessary conditions on knowledge. The issue is just
whether this work contains arguments for Gettier judgments. As we will
see, it very clearly does.
Start not quite post-1963, with Clark 1963. This is the first published
response to Gettier 1963, and in it Clark proposes that the presence of
false grounds in an inferential chain is what explains why justified true
believers in Gettier cases fail to know. Clark claims that adding a “no false
grounds” condition, which is itself necessary, to the JTB theory’s conditions
produces a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.15 It turns out that he
was wrong, not just about the claimed sufficiency of the resulting set of
conditions, but also about the necessity of the no false grounds condition.
What matters for the present purposes, however, is the way in which Clark
argues, not whether his conclusions were correct. And, as I said, he argues
that agents in Gettier cases fail to know because they make their inferences
based on false grounds.
A case he considers involving testimony is a Gettier case that is interest-
ingly different in several respects from Gettier’s original cases, but, like Get-
tier, Clark argues for the conclusion that the agent in his case fails to know.
He certainly does not rest his conclusion on intuitions, and, like Gettier, Clark
nowhere mentions intuitions or intuitiveness in his paper. Here is Clark argu-
ing that the agent in the testimony case, Smith (again) fails to know:
Yet Brown’s wild guess can hardly be regarded as providing Smith with knowledge
merely because it happens to be right. In this case, then, the grounds on which
The Evidence for the Evidence  91

Smith believes (1) are true, but the grounds on which he accepts these grounds, viz.
that Brown knows them, are false. (Clark 1963, 448)

This is an argument that Smith fails to know (1). (Never mind what (1) is
and ignore the details of the case. The purpose of quoting this passage is
simply to bring out the fact that Clark argues for his Gettier judgment.) He
cannot know it because it is based on a “wild guess” of Brown’s that just
“happens to be right.” This claim, which echoes Gettier’s claims about the
effect of epistemic luck, is then connected to Clark’s general explanation of
Gettier judgments: The luck involved in the case generates a false ground
for Smith’s belief in (1).
Turn now to Goldman 1967, which argues that, in many instances, justi-
fied true believers in Gettier cases fail to know because the facts that cause
them to believe are not appropriately causally connected to the facts that
make their beliefs true. Goldman’s explicit diagnosis of Gettier’s original
cases is that Gettier’s Smith character fails to know because a necessary
causal condition on knowledge is not satisfied in those cases. Goldman’s
discussion of his diagnosis and of its contrast with Clark’s proposal is a
remarkably clear example of a philosopher arguing for Gettier judgments.
Here is a passage from Goldman 1967 (q is the proposition that Jones owns
a Ford, while p is the proposition that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Bar-
celona; Goldman’s discussion in the passage concerns Gettier’s Brown in
Barcelona case):
Michael Clark, for example, points to the fact that q is false and suggests this as the
reason why Smith cannot be said to know p. … I shall make another hypothesis to
account for the fact that Smith cannot be said to know p, and I shall generalize this
into a new analysis of “S knows p.”
Notice that what makes p true is the fact that Brown is in Barcelona, but that this
fact has nothing to do with Smith’s believing that p. That is, there is no causal con-
nection between the fact that Brown is in Barcelona and Smith’s believing p. … Thus
one thing that seems to be missing in this example is a causal connection between
the fact that makes p true (or simply: the fact that p) and Smith’s belief of p. The re-
quirement of such a causal connection is what I wish to add to the traditional analysis.
(Goldman 1967, 358; emphasis in original)

All of this seems to be straightforward argument to the effect that since

there is not the appropriate causal connection between p and Smith’s belief
that p, Smith doesn’t know p. Intuitions are irrelevant, and, as is typical
of the post-1963 literature on the Gettier problem, are not mentioned or
appealed to anywhere in Goldman 1967.
92  Chapter 4

In another passage, Goldman discusses an alleged counterexample to

the sufficiency of Clark’s JTB plus no false grounds conditions due to Saun-
ders and Champawat 1964 and uses much the same language. The details
of the case, which is yet another permutation of Gettier’s original cases, are
not important for present purposes (though I should perhaps say that the
“Patterns” Goldman mentions are, according to him, kinds of knowledge-
producing causal patterns between facts, on the one hand, and beliefs to
the effect that those facts obtain, on the other); what is important is, first,
noting that Goldman very clearly supposes that argument is required for
settling the issue of whether the agent in the case (Smith again) knows and,
second, that there is no appeal to intuitions in Goldman’s reasoning:
But, as it happened, it is purely a coincidence that Jones owns a Ford today as well as
yesterday. Thus, Smith’s belief of p is not connected with p by Pattern 2, nor is there
any Pattern 1 connection between them. Hence, Smith does not know p. (Goldman
1967, 367)

Notice that, as in Clark 1963, considerations of epistemic luck play a role

in Goldman’s reasoning about Gettier cases. Coincidence is cited as a reason
for denying Smith knowledge and a deeper explanation is then offered: the
coincidence in question is a matter of lack of causal connection, which is
the very thing Goldman is proposing as a necessary condition on knowl-
edge. Earlier in his discussion of the same case, Goldman writes:
Clearly Smith does not know p; yet he seems to satisfy Clark’s analysis of knowing.
Smith’s lack of knowledge can be accounted for in terms of my analysis. Smith does
not know p because his believing p is not causally related to p, Jones’s owning a Ford
now. (Goldman 1967, 366)

Again, what we see here is an utterly typical example of reasoning about

thought experiments—about what is true in them and why. It is clear that
Smith does not know, Goldman says; and this is clear, he says later, because
it is purely coincidence that Smith’s belief is true. What does the coinci-
dence consist in; why is it coincidental that Smith’s belief is true? Not for
Clark’s no false grounds reason, for, as Goldman says, Clark’s conditions
seem to be satisfied in the case. Instead, according to Goldman, it is a mat-
ter of lack of appropriate causal connection.
As a final example, consider Lehrer and Paxson 1969, the paper that
bred the so-called defeasibility approaches to the problem of analyzing
knowledge. An early passage in the paper rehearses the way in which Get-
tier refuted the JTB theory. There is nothing remarkable about the passage
The Evidence for the Evidence  93

unless one is wedded to the idea that Gettier’s demonstration of the falsity
of the JTB theory depends on intuitions as evidence and that this is the
standard interpretation of his demonstration in post-1963 epistemology. If
one is wedded to that idea, this passage is surprising, but there are count-
less other such passages in the post-1963 literature, ones that show, just like
this one from Lehrer and Paxson 1969, that epistemologists took Gettier to
be arguing against the JTB theory, and arguing for his judgments about his
cases. Here are Lehrer and Paxson on what Gettier did and how he did it:
This analysis of nonbasic knowledge [the JTB theory] is, of course, defective. As Ed-
mund Gettier has shown, there are examples in which some false statement p entails
and hence completely justifies S in believing that h, and such that, though S cor-
rectly believes that h, his being correct is mostly a matter of luck. Consequently, S
lacks knowledge, contrary to the above analysis. (Lehrer and Paxson 1969, 227)

Note that Lehrer and Paxson attribute a reason to Gettier for thinking that
the agents in his cases do not know: their true beliefs, though justified, are
“mostly a matter of luck.”
Later, in motivating their defeasibility analysis, Lehrer and Paxson, like
Clark and Goldman before them, look for an explanation for what the epis-
temic luck in the various Gettier cases consists in:
In the examples referred to above, there is some true statement that would defeat
any justification of S for believing that h. In the case of the pyromaniac [a Gettier
case due to Skyrms 1967], his justification is defeated by the true statement that
striking the match will not cause it to ignite. This defeats his justification for believ-
ing that the match will ignite upon his striking it. (Lehrer and Paxson 1969, 227)

They then propose adding a defeasibility condition to the JTB analysis and
spend the bulk of the rest of the paper trying to arrive at the correct account
of epistemic defeat. None of this attempt involves appealing to intuitions as
evidence. Lehrer and Paxson’s paper contains a good number of relatively
complicated thought experiments but the various conclusions they draw
about these thought experiments are argued for; nothing rests or hangs on
what strikes them as intuitive.
At one point in Lehrer and Paxson 1969, there is a comparison between
two thought experiments. In one, according to Lehrer and Paxson, there is
justified true belief and also knowledge;16 in the other, there is justified true
belief without knowledge (a variation on one of Gettier’s original cases). But
the two cases are similar in that there at least appears to be a “defeater” in
each case, that is, a true proposition, which, were it conjoined to the agent’s
94  Chapter 4

justification would result in an unjustified true belief. Lehrer and Paxson

then argue for the view that it is only the second case that involves the kind
of epistemic defeat that prevents knowledge. As before, for the present pur-
poses, the nitty-gritty thought-experimental details need not be presented
in full. The point of reproducing these passages is simply to give a flavor of
the ways in which epistemologists argue for Gettier judgments:
Why should one true statement but not the other be allowed to defeat my justifica-
tion? The answer is that in one case my justification depends on my being com-
pletely justified in believing the true statement to be false while in the other it does
not. My justification for believing that Tom removed the book does not depend on
my being completely justified in believing it to be false that Mrs. Grabit said Tom
was not in the library and so forth. But my justification for believing that someone
in my class owns a Ford does depend on my being completely justified in believing it
to be false that Mr. Nogot does not own a Ford. Thus, a defeating statement must be
one which, though true, is such that the subject is completely justified in believing
it to be false. (Lehrer and Paxson 1969, 229)

It is clear that intuitions are playing no evidential role in this reasoning. It

is not that it is intuitive that the belief that Tom removed the book adds up
to knowledge, while the belief that someone in class owns a Ford does not.
Instead, an argument is being offered; reasons for thinking that the latter
belief is not knowledge are being given. This is standard practice in analytic
epistemology.
By looking at Gettier 1963 and a few of the definitive post-1963 papers
on the Gettier problem, it is, I hope, clear that epistemologists argue that
their Gettier judgments are true, and do not treat the intuitiveness of these
judgments as epistemically or methodologically important. So what should
we make of the data in Weinberg et al. 2001 showing that there is cross-
cultural variability in Gettier judgments?
Well, a variety of arguments do favor the “Western” Gettier judgment,
arguments appealing to such things as epistemic luck, appropriate causal
connections, and defeasibility. Given this, a reasonable thing to do, it seems
to me, is to simply ignore the cross-cultural data and assess the arguments
directly. The data would be very interesting and challenging if the only thing
to be said in defense of the Western judgment was that Westerners tend to make
this judgment when considering Gettier cases. But I hope to have reminded
philosophers of what I suspect they knew all along: there is a lot to be said
in defense of the view that agents in Gettier cases do not know, and most of
it—no, all of it—goes beyond what is intuitive.17
The Evidence for the Evidence  95

One comment about the how this bears on what I earlier called the relo-
cation problem. The arguments for Gettier judgments I canvassed in this
section appeal to premises, of course. So what justifies these premises? For
example, why should we think, with Gettier, that the sort of epistemic luck
involved in his cases is what prevents the justified true beliefs in them from
qualifying as knowledge? Will we not reach a stage at which we will have to
appeal to brute intuition? These are reasonable questions, and my answers
to them will not be fully complete until I return to the relocation problem
in chapter 5.
However, for now, I want to draw attention to the following conse-
quence of having relocated the appeal to intuition elsewhere, “further up”
on the justificatory chain, as it were, even if that were all that could be
accomplished. The consequence is that the current xphi data, the data that
has been gathered so far, is entirely irrelevant to whether we know that this
or that philosophical judgment is true. For if intuitions come into play, but
only further up the justificatory chain—for example, with respect to a pro-
posed necessary condition on knowledge that bans certain sorts of luckily
true beliefs—then the only relevant data would be data concerning people’s
intuitions about whether that is, indeed, a necessary condition on knowl-
edge. But of course there is no empirical data on that question; xphiles
do not have data about people’s judgments about more general epistemic
principles. Hence, if the appeal to intuition has been relocated, then there
is currently no reason based on empirical data about intuitions to be at all
skeptical about any philosophical judgment or principle. My view is that
it is a mistake to think that intuitions enter the picture at any stage, and I
will argue for this more fully in the next chapter. However, relocating the
appeal to intuition, even if that were all that pointing to the various and
sundry arguments that have been given for Gettier judgments and other
judgments about thought experiments could accomplish, would stop the
negative xphi challenge dead in its tracks.

4.4  Inventing Thought Experiments and the Order of Explanation

Objection

Here is an objection to my claim that there are arguments for Gettier judg-
ments, both in Gettier 1963 and in many post-1963 examples of Getti-
erology besides:18 There are arguments there, certainly, but conceiving of
96  Chapter 4

them as arguments for Gettier judgments is a mistake. Instead, what we

have in the Gettierology literature are many instances of abduction: Gettier
judgments are taken to be true, perhaps simply on the grounds that they
are intuitive, and then the task is one of finding the best explanation of
their supposed truth. In other words, the perspective on the arguments I
discussed in the previous section gets things backward; the order of expla-
nation goes from the truth of the Gettier judgments to the probable truth
of the principle intended to explain their truth, not from the truth of the
principle to the truth of the Gettier judgments. Call this the order of explana-
tion objection.
I concede to the order of explanation objection that, sometimes (though
this is fairly rare, I think), arguments involving judgments about thought
experiments do seem intended to be read at least partially abductively. In
fact, some of the arguments for Gettier judgments I cited above are not,
perhaps, simply arguments for Gettier judgments; they are also meant to
be abductive arguments that proceed from the truth of a Gettier judgment
to the truth of the epistemic principle that best explains it. This is fairly
unsurprising, since a good deductive or inductive argument for q that takes
p as a premise can also often be treated as a good abductive argument for p
that takes q as a premise.
This concession is not, therefore, very damaging to my overall view. An
argument involving a Gettier judgment that is not purely abductive—by
which I mean that the order of explanation goes both ways, from the truth
of the Gettier judgment to the truth of some more general epistemic prin-
ciple, but also vice versa, is still an argument for the Gettier judgment that
need not depend on intuitions as evidence. The fact that Gettier judgments
are sometimes treated as premises in arguments for general principles does
not, by itself, establish that all, or even any, of the support for the Gettier
judgments themselves comes from intuition. An abductive argument for q
from p takes the truth of p as granted or given. It is a further question why
p should be taken for granted or given.
One might think that the rhetorical language in which an argument
is expressed would provide clues about whether it should be interpreted
abductively. Unfortunately, this language is often ambiguous. If a philoso-
pher says that p “explains” q, for example, or that p “accounts for” q, or
that p is “the reason for” q, or that q is true “because” p, these could mean
either that p is being treated as a premise in an argument for q, or that q is
The Evidence for the Evidence  97

being treated as a premise in an abductive argument for p, or both. And, of

course, this sort of ambiguous rhetorical language occurs frequently in dis-
cussions of thought experiments and counterexamples, including in many
of the examples of discussions of Gettier judgments I quoted in the previ-
ous section.19
There are, however, two reasons for thinking that judgments about
thought experiments—Gettier judgments, for example—are not regularly
taken as premises in fully abductive arguments for some or another explan-
atory principle or proposition. The first reason is that, in these cases, the
negation of the relevant thought-experimental judgment—for example, the
claim that an agent in a Gettier case really does know—is always, to some
extent, a live option. Certainly, Gettier himself could not have simply taken
it for granted that his Smith character, in the 10 Coins and Brown in Bar-
celona cases, fails to know. After all, the JTB theory rules that Smith does
know in these cases, so it would have been dialectically quite strange if Get-
tier intended the arguments he gives to be abductive arguments that take
his judgments about his cases for granted.
It might be objected that this overlooks the role of intuition. Intuition
supports the thought-experimental judgments, and then those judgments
are assumed in abductive arguments for explanatory principles and propo-
sitions—or so the objection might go. This is a possible view of the meth-
odology of thought experimentation in philosophy; I will not deny that.
The trouble with it is that there is no evidence at all that this view of the
method is correct. If it were the correct view, we would at least sometimes
find philosophers arguing explicitly as follows: “P is intuitively true in this
case, hence p. Now, what is the best explanation for p? Q is a good candidate.
Therefore, q.” But this pattern never appears, or never does so explicitly, at
any rate. So far as I know, there are no cases of thought experimentation in
analytic philosophy that explicitly fit the bill. The best explanation for this
is that the view under consideration is not the correct view of the method
of thought experimentation in analytic philosophy.
Typical cases of abduction involve judgments based on empirical obser-
vation. The truth of these judgments is given in a certain literal way—they
are given in perception. Arriving at them is not a matter of careful thinking
or reflection, and it is not especially difficult to generate the judgments that
serve as premises in typical, empirical abductions. Those inclined to see a
heavy reliance on intuitions in philosophy might take them to be analogous
98  Chapter 4

to intuitive judgments for these reasons, but I think this is a mistake. The
mistake involves taking the wrong perspective on thought experiments.
The perspective that is usually taken is that of a consumer of a thought
experiment. When thinking about philosophical arguments, we, for what-
ever reason, think of our reactions to these arguments, and to the cases,
counterexamples, and thought experiments they involve. Now, it may be
that many of us do make relatively spontaneous, nonreflective, and nonin-
ferential judgments when encountering a thought experiment in someone
else’s work. If we instead take the perspective of the producer (or inventor or
discoverer) of a thought experiment and ask how the producer’s judgments
about his or her own thought experiments are generated, the picture is very
different. For, as many analytic philosophers know, inventing an illuminat-
ing and fruitful thought experiment, or constructing a good counterexam-
ple to an even somewhat plausible theory, is difficult business—so difficult
that to describe the judgments that one elicits in oneself, having invented
the thought experiment, or constructed the counterexample, as spontane-
ous, nonreflective, or noninferential seems plainly absurd.
This general point about the different perspectives one can take on
thought experiments can be put in terms specific to Gettier 1963 and the
Gettier cases and Gettier judgments contained therein: perhaps many read-
ers of Gettier 1963 intuit that Gettier’s Smith character does not know, but
Gettier himself did not intuit this. For Gettier, arriving at that judgment took a
considerable amount of ingenuity, careful thought, and inference. To cook
up his counterexamples to the JTB theory, he needed a recipe, and it is to
that recipe that we should look in trying to get clear on the methods he
used to refute the JTB theory.
Gettier makes the recipe fairly clear, and I described its main ingredi-
ent (epistemic luck) in the previous section when discussing Gettier’s argu-
ments for his judgments about his cases. The point I want to make here is
that he did not pull the counterexamples out of thin air—of course he did
not. No one pulls philosophical thought experiments or counterexamples
out of thin air. The question of whether they are effective thought experi-
ments or genuine counterexamples ought to be answered by appeal to the
sorts of considerations that led to their production, not by citing facts about
how they happen to have been received.
This, then, is the second reply to the order of explanation objection: if
we take the perspective of the inventor of a thought experiment, or the
The Evidence for the Evidence  99

discoverer of a counterexample, the abductive interpretation of arguments

involving judgments about these things looks extremely implausible.
Inventors of thought experiments and discoverers of counterexamples do
not take these judgments for granted and they do not intuit that their judg-
ments about them are true. As I have been urging, the invention and dis-
covery of these things takes time, reflection, and many difficult inferences.
Taking the producer’s perspective on thought experiments and counterex-
amples should make us very skeptical of the idea that analytical philosophi-
cal method depends on intuitions as essential evidence.
5  More Evidence for the Evidence and the Relocation
Problem Redux

5.1 Introduction

I do two things in this chapter: First, I give more examples of philosophers

arguing for their judgments about cases. Second, I give a fuller reply to what
I termed the relocation problem in chapter 3, the problem—or, rather, the
apparent problem—that my view merely relocates, instead of eliminating,
appeals to intuition in philosophy.
The two things are related. Sometimes I manage to convince some phi-
losophers that judgments made about philosophical cases are invariably
accompanied by backing arguments. But even among those I manage to
convince of this, I have discovered that there is often a lingering worry
about the role of intuition, one that amounts to something like the worry
behind the relocation problem. The feeling that many philosophers seem
to have is that there just must be some role for intuitions to play in phi-
losophy, and if this is not quite the role xphiles have taken it to be, then
there must be some other, related role for them. My hope is that, by pre-
senting more examples of the sorts of backing arguments one finds in con-
nection with judgments about cases, and then following this quickly with
a convincing reply to the relocation problem, I will succeed in dispelling
the impression that there must be a crucial evidential role for intuitions in
philosophical arguments.
The first task, namely presenting examples from the literature of the
original arguments that philosophers give for their judgments about cases,
is really the only responsible way to answer the question of whether phi-
losophers appeal to intuitions as evidence for their judgments about cases.
Like Herman Cappelen, I take the question to be a straightforwardly empiri-
cal one, to be answered by looking at first-order philosophical texts to see
102  Chapter 5

what does and does not get appealed to as evidence in them. It strikes me,
as it strikes Cappelen, as ironic that this method has never been adopted by
negative xphiles. They simply assume that philosophers treat intuitions as
evidence and then proceed with their critique. The irony is that the empiri-
cal evidence concerning first-order philosophical practice reveals their own
intuitional diversity evidence to be largely irrelevant to philosophy as it is
actually practiced.
For my purposes in this book, the most important examples to examine
are those for which there exist xphi data showing that the relevant intuitions
exhibit the kind of truth-irrelevant diversity that negative xphiles believe
to be a serious problem. Because there is now a fair bit of data concerning
intuitional diversity relative to Gettier cases, I expended a fair bit of energy
in the last chapter discussing the arguments that have been given by epis-
temologists for Gettier judgments. In this chapter, I will show that Kripke’s
antidescriptivist judgment about the Gödel Case is supported by argument
as well, showing, thereby, that diversity of intuition about the Gödel Case
is irrelevant to the question of whether we have good evidence for Kripke’s
judgment about that case (and so, to that extent, against descriptivism). I
will then briefly discuss the arguments that have been given by Keith Leh-
rer for his judgment about the Truetemp Case. (Briefly, because, in this case,
the arguments have already been re-presented by Cappelen.)
Are there any arguments in philosophy that rest on a brute intuition
about a case? If there were, that would weaken the empirical case for the
view that intuitions about cases are not treated as essential evidence con-
cerning what is true in them. However, if there are such arguments, they are
very difficult to come by. I do not know of a single clear example, and there
are in this book, and in Cappelen’s, a great many examples of arguments
that involve thought experiments and cases but do not rest on brute intu-
itions about them. However, in informal conversations with philosophers
who incline toward the myth of the intuitive, I sometimes hear favorite
examples of arguments that they allege rest on a brute intuition about a
case. I briefly discuss three of these favorites in the next section, ones that
seem to come up again and again: Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument,
John Searle’s Chinese room argument, and Donald Davidson’s Swampman
argument. However, as I will show, these examples are not what they are
purported to be; they are examples in which one does find supporting argu-
ments, right there in the surrounding text of the original presentations.
More Evidence for the Evidence  103

Jackson’s, Searle’s, and Davidson’s arguments involve thought experi-

ments that are pretty wild. Very strange circumstances are hypothesized
in them and some negative xphiles (e.g., Jonathan Weinberg [2007] and
Edouard Machery [2011]) have claimed that, beyond the concern raised
by truth-irrelevant variability, part of the case against relying on intuitions
as evidence has to do with the fact that a great many of the prominent
examples of philosophical thought experiments involve imagining highly
improbable, and sometimes downright outlandish, scenarios. Indeed, they
have cited these very thought experiments from Jackson, Searle, and David-
son, as examples of the bad practice of relying on intuitions about very
strange cases as evidence.
Before turning to a discussion of the relocation problem in the last sec-
tion of this chapter, I comment on this supposed additional reason for
being suspicious of appealing to intuitions as evidence. I argue that, while
making judgments about strange cases can be difficult, that is no reason
to deny that one might know, via careful argument, that one or another
such judgment is true. And, unsurprisingly, what we find when we actually
examine the contexts in which these thought experiments are presented is
exactly that: arguments, not intuitions. That is true not just of the thought
experiments from Jackson, Searle, and Davidson, but also in other cases in
which highly unusual circumstances are hypothesized in the service of test-
ing a philosophical theory. I discuss one more recent case of an outlandish
thought experiment (from Jennifer Lackey’s fine work on the epistemol-
ogy of testimony) and show that, as is perfectly typical, its presentation is
accompanied by various arguments for the judgments its inventor makes
about it. The take-home message is that there seems to be nothing in first-
order philosophical practice that would justify the view that philosophers
routinely rely on intuitions as evidence.

5.2  More Evidence for the Evidence

One question that I should revisit here, before presenting more examples
of philosophers arguing for their judgments about cases, is the question
of how large an evidential role intuition is supposed to play, according to
those who think it has any such role to play at all. Back in chapter 1, I
emphasized the fact that the negative xphi critique represents a significant
challenge to philosophy and its methods only if intuitions about cases are
104  Chapter 5

treated as essential evidence for what is true in the cases. Only then would
the variability results lead us to suspend judgment about what is true in
the cases.
But there is a range of metaphilosophical positions one might take
regarding the evidential role of intuition. One might think, for example,
that intuitions about a given case are treated as a part, but only a nones-
sential part, of the evidence for what is true in the case. Simply pointing
out that judgments about cases almost always receive backing arguments
does not rebut this view, since the view is obviously compatible with the
fact that there are backing arguments.
However, while the existence of backing arguments is compatible with
the philosophers presenting these arguments also taking intuitions to pro-
vide some evidential support for the relevant judgments, the real question
is whether there is any evidence that philosophers actually do endorse a
view to the effect that intuitions are nonessential evidence for the truth
about thought experiments and cases. If philosophers, in their reasoning
about cases, came right out and said, “Intuitions are some, though not all,
of the evidence for this judgment about this case,” then there would be
such grounds. But they seem never to say such a thing, not, anyway, in
first-order philosophizing. I am open to the possibility that such a view is
implicit in their practice, but is there any evidence that this possibility is
actual? My admittedly limited survey of arguments involving appeals to
thought experiments and cases suggests not. There is no reason to think
that the philosophers who present these arguments are implicitly suggest-
ing that the intuitiveness of a judgment about a given case is even part of
the evidence for the truth of the judgment.
In fact, since the philosophers in question usually argue for such judg-
ments, we have some reason to deny that there is any such implicit appeal
to intuitions. For, as Cappelen points out, if someone, philosopher or oth-
erwise, presents an argument for p, and says and does no more by way
of indicating why the rest of us should believe p, then we are justified in
believing that the argument encodes what its presenter takes to be the evi-
dence for p, not just some of it. When we add that the contexts of the pre-
sentations are philosophical papers and books, wherein we should expect
the philosopher who wants to convince us of p to explicitly present his or
her fullest and best case for p, the idea that there might nevertheless be
some implicit appeal to intuitions becomes extremely doubtful.
More Evidence for the Evidence  105

5.2.1  Kripke’s Arguments for the Gödel Case Judgment

Kripke makes this widely quoted comment about intuition in Naming and
Necessity:
Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is
very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it’s very heavy evidence in favor of
anything myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one
can have about anything, ultimately speaking. (Kripke 1980, 42)

I have argued elsewhere (Deutsch 2010) that this is not an endorsement

of a general, intuitions-as-evidence methodology for philosophy. In par-
ticular, Kripke is not saying that people’s intuitions about thought experi-
ments and cases are “very heavy evidence” regarding what is true in those
thought experiments and cases. The impression that Kripke is saying or
implying this is, I claim, an artifact of taking the quotation out of context.
The surrounding passages make it clear that Kripke is concerned in them
with philosophical distinctions and whether such distinctions “have intuitive
content,” in the sense that nonphilosophers are inclined to draw them. The
issue is important to Kripke because of Quinean skepticism about essen-
tial properties. Quine held that, independently of how they are described,
objects do not have (and, indeed, do not lack) essential properties. Quine
did not merely deny that there are no description-independent essential
or accidental properties of objects, he also suggested that the very distinc-
tion between (description-independent) essential and accidental properties
is a philosophical fiction, a distinction invented by philosophers with no
analogue in the thought and talk of ordinary folk in their ordinary lives.
However, as Kripke convincingly argues, ordinary people do draw the dis-
tinction and do so fairly regularly. But—and for my purposes, this is the
really important point—the claim that ordinary people draw the distinc-
tion is all that Kripke means by the claim that the distinction has “intuitive
content.” In fact, in the passages surrounding the quoted passage, Kripke is
at pains to stress that the issue for him, at this stage in Naming and Necessity,
is not whether there are any description-independent essential or acciden-
tal properties of objects (which is something he gives arguments—not just
intuitions—for later) but just whether there can be meaningful ascriptions
of such properties to objects. And it is relevant to that issue, Kripke thinks,
that “the ordinary man” is inclined to make such ascriptions in his ordi-
nary thought and talk.1
106  Chapter 5

In any case, Kripke’s behavior, in the rest of Naming and Necessity, does
not explicitly suggest that he subscribes to the view that intuitions are evi-
dence for judgments about cases. He somewhat (but only somewhat) regu-
larly uses the word “intuition” and its cognates, but most of these uses are
most plausibly interpreted as indicating that Kripke takes the propositions
he characterizes in such terms as ones we might pretheoretically or uncritically
endorse. (This is related, clearly, to his use of “intuitive content” in the quo-
tation with which I began.) It would be strange to ascribe to Kripke a view
according to which the propositions we would pretheoretically or uncriti-
cally endorse are ones for which we have very heavy evidence. It is a strange
view to ascribe to anyone, but ascribing it to Kripke in particular would be
to forget the revolutionary character of many of the conclusions in Naming
and Necessity. At least some of what is revolutionary about Kripke’s book is
revolutionary in the way that good philosophy often is; that is, by showing
us that our preconceived, pretheoretical opinions are wrong.
Even if I am right that Kripke does not explicitly treat intuitions as evi-
dence, it could be that there are implicit appeals to intuitions in Kripke’s
arguments for his conclusions about, specifically, cases and thought experi-
ments (of which there are a great many in Naming and Necessity). I argued
in chapter 3 that, at least in the case of the Gödel Case, such an appeal is
not explicit; the passages in which Kripke presents the Gödel Case do not
explicitly say that intuitions about the case are meant to play some argu-
mentative role. This leaves it open that Kripke means his judgment about
the case to find implicit support in the fact that it is intuitive. However,
once again, the textual evidence speaks against this possibility, since what
one finds, when one bothers to look, is straightforward appeals to argu-
ment instead.
Immediately following his presentation of the Gödel Case, Kripke men-
tions three real-life (not hypothetical) cases that he takes to be similar to it.
He does this, he says, in order to discourage the impression that the circum-
stances imagined in his hypothetical case are far-fetched or even unusual.
Just as the imagined speakers in the Gödel Case do, we often use a name,
Kripke says, “on the basis of considerable misinformation” (Kripke 1980,
84). As examples, Kripke mentions uses of the names “Peano,” “Einstein,”
and “Columbus.” Kripke makes the same point with each example: in each,
it is clear that the misinformation that some speakers labor under when
using these names does not affect the referential facts; that is, speakers who,
More Evidence for the Evidence  107

for example, mistakenly believe that Peano discovered the so-called Peano
axioms (the discoverer of the axioms, Kripke reminds us, was Dedekind,
not Peano) do not, because of their mistake, fail to refer to Peano with their
uses of “Peano.” On the contrary, those uses refer to Peano, about whom
such speakers, because misinformed, are led to say false things (such as
that Peano discovered the Peano axioms). Similarly, although some peo-
ple believe that Einstein invented the atomic bomb and so associate “the
inventor of the atomic bomb” with “Einstein,” they still, and despite their
mistake, refer to Einstein with their uses of “Einstein.” Likewise for “Colum-
bus”: a good number of the “identifying descriptions” that get associated
with the name, “Columbus,” simply do not apply to Columbus, the man.
“Columbus was the first man to realize that the Earth is round” is false,
regardless of who utters it, and regardless, therefore, of which identifying
descriptions its utterer associates with “Columbus,” including, of course,
“the man who first realized that the Earth is round.”
I take Kripke’s comparison between the Gödel Case and the real-life cases
to be an argument for his judgment about the Gödel Case. If nothing else,
their placement in Naming and Necessity strongly suggests this. Coming, as
they do, immediately after the presentation of the Gödel Case, it would be
odd if Kripke did not take the facts about them to have some bearing on
what he says just before, in his discussion of the Gödel Case. Furthermore,
as I said above, Kripke explicitly says that the presentation of the real-life
cases is meant to counter a potential objection to his judgment about the
Gödel Case, namely the objection that the circumstances described in the
presentation of the Gödel Case are unusual in some way that would blunt
its antidescriptivist force. The idea here is that the similarities between the
hypothetical case and the real-life ones are so strong that, whatever the
correct characterization of the referential facts in the real-life cases happens
to be, an analogous characterization should apply to the hypothetical case.
There is also, and importantly, an assertion of—not an intuition about—
what the correct characterization in the real-life cases is: in the real-life
cases, speakers who are misinformed in various ways about the bearers of
the names they use nevertheless refer to those bearers with their uses. This
is strong evidence that the misinformed users of “Gödel,” in the hypotheti-
cal Gödel Case, refer to Gödel, not Schmidt.
It is not, however, intuitive evidence; it would be a mistake, I think,
to describe Kripke’s strategy, in his discussion of the real-life cases, as an
108  Chapter 5

attempt to elicit further intuitions that conflict with descriptivism. In

recent work, Michael Devitt (2011, 2012) describes Kripke’s strategy in just
this mistaken way; according to Devitt, Kripke relies on intuitions in his
attack on the descriptivist theory of reference, but, in addition to intuitions
about hypothetical cases, he relies on intuitions about real-life cases too. In
fact, Devitt maintains that the Gödel Case, and the antidescriptivist intu-
ition it is meant, according to Devitt, to elicit, is inessential to Kripke’s
attack on descriptivism. Our intuitions about the real-life cases are better
evidence against descriptivism, he says.
One problem with Devitt’s view is that Kripke does not treat the ques-
tion of whether, say, “Einstein,” refers, for all of us, to Einstein, or instead,
for some of us, to the inventor of the atomic bomb, as an open question.
Rather, Kripke takes it for granted that “Einstein” does not refer, for any of its
users, to the inventor of the atomic bomb. That is, it is a mistake to suppose
that Kripke thinks he is adducing evidence—of any kind, let alone intuitive
evidence—for the view that “Einstein” does not refer, for any of its users, to
the inventor of the atomic bomb. Instead he assumes this view and uses it,
along with similar assumptions about “Peano” and “Columbus,” in support
of the view (which he does not, at this stage, regard as fully settled) that
“Gödel” does not refer, for any of the hypothetical speakers he imagines, to
the man who, in the imagined circumstances, proved the incompleteness
theorem, namely Schmidt.
Does Kripke’s appeal to the real-life cases in support of his judgment
about the Gödel Case beg the question? The answer, I think, is that the
question that Kripke takes himself to be answering in presenting the Gödel
Case is not simply whether there are counterexamples to descriptivism. As
Jonathan Ichikawa, Ishani Maitra, and Brian Weatherson (2012) point out
in a recent paper, Kripke presents the Gödel Case after he has presented
other counterexamples, ones in which speakers use a name but cannot
themselves cite any uniquely identifying properties of the names’ bearers
(the “Cicero” and “Feynman” cases).2 The question then becomes whether,
in those cases in which a name does get associated with a uniquely identify-
ing description, the name refers, in virtue of that association, to whatever
the description denotes. In fact, I think (and here my view differs from that
taken in Ichikawa et al. 2012) that the question is somewhat subtler even
than this. The question that the Gödel Case is meant to test is whether, in
those cases in which we know already that a certain description commonly
More Evidence for the Evidence  109

associated with a name does in fact denote the bearer of that name (this,
Kripke points out, is true of “Gödel” and “the discoverer of incomplete-
ness” as we actually, in real life, use the terms—the Gödel Case, remember,
is “blatantly fictional”), the name refers to its bearer because the descrip-
tion denotes the bearer. If that were true, then, in the blatantly fictional
circumstances imagined in the Gödel Case, it should be true that “Gödel”
refers to Schmidt, not Gödel. That this is not so—that, in those imagined
circumstances, “Gödel” refers, still, to Gödel—is then argued for by appeal
to the real-life cases, in which we know already that certain descriptions
associated with certain names do not denote the bearers of those names.
Kripke’s argument for his judgment about the Gödel Case does not end
with the comparison to the real-life cases, however. In a footnote to his
discussion of the Gödel Case (Kripke 1980, 85, n. 36), Kripke notes that
if descriptivism were true, then certain sentences that express misconcep-
tions—his example is “Peano discovered the axioms of number theory”—
would express trivial truths instead. The point, cast as it is in terms of the
nature of the content of certain name-containing sentences, counts against
descriptivism about the meanings of names, but Kripke does not always
carefully separate the varieties of descriptivism, and it is clear, given that
the footnote’s context is a discussion focused on descriptivism about refer-
ence, that his intention is to say something against that variety as well.
To bring out its force as a point against descriptivism about reference, it
can be put in terms not of triviality, but of immunity from error. According
to descriptivism about reference, the reference of “Peano,” for speakers who
associate “the discoverer of the axioms of number theory” with the name,
will be whoever is uniquely identified by that description. That implies
that such speakers are immune to error when they utter Kripke’s example
sentence. Such speakers cannot but refer to the discoverer of the axioms of
number theory when using “Peano,” so they can only speak the truth if
they say “Peano was the discoverer of the axioms of number theory.”3 The
argument against this implication is straightforward: no speaker who utters
that sentence speaks truly; Dedekind, not Peano, discovered the relevant
axioms.
The application of the point to the Gödel Case is also straightforward: if
one is inclined, on descriptivist grounds, to say that the speakers in Kripke’s
imagined circumstances refer to Schmidt with their uses of “Gödel,” then
one will be forced to say that those speakers do not and cannot err when
110  Chapter 5

they say, for example, “Gödel discovered the incompleteness of arithme-

tic.” But when they utter that sentence, they say something false, not some-
thing they could not but be correct in saying.
This lack of immunity to error figures in an indirect argument for the
truth of the judgment Kripke makes about the Gödel Case: the only rea-
son for making the opposite judgment, namely the reasons given by the
descriptivist theory of reference for names, has false consequences con-
cerning a certain kind of immunity from error. That provides a reason for
not making the opposite judgment, and for concluding, with Kripke, that
“Gödel” refers to Gödel in the Gödel Case.
In still more indirect ways, that conclusion is also supported by (i) the
arguments Kripke gives against the stronger descriptivist thesis to the effect
that the meaning, in the sense of semantic value, of a name is given by
associated descriptions, and (ii) the positive arguments that Kripke gives for
his causal-historical “picture” of how the reference of a name is determined.
The arguments against descriptivism about meaning raise the possibility
that descriptions play no significant role in the metasemantics for names.
The raising of this possibility is of course not a direct argument for Kripke’s
conclusion about the Gödel Case, but it does play a role in softening us up
to its truth. The xphiles responsible for the cross-cultural studies on intu-
itions about the Gödel Case (myself included) have sometimes claimed that
the so-called modal argument, for example, is irrelevant to the issue raised
by the Gödel Case, since that issue concerns reference, not meaning. Crit-
ics (e.g., Devitt [2011, 2012]) are right to reply that Kripke’s considerations
about meaning have a clear connection to, and bearing on, his later consid-
erations about reference. True, it does not follow from the falsity of descrip-
tivism about meaning that descriptivism about reference is false. However,
rejecting descriptivism about meaning undercuts a main reason for going
on to endorse descriptivism about reference, and that amounts to undercut-
ting a reason for judging that “Gödel” refers to Schmidt in the Gödel Case.
Something similar can be said about Kripke’s positive arguments for the
causal-historical picture of reference. I will not rehearse those positive argu-
ments here, but will content myself with saying, what I take to be quite
obvious, that the arguments for the picture are indirect arguments for the
judgments about cases suggested by the picture. To the extent that we have
reason to think that reference for names is determined in the way suggested
by the picture, we have reasons for making the judgments about specific
More Evidence for the Evidence  111

cases that are consonant with the picture, including, of course, the judg-
ment that “Gödel” refers to Gödel in the Gödel Case.
I hope, by now, that it is clear that Kripke’s judgment about the Gödel
Case is not something we are meant to accept on the grounds that it is
intuitive. Instead, Kripke offers a host of arguments for the judgment, rang-
ing from considerations that have a direct evidential bearing on the issue
(the facts about the real-life cases and the point about immunity from error,
e.g.) to considerations about meaning and reference that are more general
and pertain less directly to that specific judgment (the arguments against
meaning descriptivism and those in favor of the causal-historical picture of
reference, e.g.), but which count, nevertheless, as considerations that lend
support to its truth. The view that it is simply an intuition about the Gödel
Case that is the engine driving Kripke’s view of the case is a bad mistake. A
worse mistake is thinking that cross-cultural variability in intuitions about
the case, or ones similar to it, presents a significant challenge to either to
Kripke’s judgment about the case or to the methods he uses in arriving at
it. Instead, the judgment stands or falls with the quality of the arguments
marshaled in its defense.
The worst mistake is to think, as Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich put
it in their most recent paper, that Kripke and other philosophers of language
think that “the correct method for determining the right theory of refer-
ence” is by “appeal to the intuitions of competent speakers about the refer-
ence of proper names (or other kinds of words) in actual and possible cases”
(Machery et al. 2013, 620; emphasis added). No. This is just plain wrong.
The methods—plural—for determining the right theory of reference involve
considering cases, of course, but the truth about these cases is argued for, not
intuited. No one could read Kripke’s presentation of the Gödel Case and its
surrounding discussion and sensibly believe that Kripke thinks otherwise.

5.2.2  Lehrer’s Argument for the Truetemp Case Judgment

Recall that, as Swain et al. (2008) describe it, the target of Keith Lehrer’s
(1990) argument involving his Truetemp Case is a variety of reliabilism that
holds that reliably produced true beliefs count as knowledge. Swain et al.
(2008) claim that this argument depends on an intuition about the case.
Here is their very clear statement of this view:
Therefore, according to reliabilism, Mr. Truetemp does know it is 104 degrees. But
Lehrer claims that there is something lacking in Mr. Truetemp’s epistemic position,
112  Chapter 5

such that his temperature beliefs do not count as knowledge. Purportedly, if we con-
sider this case, we will have the intuition that Mr. Truetemp does not know that it
is 104 degrees. Reliabilism’s inability to account for this intuition is supposed to be
reason to reject reliabilism. (Swain et al. 2008, 140)

However, as Cappelen (2012) says, this is simply a misreading of Lehrer.

Lehrer says neither that “we” will have any particular intuition about the
case, nor that the inability of reliabilism to explain this or that intuition is
a reason to reject it. Instead, Lehrer presents the case and then immediately
offers an argument for the judgment that Mr. Truetemp does not know
that the temperature is 104 degrees. Here is the argument, exactly as Lehrer
presents it:
He [Mr. Truetemp] has no idea whether he or his thoughts about temperature are
reliable. What he accepts, that the temperature is 104 degrees, is correct but he does
not know that his thought is correct. His thought that the temperature is 104 degrees
is correct information, but he does not know this. Though he records the informa-
tion because of the operation of the tempucomp, he is ignorant of the facts about
the tempucomp and about his temperature-telling reliability. Yet the sort of causal,
nomological, statistical, or counterfactual relationship required by externalism, may
all be present. Does he know that the temperature is 104 degrees when the thought
occurs to him while strolling in Pima Canyon? He has no idea why the thought oc-
curred to him or that such thoughts are almost always correct. He does not, conse-
quently, know that the temperature is 104 degrees when that thought occurs to him.
The correctness of the thought is opaque to him. (Lehrer 1990, 187)

It is very difficult to see how anyone could read this passage as anything
other than an attempt to provide reasons for the judgment that Mr. Tru-
etemp does not know that the temperature is 104 degrees. Unlike Cappelen,
I am, given my adoption of the no-theory theory of intuitions, prepared to
grant that the judgment is an intuition, or counts as such for some read-
ers, anyway. But it is very clear that, as far as Lehrer is concerned, this is
irrelevant, evidentially speaking. That Mr. Truetemp does not know is taken
to be the conclusion of an argument whose premise is that Mr. Truetemp
has “no idea why the thought [about the temperature] occurred to him or
that such thoughts are nearly always correct.” Lehrer even makes this argu-
mentative structure explicitly clear, by using the conclusion indicator word
“consequently.” This is not the behavior of a philosopher who means the
case for the judgment about the Truetemp Case to hang on whether that
judgment is intuitive.4
More Evidence for the Evidence  113

As Cappelen goes on to note, Lehrer not only offers this main argument,
contained in the quotation above, but also one meant to bolster it. Lehrer
modifies the original story so that the doctors responsible for implanting
the “tempucomp” do not themselves have any idea about its effects. This,
Lehrer insists, makes it even clearer that Mr. Truetemp does not know that
it is 104 degrees. Not only does Mr. Truetemp himself not have any inkling
about the reliability of his tempucomp-produced beliefs, but no one does,
and this, Lehrer insists, makes it impossible to truly describe Mr. Truetemp’s
belief as knowledge that the temperature is 104 degrees.5
But keep in mind that the point of drawing attention to the arguments
that philosophers give for their judgments about cases is a methodologi-
cal one. The question is not whether Lehrer’s arguments for his judgment
about the case are good arguments. The question is rather whether intu-
itions about the Truetemp Case play the evidential role that Swain et al.
(2008) assign to them. The answer to this fully empirical question is a
resounding “no.” There is nothing in Lehrer’s presentation of the case that
would in any way justify the view that his argument against reliabilism
turns on facts about what intuitions “we” do or do not have when consider-
ing the case. And that makes the sort of data about order effects reported in
Swain et al. 2008 simply irrelevant to the underlying epistemological issues
concerning the truth of reliabilism and the genuineness of the Truetemp
counterexample.

5.2.3  Brute Intuitions about Mary, the Chinese Room, or Swampman?

Are there any arguments in analytic philosophy that are meant to rely on
a brute intuition about a case? Is there even a single example in which a
thought experiment has been presented, but no arguments at all have been
given for accompanying judgments about what is true in the thought-
experimental scenario?
The negative xphi critique is not made more plausible, if so. The spe-
cific arguments targeted by the critique do not depend on treating intu-
itions about cases as essential evidence for what is true in the cases, so the
question of whether there are other arguments that do is, from a certain
perspective, irrelevant. Still, from a broader perspective, the question is
important and interesting. Some of the attraction of the myth of the intui-
tive would be explained, if it were fairly standard practice in philosophy to
114  Chapter 5

make a judgment about a case and say no more in its defense than that the
judgment is intuitive.
I think that appealing to brute intuitions about cases in philosophy must
be very rare. Many of the alleged examples of arguments that make such an
appeal are merely alleged. When one looks back at the original presenta-
tions of these arguments, one finds that the supposedly brute intuitions are
instead supported by reasons and argument.
In informal discussions with other philosophers about the role of intu-
itions in philosophy, I often ask for examples of arguments that they take
to appeal to brute intuitions about cases. I have yet to be presented with a
convincing one.

5.2.3.1 Mary Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument (1982, 1986)

against physicalism is often cited as a clear example of an argument that
rests on a brute intuition. I will assume that readers have some familiar-
ity with the details of Jackson’s argument and that I can skip right to the
judgment about the case that plays a crucial role in the argument, namely
Jackson’s judgment about the case of color-deprived Mary. The judgment is
that Mary learns what it is like to see red when she is released from the black-
and-white room.6 This judgment is crucial, of course; if it is true, then,
Jackson argues,7 physicalism is false. Is the judgment that Mary learns what
it is like to see red presented as a brute intuition? No. Jackson argues that
the judgment is true.8
A first point to make is that the case of Mary is one of two cases that
Jackson presents in his 1982 paper as refuting physicalism. The other, less
well-known case is the case of extra-color Fred. Very briefly, the case, and
the instance of the knowledge argument based on it, is this:

Fred, we come to discover, makes more color discriminations than the rest
of us. This is confirmed by a host of behavioral and physiological evi-
dence; Fred sees two distinct colors where we see just one, the one we call
“red.” We learn all the physical facts about Fred, but this will not teach us
everything there is to know about Fred. In particular, we will not find out
what it is like for Fred to see the extra color. If we were made, via surgery,
to have the type of visual system Fred has, we would learn, thereby, what
it is like to see the extra color. But this is something we would not know
before such an operation, despite knowing all the relevant physical facts
there are to know about Fred. So, physicalism is false.
More Evidence for the Evidence  115

The presence and placement of this lesser-known case is important because

there is far more discussion and setup with respect to this case in Jackson
1982 than there is concerning Mary. In Jackson 1982, the Mary case is pre-
sented as merely a further illustration of the point made by the case of Fred.
Indeed, the only thing Jackson says in Jackson 1982 in defense of the judg-
ment that Mary will learn something when she starts seeing colors is that
“it seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and
our visual experience of it”9 (130). In my view, this should be read as the
claim that the judgment about Mary is obvious in light of the earlier consid-
erations concerning Fred.
What are the relevant considerations concerning Fred? In the Fred case,
the crucial judgment is about us; it is that, by undergoing an operation that
would, in effect, turn our visual systems into instances of Fred’s more dis-
criminating one, we would learn what it is like to see the extra color. That
we would learn this is defended via the claim that the availability of such
an operation would “create enormous interest” (1982, 129). In fact, Jackson
says that “the important point” about the availability of the operation is
precisely that it would create such interest (129; my emphasis). At one point,
Jackson says that, in advance of the operation, “People would say, ‘At last
we will know what it is like to see the extra color, at last we will know how
Fred has differed from us in the way he has struggled to tell us about for so
long’” (129). The thought is that the fact that we would react in these ways
to availability of the operation is strong evidence that it “cannot be that we
knew all along all about Fred” (129). That is, it is evidence that we will learn
something via the operation, namely what it is like to see the extra color.
Clearly, a similar argument is meant to apply to the judgment about
Mary. Like us, relative to the operation that allows us to see the new color,
she will be expectant, excited, and interested about the prospect of seeing
red for the first time. None of those attitudes seem compatible with know-
ing already what it is like to see red.
The argument is repeated in Jackson 1986, where the focus is on Mary
exclusively and Fred is long forgotten. There, after asserting that Mary will
learn what it is like to see red upon leaving the black-and-white room, Jackson
argues that “this is rightly described as learning—she will not say ‘ho, hum’”
(1986, 291; emphasis in the original). This is just what it appears to be—an
argument for the judgment that Mary will learn what it is like to see red.10
116  Chapter 5

5.2.3.2  The Chinese Room  I often hear it claimed that John Searle’s
Chinese room argument (Searle 1980) rests on a brute intuition about a
thought experiment. But this, once again, is a bit of philosophical folklore;
Searle argues for his judgment about the Chinese room.
Again I will assume some familiarity with the details of the thought
experiment and with the larger argument in which the judgment figures,
the argument against the view that “an appropriately programmed com-
puter … can literally be said to understand and have other cognitive states”
(Searle 1980, 417; emphasis in original).
Many readers will recall that the crucial judgment that Searle makes
about the Chinese room case is that the man in the Chinese room does not
understand any Chinese. (The man, in the original 1980 presentation, is
Searle himself.) When the judgment first appears (1980, 418), Searle says
that its truth seems “quite obvious,” and he does not immediately back it up
with an argument (418). No doubt this has contributed to the impression
that Searle does not bother to argue for the judgment, but the fact is that
the argument is there; it simply appears a bit later.
The argument occurs in Searle’s counter to the “Systems Reply” and
begins with Searle pointing out that the answer to the question of what the
man has in the case of sentences of English (the man in the room, Searle
himself, is a native English speaker), but lacks in cases of sentences of Chi-
nese, is that he knows what the former, but not the latter, mean (418). That
might sound, to some ears, quite close to the claim that the man does not
understand any Chinese, but, in fact, the claims are different. The fact that
the man in the room does nothing that would recognizably count as learn-
ing the meanings of the Chinese symbols with which he is operating counts
in favor of the judgment that he does not understand those symbols. Searle
is clearly relying on this fact in arguing for the crucial judgment that the
man does not understand any Chinese.
Later, the argument is developed in the following way: Understanding
the sentences of a language involves knowing what they are about. The
man in the room understands English sentences with “hamburgers” and
“restaurants” in them partly in virtue of the fact that he knows that these
sentences are about hamburgers and restaurants. On the other hand, he
has no clue what the Chinese sentences with which he deals are about. For
example, he does not know that Chinese sentences with the Chinese word
for “hamburgers” in them are about hamburgers. He does not know, even,
More Evidence for the Evidence  117

which word of Chinese refers to hamburgers; indeed he does not know what
any of the Chinese words refer to. That implies, according to Searle, that
the man in the room does not understand the Chinese sentences. In other
words, the man’s lack of knowledge of various semantic facts about the Chi-
nese sentences is meant to ground an argument for the judgment that the
man does not understand those sentences. (See Searle 1980, 419.)
This argument for Searle’s judgment about the Chinese room case is
bolstered by an argument to the effect that the operations that the man
performs with the Chinese sentences (which, the reader will recall, Searle
repeatedly describes as the mere “manipulation of formal symbols”) are not
such that they would produce knowledge of the semantic facts necessary
for literal understanding. The man can perform those operations without
knowing the semantic facts about the sentences. The conclusion that the
man can perform those operations without understanding the sentences is
supposed by Searle to be just that—a conclusion from reasoning about the
conditions on literal understanding, not a brute intuition about what is
true in the Chinese room case.11

5.2.3.3 Swampman In his 1987 paper, “Knowing One’s Own Mind,”

Davidson presents his famous Swampman thought experiment. The pre-
sentation involves a mere four sentences, so I will reproduce it in full:
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body
is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different mole-
cules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves
exactly as I did; according to its nature, it departs the swamp, encounters and seems
to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves
into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell
the difference. (443)

Many readers will recall that Davidson judges that Swampman does not mean
anything by the sounds it makes and does not have any thoughts (444). There is
a sense in which it is true that Davidson offers this judgment without offer-
ing very much by way argumentative backing. (Here, once more, I assume
that the reader is familiar, at least in outline, with some of the issues raised
in Davidson 1987.) But this is because, as is very clear from the surrounding
discussion, Davidson is taking it for granted that externalism about mental
content (which, Davidson thinks, implies that his judgment about Swamp-
man is true) is true. For Davidson, Swampman is more an illustration of the
118  Chapter 5

consequences of externalism than a crucial piece of the argument for exter-

nalism.12 Davidson’s arguments for externalism occur in other work of his,
and, as he readily admits in his 1987 paper, in the work of others besides.
(Putnam 1975 is cited as the primary example.13)
Despite this Davidson 1987 does offer a couple of considerations in sup-
port of his judgment about Swampman. One consideration is this: Swamp-
man, since it just popped into existence a second ago, cannot recognize or
remember anything. It seems to remember Davidson’s friends’ names, David-
son’s house, and Davidson’s views about radical interpretation, but since it
never learned about these things in the past (having no past, really, to speak
of) it is wrong to say that it really does remember them.
A second consideration has to do specifically with whether Swampman
means anything by the sounds it makes. Davidson says that Swampman
can’t mean what he, Davidson, means by the word “house,” since its sound
“house” “was not learned in a context that would give it the right mean-
ing—or any meaning at all” (444).
Given that the main point of the Swampman case is to illustrate, rather
than argue for, externalism and its consequences, these considerations are
not developed in any detail. Nevertheless, it is clear that they are, and are
intended by Davidson to be, considerations that favor the judgment David-
son makes about Swampman. The view that the judgment about Swamp-
man is presented as a brute intuition is simply wrong.

5.2.4  Esoteric, Unusual, Far-Fetched, and Generally Outlandish Cases?

The negative xphiles Jonathan Weinberg (2007) and Edouard Machery
(2011) have (independently) claimed that part of the case against the use
of intuitions as evidence in philosophy turns on the fact that philosophers
often appeal to intuitions about, as Weinberg has put it, “esoteric, unusual,
far-fetched, and generally outlandish” cases (Weinberg 2007, 321). The
claim is developed by Machery in the following way: the intuitive judg-
ments we make about philosophical cases is the exercise of a capacity we
employ in our day-to-day lives, but even if it functions well there (in our
day-to-day lives), we have no reason to expect that, when it comes eso-
teric, unusual philosophical cases, it will function well there too. Indeed,
Machery claims that we have positive reason to think that our ordinary
capacity for making reliable intuitive judgments breaks down when we are
confronted with esoteric, unusual cases.
More Evidence for the Evidence  119

One way of interpreting this claim makes it rather uninterestingly true.

Philosophical cases are, in general, difficult to make confident and reliable
judgments about. That is because philosophy is difficult. Machery offers an
insightful diagnosis of the difficulty of philosophical thought experiments:
in them, features that are fairly regularly coinstantiated in the real world
are hypothetically pulled apart in the thought-experimental scenarios that
philosophers construct. In Gettier cases, for example, the usual connection
between what makes a belief true and what justifies it is severed. Plausibly,
for this reason, judgments about Gettier cases are more difficult than more
ordinary, everyday judgments about epistemic facts.
Machery’s diagnosis of the difficulty of philosophical thought experi-
ments would be cause for concern, if the myth of the intuitive were true and
philosophers took our intuitive reactions to cases to be essential evidence
for the truth about them. But, as we have seen again and again, philoso-
phers argue for their judgments about cases. In fact, Machery’s diagnosis
suggests that it would be downright bizarre for any philosopher to suppose
that one might just “trust one’s gut” when it comes to making a judgment
about a philosophical case; the kinds of cases philosophers consider are just
too hard for that method to have any chance of working. This strikes me as
a strong argument not just for the view that the method should not be used
(which Weinberg and Machery would wholeheartedly endorse, of course),
but also for the view that it is very likely not used in fact by any philosopher
who is genuinely interested in discovering the truth about some difficult
philosophical case.
That conclusion, that philosophers tend not to employ a method that
treats intuitions as evidence, is borne out by the empirical evidence derived
from examining actual examples of the esoteric, unusual, far-fetched, and
generally outlandish cases that philosophers trade in. We saw this already
in the previous section. Jackson’s Mary, Searle’s Chinese room, and David-
son’s Swampman all make the esoteric, unusual grade and are all cited as
examples of the offending sort of case by one or both of Weinberg and
Machery. The answer to the charge that these sorts of cases are especially
unfit for one to make reliable intuitive judgments about is simple: philoso-
phers do not behave as though they are fit for that. Instead, philosophers,
including the inventors of these cases, and in the original articles in which
the cases are presented, argue for their judgments about them. For Mach-
ery’s reason, this was to be expected: judgments about difficult cases require
argumentative support.
120  Chapter 5

To reinforce the point, I will comment on one of the more recent exam-
ples of an esoteric, unusual case that Weinberg cites (see Weinberg 2007,
321), a case from Jennifer Lackey’s (2008) work on testimony.
Lackey maintains that a certain widely held theory of testimony gets
the epistemology of testimony almost entirely wrong. This widely held
theory assigns a central role to a speaker’s knowledge in explaining how a
hearer comes to know, via a speaker’s testimony, that something is the case.
Among the views proffered by this theory are views about the necessary
conditions on a hearer acquiring knowledge by testimony. One such view is
that a hearer cannot come to know that p from a speaker’s statement that p
unless the speaker herself knows that p. Lackey argues against this, and vari-
ous allied views, with a variety of ingenious counterexamples. Weinberg
complains about one counterexample in particular, the case of a “double-
lesioned testifier” (Weinberg’s description) that Lackey calls Consistent Liar.
Lackey’s presentation is somewhat long. Here is a truncated version:

Lackey’s Consistent Liar (Summarized)

As a teenager Bertha had an ice-skating accident that produced a lesion in

her brain, an effect of which is that she became prone to telling lies, espe-
cially about her sightings of wild animals. Her surgeon could not repair
the lesion but found that by making another lesion he could connect her
pattern of lying with a pattern of misperceptions concerning wild animals.
The effect of the surgery is that Bertha’s sightings of wild animals produce
false beliefs about which animals she has sighted. But she still lies, post-op,
about which wild animals she (mistakenly) thinks she has seen. The overall
effect, then, is this: When Bertha sees a deer, she falsely believes that she has
seen a horse, but insincerely reports that she has seen a deer; when she sees
an owl, she falsely believes that she has seen a hawk, but insincerely reports
that she has seen an owl—and so on. Bertha is nearly perfectly consistent
in both her misperceptions and in her insincere reporting; she is a highly
unreliable believer when it comes to her animal sightings, but nevertheless
a highly reliable reporter of those sightings. People in Bertha’s community
know this latter fact about her reliable reporting and have come to trust her
judgment on a wide range of topics. One day, Bertha’s neighbor, Henry,
encounters Bertha on a hiking trail and she insincerely but correctly reports
to him that there was a deer on the trail. Henry readily accepts her report.
More Evidence for the Evidence  121

Lackey offers a judgment about the case: Henry knows, on the basis of Ber-
tha’s testimony, that there was a deer on the trail. If she is right, then the
view that a hearer can come to know p via a speaker’s testimony only if the
speaker knows that p is false, since, in the case, Bertha does not believe, let
alone know, that there was a deer on the trail.
According to Weinberg, since her case is especially outlandish, Lackey’s
judgment about it is an example of an especially suspicious use of an intu-
ition as evidence. However, Lackey does not treat her intuition about the
case as evidence that Henry knows, via Bertha’s testimony, that there was
a deer on the trail. Instead, just as we have seen with respect to every other
case examined in this book, Lackey offers arguments—lots of them.
She points out, for example, that although Bertha is a highly unreliable
believer, her reporting is more reliable than that of many average testifiers.
Related to this is the fact that Bertha’s reportings (though not her believ-
ings) satisfy conditions that many epistemologists take to be prime indica-
tors of reliability; her report that there was a deer on the trail is sensitive in
Nozick’s sense, and safe in Sosa’s sense, for example. Furthermore, Lackey
argues on a variety of grounds that Bertha’s report is a genuine instance of
testimony, thereby blocking the objection that while Henry knows, it is not
via Bertha’s testimony. In addition, Lackey argues that it is no accident that
Bertha’s reports of her animal sightings are accurate; this was a deliberate
effect of the work the surgeon performed. Hence, says Lackey, the thought
that Henry might have a “Gettiered” justified true belief that there was a
deer on the path is a mistake. She adds to all of this that Henry has no rea-
son to doubt Bertha’s accuracy or sincerity. Indeed, he has plenty of good
inductive evidence that Bertha is an excellent source of information about
which wild animals have appeared where.
In short, Lackey concludes on a variety of grounds that we have plenty
of reason to accept, and no reason to deny, that Henry knows via Bertha’s
testimony that there was a deer on the path. That conclusion is the clear
product of inference and argument. Intuitions and intuitiveness are, once
again, irrelevant.
Its outlandishness perhaps does show that we should not treat intuitions
about the case as evidence for the truth of the judgment that Henry knows;
I want to be clear that I am not denying that. The point is an interpretive
one concerning Lackey’s method: Lackey very clearly does not intend that
we treat intuitions about her case as evidence for her judgment about it.
122  Chapter 5

Instead, she means for us to agree, on the basis of the arguments she gives,
that that judgment is true. A survey showing us that people’s intuitions
about the case vary along truth-irrelevant dimensions would not be cause
for alarm on Lackey’s part, since data of that kind would say nothing about
the quality of Lackey’s arguments for her judgment about the case.

5.3  The Relocation Problem Redux

My answer to the evidence-for-the-evidence question is: arguments. Intu-

itions are not treated as evidence for judgments about cases in first-order
philosophy; argument plays that role instead. As we have seen in this and
the previous chapter, the considerations appealed to in these arguments
are many and various. One implication of the myth of the intuitive is that
the evidence for judgments about cases, or what philosophers treat as such,
is of one homogeneous kind: intuitions. This alone should make us suspi-
cious enough of the myth to reject it, since even a cursory examination of
how philosophers reason about cases reveals this implication to be plainly
false.
My answer to the evidence-for-the-evidence question is often met with
the following question: on what grounds do philosophers take themselves
to be entitled to the premises that they take to provide the evidence for
their judgments about cases? What, in other words, is treated as the evi-
dence-for-the-evidence-for-the-evidence? My answer is: still further argu-
ments. This answer is often met with the same question about these further
arguments, namely the question of what the evidence for their premises is
supposed to be. Usually, when I get into this sort of exchange, my interlocu-
tors grow ever more incredulous. Can I really be saying that it is “arguments
all the way down,” as it is sometimes put? If I am not saying it is arguments
all the way down, then, when we get all the way down, we will find intu-
itions there. This, anyway, is the sort of reaction I often experience: even if
I am right that intuitions do not come in as evidence for judgments about
cases, they still, and indeed must, come in somewhere. This is what I earlier
described, in chapter 3, as the relocation problem for my view of the role
of intuition in philosophy. Since they must come in somewhere, my view
seems merely to relocate the place at which philosophers appeal to intu-
itions; it cannot be arguments all the way down.
More Evidence for the Evidence  123

However, it is arguments at least a fair bit of the way down. Certainly, it

is arguments further down than the myth of the intuitive would have us
believe, since, in nearly every example of which I am aware, philosophers
argue for their judgments about cases. But, as a partial reply to the reloca-
tion problem, philosophers often argue for the premises of these arguments
too. To take just one example, consider again the argument with which
this book began: Frankfurt’s argument against the view that one is morally
responsible for an action only if one could have done otherwise. Frankfurt,
as I noted in the introduction, gives the following argument for the judg-
ment that his Jones character, who, in the story, cannot do otherwise than
what he does, is nonetheless morally responsible:
It would be quite unreasonable to excuse Jones for his action or withhold the praise
to which it would normally entitle him, on the basis of the fact that he could not do
otherwise. This fact played no role at all in leading him to act as he did. He would
have acted the same even if it had not been a fact. Indeed, everything happened just
as it would have happened without Black’s presence in the situation and without his
readiness to intrude into it. (Frankfurt 1969, 836)

The argument is that there is evidence-for-the-evidence, a reason, that is,

for judging that Jones is morally responsible. This, I take it, is that Jones’s
inability to do otherwise “played no role at all in leading him to act as he
did.” But Frankfurt also offers evidence-for-the-evidence-for-the-evidence;
that is, the premise of the argument for the judgment about the case is
itself backed up with reasons of its own. Why is it correct to say that Jones’s
inability to do otherwise played no role in his acting as he did? Because he
“would have acted the same even if it had not been a fact,” and “everything
happened just as it would have happened without Black’s presence in the
situation and without his readiness to intrude into it.”
There is nothing unusual about this argumentative structure. Very often
in philosophical texts, one finds reasons/argument for a judgment about a
case, and then reasons for the reasons too. In fact, it is not very unusual to
find even more inferential structure: reasons for the reasons for the reasons
for a judgment about a case.
Of course, philosophical arguments, as they appear in philosophical
texts, have only so many “evidential levels,” as it might be put. They con-
tain chains of reasoning within them, with one proposition said to be sup-
ported by another, which in turn is said to be supported by still another;
but these chains come to an end. Of course they do, since there are a finite
124  Chapter 5

number of claims in any given philosophical text. Every argument commit-

ted to the page takes at least one premise for granted. That is true in general
of arguments that are written down, not just philosophical arguments.
But one very important methodological point to recognize in this is that,
in philosophy, nothing unifies the claims that get taken for granted. Dif-
ferent philosophers have different starting points, and the starting points
are as heterogeneous as can be. Sometimes they are alleged general truths
about knowledge, moral responsibility, or what have you. Other times they
are particular claims about particular objects. Their subject matter concerns
every philosophical subject matter there is—and more, since one beauty of
philosophy is that it can take off from claims from any intellectual domain.
Philosophical starting points—the un-argued-for premises in a philosophi-
cal argument—need have no special phenomenological or epistemological
features. Some, but not all, perhaps qualify as a priori or analytic. Some,
but not all, are plausibly described as commonsensical. Some, but not all,
might seem to some to be “intellectual seemings.” Given this extreme het-
erogeneity, it would be strange to ascribe a special, evidential function to
philosophical starting points, beyond the fact that they are argumentative
starting points. What an individual philosopher takes as a starting point
in his or her argument is largely a matter of choice, one constrained by
conventions of the philosophical subdiscipline to which the argument
belongs, perhaps, but still, within some acceptable range, a choice.14 This is
yet another reason to disbelieve that philosophical starting points are all of
one special kind, whether the special kind is supposed to be the intuitive,
or something else entirely—this too is a myth.
But the claim that it cannot be arguments all the way down is not usu-
ally intended to describe the structure of a bit of reasoning as it appears
in this or that text, for there, as I have been saying, it is obvious that it
is not, and cannot be, arguments all the way down. Usually, the claim is
meant to apply to chains of reasoning more abstractly conceived; the idea
is that, ultimately, if any of the conclusions we reach via argument are to
be properly grounded in evidence or justified at all, then there must be
some point in the chains of premises, and premises for the premises, and
so on, at which we reach propositions that qualify as evidence but are not
arrived at via inference from still further premises. This evidential “rock
bottom” need not be the premises that a philosopher, or other inquirer (for
the idea is a general one, concerning the structure of inquiry itself, not just
More Evidence for the Evidence  125

philosophical inquiry), takes as a starting point in arguing for some conclu-

sion in a paper or a book, but the thought is that the rock bottom evidence
must nevertheless be there, waiting in the wings as it were; otherwise there
is no, and cannot be any, inferential evidence for anything.
This clearly does carve out a special epistemic role for the rock bottom
propositions; they are evidence, but there is no, or at least need not be any,
inferential evidence for them, and all argument depends, ultimately, on
them. In effect, the thought that there are and must be propositions that
are evidentially rock bottom is the thought that motivates one of the main
solutions to the epistemological problem known as the regress problem,
which is the problem of explaining how any of our inferential beliefs can
be properly grounded or justified. Some of the beliefs we hold are reasons
for other beliefs we hold. But, unless there is an infinite chain of reasons,
there must be evidentially rock bottom beliefs, ones that stop the “regress
of reasons,” by serving as the noninferentially justified evidential grounds
for every claim justified via inference. So there are such rock bottom beliefs.
So, at any rate, goes the reasoning behind foundationalist replies to the
regress problem.
Suppose that such replies are correct and that there are propositions that
are evidentially rock bottom and which stop the regress of reasons. If so,
then there is indeed a sense in which, as my formulation of the relocation
problem would have it, philosophers must appeal to or rely on intuitions
as evidence at some stage. They, like every other inquirer, must rely on
intuitions in the sense of relying on rock bottom evidence. Xphiles think
intuitions come in as evidence for judgments about thought experiments
and cases, but I have argued that it is a mistake to think that intuitions, in
the rock-bottom-evidence sense, come in at that stage. Can they simply
concede this mistake and retreat to the claim that intuitions (in that sense)
do and must come in as evidence somewhere?
No. The negative xphi critique, as I have presented it, is an empirical
challenge; that is, it depends on actual empirical results. These results per-
haps show that we have no right to treat some of the judgments that some
of us make about some thought experiments and cases as rock bottom evi-
dence. But, as I have argued, this is not how these judgments are treated
in philosophy anyway. So, even if intuitions must come in as rock bottom
evidence somewhere, there is no xphi data that show that there is some dif-
ficulty with allowing them to.15
126  Chapter 5

Also, as I have emphasized at several points, the regress problem con-

cerns inferential justification in general. It is not a special problem for phi-
losophy or its methods. If the solution to the regress problem requires that
there be rock bottom evidence, then that is a requirement that applies to
all inquiry; there must be rock bottom scientific evidence, for example, not
just rock bottom philosophical evidence. I think that this generality shows
that, when considered as a reply to my objection to the negative xphile
critique, the relocation problem is not problematic. If all arguments must,
at some stage, appeal to intuitions in the rock-bottom-evidence sense, then
it is no complaint against specifically philosophical arguments that they
must, like every other sort of argument, appeal to intuitions in that sense.
One might think that what qualifies as rock bottom philosophical evi-
dence is bound to be more contentious than what qualifies as, say, rock
bottom scientific evidence, and that this shows that the relocation problem
is more severe in philosophy than it is in other disciplines (all of which face
a version of the regress problem).16 However, this strikes me as mere preju-
dice. Is there any evidence or argument that would suggest that philosophy
is in an especially bad epistemic position vis à vis its rock bottom evidence?
Is there any evidence or argument to suggest that rock bottom scientific evi-
dence is, or would be, universally agreed on, or that judgments about such
evidence would not vary with truth-irrelevant factors? No. There is just a
lingering feeling in some quarters, perhaps due to a latent empiricism or
scientism, that scientific evidence is better or more firm than other kinds.
However, to echo a point of Williamson’s, there is no evidence of any kind
that is entirely immune from skepticism. If “uncontentious decidability”
is the mark of true evidence, then there is no true evidence in philosophy,
science, or anywhere else.
Although being foundational or rock bottom is a feature that is often
listed among those that make a judgment intuitive, an interesting fact about
the kinds of foundationalisms that have been developed in response to the
regress problem is that none of them count the sorts of judgments that
xphiles describe as intuitive as paradigm examples of foundational judg-
ments. Basic perceptual judgments are often taken as paradigmatic founda-
tional judgments, for example, but most xphiles define “intuition” in such
a way as to rule out perceptual judgments as intuitive. Other foundational-
isms take phenomenological judgments as foundational, while still others
reserve this status for judgments that are “self-verifying,” such as the cogito
More Evidence for the Evidence  127

judgments from Descartes’s Meditations. Judgments about cases simply do

not qualify as foundational judgments, given the usual construals of what
counts as a foundational judgment. Nor should they; “judgments about
philosophical cases” names too heterogeneous a class for every judgment in
the class to qualify as foundational in the sense required by foundational-
ist solutions to the regress problem. All of this, it seems to me, is still more
reason to think that issues about the structure of inferential justification
cannot be put to any effective use in rescuing the negative xphi critique
from the fairly obvious (but utterly damning) objection that philosophers
argue for their judgments about cases.
Although I am, myself, more attracted to foundationalist solutions to
the regress problem than their competitors, it is important for assessing
the relocation problem to note that there are competitors. If there are com-
petitors, then it is not obviously true that every argument—and hence not
obviously true that every philosophical argument—must rest, ultimately,
on intuitive foundations. For example, if some form of coherentism about
inferential justification is true, then it is something other than resting on
rock bottom evidence that justifies our inferences. Some premises are justi-
fied not by inference from further premises but instead by their coherence
with other premises—if coherentism is true, that is.
Hence, a possible reply to the claim that intuitions must come in at some
stage and that it cannot be arguments all the way down is: no they mustn’t
and yes it can. The relocation problem assumes that foundationalism is the
only plausible solution to the regress problem. But it is not; if some version
of coherentism is a plausible competitor, then the jury is still out, it seems
to me, on whether inquiry, including the special sort we call “philosophy,”
depends on rock bottom foundational premises. And, to repeat a couple of
earlier points, even if it does depend on this sort of foundation, there is no
reason to think that philosophy is worse off than any other form of inquiry,
and certainly no reason to think that empirical studies of intuitions about
cases will, or even could, reveal that it is.
6  Other Replies to Xphi: The Expertise and Multiple
Concepts Replies

6.1 Introduction

Many philosophers think that the negative xphi critique can and should
be resisted but do not think that xphiles have a mistaken account of philo-
sophical method. These philosophers think that intuitions do play a cru-
cial argumentative or evidential role in philosophical arguments, but they
think that this role can be defended against the intuitional diversity argu-
ments of negative xphiles. Even before xphi broke on to the scene, one
could find plenty of examples of philosophers claiming that intuitions play
a central role in their methods.
None of this, however, counts against my own claim, namely that one
very rarely finds appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy. This
claim, which I have been defending over the course of the last two chap-
ters, concerns first-order philosophy; that is, it concerns the ways in which
philosophizing about language and knowledge (and morality, free will, etc.)
is carried out. Second-order philosophy, or the philosophy of philosophy, is
another matter entirely. When philosophers don their methodologist hats
and start philosophizing about the nature of philosophy itself, they rou-
tinely mention intuitions and carve out a significant place for them in their
accounts of philosophical method. As an extreme example of the sort of
thing I have in mind, here is Stephen Neale on method in the philosophy
of language:
Our intuitive judgments about what A meant, said, and implied, and judgments
about whether what A said was true or false in specified situations constitute the
primary data for a theory of interpretation, the data it is the theory’s business to
explain. (Neale 2004, 79)
130  Chapter 6

This is extreme, since many who would say that consulting intuitions
about language is an important part of the methodology of the philosophy
of language would not go so far as to say that intuitions “constitute the
primary data” for a philosophical theory of language or that they are “the
data it is the theory’s business to explain.” These claims go far beyond typi-
cal second-order philosophical claims, which tend to limit intuitions to an
evidential role. Read literally, Neale’s account implies that philosophical
theories about language are theories of intuitions about what is meant, said,
and implied, instead of theories about, more simply, what is meant, said,
and implied. Perhaps Neale is taking his cue from linguistics, where, accord-
ing to some linguists, theories of grammar are theories of speakers’ “gram-
maticality judgments,” that is, intuitions concerning the grammaticality of
sentences of the speaker’s language. In any case, what one usually hears in
defense of the importance of intuitions in philosophy is, as I say, limited to
the claim that they are an important source of evidence.
There are plenty of examples of this more modest 2nd-order philosophi-
cal stance on intuitions. Joel Pust has written an entire book (Pust 2000) in
which he defends philosophy’s alleged use of intuitions as evidence. From
the perspective of the book you are now reading, Pust’s defense is unneces-
sary, since (first-order) philosophy does not treat intuitions as evidence.
However, to give a flavor for more moderate second-order pronouncements
about the evidential role of intuitions, here is a quote from Pust:
My aim in this first chapter is to demonstrate that much contemporary philosophi-
cal theorizing proceeds as though intuitions of various kinds constitute evidence
for and against the truth of a philosophical theory. Making clear just how widely
intuitions are treated as evidence in contemporary philosophy demonstrates the im-
portance of my discussion, in later chapters, of the normative question of whether
intuitions really ought to be so treated. (Pust 2000, 1)

Pust is not alone in describing the role of intuitions this way. The view that
intuitions play an evidential role in philosophy is very widespread. Here is
a quote from a recent paper in Mind by Sara-Ann Malmgren:
In brief outline, it [the “method of cases” in philosophy] has the following structure:
the hypothesis or theory that is under evaluation states or entails some modal claim
(typically a necessary bi-conditional or one-way implication) and in a thought ex-
periment we check that modal claim against our intuitive verdict on an imaginary
problem case. If the claim conflicts with our intuitive verdict, this is treated as strong
evidence against the theory—indeed the theory may be abandoned as a result. We
say that we found a counter-example to it. If not, that is treated as at least some evi-
Other Replies to Xphi  131

dence in support of the theory. We say that it accommodates our intuitions about the
case. (Malmgren 2011, 264)1

And here is a description of the role of intuitions in philosophy from a

recent paper by Ram Neta:
Many philosophers [and Neta makes it clear later that he himself counts as one of
the many] assume that our intuitions—our spontaneous, seemingly non-inferential
and non-perceptual inclinations to judge—as to whether or not a particular property
is instantiated in a hypothetical case can provide us with evidence that bears on
some philosophical hypothesis about the nature of that property. For instance, our
intuition to the effect that the property of knowledge is not instantiated in Gettier
cases provides us with evidence against justified, true belief accounts of knowledge.
(Neta 2012, 329)

These quotations are just a small sample. One can find this second-order
view repeated again and again in self-consciously methodological work in
philosophy. The view is mistaken; in first-order philosophy, one simply
does not find intuitions playing the role assigned to them by second-order
pronouncements such as Neale’s, Pust’s, Malmgren’s, or Neta’s. But the mis-
take cries out for an explanation. Why have so many philosophers been
led astray?
This interesting question will not be pursued in much depth here. To
a large extent, I think methodologists have been misled by the rhetori-
cal style of first-order analytic philosophy, a style that includes many uses
of “intuitive” and its cognates. It cannot be denied that philosophers will
often say things such as “Intuitively p …” or “It is counterintuitive that q
…” Perhaps methodologists like Neale, Pust, Malmgren, and Neta, when
formulating their second-order views, think they are simply taking first-
order philosophy at its word. But it is a mistake to elevate “intuition talk”
into a substantial theory of philosophical method that takes that method
to treat intuitions as evidence. For one thing, as I have pointed out in sev-
eral places, there are plenty of examples of intuition talk that cannot be
plausibly read in an intuitions-as-evidence way.
Another part of the explanation, I believe, is that methodologists are not
sensitive to the state/content ambiguity of “intuition.” For, as I argued in
chapter 2, there is an uncontroversial sense in which intuitions are treated
as evidence in philosophy; their contents are treated as evidence. Indeed,
some of the claims in the quotations above would be merely mislead-
ing (instead of false) if occurrences of “intuition” and related terms were
132  Chapter 6

interpreted in the “content,” as opposed to the “state,” sense (though in

the passages I have reproduced here, the “content” interpretation is fairly
clearly not the authors’ intended interpretation).
There are other elements of the explanation, no doubt, and the issue of
what explains this widespread mistake about philosophical method is inter-
esting and merits closer examination. However, my focus in this chapter
will be on certain consequences of the mistake, instead of on how it came to
be made. I think that noting these consequences goes a long way toward
identifying the mistake as a mistake, and hence, I hope, toward correcting it.
One consequence of endorsing the second-order methodological view
that intuitions are evidence in philosophy is that first-order philosophical
practice will have to change radically. A fairly common view among non-
xphile philosophers seems to be that one can accept the methodological
view while also accepting that the actual practice of philosophy need not
alter in any substantial way. But this strikes me as an unsustainable posi-
tion. Xphiles are wrong to think that intuitions are (treated as) evidence,
but they are right to think that if intuitions are (treated as) evidence, then
philosophy, as currently practiced, must change. Either it needs supple-
mentation from empirical methods of precisely the sort xphiles are engaged
in, namely large-scale surveying of various groups of people to determine
their intuitions about philosophical cases, or, as negative xphiles would
have it, since some intuitions are variable along truth-irrelevant lines, the
practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence ought to restricted in some
substantial way. To put it another way, there is no way to defend “armchair
philosophy” from xphi’s challenge if one accepts the view that intuitions
are evidence. In fact, I think this is one of the most valuable lessons xphi
has to teach us: if one agrees with xphiles about the role of intuitions in
philosophy, then one must accept that philosophy as it has been practiced
for millennia must be reformed.2
The reason for this is straightforward. On the plausible assumption that
the truth of “p is intuitive” requires more than just that this or that indi-
vidual philosopher finds p intuitive, the experimental results xphiles are
collecting do appear to bear on the question of which propositions are
intuitive. If there are cases in which the intuitiveness of a philosophical
proposition is important evidence for its truth and, perhaps, the only evi-
dence for its truth, then data that bear on the question of whether the
proposition is intuitive clearly matter to how much evidence there is, and
Other Replies to Xphi  133

even to whether there is any evidence at all, for the truth of the proposi-
tion. To take an example, suppose that one thinks “Gödel” refers to Gödel
in Kripke’s Gödel Case but that the only evidence that this is so is that it is
intuitive that it does. Data showing that it is not intuitive after all, or that
we do not now know whether it is intuitive, will then force one to withdraw
the claim that “Gödel” refers to Gödel in the Gödel Case.
Even if one takes intuitions as evidence, one can wiggle a little here,
since one can object that the data collected so far do not show that we need
to withdraw any of the judgments about thought experiments we happen
to have made. The two major replies to the negative xphi critique that I
will examine in the next sections of this chapter wiggle in just this way, but
before getting to them I want to emphasize that there is a sense in which
they misgauge the depth of the challenge. One point on which positive and
negative xphiles agree is that both camps view the question of whether p is
intuitive as a straightforwardly empirical question. And what else could it
be, really? But if that is right, and one holds the methodological view that
intuitions are evidence in philosophy, then it seems that one is forced to
admit that the question of whether there is evidence for, for example, the
truth of the judgments philosophers make about thought experiments is
itself a straightforwardly empirical question, one to be answered by intu-
ition surveys of the type xphiles have already been running. How else does
one find out whether people intuitively judge that p except by asking them?
In the next two sections I examine the two major replies that have been
made against the intuitional diversity arguments of negative xphiles. These
replies are sometimes billed as defenses of “armchair philosophy” but, as I
have been arguing here, this is false advertising. The proponents of these
replies tend to agree with their negative xphile targets that intuitions are
evidence, and this, for the reasons laid out above, is in effect to agree that
philosophers must leave their armchairs and take data from intuition sur-
veys very seriously indeed. I think this ought to be sufficient indictment
of the replies; they do not accomplish what they set out to accomplish.
Furthermore, there is a whiff of desperation in them; both replies strike me
as very weak, and this, I suspect, is because their proponents are hamstrung
by their commitment to an intuitions-as-evidence methodology. The weak-
ness of the major replies to the negative xphile critique is another example
of the bad consequences of adopting that methodological view. Once one
accepts the methodology, the defenses against the critique are bound to be
134  Chapter 6

weak. However, the popularity of the major replies, the fact that they have
been vigorously made by famous philosophers, and the interesting side
issues they raise, all recommend more extensive discussion.

6.2  The Expertise Reply

Most xphi intuition surveys have used nonphilosopher subject groups, uni-
versity undergraduates, mainly. A natural objection to some of the conclu-
sions that have been drawn from data about these groups’ intuitions is that
xphiles are surveying the wrong subjects. The intuitions of nonphilosophers
should not count for much; instead, it is the intuitions of philosophers—the
experts—that matter most. Most philosophers are trained to do philosophy
and spend a lot of their time engaged in the practice. Surely, this training
and immersion makes them better at the practice than your average uni-
versity undergraduate. Thought experimentation and the consideration of
hypothetical cases—including the making of intuitive judgments, on some
accounts—are part of this practice. Hence, we have prima facie good reason
to expect that the intuitive judgments of philosophers are more reliable
and trustworthy than those of nonphilosophers.
This reply, in at least roughly this form, is made by Michael Devitt (2011,
2012), Frank Jackson (2011), Steven Hales (2006), and Kirk Ludwig (2007).
Williamson (2007, 2011), too, is on paper describing himself as a propo-
nent of the reply (though for reasons that will emerge, it is not entirely clear
that he really is). Here is a representative expression of the expertise reply
from Devitt (2011), who is discussing semantic intuitions in particular:
Still, are these referential intuitions likely to be right? I think we need to be cautious
in accepting them: semantics is notoriously hard and the folk are a long way from
being experts. Still it does seem to me that their intuitions about “simple” situa-
tions are likely to be right. This having been said, we should prefer the intuitions
of semanticists, usually philosophers, because they are much more expert (which is
not to say, very expert!). Just as the intuitions of paleontologists, physicists, and psy-
chologists in their respective domains are likely to be better than those of the folk,
so too the intuitions of the semanticists. (Devitt 2011, 426)

Notice that this is a claim specifically about intuitions: philosophers’ intu-

itions are better. The claim is not simply that philosophers are better at
philosophy than nonphilosophers. That claim is obviously true; training in
philosophy makes one better at it. Unless philosophy is such a terrific mess
Other Replies to Xphi  135

that none of its methods are any good at all—and a thoroughgoing skepti-
cism about philosophy as a whole is neither suggested by the xphile results,
nor recommended by negative xphiles themselves3—we can be reasonably
certain that at least some of its methods are fruitful and lead to philosophi-
cal knowledge.
However, the negative xphile critique targets what negative xphiles take
to be a specific philosophical method, namely that of appealing to intu-
itions to justify claims about what is true or false in philosophical cases and
thought experiments. (For brevity’s sake, I will henceforth refer to this class
of claims simply as judgments about cases. Examples include Gettier judg-
ments and Gödel-Case judgments, among many others.) I have argued in
previous chapters that this alleged method is merely alleged, and that, as a
matter of how first-order philosophizing actually transpires, there simply are
no appeals to intuitions to justify judgments about cases; argument plays
that role instead. But this is not something about which proponents of the
expertise reply would necessarily agree. Indeed, the most natural way to
understand the reply is to take it as agreeing that intuitions are used in the
way xphiles presume, namely as evidence for judgments about cases, but as
insisting that it is the intuitions of the experts that are the proper evidential
base, not those of the hoi polloi. Interpreted in this way, the expertise reply is
just as wrongheaded as the critique to which it replies: both wrongly assume
that intuitions are treated as evidence for certain sorts of philosophical judg-
ments. Their disagreement is simply over whose intuitions count.
As I understand it, the expertise reply not only agrees with negative
xphiles that intuitions are used as evidence for judgments about cases, they
also agree that the intuitive evidence is all the evidence there is for such judg-
ments. At the very least, the expertise reply, as I am understanding it here,
takes the intuitive evidence to be essential, where a kind of evidence is essen-
tial just in case the claims justified on its basis would not be justified in its
absence. Furthermore, as I understand them, proponents of the expertise
reply take the intuitive evidence for judgments about cases to be psycho-
logical facts concerning who intuits what; that is, they do not merely mean
to be asserting that, sometimes, the contents of expert intuitions qualify
as evidence for such judgments. They mean, instead, to be asserting that
psychological facts to the effect that the experts intuit p about a case—intu-
itions in the “state” sense (those of the experts)—are the only evidence (or
are, at least, essential evidence) that p is true in the case.
136  Chapter 6

Proponents are rarely explicit about these assumptions, but I think taking
them as implicit is the most natural way to understand the expertise reply.
After all, proponents of the reply do not complain that negative xphiles
have a completely inaccurate picture of the methodology of thought exper-
imentation; usually, they seem content to point out that xphiles have been
surveying the wrong subjects and leave the matter there. This suggests that
they think negative xphiles are mostly right, except about whom to survey.
Suppose, for now, that this is correct. A proponent of the expertise reply
implicitly makes these assumptions and hence agrees, to a large extent,
with the presuppositions of the negative xphile critique, but claims that the
wrong subjects have been surveyed. Can the matter be left there? Is this a
sufficient reply to the critique?
The xphi data, though it concerns the intuitions of nonphilosophers,
raises a question about philosophers’ intuitions: Is there reason to believe
that philosophers are less prone to making intuitive judgments about
philosophical cases that pattern along truth-irrelevant lines? Are philoso-
phers’ intuitions less prone to order-effects, for example, or to the effects of
culture? A defender of the expertise reply might presume that this is part
of what training in philosophy provides—an at least partial inoculation
against biases that affect the less-than-expert subjects surveyed thus far.
But where does the burden of proof lie? Who is responsible for showing
that the philosophical experts do—or do not—exhibit the same worrisome
patterns in their intuitive judgments about cases? I think the burden of proof,
when the expertise reply is understood as I have described it above, clearly
lies with the proponents of the reply; we need to be shown, via empirical
testing, that philosophers’ intuitive judgments will display less sensitivity to
the truth-irrelevant factors discovered to influence nonphilosophers’ intui-
tive judgments.4 It is irresponsible of the proponent of the expertise reply
simply to accuse xphiles of surveying the wrong subjects and leave the mat-
ter there. If the wrong subjects have been surveyed, then the proper thing
to do, if one thinks that what and how certain people intuit about a case is
essential evidence concerning what is true in the case, is to survey the right
ones. I think that those who have endorsed the expertise reply are obliged to
make good on it by empirically demonstrating that philosophers’ intuitions
are less sensitive to truth-irrelevant factors than the subjects surveyed thus
far. To date, none of the proponents of the expertise reply I cited above have
provided it with the experimental support it requires.5
Other Replies to Xphi  137

My claim—that the expertise reply requires empirical support before it

qualifies as a genuine reply to the negative xphile critique—itself deserves
more defense. I will give it that soon, but first I want to say something
about what I take to be a closely related issue, namely the issue of what
sort of philosophizing is prescribed for someone who puts a great deal of
methodological stock in the intuitions of philosophical experts. The larger
issue raised by the expertise reply seems to me to be whether the expert
intuitions of philosophers are evidence for judgments about cases. Propo-
nents of the expertise reply, which is a reply to the very specific challenge
raised by negative xphiles, are motivated by a more general methodologi-
cal stance, one according to which it is not intuitions, full stop, that count
as evidence, but instead the intuitions of philosophical experts. And the
point I want to make about this more general stance is just this: The stance
requires that far more empirical work on philosophers’ intuitions be done;
one cannot know from the armchair what and how the experts will intuit
about Gettier cases, Gödel cases, or any other case or thought experiment in
philosophy. Hence, those who adopt the stance cannot claim to know from
the armchair how much evidence there is, or even whether there is any, for
their judgments about thought experiments.
Returning now to the expertise reply and the issue of the burden of proof,
it may be that considerations of expertise give the claim that philosophers
are less prone to various biases and effects a kind of default justification. But
to believe with default justification that p is not necessarily to know that
p, and, at the very least, the data collected by xphiles show that we do not
now know whether philosophers are less prone to biases and effects. On the
one hand, we have a justified presumption that philosophers’ intuitions
will be less prone to certain biases and effects, if any such there be, while
on the other hand, we have the xphile demonstration that that a number of
rather surprising such biases and effects affect the intuitions of nonphiloso-
phers. Maybe they do not affect expert philosophers’ intuitions to the same
degree, and maybe there is even some good reason, given considerations of
expertise, to believe this, but it is something that both sides should agree
we do not now know.6
The matter of who carries the burden of proof would be settled in the
negative xphiles’ favor—that is, the burden of proof would not be on them,
but on the proponents of the expertise reply instead—if there were some
reason proponents of the expertise reply ought to try to turn their justified
138  Chapter 6

presumption that philosophers will be less prone to biases and effects into
knowledge that they are. And there is such a reason. After all, for the pro-
ponents of the reply, the claim that philosophers are less prone to biases
and effects is a central and important methodological claim. For they think
that, in doing philosophy, and, specifically, in determining what is true in
thought experiments and cases, we can, for the most part, rely on and trust
the intuitions of the experts—partly in virtue of the fact the experts are less
prone to intuiting along truth-irrelevant lines. But if we do not know that the
experts are less prone, then, to that extent, we do not know that we can
trust expert intuitions. And if we do not know that we can trust expert intu-
itions, then it seems clear that the methodology that recommends trust-
ing expert intuitions has not been properly defended. Hence, the expertise
reply has not been adequately made. Doing so requires demonstrating, and
thereby knowing, that the worrisome patterns of intuitions discovered in
nonphilosophical subject groups do not reappear in philosophical ones.
Furthermore, and fairly obviously, that demonstration is, or rather will be,
an empirical one: it will involve surveying the experts to discover their
intuitions.
However, suppose one thinks, as I do, that intuitions are methodologi-
cally unimportant in philosophy. Then there is no reason to worry about
whether expert philosophical intuitions are subject to effects of culture, for
example. One can admit that they might be, or even that they are in fact,
without that impugning philosophical method as one takes it to be. Strange
patterns in intuitions can be safely ignored, if one thinks intuitions play no
role in philosophical methods. But that option, of just ignoring the ques-
tion of what sorts of truth-irrelevant factors might influence even expert
intuitions, is simply not available to the proponents of the expertise reply.
As Weinberg et al. (2010) claim, the burden of proof—empirical proof—is
on the proponent of the expertise reply to show that truth-irrelevant fac-
tors have much less of an effect on the intuitions of philosophical experts
than they do on others.7
Proponents of the expertise reply are fond of analogies to other dis-
ciplines. We do not take the judgments of nonscientists (Hales 2006) or
nondoctors (Jackson 2011) or nonmathematicians (Ludwig 2007) or non-
lawyers (Williamson 2007) or nonpaleontologists, nonphysicists, and non-
psychologists (Devitt 2011) to count for much of anything in determining
the truth about science, medicine, mathematics, and so on. So why take
Other Replies to Xphi  139

nonphilosophers’ judgments about philosophy so seriously that patterns

in their judgments might constitute a threat to the practice of philosophy?
The answer I would make on behalf of negative xphiles is this: in these
other disciplines, no one supposes that the fact that people make the judg-
ments qualifies, all by itself, as a method of discovering, or as an essential
source of evidence for, the truth of the judgments. That is the crucial differ-
ence. Scientists, doctors, and mathematicians do not think that determin-
ing whether some scientific, medical, or mathematical proposition is true
involves checking to see whether people in general, or even experts in the
relevant discipline, judge that it is true.8 Instead, a variety of procedures and
methods, which have nothing to do with what anyone happens to judge,
and do not appeal to any facts about people’s psychologies at all, are used to
reveal the truth in these domains. However, according to negative xphiles,
and a fair number of non-xphile methodologists, proponents of the exper-
tise reply included, things are supposed to be different in philosophy. In
philosophy, merely judging that p is true is supposed, in some cases, to
count all by itself toward the truth of p—for example, when the judgment
that p concerns a philosophical case, and is made, or so the expertise reply
would have it, by philosophical experts.
I have been arguing that, at bottom, the trouble with both the negative
xphile critique and the expertise reply is a shared, but mistaken, concep-
tion of philosophical method, a conception that takes psychological facts
about who judges what to be methodologically and evidentially significant.
This mistake can be traced to confusion over the nature of judgments about
cases, and confusion over their argumentative role. Sometimes, for some
of us, these judgments have some marks of the intuitive. Sometimes they
are relatively spontaneous, for example, or not explicitly or consciously
inferential. But that does not mean that they cannot be given argumenta-
tive support. Indeed, as I demonstrated in the last two chapters, as a mat-
ter of how philosophical practice actually transpires, they are always given
such support; philosophers argue for their judgments about cases. And, as
I also pointed out, although their reception might involve spontaneous,
noninferential judgments, it is highly implausible that the inventors and
discoverers of philosophical cases experience their judgments about them
in that sort of way. Producing a philosophical case does not involve sponta-
neous or noninferential judgments. Far from it—the process involves care-
ful, reflective thought, and many inferences.
140  Chapter 6

However, somehow missing these fairly obvious facts about philosophi-

cal practice, many methodologists, xphile and non-, inflate the psychologi-
cal or phenomenological features these judgments sometimes have for some
of us into significant epistemic features. For example, many methodologists
take judgments about cases to be such that, beyond the fact that they are
made, they need no justification, or at least are treated as though they do not.
In a forthcoming paper, Alexander and Weinberg write, “Philosophical dis-
cussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes
actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argu-
ment in their defense” (Alexander and Weinberg 2014; emphasis added). And
later, characterizing what they believe other philosophers take to be a core
feature of judgments about cases, they write that such judgments “provide
a non-inferential, defeasible justificatory foundation in at least the follow-
ing way: a person may appeal to an intuition as evidence without having to
provide further evidence for the intuition” (ibid.; emphasis added).
Granted, if one conceives of judgments about cases to be foundational,
“unjustified justifiers,” then there is literally nowhere to turn in defending
this or that judgment about a case, except, perhaps, by pointing out that
the experts make the judgment too. One cannot turn to properly eviden-
tial reasons for making the judgment, since, according to the conception
of judgments about cases as unjustified justifiers, there simply are no such
reasons to which to turn. But this situation is just an artifact of a badly
mistaken conception of the judgments. If we pay attention to the ways in
which philosophers actually philosophize, we see them arguing, in a rich
and multifaceted way, for their judgments about cases. The view that judg-
ments about cases are just intuitions is a myth, and should not glorified
with a reply that assumes that the myth, except for one little detail over
whose intuitions count, is a factual account of philosophical practice.

6.2.1  Williamson on Expertise

I hinted earlier that it is not clear that Williamson is a proponent of the
expertise reply. In his 2011, he describes himself as such, but he is also
known for being quite hostile, and justifiably so, to the idea that evidence
in philosophy consists of psychological facts about who intuits or judges
what. Since, as I have been arguing so far, both the negative xphile critique
and the expertise reply depend on treating evidence for judgments about
cases as psychological (psychological results used to challenge the supposed
Other Replies to Xphi  141

psychological evidence), there is some tension, I think, between the views

Williamson is on record as holding. The expertise reply, as I have been
understanding it here, does not sit well with Williamson’s professed anti-
psychologism about philosophical evidence.
Interestingly, support for my claim that there is some tension in Wil-
liamson’s views on these matters comes from an interpretation of William-
son due to Alexander and Weinberg. Here they are discussing what they
take to be Williamson’s attitude toward the negative xphile critique (which
they describe in the quotation as the “restrictionist threat”):
Timothy Williamson has also developed a more radical response to the restrictionist
threat: rejecting the picture of philosophical practice as depending on intuitions at
all! He argues that our evidence, in considering the cases like those listed in section
1, is not any sort of mental seeming, but the facts in the world. (Alexander and
Weinberg 2007, 72)

One would think that this antipsychologism about philosophical method

and evidence would obviate the need for something such as the expertise
reply. If who intuits what is, in general, methodologically and evidentially
irrelevant, then facts about how the experts intuit is irrelevant in those
ways too.
And yet there is a sense in which how and why the experts judge philo-
sophical matters as they do is highly methodologically and evidentially
relevant. For the experts, being expert, are best able to provide evidence for
and defend their judgments using tried and true philosophical methods.
Among these judgments are their judgments about cases. Hence, there is
something to the thought that philosophers’ judgments about cases are
to be trusted more readily than nonphilosophers’ judgments.9 In fact, the
thought is plainly true, and known to be so. Philosophers’ judgments about
cases are more reliable, more carefully rendered, more sensitive to impor-
tant philosophical nuance, more likely to receive relevant and convinc-
ing arguments in their favor, and so on. In short, philosophers’ judgments
about cases are better. But they are not better because philosophers are bet-
ter intuiters. They are better because philosophers are better than nonphi-
losophers at arguing for, and defending, philosophical judgments.
This is, at least in part, the view defended in Williamson 2011, but it is
not what I have been calling the expertise reply here. The expertise reply,
as I have described it here, defends a specific (though merely alleged) philo-
sophical method—justifying judgments about cases by appeal to intuitions
142  Chapter 6

in the “state” sense—against a challenge to that method. The view that phi-
losophers’ judgments about cases are better than those of nonphilosophers’
is not a methodological view; it implies nothing at all about the methods
that philosophers employ in arriving at these judgments, except, rather
trivially, that philosophical methods are best. We should trust the philo-
sophical experts because they are more likely to get things right in their
area of expertise, however it is that they go about trying to get them right.
But that is not a recommendation about how to do philosophy; it is just a
comment about the effect of knowing more philosophy. Knowing more
philosophy makes one a better judge of philosophical matters, including
what is true in philosophical cases. Williamson is surely right about that,
and right that none of the xphi data even come close to touching its truth
or our justification for believing it.

6.2.2  An Intuition-Free, Nonpsychologistic Version of the Critique?

However, there is a suggestion, in the work of some negative xphiles, that
my understanding of their critique is confused. Despite appearances, the
critique neither depends on a view about the role of intuitions in philos-
ophy, nor on any view about whether significant swaths of evidence in
philosophy are psychological. This, anyway, is something they sometimes
claim. Here are Alexander and Weinberg, for example, claiming that intu-
itions and psychologized evidence have nothing much to do with the nega-
tive xphile critique:
The results of experimental philosophers are not themselves framed in terms of
intuitions, but in terms of the counterfactual judgments of various subjects under
various circumstances. Although the results are often glossed in terms of intuitions
to follow standard philosophical usage, inspection of the experimental materials
reveals little talk of intuitions and mostly the direct evaluation of claims. The re-
strictionist challenge [i.e. the negative xphi critique] does not need to turn on a
(potentially mistaken) psychologization of philosophers’ evidence; that it does not
turn on that skeptical move hopefully helps make clear that it is not itself a skepti-
cal challenge. … The [negative xphile] challenge reveals that at the present time
philosophers may just not know what their evidence really is. And the true extent of
their evidence is not, we think, something that they will be able to learn from their
armchairs. (Alexander and Weinberg 2007, 72)

Alexander and Weinberg are never explicit about how the intuition-free,
nonpsychologistic version of the negative xphile critique is supposed to go,
but there is a hint in their comment that “at the present time philosophers
Other Replies to Xphi  143

may just not know what their evidence really is.” I take them to mean that,
somehow, the discovered diversity in judgments about cases shows that
philosophers are not justified in believing that their own judgments about
cases are correct. So, philosophers do not know that the contents of these
judgments are evidence.
But the question is: how is the discovered diversity in judgment sup-
posed to show this? If all there were to say in defense of a judgment about
a case is that it is intuitive, or intuitive to the experts, then diversity in
judgment about a case along truth-irrelevant lines would be a big prob-
lem. I have already admitted this in my discussion of the weakness of the
expertise reply. But if a judgment about a case is made for reasons, if the
judgment can be given argumentative support, then why should diversity
in judgments about the case, when those reasons and that support is not
clearly in play, or registered by the judges, matter in the slightest?
So far as I can tell, the only available answer is this: the existence of
diversity in judgments about a case, and along truth-irrelevant lines, will
always defeat whatever justification might be given for any particular judg-
ment about that case. This answer is clearly wrong, however. It is not true
in general that diversity in people’s judgments with respect to p defeats
one’s justification for judging that p. Whether it does depends, of course,
on the character and quality of one’s justification. Diversity in judgment
along truth-irrelevant lines is not an epistemic defeater no matter what. If
the intuition-free, nonpsychologistic version of the negative xphile critique
depends on insisting that it is, then the critique is badly misguided.
Many varieties of judgment display diversity along truth-irrelevant lines.
Think, for example, of the ways in which people’s political judgments vary
with respect to all sorts of demographics that do not matter to the truth
of the judgments. No one would seriously maintain that diversity of that
sort defeats every justification that has been or might be given for political
judgments. Sometimes people disagree politically, not for any good reason,
but because they are being pushed around, perhaps in subtle, difficult-to-
discern ways, by truth-irrelevant factors. That unfortunate fact of life sim-
ply has no bearing on whether there is any compelling justification for one
side of the disagreement over the other. In the United States, for example,
whether one supports stricter gun control laws depends to some disturb-
ingly large extent on one’s gender, one’s income, and one’s political party
(to pick three truth-irrelevant, judgment-affecting demographics among a
144  Chapter 6

large host of them). (See Pew Research Center 2011.) To think that this
implies that justifications for or against stricter gun laws are one and all
called into question is a downright bizarre epistemological view.
The gun-control example is just one of an enormous number of exam-
ples of judgments we know to vary along truth-irrelevant lines. But every
such example leaves open the question of whether there are good, truth-
relevant reasons to hold that the judgment is true (or false). Xphiles appear
to have shown that, in some circumstances, judgments about philosophical
cases vary along truth-irrelevant lines. But if such judgments are at least
sometimes made for reasons, if they are not just intuitions, then the mere
fact of that sort of variability need not pose an epistemic threat. Gettier’s
reasons for his judgment that his Smith character fails to know, in both of
the cases he describes in Gettier 1963, might be sufficient justification for
that judgment, regardless of the kind or amount of intuitional diversity we
find when presenting the cases to various subject groups, and even if we
find it in subject groups composed of philosophical experts. If Gettier’s rea-
sons are good enough, then philosophers can “know what their evidence
really is.” Their evidence really is that there are genuine counterexamples
to the JTB theory of knowledge, and some philosophers, those cognizant of
Gettier’s reasons, know it.
It took skill, ingenuity, reflection, and careful reasoning to construct,
and argue for, counterexamples to a theory of knowledge that had reigned
in epistemology for thousands of years. So, of course, Gettier’s refutation
involved philosophical expertise. Gettier is in the business of arguing for
philosophical judgments, even those that qualify as intuitive on some
understandings of that troublesome term. Being in that line of work, he
is better placed than nonphilosophers to make justified judgments about
cases. There is no empirical evidence that shows or suggests otherwise.
What holds for Gettier holds, more or less, for the profession as a whole.
We philosophers are better placed than those who lack philosophical train-
ing to make justified judgments about philosophical cases. This does not
imply, however, that psychological facts about what intuitions philoso-
phers have are methodologically or evidentially significant. The problem
with the expertise reply is not that it appeals to expertise; philosophers
really are better at philosophy than nonphilosophers. The problem with
the reply is instead that, just like the critique to which it replies, it makes a
serious mistake about intuitions and their role in philosophy.
Other Replies to Xphi  145

Some negative xphiles seem to think that intuitional diversity poses a

problem for philosophy and its methods even if philosophers do not appeal
to intuitions in the “state” sense in their reasoning about cases. I have
argued in this section that this view appears to rest on a highly implausible
claim about when justifications for judgments about cases are defeated.
Hence, the critique either implies this implausible claim about justifica-
tional defeat, or else it wrongly assumes that intuitions in the “state” sense
are treated as evidence in philosophy. Either way, the critique fails, and
traditional modes of philosophizing have nothing to fear from the various
and sundry results of intuition surveys.

6.3  The Multiple Concepts Reply

Notice, however, that to view the xphi critique as failing in the way I just
described involves, in part, rejecting the picture of philosophy as treating
intuitions (in the “state” sense) as evidence. Unfortunately, many philoso-
phers are loath to give this up and are now scrambling desperately to save
the picture, even in the face of the ever-mounting empirical evidence that
people’s intuitions about philosophical cases vary along all sorts of truth-
irrelevant dimensions. The expertise defense is just one desperate attempt
among several. Another influential reply to the negative xphile critique—
one, again, that attempts to preserve the view that intuitions are treated as
evidence in philosophy—is to claim that the results of xphi surveys do not
necessarily indicate genuine disagreement. For example, perhaps people who
appear to disagree over Gettier cases presented in xphi surveys understand
the terms in which the questions are posed differently. And perhaps these
differences in interpretation, as opposed to genuine disagreement over one
and the same proposition, produce the appearance of disagreement in the
survey results.
Ernest Sosa (2007, 2010) is the main representative of this style of reply
to the negative xphile critique, but Frank Jackson (2011) and William Lycan
(2006) have also voiced support. To have a name, I will call it the mul-
tiple concepts reply, since a standard way of understanding the category of a
merely apparent disagreement is to see it as involving speakers who associate
different concepts with the same terms. One English speaker might appear
to disagree with another over the truth of “There is a bank in town,” for
example. But if one of them means ground near river while the other means
146  Chapter 6

financial institution by “bank,” then there is no genuine disagreement (or

none, anyway, indicated by their disagreement over the sentence, “There is
a bank in town”); they are simply using “bank” to express different concepts
and might in fact agree with one another if less ambiguous language were
used. Perhaps apparent diversity in philosophical intuitions is not genuine;
respondents are simply interpreting the language of the survey instruments
in different but compatible ways, just as in the example involving “bank.”
There is a sense in which the multiple concepts reply counts as a rela-
tive of replies to specific xphi studies that accuse the studies of not taking
enough care to guard against what I earlier, in chapter 2, called pragmatic
distortion. Recall, for example, that in Joshua Knobe’s (2003) study on intu-
itions about intentional action, there is a chance, noted by Fred Adams
and Amy Steadman (2004) that some respondents judge, in Knobe’s “Harm
Condition,” that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment
because they think the chairman deserves blame for harming the environ-
ment. Supposing, as seems very plausible, that it is not part of the literal
truth conditions of “The chairman did not harm the environment inten-
tionally” that the chairman deserves no blame, these respondents are not
evaluating the proposition literally, semantically expressed by the sentence.
The similarity to the multiple concepts reply is that, in a case of prag-
matic distortion, different speakers understand the sentences they are
evaluating differently and these differences lead to what might be merely
apparent diversity in judgment. However, the multiple concepts reply is far
more general. Charging an experimental design with risking pragmatic dis-
tortion requires at least gesturing at what sorts of merely pragmatic effects
the design is likely to produce. In the case of Adams and Steadman’s criti-
cism of Knobe’s design, there is a specification of what sort of implicature is
generated by “The chairman did not harm the environment intentionally”
(viz., that the chairman should not be blamed for harming the environ-
ment) and an explanation of how it is generated. Complaining in this way
about Knobe’s particular study is not to complain about intuition surveys
in general.
The multiple concepts reply, however, is a complaint about intuition
surveys in general. Proponents of the reply think that the success of the
xphi critique depends on showing that there are genuine disagreements
over philosophical cases. Yet so far, according to them, there is evidence
only that there might be, in the form of various apparent disagreements.
Other Replies to Xphi  147

This is all that the relevant xphi surveys have shown, according to propo-
nents of the multiple concepts reply—there exist apparent disagreements
over philosophical cases. They then quickly add that it is possible that these
apparent disagreements are merely apparent, owing to subjects associating
different concepts with the same terms. If so—if the disagreements are, in
this way, merely apparent—then the threat to armchair appeals to intu-
itions as evidence is defused. For example, for all that Weinberg et al.’s
(2001) cross-cultural study on Gettier intuitions shows, Westerners are right
about the Western concept of knowledge—it does not apply to agents in
Gettier cases—while East Asians are right about their different, East Asian
concept of knowledge—their concept does apply to agents in Gettier cases.
Despite the fact that the reply is very general (implausibly general, I will
soon argue), the cross-cultural differences in Gettier intuitions reported in
Weinberg et al. 2001 are the main target for proponents of the multiple
concepts reply. Here is Frank Jackson making the reply against these results
in particular:
We should be open to the possibility that different groups of people have different
concepts of knowledge, in the sense that the categorization the various groups effect
using the word “knowledge” may vary. There isn’t a law stating how people have to
use the term. Perhaps, therefore, at least some holdouts [that is, those who do not
share the Western Gettier intuition] have a different concept of knowledge; indeed,
it may be that their concept of knowledge is precisely true justified belief. (Jackson
2011, 469)

And here is Ernest Sosa making the same point while emphasizing that he
thinks that defenders of the use of intuitions as evidence need not assert
that there are any actual conceptual differences between survey respon-
dents; according to Sosa, the defense succeeds so long as the possibility that
there are such differences has not been ruled out:
In any case, here is the more important point: the response to the X-Phi challenge
does not need to commit to an actual divergence in meaning. Just remember: it is
the attackers who allege a real disagreement, one that is not merely verbal. But this
is an inference they are drawing from certain verbal reports. And these verbal reports
by rushers-by on a street corner are hard to take seriously as expressive of considered
views with full enough understanding of the issues under dispute, including those
concerning Gettier examples. Nevertheless opponents of the armchair infer from
those reports that there is real disagreement. Given the non-dismissible possibility
that the disagreement is just verbal, then, we need to be given reason to rule out that
possibility. (Sosa 2010, 422)10
148  Chapter 6

By contrast, William Lycan is in print making a very strong version of the

multiple concepts reply, one according to which, under certain conditions,
apparent disagreement over Gettier cases is positive evidence in favor of
the view that the (apparent) disputants are employing different concepts
answering to the term “knowledge”:
I have several doubts about the experimental procedures described by the authors
[Weinberg et al. 2001], and I would not take their results at face value. But they do
not claim too much for them. And to make things interesting, let us ignore such
doubts, and suppose that the survey results are impeccably produced and robustly
replicated: 60% of an Asian ethnic group and 25% of European-descended American
undergraduates firmly reject Gettier and insist, clearheadedly and understanding the
terms and the issue, that a Gettier “victim” does know.
In that eventuality, I submit, we have a conceptual difference. In the speech
of the 60% and the 25%, “know” really does mean justified true belief, period.
We would have to regard that speech as a dialect that differs from our own. (Lycan
2006, 164)

I will begin my criticism of the multiple concepts reply with an objection

to Lycan’s strong version of the reply.
Lycan thinks that if someone “clearheadedly and understanding the
terms and issue” asserts that a “Gettier ‘victim’ does know,” then he or
she must have a concept of knowledge different from someone who, in the
same fashion, asserts that a Gettier “victim” does not know. However, Lycan
offers nothing in defense of this view. It is not true in general that if A
assents, clearheadedly and with understanding, to a sentence S, while B dis-
sents, also clearheadedly and with understanding, to S, then A and B must
understand (some component term of) S differently; there is no reason to
suppose, in such a circumstance, that there must be a “conceptual differ-
ence” between A and B, or that they must speak different dialects of the
language to which S belongs. In fact, Lycan’s conditions are precisely those
one would think to be required for genuine disagreement. Only if assent or
dissent to S is made clearheadedly and with understanding will it qualify as
acceptance or rejection of the proposition expressed by S.
Suppose that two English speakers, A and B, are such that A assents to
“Sally went to the bank,” while B dissents. Nothing follows about concep-
tual differences, not even when we add that A and B assent and dissent,
respectively, with clear heads, and with full understanding of the sentence.
People can genuinely disagree over whether Sally went to the bank, of
course. And that is true even if the language A and B use to express the
Other Replies to Xphi  149

proposition that Sally went to the bank is ambiguous, as it is in English.

Even if A and B are using “bank” univocally to mean financial institution,
they may perfectly well genuinely disagree over whether Sally went to a
financial institution.
The point about ambiguity is important, since, even if a term is ambig-
uous, as “bank” is in English, that, by itself, does not make it somehow
more likely that disagreements over sentences formulated using the term
do not add up to genuine disagreements over some or another proposition
expressed by the sentence. So, even if ambiguous language is used in intu-
ition surveys, this not yet any evidence at all that disagreements between
subject groups over that language are not genuine. This makes Lycan’s view
even more puzzling. For even if there were some evidence, beyond the pat-
terns of assent and dissent Weinberg et al. 2001 report, for the view that
Western and East Asian English speakers use “knowledge” with different
meanings, this would not yet show that the meaning-difference or ambigu-
ity is in play, and hence that the apparent disagreement between the two
groups is not genuine. In any case, Lycan does not have any such evidence;
his view seems to be that the pattern of assent and dissent suffices, on its
own (or would if his other conditions were met), to say that there is a con-
ceptual difference.
It may be that there is something about judgments about Gettier cases
in particular that Lycan believes to show that apparent disagreement over
such judgments must be merely apparent, but it is unclear what this could
be. There can be genuine disagreements over conceptual truths or truths
that are a priori, for example, so it can hardly be some special metaphysical
or epistemic status possessed by Gettier judgments that explains Lycan’s
view. Of course, there can be merely apparent, not-genuine disagreements
over Gettier judgments and over any other judgment about any other phil-
osophical case besides. And it is also true that xphiles do not give argu-
ments to the effect that the apparent disagreements they have uncovered
add up to genuine disagreements. But this is the difference between Lycan,
on the one hand, and Sosa and Jackson on the other: these latter two phi-
losophers do not insist, as Lycan does, that the apparent disagreements
over Gettier cases, for example, must be explicable in terms of conceptual
or dialect differences. They are content, instead, to point out that such dif-
ferences are possible and that xphiles have not “ruled them out.” It is to this
milder version of the multiple concepts reply that I now turn.
150  Chapter 6

The question for the milder version of the multiple concepts reply
endorsed by Sosa and Jackson is this: just what, exactly, is required to “rule
out” the possibility that apparent disagreements are merely apparent? Must
there be conclusive reasons, ones that entail that the apparent disagreements
are also genuine? “Ruling out” suggests that this is the standard, but that
seems unreasonably strict. After all, we are not, in ordinary conversational
settings, always in a position to rule out, in this strong sense, the possibil-
ity that our interlocutors, when apparently disagreeing with us, are merely
apparently doing so. I assertively utter a sentence, S, and you seem to dis-
sent, saying, “No, not-S.” You have genuinely disagreed with me only if we
agree about what claim S expresses (or, better, about what claim I have used
S to express). But, typically, neither you nor I make any attempt at deter-
mining that there is this (metalinguistic) agreement between us. Besides,
any attempt at reaching the supposedly required agreement will involve
trading more sentences (perhaps, at this stage, ones about other sentences)
and the possibility that our agreement or disagreement at this next level is
merely apparent is just as much a possibility as is the possibility that the
disagreement with which we started is merely apparent.
In other words, the view that we know or justifiably believe that we
are genuinely disagreeing with our interlocutors only if we can rule out
the possibility that we are instead merely apparently disagreeing leads to
skepticism about our knowledge of, or justified belief in, the existence of
genuine disagreements. This skepticism is implausible—sometimes, surely,
we do know, or have good reason for supposing, that a disagreement is
genuine—and so we should reject the condition that requires that we, in
some conclusive fashion, rule out the possibility that the disagreements
are merely apparent. Sosa and Jackson are of course correct that it is pos-
sible that East Asians employ a different “concept of knowledge” and hence
say something different from Westerners when they apply, or withhold the
application of, knowledge ascriptions. But they are wrong to think that fail-
ing to conclusively rule out this possibility shows that xphiles do not know
or are unjustified in claiming that there are genuine disagreements between
East Asians and Westerners over Gettier cases.
Xphiles see this clearly. In essence, this is the response to the Sosa–Jack-
son variety of the multiple concepts reply that negative xphiles have made.
Alexander and Weinberg, for example, point out that the multiple concepts
reply, to the extent that it casts doubt on whether xphiles have uncovered
Other Replies to Xphi  151

any genuine disagreements in people’s philosophical intuitions, will also

cast doubt on whether there are any genuine agreements in people’s intu-
itions. Since multiple concepts are always possible, how can we analytic
philosophers be sure that we are genuinely agreeing with one another when
we say, as many of us do, that agents in Gettier cases lack knowledge? (See
Alexander and Weinberg 2007, 67–69.)11 This skepticism is implausible, but
it follows rather directly if we adopt the view that Sosa and Jackson suggest,
namely that we can know that genuine agreement or disagreement exists
only if we can be certain that the skeptical counter-possibility—that the
apparent agreements and disagreements we have with various interlocuters
are merely apparent—does not obtain.
If we relax our standards and say that justified belief in genuine dis-
agreement is possible even in the absence of conclusive reasons against the
possibility that the apparent disagreements we encounter are merely appar-
ent, then the multiple concepts reply loses all of its force. For what are the
appropriately relaxed standards? My view is that these are simply the stan-
dards that apply to ordinary conversational exchange (construed broadly to
include reading newspaper reports, filling out intuition surveys, and other
sorts of nonspoken linguistic exchanges), and that these standards make
belief in genuine disagreement in the presence of an apparent disagreement
justified by default. That is, if we encounter what appears to be a genuine
disagreement—I assent to S and you dissent to that very sentence, S, say—
then, unless we have compelling reasons to suppose that we are under-
standing S differently, we can believe, with justification, that we genuinely
disagree. This default justified status is sustained, I think, by rather bland
facts to the effect that, for example, we are speaking the same language,
are aiming for sincerity, are not using any of the component terms of S in
surprisingly nonliteral ways, and so on. Conversation itself is premised on
these facts, in the sense that the cooperative enterprise of a conversation
cannot get off the ground unless these basic facts are in place.
It follows that we should take the apparent disagreements that xphiles
have discovered at face value; that is, we should take them as genuine dis-
agreements. The apparent disputants speak the same language, are pre-
sumed to be speaking sincerely and literally, and so on. So the claim, for
example, that East Asians do not have the Gettier intuition, which is made,
in effect, on the basis of East Asian English-speaking subject groups’ assent
to certain English sentences, has a default justified status. We are justified in
taking it to be true unless there is a special reason not to do so.
152  Chapter 6

Are there special reasons not to do so? I have already expressed my dis-
satisfaction with Lycan’s view, according to which the special reason is sim-
ply the existence of the apparent disagreement itself. That cannot be right,
since every instance of genuine disagreement is also an instance of appar-
ent disagreement. Something more is needed to substantiate the charge
that the apparent disagreement might, in some sense of “might” that goes
beyond bare logical possibility, be merely apparent. Lycan offers nothing
that will do the trick; however, neither do Sosa or Jackson.
Sosa is at pains to point out that his version of the multiple concepts
reply “does not need to commit to an actual divergence in meaning” (Sosa
2010, 422). He is adamant that he need not say that East Asians and West-
erners attach different meanings to “knowledge,” for example. But, while
that is true, his version of the multiple concepts reply does need to offer
some reason for thinking that the default justification we have for believing
that, in most cases, apparent disagreements are genuine is overridden in
this case. That can fall short of a reason for thinking that there is an actual
divergence in meaning. However, the mere possibility of a merely apparent
disagreement is insufficient in this regard, for even in those cases in which
we have very strong evidence that a disagreement is genuine, it is of course
still possible, even given the evidence, that subtle conceptual differences are
producing the relevant patterns of assent and dissent.
Similarly, Jackson, speaking of “knowledge,” is right when he says,
“there isn’t a law stating how people have to use the term” (Jackson 2011,
469). True, there is no such law, but there is, or so I have argued, a presump-
tion to the effect that speakers of a language communicate with each other
when speaking their shared language. That presumption implies that we
can reasonably take what looks like disagreement between two speakers
to be genuine. Jackson, like Sosa, offers nothing that might counter this
presumption beyond the fact that it is possible that apparent disagreements
between people over Gettier cases are merely apparent. But every appar-
ent disagreement is, possibly, merely apparent. Unless we accept that a
general skepticism about our knowledge of genuine disagreement follows
from this possibility, and hence that we can never know, about any putative
genuine disagreement that it is genuine, we will be unmoved by Jackson’s
point about the absence of laws governing how people must use the term
“knowledge.” The question is not whether it is possible that some people
use “knowledge” differently from other people. Instead, the question is
Other Replies to Xphi  153

whether our default justification for believing that this possibility does not
obtain is defeated or overridden in the specific case in which Jackson is
interested, namely the case of apparent cultural differences in judgments
about Gettier cases.
So it appears that, just as was true of the expertise reply, there is, in
the case of the multiple concepts reply, an issue to do with the burden of
proof. In the former case, I agreed with xphiles that the burden of proof was
on proponents of the expertise reply to show that philosophical experts
are less prone to the biases and effects that xphiles have found to affect
the intuitions of nonphilosopher folk. In the case of the multiple concepts
reply, I again agree with xphiles that, while it is possible that different sub-
ject groups are operating with different concepts and hence that what look
like genuine disagreements between them might be explicable in a way that
reveals this as mere appearance, this possibility, as things now stand, is idle.
Without some reason to believe otherwise, we—xphiles and the rest of us—
are justified in believing that there are genuine disagreements between, for
example, different cultural groups over philosophical cases. The burden of
proof is on proponents of the multiple concepts reply to show us that the
apparent disagreements are special in some way that reveals that it would
be too quick to take these disagreements at face value—to take them, that
is, as genuine.

6.4  The Right Reply

If we are justified in taking the disagreements to be genuine, then that is

a serious problem, of course, for those seeking to defend an intuitions-as-
evidence method for philosophy. For if intuitions are evidence, and the
disagreements in intuitive judgments that xphiles have discovered can be
reasonably regarded as genuine, then, for judgments about a fair number of
central philosophical cases, we can and should say that there turns out to
be some counterevidence.12 Gettier judgments have some evidence in their
favor, in the form of some people’s intuitions that such judgments are true.
But there is also evidence against Gettier judgments, in the form of other
people’s intuitions that such judgments are not true.
In these circumstances, how should we react? This question is just an
instance of a more general question about evidence for hypotheses. When
154  Chapter 6

there is both evidence and counterevidence for a hypothesis, how should

we react? In such circumstances, a responsible inquirer will withhold judg-
ment concerning the hypothesis. So, if there is some evidence for, and some
against, Gettier judgments, then, as responsible inquirers, we should, at
this stage, withhold judgment about whether there are Gettier-style coun-
terexamples to the JTB theory of knowledge. Or, if there is not yet enough
counterevidence in, then we should at least be prepared to withhold judg-
ment, and should begin treating our belief that there are Gettier-style coun-
terexamples to the JTB theory, for those of us who have this belief, less like
an established fact and more like a hypothesis awaiting further empirical
confirmation—or disconfirmation, as the case may be.
Gettier judgments are just one example, of course. Weinberg et al. 2001
reports cross-cultural differences in intuitive judgments about several other
important cases from epistemology besides. Then there is the Machery et
al. 2004 evidence that different cultural groups intuit Gödel cases differ-
ently. In Western subject groups, a good amount of intracultural variation
has been discovered. If, as I have argued, we are justified in taking most of
these apparent disagreements between subject groups as genuine, and yet
we insist that intuitions are evidence for judgments about philosophical
cases, then the only responsible attitude to take, it seems to me, is to with-
hold judgment (or at least be prepared to withhold judgment) with respect
to each and every philosophical case relative to which intuitional diversity
has been discovered. Proponents of the multiple concepts reply say that
some of this apparent intuitional diversity might be explicable in terms of
merely apparent disagreement owing to variability in concepts. But with-
out some positive evidence that this is indeed the right view to take of at
least some of the discovered diversity, we are, currently, justified in suppos-
ing that most of it instead reflects genuine disagreement.
Proponents of the expertise reply are betting that philosophical experts
will intuit better; truth-irrelevant factors will affect the experts’ judgments
to a lesser degree, and disagreements, if they will not completely disap-
pear, will at least diminish significantly. Since this is just a bet—just pure
speculation—it, like the possibility floated by proponents of the multiple
concepts reply, has no real effect on what attitude we should take right now,
concerning our judgments about those philosophical cases for which diver-
sity has been discovered. With no clear empirical evidence to the effect that
Other Replies to Xphi  155

philosophical experts will intuit better, the responsible attitude, again, is to

withhold judgment about the relevant philosophical cases.
This conclusion is precisely that of the negative xphile critique; negative
xphiles claim that, given their empirical results, we should at the very least
restrict the current practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence in phi-
losophy. One thing I have been suggesting in this chapter is that the nega-
tive xphile critique contains an important insight about philosophy and its
methods: if intuitions are evidence concerning what is true in philosophical cases,
then intuitional diversity does indeed pose a threat to what many of us take
to be clear cases of philosophical knowledge. Equally importantly, again on
the assumption that intuitions are evidence, intuitional diversity reveals
that philosophers have, so far, gathered the evidence relevant to verifying
their theories in an almost comically ineffective way. There is no way to tell
from the armchair whether a judgment is intuitive. One can tell from the
armchair whether a judgment is intuitive for oneself, but that is different.
Whether a judgment is intuitive is an empirical question, concerning how
people in general cognize the judgment. Xphiles insist on this, and rightly
so, I think.
However, another theme of this chapter (and of the book as a whole)
is that the view that intuitions are evidence, or are treated as such in first-
order philosophy, is a myth. Xphiles are guilty of perpetuating the myth,
but traditional philosophers deserve far more blame in this regard. I think
experimental philosophy is a natural outgrowth of a fairly standard and
entrenched second-order view about the nature of philosophy, one that
carves out a significant place for intuitions in its account of philosophi-
cal method and agrees with xphiles that philosophy treats intuitions as
evidence. If the myth were true, the criticisms raised by negative xphiles
would be exactly on target, and the expertise and multiple concepts replies
would do little to counter the main thrust of the critique, which is to high-
light the clearly empirical character of claims to the effect that this or that
judgment is intuitive.
The myth, however, is just a myth. Philosophy simply does not rely
evidentially on intuitions or what is intuitive. Instead, philosophers argue
for their judgments about cases, and the cogency of these arguments is
independent of who intuits what. This simple observation (since that is
all it is—an observation about first-order philosophical practice) blocks the
156  Chapter 6

negative xphile critique and reveals that the expertise and multiple con-
cepts replies are unnecessary. If intuitions are not treated as evidence, then
there is no need to fret about the sensitivity of intuition to truth-irrelevant
factors; nor is there any need to insist that philosophers intuit better or that
apparent disagreement in intuitions may be explicable in terms of concep-
tual differences. Both the critique and the major replies to it are predicated
on a mistake, the mistake of taking it to be part and parcel of philosophy to
rely on intuitions as evidence.
Conclusion: Armchairs versus Lab Coats?

It is now common to hear the dispute between xphiles and those who
defend analytic philosophy and its methods characterized as one over
whether philosophy can be pursued “from the armchair.” I myself, in the
last chapter, criticized the expertise and multiple concepts replies to the
negative xphile critique for failing to defend philosophy’s armchair meth-
ods. Nevertheless, the characterization of the dispute in terms of those for
or against armchair philosophy is misleading in at least two ways. First, the
characterization wrongly suggests that armchair philosophy is unscientific,
or unconcerned with empirical results related to its subject matter. Second,
the characterization unfairly casts xphi as a curative—a pro-science balm
designed to counteract the tendency to simply sit in an armchair and think.
Since typical survey-style xphi methods are clearly empirical, casting
xphiles as opposed to armchair philosophy suggests that armchair methods
are not empirical. But this is not true. By definition, a priori methods are not
empirical. But sitting in an armchair does not prevent one from appealing
to things one has learned a posteriori. Even judgments about purely hypo-
thetical cases are informed in various ways by one’s empirical knowledge.
To return, once again, to the example from Frankfurt with which this book
began, it is simply not true that we know, solely on a priori grounds, that
Frankfurt’s counterexample to the principle that one is morally responsible
only if one could have done otherwise is genuine. Understanding the coun-
terexample requires a great deal of empirical knowledge, for example about
people’s motives and the role these play in grounding responsibility, and
about the conditions under which people typically have or lack the ability
to do otherwise.1
So we need not accept the view that if philosophical knowledge is arm-
chair knowledge then it is entirely a priori. Thoroughgoing “naturalist”
158 Conclusion

philosophers, who are skeptical of the a priori, can and do make a place in
their epistemology of philosophy for judgments made from the armchair.
Williamson (2007) makes an excellent case for this, and even Hilary Korn-
blith (2006, 2007), who often appears hostile to traditional philosophizing,
is hostile mostly, and rightly so, to the account of philosophical practice
foisted on us by believers in the myth of the intuitive (though Kornblith,
unfortunately, is also a believer; he is hostile to what he takes to be an accu-
rate account of philosophical practice, and wants, therefore, that the prac-
tice be reformed). Kornblith thinks that philosophy needs a healthy dose of
input from the sciences, but, on his picture, this is just input; philosophy
itself, according to Kornblith, is an armchair pursuit, but one that needs
to be substantially informed and constrained by experimental/empirical
results. Kornblith does not think that philosophers need lab coats and the
labs to wear them in; he thinks that they need collaborators with these tools.
And of course Kornblith’s view is the correct one. Who in this day and
age could or would seriously deny that philosophy must pay close attention
to the results of those empirical sciences which, to take up another of Korn-
blith’s themes, deal with the very same not-purely-conceptual, real-world
phenomena (such as knowledge, reference, and moral responsibility) dealt
with by philosophers? Philosophy is not itself a science, but it cannot afford
to be positively antiscientific by ignoring the results of scientific investiga-
tions of its subject matter. Often, the best, most accurate picture we have
of a given phenomenon is the one we have from science. This is true, for
example, of our present-day understanding of the mind. A philosophy of
consciousness that simply ignores empirical results concerning “change
blindness” or “blindsight,” to name just two examples, is not going to be
complete or accurate.
But there is no real danger here. Kornblith has been misled by the myth
of the intuitive, with its emphasis on intuitions and a supposedly fully
a priori method for philosophy. As I have been stressing throughout the
book, the actual practice of philosophy does not look anything like the way
Kornblith and other believers in the myth take it to look. Philosophers do
not need advice to look closely and carefully at the sciences that bear on
their topics; most of us already heed this advice and have been doing so
at least since the rise of positivism and, arguably, for much, much longer.
Denying that armchair methods are entirely a priori is not to affirm that
such methods are entirely a posteriori. Discerning metaphysical possibilities
Conclusion 159

is partly a matter of simply thinking about whether such-and-such a propo-

sition could be true. And one might be able to discern such a possibility
without empirical evidence or premises playing any real role in the process.
Indeed, on my rendering, Gettier’s and Kripke’s counterexamples amount
to metaphysical possibilities that contradict certain necessary generaliza-
tions asserted by their opponents. But their discoveries of these counter-
examples were, I believe, not just “from the armchair,” but also free from
empirical evidence or premises, and, hence, a priori. Gettier and Kripke dis-
covered that the generalizations are false simply by thinking through their
implications; no empirical evidence was appealed to or required.
This is not the place to defend, in any thoroughgoing fashion, the pos-
sibility of a priori knowledge. However, I think there is a tendency to think
that xphi results somehow pose a challenge to the a priori component of
the methods analytic philosophers employ. Perhaps this is due to the (mis-
taken) impression that propositions (allegedly) known a priori are (alleg-
edly) known via intuition or “rational insight.” In any case, the results of
xphi studies do not, as I have argued, pose any challenge to any of the
arguments or conclusions that analytic philosophers trade in. I take this to
imply that if some of those arguments or conclusions are a wholly priori,
then the results do not present a challenge to this feature of them either.
For example, I have argued that results that show us that the Gettier intu-
ition is culturally variable do not show us that we do not know that the
intuition is true. For all the results reveal, it might well be that we not only
know that the Gettier intuition is true, but that this amounts to a priori
knowledge as well.
In any case, I think it is clear that xphi derives a fair amount of mostly
undeserved cachet from being allied with the empirical sciences. The pic-
ture is one of reformers in lab coats, revolutionizing the practice of phi-
losophy, paying due homage to the sciences along the way. Meanwhile, the
old guard philosophers sit there in their armchairs thinking they can make
genuine progress with an outmoded and faintly ridiculous method, strok-
ing their beards and consulting their intuitions. But, just as the image of
analytic philosophy as wholly a priori is inaccurate, so too is the image of
xphiles as the pro-science, truly empirically minded bunch.
Xphiles have proposed that survey-style experimentation on people’s
intuitions should be an important part of the practice of philosophy. But
this kind of experimentation has a severely limited reach. At most, it will tell
160 Conclusion

us only what various groups of people intuit or believe about philosophi-

cal cases. This kind of data is not philosophically irrelevant, although, as I
have been arguing throughout the book, it is not relevant in the way most
xphiles believe it to be. Most xphiles believe it is relevant because they think
it is related, somehow, to what evidence there is for or against philosophi-
cal theory. That intuitions are evidence, or are treated as such in first-order
philosophy, is part and parcel of the myth of the intuitive, and I reject both
claims (with the caveat that expert opinions or intuitions can count as a kind
of indirect evidence but are, methodologically, rarely treated as such).
In my view, data about people’s philosophical beliefs and intuitions are
relevant to philosophy in a broadly ethical way; that is, such data are rel-
evant to how we should treat others and how, more fundamentally, we
should understand the social practices of different groups of people. Data on
the philosophical intuitions of people from different cultural groups serve
these broadly ethical goals and has real potential for fostering cross-cultural
understanding and respect. An obvious area to investigate is people’s moral
intuitions, but investigating their epistemic or semantic intuitions is worth-
while too, since this can reveal epistemic values or facets of communicative
practices that can deepen our understanding of the similarities and differ-
ences between different cultures or groups.
Unfortunately, most of the xphi being practiced today does not seem
to serve these broadly ethical goals. The aim of most of those experimen-
tally investigating intuitions about a certain philosophical domain is to
say something, either positive or negative, about that very philosophical
domain. The myth of the intuitive has thus hamstrung xphi itself, keeping
it from its most valuable potential contribution to our philosophical and
scientific understanding of ourselves.
Thankfully, not all xphi is hamstrung in this way by the myth of the
intuitive. Recent work in moral psychology,2 for example, sometimes quali-
fies as xphi with the broadly ethical aims I have described, and there is noth-
ing in the general purview of moral psychology that requires philosophically
minded practitioners to adhere to the myth. A lot of good experimental work
in moral psychology focuses on the distinction between spontaneous and
considered moral judgments. To the extent that the former count as moral
intuitions, this work is clearly of a piece with experimental philosophy
and its attendant focus on intuitions. And it is important and interesting
work; in fact, it is precisely the kind of work that strikes me as crucial for
Conclusion 161

understanding ourselves and getting along with others. The work, if I may
take the liberty of summing up what is now a large body of results, is helping
to reveal just where, when, and how our considered moral judgments are
disconnected from the way we act in real-life situations that demand spon-
taneous moral assessments. In other words, it is the kind of experimental
philosophy that has clear philosophical relevance and is motivated by admi-
rable, broadly ethical aims. But none of it, as far as I can see, depends in any
way on commitment to the myth of the intuitive. One need not buy in to
the view that intuitions are evidence for moral theory, or are treated as such
in first-order theorizing in ethics, in order to map out the interesting connec-
tions (or lack thereof) between people’s spontaneous moral decision making
and their more considered moral opinions. None of the work experimentally
investigating this terrain is devalued, undermined, or called into question in
any way by the tenor or arguments of this book.
The distinction between spontaneous moral judgments and the consid-
ered moral judgments that figure in our moral theories is an instance of
the more general distinction between spontaneous and considered philo-
sophical judgments. And that more general distinction is ripe, it seems to
me, for exploration via experimental methods. I would welcome examples
of experimental philosophy that put aside specious claims about the link
between intuitions and philosophical evidence and focused simply on the
distinction between those two ways of cognizing a philosophical claim—
arriving at it seemingly without inference versus arriving at it through con-
scious inference.
This distinction, along with how the two modes of cognition play a role
in shaping not just our moral outlook but our philosophical outlook more
generally, is bound to have all sorts of broadly ethical implications. I encour-
age xphiles to unearth them—using surveys, but also whatever other empiri-
cal methods are required. An xphi unfettered by the myth of the intuitive
has an important place in philosophy and can make a significant contribu-
tion, but it is a mistake to think that this place and contribution will have
something to do with evidence for philosophical theory; xphi’s potential
contribution is different from what most of its practitioners take it to be.
It is also a potential that is yet to be fully realized. Hopefully, this book
will steer xphiles away from claims about how their studies and data bear
on the evidence for philosophical theory and toward the broadly ethical
goals that it has a genuine chance of serving.
Notes
 

1  Varieties of Xphi, Pragmatic Distortion, and the No-Theory Theory of

Intuitions

1.  From here on out, I will for the most part refer to the kind of philosophy that
some varieties of xphi seek to challenge as simply “philosophy,” though, as I hope is
clear by now, the kind in question is really that kind of analytic philosophy that
gives some sort of argumentative role to thought experiments and hypothetical
cases. Sometimes, I will refer to it as “traditional philosophy,” or “traditional ana-
lytic philosophy.” I am not especially happy with the usual definitions of “analytic
philosophy,” and “traditional philosophy” has connotations that are not quite
right. The general terms are stylistically useful, however. Really, all I mean by them
is: that kind of philosophy exemplified by Frankfurt’s argument about moral respon-
sibility and Gettier’s anti-JTB argument, along with several other examples we will
examine later.

2.  “Those who do care about intuitions” are alleged by negative xphiles to include
not just traditional philosophers who (negative xphiles claim) appeal to intuitions,
but also xphiles in the other, more positive camp who also appeal to intuitions, but
do so in more scientifically respectable way. My favorite paper in the whole of the
xphi literature is Alexander et al. 2010. The paper, “Accentuate the Negative,” argues
that positive xphi is (nearly) as bad off as traditional “armchair” philosophy and
that the negative xphi critique works (nearly) as well against positive xphi as it does
against traditional philosophy. A main thesis of this book is that, whereas positive
xphi does carve out an important place for intuitions, traditional analytic philoso-
phy does not; hence the negative xphi critique works only against positive xphi.
Accentuate neither the positive nor the negative, I say, but the traditional (which is
not Mr. In-Between, but Mr. Entirely Different).

3.  See Cappelen 2012 for an interesting argument to the effect that there is no uni-
vocal use of “intuition” in analytic philosophy. In fact, Cappelen argues that, not
only is there no univocal use, but the extreme unclarity in the intentions behind
these uses makes them literally meaningless. I disagree with Cappelen’s conclusion,
164 Notes

as I will make clear in section 1.5, but I do think that the premises of Cappelen’s
argument strongly support a different conclusion, which Cappelen also endorses,
namely that the ways in which “intuition” is used in philosophical texts do not
show that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence.

4. Several papers discuss divisions in xphi, including Knobe and Nichols 2007,
Appiah 2008, and Nadelhoffer and Nahmias 2007.

5. If xphi’s methods were irremediably methodologically flawed, then there would
be no actual grounds for the challenges to traditional methods I will discuss in this
chapter. At best, there would remain only hypothetical challenges of the form “If
groups of people were to intuit in such-and-such ways, then there would be thus-
and-so reasons to suspect traditional philosophical practice.” As a matter of fact, the
first xphi-ish challenge was hypothetical in just this way. When xphi was just a
twinkle in the eyes of some of his graduate students, high-muck-a-muck of xphiles
everywhere Stephen Stich hypothesized groups of people with significantly different
philosophical intuitions from “ours,” and concluded that this possibility seriously
undermines the methods of analytic philosophy, which Stich took, and still takes,
to be highly reliant on intuitions (Stich 1988). Xphiles, including Stich, now think
that this possibility has been shown to be actual. I agree, though I am not sure that
it matters very much that the possibility is actual, though that may be simply
because I am fond of hypotheticals and thought experiments. In any case, although
there are very likely some xphi studies that are methodologically unsound (this fol-
lows from the fact that there are experimental studies in all areas that are method-
ologically unsound), we can, given the sheer numbers of studies, and the care,
intelligence, and diligence of xphiles, be reasonably sure that this is not some sort of
in-principle problem with collecting people’s intuitive reactions in experimental set-
tings. All that said, I think one fairly general methodological problem is severe
enough to cast doubt on the methodological soundness of quite a few xphi studies.
This is the problem discussed in section 1.3.

6.  It is difficult to make good sense of the current empirical data on Gettier intu-
itions. In addition to the studies I have mentioned in the main text, there is a study
carried out by Jennifer Nagel and her colleagues, the results of which have not yet
been published, but on which she reports in Nagel 2012. According to Nagel, her
studies reveal very few differences in Gettier intuitions due to ethnicity. Further-
more, unlike the findings in Starmans and Friedman 2012, Nagel’s results, she says,
reveal that people do tend to have the Gettier intuition. That is, significant majori-
ties of her subjects, in a range of Gettier cases, judge that the relevant agents do not
know the propositions in question. That is in rather direct conflict with Starmans
and Friedman’s findings. A forthcoming paper by Stephen Stich argues that Nagel
has not shown that we have reason to doubt that there are cross-cultural differences
in epistemic intuitions. Suffice it to say that the issue of diversity in Gettier intu-
itions is not yet fully settled. However, I will continue to assume in the main text
that there is still some (perhaps shrinking) evidence for cross-cultural diversity.
Notes 165

7.  This is not to say that Knobe takes his work to have no bearing on philosophical
questions. Indeed, he has stressed in many places that questions about the workings
of the mind are central philosophical questions. He views his work as an empirically
informed investigation into such questions.

8. In English, most definite descriptions are familiar noun phrase constructions
beginning with the definite article “the,” e.g., “The man who won the 2012 US
presidential election.”

9.  The “Tsu Ch’ung Chih Case” is a case very closely modeled on Machery et al.’s
Gödel Case, but modified to contain elements more immediately recognizable to
East Asians.

10.  See Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer and Turner 2005.

11.  Or, if they do not quite think this, they at least think that their results show that
we are less entitled to the Kripkean judgment about the Gödel Case than we may
have initially supposed.

12. This is roughly Michael Devitt’s (2011, 2012) view of “folk intuitions” about
reference; they are evidence, but only a little bit of not especially good evidence. His
complaint about the “experimental semantics” exemplified by Machery et al. 2004
is that it assumes that semanticists treat such intuitions as having a very important
evidential role. They have an evidential role, Devitt thinks, but a far more minimal
one.

13.  Negative xphiles rarely bother to spell out the form of the argument. Weinberg
2007 comes close, but Weinberg’s main concern in that paper is to explain how the
critique extends from conclusions about specific philosophical arguments (those rela-
tive to which truth-irrelevant variability in intuitions has been discovered) to the
entire practice that Weinberg describes as “philosophers’ appeals to intuitions.”
Joshua Alexander’s (2010) response to the reply to negative xphi he discerns in
Timothy Williamson’s metaphilosophical work makes it clear that at least some
negative xphiles (e.g., Alexander himself) do assume that analytic philosophers treat
intuitions about cases as essential evidence for what is true in those cases. In Alexan-
der’s reconstruction of Gettier’s anti-JTB argument, this is clear.

14. Note, however, that Swain et al. (2008) do not quite come out and say that
Lehrer’s Truetemp Case—based argument has been undermined. They say instead
that intuitions about Truetemp cases are not good evidence. That leaves it open that
there is different and perfectly good evidence for Lehrer’s judgment about the True-
temp Case. My view is that they intend the stronger claim; the argument that Lehrer
actually gives, they think, does rely essentially on intuitions. If that is what they
think, they are wrong. Lehrer argues for the judgment he makes about the Truetemp
Case. Cappelen (2012) argues convincingly for this.
166 Notes

15.  Again, see Cappelen 2012 for the point that Lehrer himself argues for his judg-
ment about the Truetemp Case.

16.  Why might it communicate this pragmatic meaning? Because people know (and
know that other people know) that, in a great many typical cases, when agents are
responsible/blameworthy for an outcome, this is partly in virtue of the fact that they
brought it about intentionally. That is the full explanation. Sometimes philosophers
demand special Gricean (see Grice 1989) explanations of how pragmatic meanings
arise. Though I do not have space to defend the view here, I think this is an unrea-
sonable demand. Grice’s theory cannot explain every case of pragmatic meaning. In
fact, there is a sense in which there can be no general theory of pragmatic meaning.
Whether an utterance gives rise to this or that pragmatic meaning is a highly contex-
tual matter. Also, Grice’s theory applies only to those pragmatic meanings that are
derived from speakers’ communicative intentions. But meanings that are generated
instead by hearers’ expectations and beliefs contribute to the phenomenon I am call-
ing pragmatic distortion.

17.  Knobe, remember, does not intend his results to play a role in any negative xphi
argument, but, as I argued earlier, on the face of it, someone else might be inspired
to use them for that purpose. The point about pragmatic distortion is that, on a
second look, it is unclear whether the variability in answers to the survey question
concerning the Harm Case amounts to variability in intuitions about the Harm
Case.

18. For the record, I think there are cross-cultural differences in intuitions about
reference, but I do not think that Machery et al. 2004 should be credited with this
discovery. Later studies (as yet unpublished) that attempt to eliminate the pragmatic
distortion I describe in the main text appear to show that, yes, East Asians are more
attracted to descriptivism than Westerners. I should say here that, in the case of
Machery et al. 2004, the pragmatic meaning that I claim is conveyed by their survey
question and answer choices is conveyed in roughly the following way: it is common
knowledge between speakers and their audiences that, in typical cases, when one
uses a proper name to “talk about” a person, this is a person one intends to be talking
about. This, again, falls short of a Gricean explanation of how the pragmatic mean-
ing is generated, but that is not to say the explanation is faulty or incomplete. (See
note 15 above.)

19. Though see Bengson 2013 for grounds for saying exactly this. Bengson’s
grounds, all of which are based on the idea that one might answer a question with
“p” even when p does not “strike one” as true (and so is not, according to Bengson,
expressive of an intuition that p), are interesting, but negative xphiles are bound to
reply by legitimately demanding that Bengson provide evidence that the phenome-
non he points to really does affect their experimental designs, not just that it could.

20.  There are reasons to suspect that the two studies on Gettier intuitions, and the
Knobe and Nichols study on intuitions about compatibilism, are affected by prag-
Notes 167

matic distortion as well. In the Gettier studies, subjects were asked whether an agent
described in the vignettes “really knows” something. That is different from asking
them whether an agent in the vignette knows something. That is, the intensifier,
“really,” potentially has an effect on how subjects understand the question. It is not
clear what this effect might be—perhaps some subjects understand it as asking
whether the agent described in the vignettes knows with certainty the relevant thing,
or perhaps some subjects understand it as asking whether they (the subjects) are
reasonably, or perhaps very, confident that the agent knows. In either case, a subject
might answer differently than they would if they took the question to be merely a
stylistic variant on the question of whether the agent (simply) knows. Perhaps this is
not pragmatic distortion, but rather semantic ambiguity; but in any case, the under-
lying problem is the same: it is impossible to tell from the results alone which ques-
tion subjects were answering. Regarding Knobe and Nichols 2007, a case can be
made that a “no” answer to the question asked about the concrete, affect-inducing
vignette, “Is Charles fully morally responsible for killing his wife and kids?” suggests
various things about how Charles ought to be treated—for example, that he ought
not be tried and punished for the act. If that is right, then, again, “no” answers do
not clearly conflict with “yes” answers, for one might think both that Charles is not
fully morally responsible but that, perhaps for nonmoral reasons, he should be tried
and punished.
One very general point about this objection-from-pragmatic-distortion deserves
airing. I do not claim simply that every study examined in this chapter might be
affected by pragmatic distortion. I claim instead that they are affected by it in fact.
So the objection is not the facile sort that one can make against any interpretation
of a given set of experimental data, namely the objection that has this form: “Well,
the results might be equally well explained in this other way.” In each case, I have
suggested specific pragmatic meanings and have gestured at how they might arise
and how they might influence a subject’s responses (these mights are wholly appro-
priate; there is no evidence that these are exactly the pragmatic meanings that arise,
that they arise in the very way I have indicated, or that any particular subject’s
response was distorted by them). Also, the objection does not take the form of a
complete alternative explanation of the data and is not intended to. The objection is
simply that we have reasons to suspect that, in some cases, subjects are not evaluat-
ing the semantic meanings of the survey questions. However, if, as is likely, other
subjects are evaluating the semantic meanings, then the existence of variable
answers to the survey questions is not clear evidence of variable intuitions.

21.  It is well known that all sorts of judgments, even simple perceptual judgments,
can be affected by factors that are irrelevant to their truth. It would be extremely
surprising if this were not the case for some philosophical judgments.

22.  Actually, these examples of intuitions from the traditional literature are general-
izations of more specific intuitive judgments about specific and detailed hypotheti-
cal examples. But you get the idea.
168 Notes

23. I suspect this is not the intended view. Rather, the view is that intuitions are
beliefs or judgments as opposed to a special mental kind such as an intellectual
seeming. That can be true even if many beliefs/judgments are not intuitions.

24. At any rate, Malmgren (2011) implies that there is widespread agreement in
philosophy that a, or perhaps the, method of philosophy is the “method of cases,” a
method she takes to depend heavily on intuitive judgments. It is not especially clear
that this means she thinks that “intuition talk” in philosophy is unified or coherent,
though my own view is that the “method of cases,” when characterized as Malmgren
characterizes it, is a myth. Cappellen would agree. I will say much more in later
chapters about the method of cases and why, under its usual descriptions, it is a
myth.

25.  This is part of what is at issue, but only part. Those involved in the project also
disagree over the “logical forms” of what I am calling the “specific” Gettier judg-
ments. However, they agree at least about the “surface” forms. None would deny,
for example, that the surface form of the intuitive judgment relative to the Gettier’s
10 Coins Case is: Smith does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in
his pocket. Agreement over the surface forms suffices for identifying the paradigms, it
seems to me. I am not sure whether Malmgren would agree (her favored analysis of
the surface form of Gettier judgments is misleadingly described as the “real” Gettier
judgment), though I think she should.

2  Intuitions and Counterexamples

1.  Although there are important differences between us that will be spelled out later
in section 2.5 and chapter 3, Timothy Williamson (2007) takes a similar line against
negative xphi. There are also similarities between my view of philosophical method
and that of Jonathan Ichikawa (2012). My closest ally on such issues is Herman
Cappelen (2012).

2. Precious few philosophers working on methodological issues have explicitly

acknowledged the state/content ambiguity of “intuition” or addressed the question
of how it might bear on the role of intuition in philosophical argument. Lycan
(1988) draws the intuiting/intuited distinction but does not comment on how it
might bear on general methodological questions. Pust (2000) cites Lycan (1988) and
mentions Lycan’s intuiting/intuited distinction, but strangely does not mention the
distinction in his general discussion of intuitions and philosophical method in
chapter 1 of his book. Taken on their own, many of the claims about the role of
intuition in that chapter are therefore difficult to interpret, though it is clear from
the book as a whole that Pust thinks that intuitings, not just intuiteds, are treated as
evidence by philosophers (and at one point Pust says so explicitly; see note 15,
below).
Notes 169

3.  Other diagnoses of the appeal of the myth of the intuitive miss this fairly obvious
source. For example, Cappelen’s diagnosis of the appeal of the myth (which he calls,
less derisively, Centrality) mentions several sources, the main one for Cappelen
being a relatively recent “verbal tic” afflicting analytic philosophers that causes
them to pepper their writing with plenty of (unmotivated, according to Cappelen)
uses of “intuitively” and cognates. The truth of (EC2) explains both the appeal of
the myth and the presence of the tic.

4. I think it is misleading to say that philosophical counterexamples are intuitive

for their discoverers. That suggests, wrongly in my view, that counterexamples are
discovered via intuition. A much more plausible view is that counterexamples are
discovered via careful thinking and inference. They are often intuitive to their
intended audience, however. This point, and the significance of the distinction
between producing and consuming a counterexample or thought experiment, is devel-
oped in section 4.4.

5.  Ichikawa (2012) discusses the state/content ambiguity of “intuition” and uses it
to make some of the same points I make here.

6.  There is no logical conflict between (EC1) and (EC2); one can consistently hold
both. Perhaps the xphi view of the analytic method is better described as the con-
junction of (EC1) and (EC2). Indeed, this conjunction of (EC1) and (EC2) seems to
be a popular metaphilosophical view even outside of xphi circles. Nevertheless, I
shall argue that, since (EC1) is false, the conjunctive view is too. Ichikawa (2012)
and Williamson (2007) acknowledge the state/content ambiguity of “intuition” and,
as I do, reject the view that intuitions in the “state” sense are treated as evidence in
philosophy.

7.  Bealer (1998) is often taken by xphiles as a prime example of an analytic philoso-
pher who holds that intuitions are evidence in philosophy. Given the state/content
ambiguity of “intuition,” Bealer’s explicit endorsement of the idea that intuitions
are evidence might be merely an endorsement of (EC2). In fact, at one point, Bealer
says, “When I say that intuitions are evidence, I of course mean that the contents of
the intuitions count as evidence” (1998, 205). However, immediately following this,
Bealer adds, “When one has an intuition, however, often one is introspectively
aware that one is having that intuition. On such an occasion, one would then have
a bit of introspective evidence as well, namely, that one is having that intuition”
(1998, 205). The best reading of Bealer is thus one that takes his claim that intu-
itions are evidence as an endorsement of both (EC1) and (EC2).

8.  On the other hand, it might be that “counterintuitive consequences” is simply a

misleading label for “false consequences,” in which case there is nothing wrong
(besides being misleading) with the view that theories are to be rejected if they have
counterintuitive consequences. I return in section 2.3.2 to the issue of counterex-
amples and counterintuitive consequences.
170 Notes

9.  An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press objected that I do not pay adequate atten-
tion to methods employed in nonoriginal presentations of philosophical thought
experiments and cases. David Chalmers (2014) raises the same objection against
Cappelen 2012 in a commentary on Cappelen’s book.

10. I leave aside, for now, the issue of how purely hypothetical cases could count
against the generalizations I have labeled the “JTB theory of knowledge” and the
“descriptivist theory of reference.” This issue is taken up in section 2.3.3.

11.  At various places throughout the book, when discussing a philosopher’s presen-
tation of a hypothetical case, I will point out, as I do here with respect to Gettier’s
presentation of the 10 Coins Case, that the philosopher presenting the case does not
use “intuition” or cognates in the presentation. I should say, however, that I do not
take this to be conclusive evidence that intuitions are not being appealed to as evi-
dence in these presentations. What I do think is that the lack of intuition terminol-
ogy shifts the burden of proof to those inclined to see evidential appeals to intuitions
in these presentations: if there are implicit such appeals in the relevant presenta-
tions, then the burden, given the lack of explicit appeals, is on my opponent to
demonstrate this.

12. Kripke’s (1980) main stalking horse is a theory of meaning for proper names
unfortunately also known as the “descriptivist theory.” Descriptivism about the
meaning of a proper name is the view that the “semantic value” of a name is identi-
cal with the semantic value of the definite description, or “cluster” of such descrip-
tions, users of the name associate with it. Kripke’s arguments against descriptivism
as a theory of meaning for names will be left to one side here. What I have labeled
the “descriptivist theory of reference” is a theory of how names “have their refer-
ence fixed.” It is not a theory of a name’s “semantic value,” conceived as that contri-
bution a name makes to the propositional content of containing sentences. It is
important to recognize this distinction between the two varieties of descriptivism in
order to understand the aim of the Gödel Case, which I present below, in the main
text. The Gödel Case is designed to refute a certain theory of “reference fixing,”
namely the descriptivist theory of reference. It can succeed in this regardless of the
quality of Kripke’s arguments against descriptivism about meaning, since descriptiv-
ism about reference is independent of descriptivism about meaning, in sense that
one might be a reference descriptivist without being a meaning descriptivist. (How-
ever, if “meaning determines reference,” meaning descriptivism commits one to
reference descriptivism.)

13.  It is true that Kripke first says, “It seems to me that we are not,” when consider-
ing the question of whether “Gödel” refers to Schmidt, immediately following this
with, “We simply are not” (1980, 84). However, it would be a stretch to interpret
this as an inference from “It is intuitive that we are not” to “We are not.” It seems
rather as though Kripke is replacing what strikes him as an overly cautious “seems”
claim with the more appropriate and bolder “is” claim.
Notes 171

14.  I do not say that xphiles definitely do think that the best representation of the
arguments’ form requires a premise about intuitions in the “state” sense; xphiles are
unfortunately not very explicit about how best to represent the forms of the philo-
sophical arguments they seek to criticize. However, I do think that if they did assume
that the best representations of their target arguments include premises about intu-
itions in the “state” sense, then it would be understandable why they might then go
on to suppose that cross-cultural variability with respect to a philosophical intuition
poses a serious threat to an argument based on the content of that intuition. For, in
that case, the variability would be evidence that the premise is false.

15.  Occasionally, philosophers do more than just strongly suggest that philosophi-
cal method involves appeals to intuitions in the “state” sense as evidence. Pust, after
describing a typical Gettier case, says that “most philosophers take the fact that they
have the intuition that S does not know p in this case to show that S does not know p”
(Pust 2000, 5; emphasis added). Here, it is clear that Pust thinks “most philosophers”
take the psychological state of intuiting that S does not know p (in the relevant case)
as essential evidence for the conclusion that S does not know p (in the case). Alexan-
der and Weinberg (2007), in describing a Gettier case, write, “According to Gettier,
despite now having a justified true belief that q, the person lacks knowledge that q.
Purportedly, when we consider this case, we will have the intuition that the person
whose epistemic position is detailed in the thought-experiment does not know that
q. Further, this is to count as sufficient evidence against the claim that a person
knows that p just in case that person’s true belief is justified” (2007, 57; emphasis
added). According to Alexander and Weinberg, it is our having the intuition, not
(just?) the truth of the content of the intuition, that serves, according to analytic
epistemologists, as evidence against the JTB theory of knowledge.

16.  An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press says that it is strange to think that the
notion of a counterexample is a purely logical one and hence that there could be
counterexamples just, as he or she puts it, “out there, floating through the ether.” I
confess to not understanding the complaint. If there are pink cows, then there are
counterexamples to the claim that no cows are pink, regardless of whether anyone
has, does, or will believe that there are pink cows. To my ear, there is nothing the
least bit “weird,” as the same reviewer also puts it, about this purely logical, nonpsy-
chological conception of a counterexample.

17.  Cf. Hilary Kornblith (1998, 134), who draws an apt analogy between counterex-
ampling in philosophy and a rock collector judging that a rock meeting certain
conditions does not count as a sample of a given kind.

18.  Instead, there appears to be a single method—generalization versus counterex-

ample—with some instantiations that involve (allegedly) necessary generalizations
versus purely hypothetical counterexamples and some that involve contingent or
necessary generalizations versus actual (real-life) counterexamples. When Gareth
Evans (1973) objected to a simple version of the “causal-historical” theory of refer-
172 Notes

ence by pointing out that the theory is inconsistent with the fact that “Madagascar”
refers to the island off the east coast of Africa, he was using the same method as other
philosophers who present counterexamples, despite the fact that his case was an
actual case, not a purely hypothetical one.

3  The Relocation Problem and Williamson on “Judgment Skepticism”

1.  I do not mean to suggest that Williamson accepts that intuitions are noninferen-
tial judgments. He denies that there is any unifying account of “intuition” as it is
used in philosophy and even gives examples of judgments that are described as
“intuitive” by philosophers but are products of inference (2007, 217). Nor do I mean
to suggest, in claiming that he allows that some evidence is “basic,” that Williamson
is a foundationalist about evidence. It is rather that there are specific examples of
judgments made in philosophy that Williamson regards as noninferential and
standing in need of no inferential justification. His main example is “the Gettier
intuition.” Williamson takes this judgment to have “epistemic priority” (182) over
more general principles that might imply it, and argues at length (in chap. 7 of his
2007) that it may be regarded as evidence even if it does not receive any argumenta-
tive backing of its own.

2. Alexander (2010) expresses puzzlement about this, claiming at one point (see
Alexander 2010, 383) that Williamson perhaps thinks that our judgments that
agents in Gettier cases fail to know are self-justifying. This is not Williamson’s view.
Williamson’s view is that we can take it for granted that these judgments are true,
unless there is some legitimate challenge to them, one, for example, that does not
lead to judgment skepticism.

3.  It somewhat misrepresents the view expressed in Weinberg et al. 2001 to describe
it as a view according to which the Gettier intuition is “mere cultural prejudice,”
however. Weinberg et al. 2001 never takes a stand on whether the Western Gettier
intuition is true or false. Yet representing its authors as holding that it is a mere cul-
tural prejudice, as Williamson does, suggests that they take it to be false, when in
fact they do not.

4.  Alexander (2010) and Weatherson (forthcoming) argue that the dialectical con-
ception of evidence is correct.

5. There is perhaps another ambiguity in Williamson’s formulation of Evidence

Neutrality, one to do with what, exactly, a community of inquirers is supposed to be
able to uncontentiously agree on in order for a proposition p to count as evidence in
a debate. Must they agree simply that p is true, or must they agree that p constitutes
evidence for the purposes of the debate at hand? The former seems more plausible,
since otherwise dogmatic refusal to count anything as potential evidence against
one’s views will result in nothing counting as evidence against one’s views. How-
ever, the latter reading again seems closer to the literal meaning of the principle as
Notes 173

Williamson formulates it. However this ambiguity is resolved, it matters little to

either the metaphysical/epistemological ambiguity mentioned in the main text or
to the question of the principle’s truth. (It is false on every reading.)

6.  Here again the state/content ambiguity of “intuition” comes into play. The idea
is that commitment to Evidence Neutrality forces one to trade regarding “the Gettier
intuition” in the “content” sense as evidence for regarding “the Gettier intuition” in
the “state” sense as evidence.

7. One might appeal to the general reliability of intuitive judgment to bridge the
gap: people intuit p and intuitions are reliable; hence p (or likely p). Brian Weather-
son (forthcoming) suggests this move as a way of taking the sting out of William-
son’s charge that Evidence Neutrality leads to a psychologization of the evidence in
philosophy. As I said earlier, I’m not opposed to the idea that the intuitiveness of a
proposition provides some highly defeasible evidence for its truth. What is troubling
about Evidence Neutrality is that it seems to lead to the view that the philosophical
evidence consists entirely of the psychological. That would be bad, since, in that
case, there would be no way to verify the supposed reliability of intuition.

8. Arguments for eliminativism and mereological nihilism do not depend on dis-

agreements of any sort, nor are there any explicit conclusions drawn in these argu-
ments about what does or does not count as evidence. So it is even less clear in these
cases how or why Evidence Neutrality is relevant.

4  The Evidence for the Evidence: Arguing for Gettier Judgments

1.  Henceforth, references to “intuitions” should be understood as references to intu-

itions in the “state” sense, unless otherwise noted.

2. I say a simple clash of belief because intuitive clashes are, usually, also cases of
clashing beliefs, since people tend to believe what they intuit. A simple clash of
beliefs is a case in which beliefs clash but it is not (also) a case of clashing
intuitions.

3. An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press claims that I am not careful enough, in
these passages in the main text, to note results from work in the epistemology of
disagreement. In my opinion, however, this work is not clearly applicable. Those
who work on the epistemology of disagreement agree that mere disagreement with
someone else over p is not sufficient grounds for withholding judgment regarding p.
That someone else must be an “epistemic peer,” for one thing, where someone is
disqualified from being one’s epistemic peer if they have more (or less) evidence for
p than one does.

4. I should stress that this is an empirical claim about extant first-order analytic
philosophy. It could be falsified tomorrow by the publication of a paper that uses a
thought experiment and in which it is clear that the author is appealing to the intu-
174 Notes

itiveness of a judgment about the thought experiment in order to provide (what he

or she regards as) essential evidence for the truth of the judgment. The point though
is that this sort of thing is not at all common in analytic philosophy as it is currently
practiced. Again, I know of not even a single example in which this is clearly an
accurate description of the method employed.

5.  The view that philosophers treat intuitions about cases as (not the only, but nev-
ertheless) essential evidence for the truth about those cases is not quite inconsistent
with the actual practice of first-order philosophy, but that practice strongly suggests
that the view is false. If the view were true, we would at least sometimes see explicit
focus on the intuitiveness of a judgment about a case in the process of justifying the
judgment. But, I claim, we never do. (See Cappelen 2012 for more on this theme.)
That strongly suggests that view is false. In any case, the issue of whether philoso-
phers do treat intuitions about cases as essential evidence for their judgments about
them is an empirical issue that ought to be settled by canvassing the literature and
finding clear examples. To my knowledge, no xphile has ever done this.

6. Herman Cappelen (2012) provides a good number of examples of judgments

about thought experiments that are backed up by argument in chapter 8 of his Phi-
losophy without Intuitions.

7. Ironically, one reason for the derision is that Gettierology is supposed to lean
heavily on intuitions.

8.  Of course, Gettier’s argument is an example, or perhaps even a paradigm, of this

sort of argument—one that argues against a generalization on the basis of counter-
examples. I stressed this in chapter 3. Still, calling it a paradigmatic argument in
analytic philosophy can mislead since most such arguments are considerably more
complex, and, if they appeal to judgments about thought experiments, they typi-
cally provide a wealth of supporting premises and considerations in favor of these
judgments.

9.  An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press objects that what I am describing here as an
argument for Gettier’s judgment about the 10 Coins Case is instead just a redescription
of certain features of the case. As he or she puts it: “Every premise of the argument is
nothing more than Gettier repeating some fact about the case he just presented.” He or
she points out, for example, that that (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s
pocket is simply a detail built into the earlier story that Gettier tells in presenting the
10 Coins Case. The objection appears to assume that the premises of the argument
can’t also be features or facts of the 10 Coins Case itself. But there is nothing to be said
for this assumption; indeed, the most likely place to find the premises of an argument
supporting a judgment about a thought experiment is right there in the specification
of the details of the thought experiment or case itself—where else? So, yes, the argu-
ment Gettier gives is a summary of some of the relevant facts of the 10 Coins Case;
Gettier is redescribing these facts, true. However, it is also an argument for the crucial
anti-JTB judgment that Smith does not know.
Notes 175

10.  Gettier also gives an explicit reason for thinking that his Smith character fails to
know in both the 10 Coins and Brown in Barcelona cases. This explicit reason is not
the fact that Smith deduces his justified true belief from a justified false one in each
case, but instead that the fact that, in each case, the claims Smith justifiably and
truly believes are made true by facts disconnected from the facts that justify Smith
in believing them, and thus it is a lucky accident that the beliefs are true. I discuss
this explicit reason in a bit more fully in what follows in the main text.

11. Many authors say things that imply that Gettier does not argue for his judg-
ments about his cases, but it is rare to find someone explicitly asserting that there
are no arguments there to be found. As I say in the main text, Nagel 2012 is the only
exception of which I am aware.

12.  An interesting example to consider in this connection is that of the very first
published attempt to patch up the JTB theory with an additional, fourth, necessary
condition, namely Clark 1963, in which it is proposed that, by disallowing infer-
ences from “false grounds,” we can formulate the correct theory of knowledge.
Roughly, according to Clark’s theory, knowledge is JTB in which the relevant belief
is not grounded by any falsehoods. The theory faces a number of clear counterex-
amples to the sufficiency of the proposed conditions, but, more interestingly from a
methodological perspective, to their necessity as well. This is interesting because it
seems to me that, despite the fact that the “no false grounds” condition is not
strictly necessary, if the condition goes unmet while the other conditions (J, T, and
B) are satisfied (as, for example, in Gettier’s original cases), that is strong evidence
that the relevant agent fails to know. One can argue, therefore, that agents in such
circumstances do not know because they infer based on false grounds. Indeed, this is
precisely what Clark 1963 does argue. In a sense, then, there is nothing wrong with
the argument except Clark’s further claim to the effect that the “no false grounds”
condition is strictly necessary (and that it, along with the original JTB conditions,
are sufficient) for knowledge. The presence of false grounds in an inferential chain is
a strong indicator, without being conclusive evidence, for the inferred belief failing
to qualify as knowledge.

13.  See Engel 1992; Pritchard 2005; Vahid 2001.

14.  One way to understand Gettier’s contribution is this: Pre-1963, epistemologists

knew that luckily true beliefs (such as lucky guesses) do not add up to knowledge,
but what they did not see is that there are ways in which fully justified beliefs can
count as luckily true. Indeed, the justification condition was designed to rule out
luckily true belief, so it must have been a surprise to proponents of the JTB theory
when Gettier came along and demonstrated that the justification condition fails to
rule out some varieties of luckily true belief. Perhaps this way of understanding Get-
tier’s contribution explains why his arguments for the judgment that Smith fails to
know are so abbreviated. He knew that most epistemologists were already convinced
that luckily true beliefs never count as knowledge, so that part of his argument had,
176 Notes

in effect, been made earlier. More care was needed in showing that luckily true
beliefs can count as fully justified, less in just repeating what was known already,
namely that epistemic luck is knowledge-preventing. (Engel 1992 inspired this inter-
pretation of Gettier’s contribution.)

15.  Clark’s proposal is actually a bit subtler than this description or my rough char-
acterization in note 12 suggests. Clark makes a distinction between those beliefs that
ground a given belief and the “second-order grounds” that ground the grounding
beliefs. Using this distinction, he presents a case in which all of an agent’s first-order
grounds are true and justify some true belief an agent has. But, in Clark’s case, one
of the second-order grounds of one of the agent’s grounding beliefs is false, and
Clark argues that this prevents knowledge in the case. Still, the proposal is that there
can be no falsity anywhere in an agent’s total set of grounding beliefs, where this
might include grounds for grounds, grounds for grounds for grounds, etc.

16. This is their “Tom Grabit” case. They argue that the Tom Grabit case is one
involving knowledge. (See Lehrer and Paxson 1969, 228–229.) They make no appeals
to brute intuition anywhere in the paper.

17.  I hasten to add that there are things to be said in favor of the East Asian judg-
ment about Gettier cases too, though the examples I know of are due to Western
philosophers. Both Weatherson (2003) and Stephen Hetherington (1999; 2001)
argue that the JTB theory is true, and arguments for the JTB theory are ipso facto
arguments for the East Asian judgment about Gettier cases.

18.  This objection was put to me by my colleague, Patrick Hawley.

19. Sometimes, however, the language of the arguments involving Gettier judg-

ments I examined earlier makes it very clear that the argument is not meant to be
interpreted abductively. When Lehrer and Paxson describe an agent in a Gettier
case, S, as having a true belief “mostly as a matter of luck,” and then write, “Conse-
quently, S lacks knowledge …” (Lehrer and Paxson 1969, 227; emphasis added), they
are very clearing arguing for a particular Gettier judgment.

5  More Evidence for the Evidence and the Relocation Problem Redux

1.  It is really a very large reach to take the quotation from Kripke I have been dis-
cussing as expressing an overarching methodological view about the relationship
between intuitions and evidence in philosophy. Any remaining doubts on this score
ought to be settled by reminding ourselves of the sentence that comes immediately
after the passage I have reproduced, concluding the passage and ending Kripke’s
commentary on theme of the meaningfulness of the distinction between essential
and accidental properties. The concluding sentence is, “But, in any event, people
who think the notion of accidental property unintuitive have intuition reversed, I
think” (Kripke 1980, 42). This makes it very clear, I think, that Kripke is not suggest-
Notes 177

ing some very general methodological view about intuitions and evidence in phi-
losophy. He has a much more limited principle in mind, one to do with the
connection between ordinary people drawing certain distinctions and the meaning-
fulness of the distinctions thus drawn.

2.  These other counterexamples and their supporting arguments, though they are,
strictly, counterexamples to a stronger form of descriptivism than that tested by the
Gödel Case, can nevertheless be viewed as supporting Kripke’s judgment about the
Gödel Case. These earlier counterexamples raise the suspicion that associating
descriptive material with a name will not explain the referential facts about names.

3.  Strictly speaking, speakers can go wrong in uttering “Peano discovered the axioms
of number theory,” even if descriptivism about reference is true. It could turn out
that no one discovered the axioms of number theory. That possibility also shows that
Kripke’s example does not express a trivial truth, even if descriptivism about mean-
ing is true. This means only that the wrong example sentences have been chosen;
the underlying point still holds. Consider: “Peano, if he exists, discovered the axioms
of number theory.” On meaning descriptivism, this sentence is trivially true, while,
in fact, it is false. Similarly, the sentence, given reference descriptivism, cannot be
uttered falsely, when, in fact, any actual utterance of it is false.

4.  An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press complains, as he or she did about my ren-
dition of Gettier’s argument for his judgment about the 10 Coins Case (see note 9 of
chapter 4), that the premise of this “argument” that I claim that Lehrer gives is
simply a feature or fact of the case as Lehrer stipulates it. My reply is the same: Yes,
the premise is a feature or fact of the case, but not simply that. It is also a premise in
Lehrer’s argument for his judgment about Mr. Truetemp.

5.  One important facet of Lehrer’s argument that is skipped over by both Swain et
al. and Cappelen is that the argument is embedded in a larger argument that has a
much larger target, namely every extant “externalist” theory of knowledge, not just
Goldman-esque reliability theories. The Truetemp Case is presented after what
might as well be called Lehrer’s Thermometer Case. In the Thermometer Case,
Lehrer imagines an ordinary thermometer used to measure the temperature of an oil
of some kind. Lehrer supposes it to be highly reliable and to be reading accurately
on some occasion that the temperature of some sample of the relevant sort of oil is
104 degrees. Lehrer takes it for granted that the thermometer does not possess
knowledge that the temperature of the oil is 104 degrees. Ordinary thermometers do
not know things; this is treated by Lehrer as a datum (as it surely ought to be). And
yet, the thermometer satisfies various externalist conditions on knowing. Its reading
is produced by a reliable temperature-reading process, its reading “tracks the truth”
about the oil’s temperature, etc. So the explanation of why the thermometer does
not know cannot be failing to satisfy these externalist conditions. Lehrer then con-
siders whether what is missing in the Thermometer Case is simply the capacity for
thought. Suppose, he says, that we add this, producing the Thoughtful Thermometer
178 Notes

Case. The Thoughtful Thermometer literally believes that the temperature of the oil
is 104 degrees. But, still, Lehrer says, it does not know. And here he offers a reason:
though it believes that the temperature of the oil is 104 degrees, it “might have no
idea that it is an accurate temperature-reading device” (Lehrer 1990, 162). This
reason is then used to justify the judgment in the later Truetemp Case, but it is clear,
I think, that Lehrer takes it to be no more plausible that Mr. Truetemp knows than
that the Thoughtful Thermometer knows, and no more plausible that the Thought-
ful Thermometer knows than that the Thermometer knows. So there is not just an
argument that appeals to a general principle to the effect that knowledge requires
the satisfaction of some “internalist” condition, such as justified belief about the
reliability of one’s beliefs; there is also an argument by analogy to the Thermometer
and Thoughtful Thermometer cases for Lehrer’s judgment in the Truetemp Case.
The reasoning is highly reminiscent of Kripke’s reasoning about the Gödel Case in
which we find that a comparison between a somewhat controversial case (Truetemp
in Lehrer; Gödel in Kripke) and much less controversial ones (Thermometer and
Thoughtful Thermometer in Lehrer; Einstein, Peano, and Columbus in Kripke) is
used to bolster the judgment about the controversial case.

6.  Actually, this judgment about the Mary case, framed as it is in terms of “knowing
what it is like to see red,” does not appear in Jackson 1982. There, the judgment
about Mary is instead that, when she starts receiving color television transmissions,
“she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it” (Jackson
1982, 130). The “what-it-is-like” formulation occurs in Jackson 1986. The phrase
also appears in the discussion of extra-color Fred in Jackson 1982.

7.  In his 1982 and 1986, at any rate—Notoriously, Jackson, has changed his mind
and now rejects the knowledge argument and the antiphysicalism he once claimed
it established. (See Jackson 1998, 2003, and 2006.)

8.  I will admit, however, that Jackson’s case of Mary is one of the better candidates;
Jackson’s defense of his judgment about the Mary case is fairly minimal in compari-
son to the kinds of backing arguments for judgments about cases that one typically
finds in analytic philosophy.

9.  This explains why many people have mistakenly taken the knowledge argument
to rest on a brute intuition about the Mary case.

10.  I think there is an all but explicit suggestion, in Jackson’s presentations of the
knowledge argument, that facts about the qualitative characters of experiences are
knowable only via having experiences with those characters. This is why the various
physical facts we might learn about Fred will not add up to knowledge of what it is
like to see the extra color, and why the various physical facts Mary might learn
about color and color vision do not add up to knowledge of what it is like to see red.
The suggestion is implicit in Jackson’s repeated assertions to the effect that the vari-
ous things learnable by Mary while in the room, or by us before we have the opera-
tion that makes our visual systems Fred-like, do not come anywhere close to giving
Notes 179

us the crucial bit of knowledge concerning what it is like. I take this suggestion as an
additional argument for Jackson’s judgments about the cases: Mary learns what it is
like to see red only after leaving the room and having visual experiences with “red
qualia” because that is the only way one could come to know what it is like to see
red. Experience is the only teacher when it comes to knowledge of qualia, as the
general principle might be put. The impression that this general principle concern-
ing knowledge of qualia is part of what justifies Jackson’s judgment that Mary learns
what it is like to see red only after leaving the room and actually seeing red is fairly
common. Martine Nida-Rümelin’s (2010) presentation of the knowledge argument
in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, suggests that the judgment
about the case is partly justified by appeal to such a principle. (See especially the last
paragraph of the second section of Nida-Rümelin’s entry.)

11.  In his “Author’s Response” in the original (1980) article, Searle explicitly denies
that the Chinese room argument evidentially depends on intuitions. (See the sec-
tion titled “Intuitions” in the Author’s Response section of Searle 1980.) In a passage
presaging the general methodological stance taken by me in this chapter and in the
book as a whole, really, Searle writes:

In sum, though in some sense intuition figures in any argument, you will mistake the nature of
the present dispute entirely if you think it is a matter of my intuitions against someone else’s or
that some set of contrary intuitions has equal validity. The claim that I don’t speak Chinese or
that my thermostat lacks beliefs aren’t just things I find myself mysteriously inclined to say.
(Searle 1980, 451)

12. Machery (2011) admirably acknowledges this about Davidson’s Swampman

case.

13.  Note the language Davidson uses in citing Putnam:

Consider Putnam’s 1975 argument to show that meanings, as he put it, “just ain’t in the head.”
Putnam argues persuasively that what words mean depends on more than “what is in the head.”
He tells a number of stories the moral of which is that aspects of the natural history of how
someone learned the use of a word necessarily make a difference to what the word means. It
seems to follow that two people might be in physically identical states, and yet mean different
things by the same words. (Davidson 1987, 443)

This is not the language of someone who thinks the case for externalism (either his
own or Putnam’s) rests on intuitions about thought experiments.

14.  By saying that it is largely a choice which propositions philosophers take as their
starting points, I do not mean to be saying that they start with propositions that
they do not take to be true. I assume that, in most cases, philosophers take their
starting points to be true (though of course sometimes an initial premise is treated as
an assumption or held true only “for the sake of argument”). The choice is among
propositions they take to be true, but it is not constrained such that the starting
point propositions must have some “mark of the intuitive.” I thank an anonymous
reviewer for MIT Press for forcing me to be clearer on this point.
180 Notes

15.  An anonymous reviewer for MIT Press objects that my stance here risks possible
future xphi challenges. Perhaps current xphi results do nothing to challenge any
extant philosophical argument (because the challenges are not directed at rock
bottom evidence), but we can imagine data that do challenge such evidence. My
reply is that, yes, of course, we can imagine this, but that leaves everything as it is;
there is no reason right now to think that Gettier is wrong about his cases, or suspend
judgment on his verdicts about them, for example. Furthermore, the issue of what
sorts of propositions could qualify as rock bottom evidence is an extremely vexed
one in epistemology. Whether there will ever be any agreement on this issue is an
open question. So it is unclear whether we will ever be able to even recognize
whether some bit of xphi data challenges rock bottom philosophical evidence or
not. And, it should be borne in mind that I am, at this point, granting for the sake of
argument that it is not “arguments all the way down” and that there is founda-
tional, rock bottom evidence. Officially, I am agnostic. If there is always another
argument to which to appeal, then there is no possibility of a “crucial” xphi experi-
ment. Finally, it is pure speculation that there will be truth-irrelevant-variability
with respect to judgments about propositions that qualify as rock bottom evidence.
Given what we now know, this is no more and no less likely than that there won’t
be such variability with respect to such judgments.

16.  This objection was raised by an anonymous reviewer for MIT Press.

6  Other Replies to Xphi: The Expertise and Multiple Concepts Replies

1. As is typical in such methodological pronouncements, Malmgren does not dis-

ambiguate between two readings of her term “intuitive verdict.” The term has a
psychological sense, as well as a content sense. As I said in chapter 3, this ambiguity
is potentially harmful, since many who would reject Malmgren’s description of the
method of cases as a recognizable philosophical method, if “intuitive verdict” were
intended in the psychological sense (as I would), would not reject it if the term were
instead intended in the content sense. (See immediately below in the main text, and
again in section 6.1, for more on the pernicious effect of the state/content ambiguity
of “intuition.”) There is also, in the quotation from Malmgren 2011, a disturbing
echo of the mistake made in Weatherson 2003 about the meaning/use of “counter-
example.” Pace Malmgren, “counterexample” means counterexample, not intuitive
counterexample.

2.  On the other hand, the fact that philosophy has been practiced for millennia and
until very recently without any respectable, properly scientific attempts to determine
whether people share their intuitive judgments about thought experiments is yet
more evidence that first-order philosophical practice does not rely on intuitions as
evidence.

3. In a paper in which they object to the expertise reply, Weinberg, Gonnerman,
Buckner, and Alexander (2010) write: “It borders on the trivial to claim that philoso-
Notes 181

phers’ training makes them at least somewhat better than the folk, at least at some
philosophically relevant tasks” (Weinberg et al. 2010).

4. If expert intuitions were not taken by proponents of the expertise reply to be
essential evidence for judgments about cases, then there might be some other way
to defend the experts’ judgments other than by appeal to what and how they intuit.
(For example, one might appeal to whatever reasons the experts give for judging as
they do!) But the expertise reply, as I am understanding it here, agrees that intu-
itions are essential evidence. This makes its proponents vulnerable to the charge
that the burden of empirical proof is on them.

5.  Xphiles have already begun to do this work for proponents of the expertise reply,
and the early findings seem to suggest that philosophers’ intuitions are no less
immune to certain kinds of biases than are the intuitions of the “folk.” See, e.g.,
Shulz and Cokely 2012 and Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012.

6.  That the demonstrated biases and effects are rather surprising is important and
seems to me to tip the scale slightly in favor of the view that philosophers would not
be less prone. Consider the effect of culture on Gettier judgments, for example. This
is a surprising effect, and part of what makes it surprising is that we do not have any
reason to believe it would diminish among expert subject groups. So it is unlike
something such as lack of attention to thought-experimental detail, which one might
reasonably expect to diminish with training of the sort philosophers receive.

7. Weinberg et al. (2010) claim that there are three ways to reply to the negative
xphile critique. One can object to the experimental design of the studies that appear
to show biases and effects in the intuitions of the folk. One can claim that the biases
and effects are not what they appear to be; perhaps, for example, East Asians are
simply operating with a different concept of knowledge, and the different pattern of
answers to Gettier cases among East Asian subject groups does not indicate genuine
disagreement between Western and East Asian populations. (This second way of
replying, by appealing to differing concepts, is the topic of the next section of this
chapter.) Or, one can say that biases and effects found in the intuitions of the folk
will not reappear in the intuitions of the experts—the expertise reply. But there is a
fourth way to reply, which is the way I have been recommending in this book: deny
that intuitions, whether of the folk or the experts, play any sort of evidential role in
philosophy.

8.  This is not to deny that there are cases in which one determines that that some
proposition, of, say, mathematics, is true by consulting mathematicians. There are
plenty of such cases, of course. For example, I know that Fermat’s Last Theorem is
true because expert mathematicians have told me so. But consulting mathemati-
cians is not part of the methodology of mathematics, and that mathematicians
judge that Fermat’s Last Theorem is true is not part of the evidential basis on which
mathematicians ground their belief that the theorem is true.
182 Notes

9. Here I don’t mean to be denying that there is, so far, some empirical evidence
that, as a group, philosophers are no less immune to biases in intuitive judgments.
(See the references in note 5.) My point is that rather that, on the whole, philoso-
phers’ judgments about philosophical cases, which by my lights are usually not
intuitive judgments, are bound to be better and more accurate than nonphiloso-
phers’ judgments about cases.

10.  In this passage, Sosa explicitly mentions Gettier intuitions and clearly has the
results of Weinberg et al. 2001 in mind. However, more than other proponents of
the multiple concepts reply, Sosa has made it clear that he takes the reply to be very
general, and has deployed the reply in connection with other xphi results (see Sosa
2007). He argues, for example, that an ambiguity in “moral responsibility” makes it
possible, or perhaps even likely, that some of the apparent disagreement between
the subjects surveyed in Nichols and Knobe 2007 over whether agents in determinis-
tic universes are morally responsible is merely apparent, merely verbal, disagreement.
And he approvingly cites Nichols and Ulatowski 2007, an xphi paper that proposes
to explain some of the apparent disagreement between its subject groups over when
actions are intentionally produced by appeal to an alleged ambiguity in action
ascriptions formulated with the term “intentionally.”

11.  The irony is that the multiple concepts reply, though intended as a defense of
an intuitions-as-evidence methodology, engenders a kind of skepticism that is even
more damaging to that sort of methodology than the negative xphi critique.

12.  I here ignore the possibility of combining the expertise and multiple concepts
replies, which, to some extent, is what both Sosa and Jackson do. It should be clear
from what I have said thus far that such a combination is, I think, ineffective twice
over.

Conclusion: Armchairs versus Lab Coats?

1.  Putting it this way, in terms of knowing the conditions under which so-and-so, or
knowing what grounds what, will suggest conceptual analysis to some ears. But that
is not what I intend. We sometimes know such things simply by living in and
observing the world—in a fully a posteriori manner, in other words. Some of the
facts about the conditions under which people are morally responsible for their
actions are surely knowable a posteriori, simply by observing people, the things they
do, and what they are held accountable for.

2.  Jonathan Haidt’s work on “moral dumbfounding” is a good example of the kind I
have in mind. Haidt 2012 is a good overview.
 
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Index
Abduction, 96–99
Adams, Fred, 146
Affect, intuitions about moral responsi-
bility influenced by, 15–16
Alexander, Joshua, 14, 48–50, 83–84,
140–142, 150–151, 165n13, 171n15,
172n2, 180n3
“Accentuate the Negative” (with Mal-
lon and Weinberg), 163n2
Analytic philosophy. See Philosophy
A priori philosophy, xx, 158–159
Argument
as answer to evidence-for-the-evidence
question, 122–127
Gettier judgments and, 78–95
intuitions supported by, 74–78
philosophy’s use of, xv–xvi, xix–xx,
57, 61–62, 74–75, 77, 101–122, 139–
140, 155–156
starting points of, 124–125, 179n14
Armchair philosophy, xx, 27, 132, 133,
155, 157–159, 163n2
Ayer, A. J., xi
Bealer, George, 27–28, 38, 39, 46, 50,
169n7
Belief, disagreements in, 75–76
Bengson, John, 166n19
Bonjour, Laurence, 38, 39
Brown in Barcelona Case, 82–83, 88, 91
Buckner, Cameron, 180n3
Cappelen, Herman, 30–32, 79, 101–
102, 104, 112–113, 163n3, 165n14,
168n1, 169n3
Cartesian skepticism, 68
Cases. See Hypothetical cases
Champawat, Narayan, 92
Chinese room argument, 102–103, 116–
117, 119, 179n11
Chisholm, Roderick, xi
Clark, Michael, 90–92, 175n12, 176n15
Coherentism, 127
Compatibilism, 1, 15–16, 166n20
Concepts, 54
Consistent Liar, 120–122
Counterexamples. See also Thought ex-
periments and hypothetical cases
to generalizations, 50–53, 171n18
genuine, 47–48, 54
intuitions as basis of, 37, 169n4
methodological confusion concern-
ing, 53–54
refutation by, 40–43, 48, 50
Counterintuitive consequences, 38–39,
52, 169n8
Cullen, Simon, 6, 23
Cultural background, as influence on
intuition, xiii–xiv, 6–8, 12–13, 40,
65, 69–70, 94, 147, 154, 160, 164n6,
166n18
190 Index
Davidson, Donald, 102–103, 117–118,
119, 179n13
Defeasibility analysis of knowledge,
92–94
DePaul, Michael, 54–55
Descartes, René, 68, 126–127
Descriptivism, 11–12, 38–57, 107–111,
170n12
Determinism, ix–x, xv–xvi, 15–16, 123
Devitt, Michael, 108, 134, 165n12
Disagreement, 145–153, 173n3
EC. See Evidence claim (about
intuitions)
Eliminativism, 65, 69–70
Epistemic luck, 5, 88–93, 175n10,
175n14
Epistemology. See also Justified true
belief (JTB) theory of knowledge;
Knowledge
justification in, 62–63, 124–127
regress problem in, 62, 125–127 (see
also Relocation problem)
relativism in, xiv
Epistemology of disagreement, 173n3
Essential properties, 105
Evans, Gareth, 171n18
Evidence
basic, 59
empirical issues concerning, x
essential, intuitions as, 18, 53, 71, 76–
77, 102–104, 113, 119, 135, 136
foundational (“rock bottom”), 124–
127, 180n15
intuitions as, ix–x, xii–xvi, xix, 5, 13,
15, 17–20, 28–29, 34–39, 103–106,
113, 119, 121–122, 130–156, 160,
165n13, 180n2
judgments concerning, 153–154
psychologization of, 68–69, 140–142
Evidence claim (about intuitions) (EC),
34–58, 169n6
Evidence-for-the-evidence question. See
also Relocation problem
arguments as answer to, 122–127
Gettier judgments and, 78–99
judgment skepticism and, 59–60,
64–71
outline of, 55–57
Evidence Neutrality, 66–71, 172n5,
173n7
Experimental philosophy (xphi). See
also Negative xphi; Negative xphi
critique
challenges to philosophy from, ix,
xvi–xvii, 132–133, 157–161
criticisms of, xvii–xviii
cross-cultural, xvii
empirical tests conducted by, x–xi,
xviii, 159–160
ethical uses of, 160–161
intracultural, xvii
on intuitions, xiii–xiv, xvi–xvii, 1–20
methodological criticisms of, 3
positive, xviii, 1–3, 9, 12, 163n2
as real philosophy, xviii
traditional philosophy in relation to,
xviii, 3
value of, xvii–xviii
Expertise reply, to negative xphi cri-
tique, xx, 134–145, 154–155, 181n5,
182n12
Externalism, 117–118, 177n5, 179n13
First-order philosophy, 101–102, 104,
122, 129, 131–132, 180n2
Folk conception of knowledge, 6, 9
Foundationalism, 62, 126–127
Frankfurt, Harry, ix–x, xv–xvi, 123, 157
Free will, ix–x
Friedman, Ori, 6, 8–9, 164n6
Generalizations, counterexamples and,
50–53, 171n18
Gettier, Edmond, xi, xiii, xvi, xix, 19,
38, 74, 78–89, 144, 159
Gettier cases. See also 10 Coins Case
Index 191
argumentation in and about, 78–95,
174n9
cross-cultural responses to, xiii–xiv,
6–7
EC and, 38–57
evidence-for-the-evidence question in,
64, 68–69
multiple concepts approach to,
148–149
pragmatic distortion in studies on,
166n20
role of intuitions in, xi–xiv, 4–9, 25,
28, 31, 63, 78–89, 171n15
variability in intuitions about, 33
Gettier holdouts, 5
Gettier intuitions, 4–9, 164n6
Gettier judgments, 31, 78–99, 168n25
Gettierology, xix, 78, 89, 95–96, 174n7
Gödel Case, xix, 11–12, 17–18, 22, 42,
44–52, 73–74, 102, 106–111, 133,
170n12
Goldman, Alvin, 38, 39, 52–53, 91–92
Gonnerman, Chad, 180n3
Grice, H. Paul, 166n16
Hales, Steven, 134
Harm and Help cases, 10–11, 22, 146
Hypothetical cases. See Thought experi-
ments and hypothetical cases
Ichikawa, Jonathan, 108, 168n1
Intentional action, 9–11
Intuitions, 1, 8, 102. See also Evidence
claim (about intuitions) (EC); Myth
of the intuitive
ambiguity in term, 4, 30–31, 35–39,
131–132, 163n3, 168n2, 180n1
arguing for, 74–78
brute, 63, 79, 89, 102, 113–118
cultural background as influence on,
xiii–xiv, 6–8, 12–13, 40, 65, 69–70,
94, 147, 154, 160, 164n6, 166n18
diversity in, 102, 129, 145–155
empirical issues concerning, x–xi
as evidence, ix–x, xii–xvi, xix, 5, 13,
15, 17–20, 28–29, 34–39, 103–106,
113, 119, 121–122, 130–156, 160,
165n13, 180n2
Gettier cases and, xi–xiv, xvi, 4–9, 28,
31, 63, 78–89, 171n15
about intentional action, 9–11
Kripke on, 105–106, 176n1
about moral responsibility and deter-
minism, ix–x, xv–xvi, 15–16, 123
negative xphi critique concerning,
17–20
nonphilosophers’, xiv, 105, 134–144
order of case presentation as influence
on, 14–15
philosophical, xiv, xvii, 1, 3, 17, 20,
21, 27, 62, 105, 137
philosophical arguments’ use of,
76–78
properties of, 26–27
psychological features of, 26
about reference, 11–13
relocation problem and, 57–58, 61–62,
71, 122–123
role of, in philosophy, ix, xiv, 76–78,
101–104, 129–153, 174n5
Searle on, 179n11
second-order philosophy and,
129–132
studies of, 33–58
theory of, 24–32
truth-irrelevant variability in, x, xiv,
xvi, 7–8, 10, 15–20, 33
ultimate philosophical, 62
Intuition talk, 30–31, 131
Jackson, Frank, 5, 38, 39, 55, 102–103,
114–115, 119, 134, 145, 147, 149–
153, 178n6, 178n7, 178n10,
182n12
JTB theory. See Justified true belief (JTB)
theory of knowledge
192 Index
Judgments
about cases, 139–140
diversity in, 143–144
expert vs. folk, 65
moral, 160–161
philosophers’ vs. nonphilosophers’,
141–142
spontaneous vs. considered, 160–161
Judgment skepticism, xix, 56–60, 63–71
Justification, epistemic, 62–63, 124–127
Justified true belief (JTB) theory of
knowledge
defense of, 175n12
epistemic luck and, 175n14
Gettier’s challenge to, xi–xiv, xvi, 5,
7–9, 38–57, 64, 78–95
refutation of, xi–xii, xiv, xvi, 8
statement of, 41
Knobe, Joshua, 9–11, 15–16, 22, 25,
146, 165n7, 166n20
Knowledge. See also Epistemology;
Justified true belief (JTB) theory of
knowledge
defeasibility analysis of, 92–94
folk conception of, 6, 9
Jackson’s argument about, 102–103,
114–115, 119, 178n6, 178n7,
178n10
necessary conditions on, 87–91
Kornblith, Hilary, 158, 171n17
Kripke, Saul, xix, 11–12, 17–18, 19, 38–
57, 73–74, 102, 105–111, 133, 159,
170n12, 176n1
Lackey, Jennifer, 103, 120–122
Lehrer, Keith, 13–14, 19, 20, 92–94, 102,
111–113, 165n14, 177n4, 177n5
Lewis, David, 27–29
Linguistics, 130
Luck. See Epistemic luck
Ludwig, Kirk, 134
Lycan, William, 36, 145, 148–149, 152,
168n2
Machery, Edouard, 12–13, 17, 22, 25,
40, 47, 73, 103, 111, 118–119, 154,
166n18
Maitra, Ishani, 108
Mallon, Ron, 12, 111
Malmgren, Anna-Sara, 30–31, 130–131,
168n24, 180n1
Mary case, 102–103, 114–115, 119,
178n6, 178n7, 178n10
Meaning, 110, 170n12, 179n13
Mereological nihilism, 65, 69–70
Method of cases, 168n24
Moral judgments, 160–161
Moral psychology, 160–161
Moral responsibility, ix–x, xv–xvi, 15–
16, 123, 157
Multiple concepts reply, to negative
xphi critique, xx, 145–153, 182n12
Myth of the intuitive
adherents of, xx
alleged examples of, 102, 113–118
appeal of, xix, 37, 113–114
EC and, 37, 169n3
entrenchment of, 34–35
as false, xiii, xvii, 35, 122–123, 155,
158, 160
influence of, xiii–xv, 59–60
notion of intuition as evidence in,
34–35, 122
xphi and, xvi–xvii
Nagel, Jennifer, 85–87, 164n6
Natural compatibilism, 1
Naturalism, 157–158
Neale, Stephen, 129–130
Necessary conditions on knowledge,
87–91
Negative xphi, xvi–xvii, xix. See also
Experimental philosophy; Negative
xphi critique
and Gettier cases, 4–9
on improbable/outlandish thought ex-
periments, 103, 118–122
and intentional action, 10–11
Index 193
and intuitions, 1–2
methodology of, 45
and no-theory theory of intuitions, 30
and order of case presentation, 15
positive vs., xviii, 1–3, 163n2
and reference, 13
Williamson’s critique of, 59–60, 64–71
Negative xphi critique, xvii, 2, 3, 17–20,
33–34
empirical nature of, 125
expertise reply to, xx, 134–145,
154–155
failures/mistakes of, 20, 24, 35, 38,
47–48, 61–63, 70–71, 102, 125, 127,
155–156, 160
and Gettier cases, xi–xiv, 4–9, 79–89,
95
intuition-free, nonpsychologistic ver-
sion of, 142–145
multiple concepts reply to, xx,
145–153
replies to, 133–156, 181n7
self-presentation of, 34
and state/content ambiguity, 35–39
Neta, Ram, 131
Nichols, Shaun, xi, 12, 15–16, 111,
166n20
“No false grounds” condition, 90–92,
175n12, 176n15
Nonphilosophers, intuitions and judg-
ments of, xiv, 105, 134–144
No-theory theory of intuitions, 2, 24–
32, 36–37
Nozick, Robert, 121
Order of explanation, 96–99
Paxson, Thomas, 92–94
Peano, Giuseppe, 106–109
Philosophy
a priori, xx, 158–159
argument as basis of claims in, xv–xvi,
xix–xx, 57, 61–62, 74–75, 77, 101–
122, 139–140, 155–156
armchair methods in, xx, 27, 132,
133, 155, 157–159, 163n2
challenge to, ix, xiv
empirical issues concerning, xviii,
157–158
expertise in, 134–145, 154–155,
180n3, 181n5, 181n6, 182n9
first-order, 101–102, 104, 122, 129,
131–132, 180n2
hypothetical cases in, xv–xvi
intuition as basis of claims in, ix, xiv,
76–78, 101–104, 129–153, 174n5
methods of, 41, 52–55, 129–132, 139,
141–142
misconceptions of, 52–55
myth of the intuitive and, xv–xvi
negative xphi critique of, 1, 17–20, 33–34
notion of, 163n1
second-order, 129–132, 155
thought experiments in, xv–xvi
unexceptional nature of, 49, 62, 126
xphi in relation to, xviii, 3
Philosophy of language, 129–130
Physicalism, 114, 178n7
Plato, 54
Theatetus, xi
Pop philosophy, 41
Pragmatic distortion, 2, 21–24, 146,
166n20
Pragmatic meaning, 21, 166n16
Properties, essential, 105
Psychologism, 68–69, 140–142, 173n7
Pust, Joel, 38, 39, 130, 168n2, 171n15
Putnam, Hilary, 179n13
Quine, W. V. O., 105
Ramsey, William, 54–55
Rawls, John, 27
Reference
causal-historical view of, 51, 110
Kripke’s argument against descriptiv-
ist theory of, 11–13, 38–57, 107–111,
170n12
194 Index
Regress problem, 62, 125–127. See also
Relocation problem
Relativism, epistemological, xiv
Reliabilism, 13–14, 20, 111–113
Relocation problem, xx, 57–71, 95,
122–127
Restrictionist threat, 141
Saunders, John Turk, 92
Searle, John, 102–103, 116–117, 119,
179n11
Second-order philosophy, 129–132, 155
Semantic meaning, 21
Skepticism. See Cartesian skepticism;
Judgment skepticism
Socrates, 54
Sosa, Ernest, 121, 145, 147, 149–152,
182n10, 182n12
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, xii
Starmans, Christina, 6, 8–9, 164n6
Steadman, Amy, 146
Stich, Stephen, xi, xiv, 12, 111, 164n5
Surveys
disagreement in, 145–153
ethical value of, 160–161
methodology of, xviii, 3, 164n5
philosophers’ promotion of, 55
pragmatic distortion in, 21–24
xphi’s use of, xviii, 1, 3, 133, 159–160
Swain, Stacey, 14–15, 19–20, 23, 111,
113, 165n14
Swampman, 102–103, 117–118, 119
10 Coins Case, xi–xiii, xvi, 4, 7, 42–52,
68, 73–74, 80–83, 88
Testimony, 120–122
Textbook philosophy, 41
Thermometer Case, 177n5
Thought experiments and hypothetical
cases. See also Counterexamples
improbable/outlandish, 103, 106–107,
118–122
intuitions about, ix, 34–35
judgments in, 59–71
methodology of, 97
production vs. consumption of, 78–
79, 98–99
and refutation of generalizations,
50–52
role of, in analytic philosophy, xv–xvi
Traditional philosophy. See Philosophy
Truetemp Case, 13–15, 20, 23, 102, 111–
113, 165n14, 177n4
Van Inwagen, Peter, 27–29
Weatherson, Brian, 53–54, 108
Weinberg, Jonathan, 14, 48–50, 73, 83–
84, 94, 103, 118–121, 138, 140–142,
150–151, 165n13, 171n15, 180n3,
181n7
“Normativity and Epistemic Intu-
itions” (with Nichols and Stich), xi,
xiii–xiv, xvi, 6–8, 25, 40, 47, 63, 65,
147, 154, 172n3
Williamson, Timothy, xix, 27–29,
48–49, 56–60, 63–71, 75, 126, 134,
140–142, 158, 165n13, 168n1, 172
Xphi. See Experimental philosophy;
Negative xphi; Negative xphi
critique