Two new SEP entries on perception are online: Tim Crane on the problem of perception, and Susanna Siegel on the contents of perception. Between these two excellent entries, one could get a fairly comprehensive background in the philosophy of perception. Also recently added is a very useful entry by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi on phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness.
During the past year and a half, I have been working on a research project with Eddy Nahmias, Steve Morris, and Jason Turner. The project–which was an attempt to probe folk intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility in an empirically informed manner–has produced three papers. The third paper–entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?”–has just been accepted for publication by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Since we talk a lot about the relevance of folk intuitions to the free will debate–I thought some of you may be interested in checking it out. Here’s the abstract:
Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.
Terry Horgan and Galen Strawson have had to withdraw from the session on Phenomenology at the Pacific APA next week in San Francisco, so I’m filling in. (N.B. All this was arranged before and is independent of the fracas involving a labor dispute at the conference hotel.) The session will take place on Saturday March 26 from 2pm to 5pm. The speakers will be Charles Siewert on "The Relevance of Phenomenology", and me on "Perception and the Fall from Eden" (with separate discussion periods, as the topics are pretty different). The printed program still shows the original lineup, so fans of Terry and Galen are hereby forewarned.
This hiring season has been a busy one for several of our contributing PEA Brains, with four of them moving to new universities, all of which have Ph.D. programs. In alphabetical order . . . .
Campbell Brown (grad work done at the Australian National University), currently a visiting assistant professor (VAP) at Bowling Green State University (where I myself live and breathe) is “moving” to a tenure-track assistant professor position there. Campbell’s specialties include ethics, political philosophy, and social choice theory.
Josh Glasgow (University of Memphis), currently a VAP at Occidental College, has accepted an offer from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) to become a tenure-track assistant professor there. Josh’s specialties include ethics (Kant, deontology) and philosophy of race, among others.
Doug Portmore (UC Santa Barbara) currently an assistant professor at Cal State Northridge (my old stomping grounds), has accepted an offer from Arizona State University to become a tenure-track assistant professor there. Doug’s specialties are in several branches of ethics (including consequentialism, welfare/value theory, death/dying).
Kyle Swan (Bowling Green State University), currently an assistant professor at U. Minnesota Duluth, is taking a position on the faculty at the National University of Singapore. Kyle’s specialties include ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy.
And of course our newest member, Chris Heathwood, is starting up this fall at University of Colorado, Boulder.
Congratulations to everyone! We now expect your posts to be much, much better than they have been.
While poking through Powerpoint files on my laptop, I came across "Hey Joe", my comments on Joe Levine’s book Purple Haze for the Pacific APA last year. As I probably won’t be doing anything further with these comments, I’ve posted the Powerpoint file online. Explanatory gap aficionados can check out the arguments, and Jimi Hendrix aficionados can check out the album covers.
Perhaps everyone is already aware of this, but I just wanted to mention that Harry Frankfurt is going to be on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show tonight (Monday, March 14) to talk about his small but quite entertaining book, On Bullshit. Harry was my dissertation advisor, so I for one am looking forward to it.
(This is a follow-up to the discussion that broke out here.)
Of the many good fruits that the experimental philosophy movement might bear, one that I expect to see ripen quickly is its making analytic philosophers get clearer on their own metaphilosophies. With each odd empirical finding that gets put on the table, it’s as if we’re saying to the more traditional intuition-mongering philosopher, "Ok, just what do you take yourself to be doing, such that what you’re doing is consistent with that finding?" And some folks are already rising to the challenge; for example, Brian Weatherson’s 2003 paper What Good Are Counterexamples? can be seen as such. One thing that’s becoming clear in the discussion threads here is that there are at least two metaphilosophies of intuition, more or less completely incompatible with each other, that might be operative in analytic philosophy today. Because of their radical differences with each other, they permit very different responses to the empirical findings.
One of these metaphilosophies takes the philosopher’s task to be, at least in part, the mapping out of the structure of ‘our’ concepts of philosophical matters like AGENCY or KNOWLEDGE. And philosophers pumping their intuitions is a good way to do this, because the philosophers share in that same concept — that ‘our’ is meant to include philosopher and non-philosopher alike. The analogy here is with linguists studying the syntax of English, and using their own grammaticality judgments as data. Let’s call this, therefore, the "Chomskyan metaphilosophy".
Another view values philosophers’ intuitions not because they partake of the folk conception of the matter in question, but precisely because they do not do so. Philosophers have better judgments about the target concept than the folks, because of some particulars about the philosophers’ training and/or knowledge. Because this metaphilosophy appeals to the superiority of the rational apperceptions of the specially enlightened, we can call this the "Platonic metaphilosophy".
(Three caveats: I don’t think that these two are exhaustive of intuition-mongering metaphilosophies, though I suspect they are the main strains, with Frank Jackson as a promoter of the Chomskyan and George Bealer of the Platonic. Also, these are probably better viewed as two families of metaphilosophies, since clearly there could be a great deal of variation within each. Finally, I’m going to call the respective practitioners "Chomskyans" and "Platonists", but please don’t take that to imply that such practitioners or their philosophies are in any other way Chomskyan and/or Platonist!)
Clearly, these two metaphilosophies will be able to respond differently to different empirical challenges. Consider empirical evidence that philosophers’ intuitions diverge significantly from those of the folk. Such evidence is prima facie; a huge problem for the Chomskyans. They do have responses. For example, they can suggest ways of figuring out which philosopher-intuitions are successful at tracking the folk, and give those intuitions more credibility; or they could fall back on a kind relativism, studying now not the folk at large but the philosopher-folk. But it would be very hard for the Chomskyans to just continue as they were, in the face of such evidence of divergent intuitions between philosophers and nonphilosophers.
But it is not so for the Platonist — indeed, such evidence might count at least a little bit in favorof the Platonist, since they are committed to their intuitions being better than, and a fortiori different from, those of the unenlightened.
There is a similar difference in responses to empirical data that the folk themselves have divergent intuitions about various cases. (The term "the folk" is, after all, only something of a convenient fiction to lump together a vast number of very different persons.) The Chomskyans must now decide which folk(s) they take themselves to be studying — and what to do about the fact that different philosophers will themselves likely belong to different folk(s). Again, there are responses, including relativisms; but again, the Chomskyans cannot simply proceed as if these differences were not there. But prima facie, evidence of divergence across different folk groups is not a problem for the Platonists, since all that shows (they might say) is that lots of people have found lots of different ways to be wrong.
So, is the whole experimental philosophy project just irrelevant to Platonists? Not necessarily. For the Platonists have a theoretical burden to discharge: they owe us an account of what gives the intuitions of the philosophers a higher epistemic status than those of nonphilosophers. And the details of such an account may well be in tension with empirical findings. Here’s the abstract form of the concern: suppose the Platonists argue that some philosophers have some characteristic X generally lacked by nonphilosophers, that allegedly renders the former’s intuitions more trustworthy. But then suppose further that there is an empirical result showing that the intuitions in question are highly variable across groups A and B, when there is no reason to think that there is any difference in the degree that X is found in the A and B populations. Under such supposition, it is reasonable to worry that the mere presence of X may not in fact be sufficient to shield philosophers’ intuitions from whatever the influence of A-ness or B-ness might be. (One possible response the Platonist might have would be to try to study those members of both A and B who are also high in X, to see whether the same variation is found there. But I take it that there’s a certain sort of victory condition here for the experimental philosophers, if we compel the other guys to have to go out & do their own studies.)
One way that this might happen is if the X-factor is in any way sensitive to initial conditions. Any reflective equilibrium story, to adapt a move from Stich’s Fragmentation of Reason (which Adam also uses in his paper available here), has the reflectors (the equilibrizers?) starting with their own intuitions, principles, and/or background knowledge, and reflecting & equilibrating from there. If members of different groups start with sufficiently different intuitions and such, then we should expect them to RE to different ending positions, too. So an empirical demonstration of robustly different intuitions across different groups implies a high likelihood of different intuitions at the end of the Grand Equilibration. Thus, if the proposed X-factor is "being the product of RE", then empirical results showing different intuitions across groups would still, in fact, be a very real threat to Platonic intuition-mongering.
So it will depend a lot on what the Platonists say in defense of their Platonism. But whatever they say, it will certainly have some empirical content about how one gets to enlightenment from our current unenlightened state. And that empirical content will itself be scrutinizable by empirical means. So they are no more immune from empirical challenges than are their Chomskyan brethren — the challenges just take a different shape for them.
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