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Papers in History and Methodology of Analytic Philosophy

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Papers in History and Methodology of Analytic Philosophy Papers in History and Methodology of Analytic Philosophy Brian Weatherson March 5, 2014 Contents 1 What Good are Counterexamples? 1 2 Morality, Fiction and Possibility 20 3 David Lewis 46 4 Humean Supervenience 81 5 Lewis, Naturalness and Meaning 96 6 Centrality and Marginalisation 114 7 Keynes and Wittgenstein 128 8 Doing Philosophy With Words 144 9 In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma 152 Co-authored with Jonathan Ichikawa and Ishani Maitra Bibliography 161 What Good are Counterexamples? e following kind of scenario is familiar throughout analytic philosophy. A bold philosopher proposes that all Fs are Gs. Another philosopher proposes a particular case that is, intuitively, an F but not a G. If intuition is right, then the bold philosopher is mistaken. Alternatively, if the bold philosopher is right, then intuition is mistaken, and we have learned something from philosophy. Can this alternative ever be realised, and if so, is there a way to tell when it is? In this paper, I will argue that the answer to the rst question is yes, and that recognising the right answer to the second question should lead to a change in some of our philosophical practices. e problem is pressing because there is no agreement across the sub-disciplines of phi- losophy about what to do when theory and intuition clash. In epistemology, particularly in the theory of knowledge, and in parts of metaphysics, particularly in the theory of causation, it is almost universally assumed that intuition trumps theory. Shope’s e Analysis of Knowl- edge contains literally dozens of cases where an interesting account of knowledge was jettisoned because it clashed with intuition about a particular case. In the literature on knowledge and lotteries it is not as widely assumed that intuitions about cases are inevitably correct, but this still seems to be the working hypothesis.1 And recent work of causation by a variety of au- thors, with a wide variety of opinions, generally takes the same line: if a theory disagrees with intuition about a case, the theory is wrong.2 In this area exceptions to the rule are a little more frequent, particularly on the issues of whether causation is transitive and whether omissions can be causes, but in most cases the intuitions are taken to override the theories. Matters are quite different in ethics. It is certainly not a good thing for utilitarian theories that we very often feel that the action that maximises utility is not the right thing to do. But the existence of such cases is rarely taken to be obviously and immediately fatal for utilitarian theories in the way that, say, Gettier cases are taken to be obviously and immediately fatal for theories of knowledge that proclaim those cases to be cases of knowledge. Either there is some important difference here between the anti-utilitarian cases and the Gettier cases, a difference that justies our differing reactions, or someone is making a mistake. I claim that it is (usually) the epis- temologists and the metaphysicians who are wrong. In more cases than we usually imagine, a good philosophical theory can teach us that our intuitions are mistaken. Indeed, I think it is possible (although perhaps not likely) that the justied true belief (hereafter, JTB) theory of knowledge is so plausible that we should hold onto it in preference to keeping our intuition that Gettier cases are not cases of knowledge. My main interests here are methodological, not epistemological. Until the last section I will be arguing for the JTB theory of knowledge, but my main interest is in showing that one particular argument against the JTB theory, the one that turns on the fact that it issues in some rather unintuitive pronouncements about Gettier cases, is not in itself decisive. Still, the epistemological issues are important, which is one reason I chose to focus on the JTB theory, † Penultimate draft only. Please cite published version if possible. Final version published in Philosophical Studies 115 (2003): 1-31. 1See, for example, DeRose (1996) and Nelkin (2000) 2See, for example, Menzies (1996), or any of the papers in the special Journal of Philosophy issue on causation, April 2000. What Good are Counterexamples? 2 and at the end I will discuss how the methodological conclusions drawn here may impact on them in an unexpected way. 1 Intuitions Let us say that a counterexample to the theory that all Fs are Gs is a possible situation such that most people have an intuition that some particular thing in the story is an F but not a G. e kinds of intuition I have in mind are what George Bealer (1998) calls intellectual “seemings”. Bealer distinguishes intellectual seemings, such as the intuition that Hume’s Principle is true, or that punishing a person for a crime they did not commit is unjust, from physical seemings, such as the ‘intuition’ that objects fall if released, or perhaps that the sun rotates around the earth. We shall be primarily concerned here with intellectual seemings, and indeed I shall only call these intuitions in what follows. As Bealer notes, whether something seems to be true can be independent of whether we believe it to be true. Bealer himself notes that Frege’s Axiom V seems to be true, though we know it is false. It does not seem to be the case, in the relevant sense, that 643 x 721 = 463603. Unless one is rather good at mental arithmetic, there is nothing that 643 x 721 seems to be; it is out of the reach of intuition. ese are not the only ways that seemings and belief can come apart. One can judge that something seems to be the case while neither believing nor disbelieving it. is is a sensible attitude to take towards the view that one cannot know that a particular ticket will lose in a fair lottery. is is despite the fact that it certainly seems one cannot know this. If one’s intuitions are running rampant, one may even have an intuition about something that one believes to be strictly indeterminate. For example, some people may have the intuition that the continuum hypothesis is true, even though they believe on reection that it is indeterminate whether it is true. e distinction between intuitions and belief is important because it helps reduce the vi- olence that revisionary philosophical views do to our pre-existing positions. When I say that Gettier cases may be cases of knowledge, I am not denying that there is a strong intuition that they are not cases of knowledge. I am not denying that a Gettier case does not seem to be a case of knowledge. e same thing occurs in ethics. Utilitarians rarely deny that it seems that punishing innocents is the wrong thing to do. ey urge that in certain, rare, cases this might be one of those things that seems to be true despite being false. e case that knowledge is jus- tied true belief is meant to be made in full awareness of the fact that certain cases of justied true beliefs seem to not be cases of knowledge. Actually, although we will not make much of it here, this last claim is not true as a gen- eral statement about all people. Jonathan Weinberg, Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols have reported Weinberg et al. (2001) that the intuition that Gettier cases are not cases of knowl- edge is not universally shared. It is not entirely clear what the philosophical relevance of these discoveries is. It might show that we who have Gettier intuitions speak a different language from those who do not. It might show (though as Stich and Nichols point out it is rather hard to see how) that philosophers know a lot more about knowledge than other folk. I think it is rather unlikely that this is true, but we shall bracket such concerns for now, and continue on the assumption that all parties have the Gettier intuitions. Since I shall want to argue that knowledge may still be justied belief in any case, I am hardly tilting the playing eld in my direction by making this assumption. What Good are Counterexamples? 3 Given that intuitions are what Bealer calls intellectual seemings, and given that the example of Axiom V shows that seemings can be mistaken, what evidence have we that they are not mistaken in the cases we consider here? Arguably, we have very little indeed. Robert Cummins (1998) argues that in general intuition should not be trusted as an evidential source because it cannot be calibrated. We wouldn’t have trusted the evidence Galileo’s telescope gave us about the moon without an independent reason for thinking his telescope reliable. Fortunately, this can be done; we can point the telescope at far away terrestrial mountains, and compare its ndings with the ndings of examining the mountains up close and personal. ere is no comparable way of calibrating intuitions. Clearly we should suspicious of any method that has been tested and found unreliable, but there are tricky questions about the appropriate level of trust in methods that have not been tested. Ernest Sosa (1998) argues in response to Cummins that this kind of reasoning leads to an untenable kind of scepticism. Sosa notes that one can make the same point about perception as Cummins makes about intuition: we have no independent way of calibrating perception as a whole. ere is a distinction to be drawn here, since perception divides into natural kinds, visual perception, tactile perception, etc, and we can use each of these to calibrate the others.
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