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Schukraft-Dissertation-2017 Copyright by Jason Donald Schukraft 2017 The Dissertation Committee for Jason Donald Schukraft Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Carving Intuition at Its Joints Committee: Cory Juhl, Supervisor Ernest David Sosa Joshua Dever Miriam Schoenfield Herman Cappelen Carving Intuition at Its Joints by Jason Donald Schukraft, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2017 Dedication To Katie Carving Intuition at Its Joints Jason Donald Schukraft, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017 Supervisor: Cory Juhl Metaphilosophy is the philosophical study of philosophy itself. Metaphilosophers attempt to articulate and evaluate the aim(s) of philosophy, the value(s) of philosophy, and the method(s) of philosophy. One striking feature of contemporary metaphilosophy is the attention it devotes to the investigation of philosophical intuitions. There is a tacit presumption in this literature, shared by both proponents and critics of appeals to intuition, that philosophical intuitions constitute something like a natural kind. Intuitions may not issue from a single faculty, and the intuitions themselves may concern a heterogeneous collection of propositions, but nonetheless—so this line of thinking goes— there is something unifying about philosophical intuitions that justifies treating them monolithically. This treatment, I argue, is a mistake. To determine the merit of philosophical appeals to intuition, we need some way to gauge the reliability or justificatory power of such appeals. But attempting to measure the reliability or justificatory power of intuitions immediately generates a dilemma. On the one hand, challenging the reliability or justificatory power of all intuitions leads to self-defeat, as any such challenge will necessarily rely on intuition at some point in the argument. On the other hand, restricting the challenge to a certain subset of intuitions risks a familiar sort of v generality problem: what makes these intuitions problematic and not their counterparts in other domains? In response to this dilemma, I argue that metaphilosophy would be best served abandoning intuition talk altogether. ‘Intuition’ picks out an overly broad and general category. When assessing the reliability or justificatory power of an evidence source, it is necessary to be fine-grained about the evidence source. We ought not ask whether intuition as a whole is reliable; rather, we should ask whether particular kinds of intuition are reliable, leaving open the possibility that some sorts of intuitions are more reliable than others. I explore three principled ways of sub-dividing intuitions in a way that pushes the metaphilosophical dialectic forward. We can individuate classes of intuition by (1) their context of employment, (2) the exoticism of their content, and (3) their psychological provenance. This tripartite division will make it easier to identify which appeals to intuition are problematic without risking wholesale skepticism. vi Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Project Overview ......................................................................................................... 2 Chapter Two: Methodological Particularism and Descriptive Intuition Skepticism.. 11 Against Methodological Particularism .................................................................... 12 Against Descriptive Intuition Skepticism ............................................................... 28 Chapter Three: The Heterogeneity of Intuition .............................................................. 68 Ambiguities ................................................................................................................. 68 Varieties of Intuition ................................................................................................. 75 The Diversity of Intuition Contents ....................................................................... 82 The Particularity of Intuitions .................................................................................. 86 Objections ................................................................................................................... 89 Chapter Four: Metaphilosophical Arguments ............................................................... 101 Calibration ................................................................................................................. 101 Intuitional Sensitivity ............................................................................................... 109 Self-Defeat ................................................................................................................ 124 Innocence-by-Association ...................................................................................... 133 Chapter Five: Carving Intuitions More Finely ............................................................... 140 Causal Carving .......................................................................................................... 143 Context Carving ....................................................................................................... 162 Content Carving ....................................................................................................... 178 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 194 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 196 vii Chapter One: Introduction “There are few things that we phrase properly; most things we phrase badly; but what we are trying to say is understood.” -Augustine, Confessions, XI.20.26 1. INTRODUCTION The thesis of this monograph is a plea: stop talking about intuitions.1 Stop utilizing the locution ‘it is intuitive that p.’ Stop phrasing sentences ‘intuitively, p.’ Above all, stop reporting ‘I have the intuition that p.’ The reason that we should stop talking about intuitions isn’t that intuitions cannot be calibrated against an independent standard, as Cummins 1998 and Weinberg et al. 2012 claim. The reason isn’t that appeals to intuition are without any respectable theoretical foundation, as Hintikka 1999 and Hales 2000 claim. The reason isn’t that appeals to intuition conflict with our commitment to naturalism, as Devitt 1994, Ladyman & Ross 2007, and Maclaurin & Dyke 2012 claim. Nor is the reason that appeals to intuitions are argumentative third-wheels, as Cappelen 2012, Molyneux 2014, and Deutsch 2015 claim. And the reason isn’t that intuitions are sensitive to non-evidential factors, as Machery et al. 2004; Swain, Alexander, & Weinberg 2008; Buckwalter & Stich 2014; and Costa et al. 2014 claim. The reason that we should stop talking about intuitions is that ‘intuition’ does not pick out a monolithic, unified kind. The category represents a diverse collection of distinct mental states.2 The heterogeneity of the category makes for a term that is vague and 1 This plea is directed at, and restricted to, professional philosophers. Intuition talk in other disciplines may be unproblematic. 2 Indeed, some types of intuition-talk don’t refer to mental states at all. 1 imprecise. Our philosophy would be much improved if we adopted a finer-grained taxonomy to reflect this heterogeneity. Or so I shall argue. 2. PROJECT OVERVIEW Metaphilosophy is the philosophical study of philosophy itself. Metaphilosophers attempt to articulate and evaluate the aim(s) of philosophy, the value(s) of philosophy, and the method(s) of philosophy. The specific objectives of metaphilosopy are many and varied. In this monograph, I concentrate on two central metaphilosophical tasks. I’ll call them RELIABILITY and JUSTIFICATION: RELIABILITY Evaluate the reliability of the purported evidence that figures in philosophical arguments JUSTIFICATION Evaluate the justificatory status of relying on the purported evidence that figures in philosophical arguments I don’t intend to undertake these tasks. I merely intend to clarify what would be required in order to undertake them. A few clarificatory remarks are in order. RELIABILITY and JUSTIFICATION presuppose some answer to the descriptive question ‘what sort of things figure in philosophical arguments?’. This is no easy question. Much of contemporary metaphilosophy assumes that intuitions are the sort of thing that either appear among the premises of philosophical arguments or support the premises of philosophical arguments, and I defend that assumption in chapter two. I include ‘purported’ in my formulation of the goals because if evidence is factive, its reliability is guaranteed. Finally, the two goals are interrelated. The reliability of the purported evidence that figures in philosophical arguments may underwrite (or, indeed, constitute, if reliabilism is true) the justification for relying on that evidence. 2 The reliability of some belief-forming process Φ is a measure of the truth- conduciveness of Φ. Truth-conduciveness can be decomposed into two subjunctive components: SENSITIVITY and SAFETY: SENSITIVITY If p were false, Φ would not output that p SAFETY If Φ were to output that p, p would not be false A perfectly reliable (and hence infallible) belief-forming process
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