La Calidad y la Garantía del Servicio

There are various ways thought experiments might be relevant to philosophical theorizing, even limiting ourselves to their use in building arguments, as opposed to raising interesting questions. It will be useful to distinguish them clearly, to understand the problem I am going to discuss later. One might take as a premise the claim that most people give a certain judgement about a certain kind of thought experiment (hypothetical case), and proceed to use this premise, perhaps as the basis of an inference to the best explanation, to draw further conclusions, e.g. about philosophically relevant aspects of human psychology. If this is what one is doing, then obviously one should have adequate justification for the premise one is using, the claim that most people give that certain judgement about that kind of hypothetical scenario. It is generally not good enough to give one’s own judgement on the hypothetical case and assume that most people will give the same judgement. A theorist must at least undertake some informal inquiry to get a sense of how typical her judgement is in that respect, such as, for example, comparing her judgement with those of her colleagues or other competent speakers. Sometimes, this might be enough. Indeed, Jackson [1998] briefly argues that this is usually enough: “Everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class of students is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answer they get in the vast majority of cases. But it is also true that often we know that our own case is typical and so can generalize

from it to others”93

. In the first decade of the new century, a movement of thought has developed that advocates, among other things94, a more thorough empirical study of such assumptions. This movement is usually known as the ‘experimental philosophy’ movement, or the ‘X-phi’ movement. Initial results (Weinberg et al. [2001], Machery et al. [2004], Swain et al. [2008]) seem to show that Jackson was overly optimistic. Philosophers are less typical than they thought, and probably Jackson did not know what answer people get in presenting students with Gettier case, as he was wrongly assuming they get (what according to most of the philosophical community is) the right results, while the truth is more complicated. Be that as it may, this is not the sort of use of thought experiments I am concerned with here. I am interested in a more direct use of thought experiments, the use of the hypothetical judgment itself about a case, and not of the judgment that we make or are inclined to make the judgment. Typically, the judgment I am thinking about is of the form ‘concept C applies applied to X in scenario S’ and not ‘I (we) am (are) inclined to apply concept C to X in scenario S’.95

I am not taking a stand on how prominent these two different uses of thought experiments are or should be in philosophy, I am willing to be pluralist about both issues, at least for the sake of the argument.96

The main claim I am defending in this chapter is that a subject can often form justified beliefs, which will constitute knowledge if everything else is fine, about hypothetical scenarios of the kind typically used in philosophy, even taking for granted the empirical results obtained so far by experimental philosophers, and taking for granted that the subject knows about those results. A presupposition I will be using here is that the judgments we make about hypothetical cases have a definite answer. One might worry that in some of the cases philosophers consider there is no determinate answer as to whether a certain concept applies, but there are incompatible and equally acceptable ways of extending our usage with

93 _{See Jackson [1998] pp. 36-7.}

94 _{For a survey of those other things, see Knobe and Nichols [2008]}

95 _{One might also reason as follows: ‘Most people are inclined to apply concept C to X in scenario S’,} therefore ‘Concept C applies to X in scenario S’. At this point, I am also not interested in this kind of use of thought experiments. It makes a difference if the form of argument used by a philosophers is instead: ‘I am inclined to apply concept C to X in scenario S’, therefore ‘Concept C applies to X in scenario S’. My defense of the use of thought experiments would also apply to this first-person style of argument (which was however criticized in chapter 1).

96

But see Cappelen [forthcoming] for a strong case that in actual philosophical practice premises about the philosophers mental states are not typically used.

respect to such cases97. While I think such a situation is possible, and probably even actual, I am going to presuppose, at least at this stage, that it is sufficiently rare to be ignored, and that in the cases we are going to discuss there is a fact of the matter as to the application of the concept in the relevant hypothetical case. I will come back to the significance and the motivations of this presupposition below. A further presupposition will be that there often is genuine agreement and disagreement (not merely verbal), both between philosophers and between philosophers and non-philosophers, about the correct judgements to be given on a thought experiment. Other things being equal, disagreement on a sentence or utterance between two parties might be evidence that the sentence or utterance is used with the different meaning, so that the disagreement is merely verbal; but only very weak evidence. Again, I am not saying that verbal disagreements never take place, but I am going to assume that they are sufficiently rare to be ignored for my present purposes. Note how the second assumption, that disagreement about thought experiments typically does not indicate difference in meaning, is favorable to the experimental philosopher, or in general to someone who wishes to put in doubt the reliability of judgements about thought experiments. Sosa (Sosa [2007c], [2010]) argued convincingly that if there is a divergence in meaning between philosophers and non- experts subjects, the experimentalist challenge is undermined. I accept that conditional. Sosa also argues that the antecedent of the conditional is true. I am not entirely convinced by those arguments on a general level, but I am also not going to try to respond to them on behalf of the proponents of the challenge.

Experimental philosophers take their results to challenge the main claim I am defending here. They believe that the results obtained so far already show that the practice of appealing to thought experiments, at least in its current form, is seriously compromised. This challenge is articulated by Weinberg et al. [2010] in the form of an argument; here is how they describe it.

First, there are the experimental results themselves, which at this point in time overwhelmingly concern ‘ordinary’ subjects (typically, but not entirely, university undergraduates). In particular, there is the claim that the studies in question reveal a worrisome pattern of responses in those subjects, such as ethnic variation or sensitivity to the order of presentation of the cases. Second, there is a metaphilosophical claim that the relevant philosophical facts do not pattern in the same way; there is a misalignment between the contours of the philosophical facts and the contours of philosophical judgments (or, at least, of those judgments as studied by the experimental philosophers). Third, there is an ampliative inference

97

Unger [1984] defends this view. I will come back to its difference with the experimental philosophy challenge.

from the patterns disclosed concerning the ordinary subjects to the predicted occurrence of those patterns in professional philosophers. Putting all three pieces together, the armchair practice is thus challenged: we have reason to think that it involves deploying a source of putative evidence that is sensitive to non-truth-tracking factors. (Weinberg et al. [2009] p. 332)

I find this reconstruction of the experimental philosopher’s critique rather useful. We can put it in a clearer argument form as follows. First there is an argument relative to non- philosophers

1) Non-philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are sensitive to factor F. 2) Factor F is irrelevant to the truth of the judgments of class C.

3) If 1 and 2, then non-philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are epistemically defective.

Hence, non-philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are epistemically defective (from 1, 2 and 3)

But the argument can also continue after premise 2 as follows

3*) If 1, then philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are sensitive to factor F. 4) Philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are sensitive to factor F (from 1 and

3).

5) If 2 and 4 then philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are epistemically defective.

Hence, philosophers’ judgments about cases of class C are epistemically defective (from 2, 4 and 5)

The argument I am interested in here is of course the latter (1, 2 ,3*, 4, 5 – call it the Challenge Argument). To be more precise, what we have here is not an argument, but rather an argument schema. At least on some ways to fill out the schema with respect to C, I am going to grant premise 1 and, with some reservations we will come to later, premise 2, two of the “three moving pieces” Weinberg et al. are talking about. My reconstruction brings out a complexity in the second moving piece; the claim is not just that the factors the relevant judgments are sensitive to are irrelevant to the truth of such judgments, but also that this is epistemically relevant and it represents a serious kind of defect (premise 5). I think this is true. However, it is worth noting that there might be a problem of self-defeat lurking here. According to this line of thought, if the argument were successful, then we would lose our

justification for premise 5. I will not discuss this line of objection here, although I will consider a different worry about self-defeat.

I will consider two lines of reply to the Challenge Argument, both of which I regard as sufficient to undermine it. The first line of reply starts with a request for clarification; what is the class of judgments we are talking about? On some specifications of the class, the argument will turn out to be sound, but uninteresting. On other, more ambitious specifications of the target, the argument will turn out to ‘prove too much’, leading to undesirable forms of skepticism about hypothetical judgment, which suggests that one of the premises must be false. I will call this the target problem.

The second line of reply will challenge the plausibility of premise 3*). It is worth noting that this ampliative step in the argument had gone unnoticed until it was pointed out by responses to the challenge, especially in Ludwig [2007] and Williamson [2007]. My guess would be that the reason why the step went unnoticed is that it is unnecessary when we criticize some of the different uses of thought experiments I was talking about above, in which philosophers directly appeal to what non-philosophers would say. Be that as it may, Weinberg et al., having realized the problem, attempt to put a patch on it by suggesting that the psychological literature on expertise makes it implausible that philosophers possess some kind of expertise in assessing thought experiments. However, I will argue that firstly, the literature they cite does not really support their claim, and, secondly, there is a part of the psychological literature on expertise which they fail to consider and which clearly tells against premise 3*.

There is a different way in which one could solve the problem for experimental philosophers, and that is conducting empirical studies that directly support premise 4. These empirical studies should involve philosophers as subjects. However, at present few such studies have been conducted, and they only concern one area, moral philosophy (Schwitzgebel and Cushman [forthcoming], Schulz et al. [forthcoming])98. So the existing

98 _{A possible exception has been pointed out to me by Joshua Knobe. Sytsma and Machery [2010] find} some differences in philosophers and non-philosophers judgements about a case in which a robot discriminates a red object from objects of different colors; it turned out that non-philosophers where much more prone to say that the robot “sees red. However, the case seems to me under-described, and it is unclear in any case what the right judgment would be (if there is one), so the study cannot tell against the expertise hypothesis. Sytsma and Machery conclude from their study that philosophers and non-philosophers are using different concepts. If that is the case, again, there is nothing here that helps the Challenge Argument. However, the difference in the concepts employed does not follow from the difference in judgment, so Systma and Machery seem to be using an invalid argument. Interestingly, they use “concept” and “conception” interchangeably, which hints at a possible

studies might at best provide grounds to eliminate the ampliative step in an argument for the limited conclusion that philosophers should not appeal to thought experiments in that area. I will come back to this in the next section. More importantly, there are some methodological difficulties in constructing such studies which seem hard to solve. Some, perhaps not insurmountable, difficulties have to do with the choice of a scenario to ask subjects about. The scenarios used in most X-phi studies were thought experiments, sometimes really famous ones, taken from the philosophical literature, or easily recognizable variants of those (see e.g. Weinberg et al. [2001], Machery et al. [2004], Swain et al. [2008]). A professional philosopher will usually have a previous opinion on those, which will be strongly influenced by a number of factors, including at least education and peer-pressure. Therefore the significance of the test would be diminished. On the other hand, using scenarios which have been constructed for the purpose of the experiment would also reduce the significance of the result. Every case is different, and each case might present peculiar difficulties. Ideally, in the experimental design one should use a case which is analogous in significant ways to well- known philosophical thought experiments, but not obviously analogous to the well-known cases; of course, this is not a trivial task. Even more serious difficulties have to do however with the choice of the subjects to be involved. It is highly unclear to me how we could individuate ‘the experts’ in a sufficiently neutral way. First of all, philosophy, at least as practiced today in the analytic tradition, is divided in a vast number of specialized sub-fields. I don’t think this can be ignored, if we want the experimental data to have some bearing on the way philosophy is actually practiced. If one has never published a paper in metaphysics, her judgment on a thought experiment in that field will have very little impact to the research community; if you have never published in a subfield, you are very unlikely even to referee a paper in that subfield. Moreover, we would also have to choose a cut-off point on the degree of professional success required. That is not trivial. It is generally acknowledged that social recognition is not a perfect guide to expertise. For example, Schwitzgebel and Cushman [forthcoming] use possession of a PhD as the criterion of expertise. Since possessing a PhD is a necessary but, unfortunately, not a sufficient condition to be a professional philosopher, this is clearly not a good criterion. It might be that not even being a professional philosopher working in a certain area is sufficient to be an expert in the relevant sense. It might be that among, for example, metaphysicians, only 60% possess the kind of ability in judging thought experiments that really separates them from the non-experts. If that were the case, of course

explanation of their hasty conclusion. I argued in chapter 4 that some theorists systematically confuse concepts and the capacity to apply concepts; it might be that this is such a case.

we could not individuate the experts simply on the basis of professional success or some other more or less measurable device (I make the metaphysically controversial assumption here that we do not live in a perfect world – besides, other metaphysicians might be more proficient in some different way). Maybe there are ways around this difficulty as well, and I will even have a suggestion to advance for those interested in doing experimental studies on philosophers. However, at present it seems justified to look for indirect ways of evaluating the plausibility of the ampliative step in the Challenge Argument. We will do that in section 5.3; first, we will need to give a closer look to the target of the argument.