I’m working on a new paper focused on experimentalist challenges to traditional philosophical methodology, and in particular on Jonathan Weinberg’s ‘How to challenge intuitions empirically without risking skepticism’. Hopefully I’ll have a draft to post before too long. (Maybe I’ll post an argument or two here in the meantime; we’ll see.) One of the main points of my paper will be, traditional methodology is already sensitive to a lot of the stuff you’re saying it needs to be sensitive to. I’d like to include lots of examples of philosphers doing the sorts of things that it is complained philosophers don’t do enough. Can you help point me to some examples?
The particular bit I’m working on at the moment concerns Jonathan’s claim that the output of philosopher’s appeals to intuitions is “basically a 1-bit signal: is p possible, yes or no? Or: Does the hypothetical situation fall under the concept or not?” Any difference in degree or strength, Jonathan says, is “largely unexplored—and unexploited—by current philosophical practice.”
I’m surprised by this remark. I think it’s pretty common to find philosophers saying things like, “I do have that intuition, but it’s not a very strong one, so I don’t feel too bad about giving it up,” or “this intuition is much stronger than that one, so I’m going to prioritize it.” I’ve found a few such examples in print; can you help point me to more?
Also, if there are any readers/frequent commenters here who are sympathetic to Weinberg’s approach, feel free to tell me whether the sorts of cases I’m now soliciting provide an adequate response to the challenge about the detectability of margins. 
My favourite example of this is Lewis on symmetric overdetermination. Here is a quote from page 194 of the postscripts to “Causation” in “Philosophical Papers, volume 2″.
Thanks very much (for both comments), Brian. This is just what I’m looking for.
Having noted an example, I do think there is a problem here about margin-detection. On pages 236-7 of “The Philosophy of Philosophy”, Williamson writes
I think he’s wrong that we need a strength parameter. It would be better to talk about comparative strength than measured strength. But the worry he raises about wishful thinking, and having theory determine strength of intuition, is real.
If you’re going to target this bit of my text, you should probably take into account the other aspects of what I claim, such as
–the radical difference of extent between the richness of any such signal in perception and that in intuition
–lack of any standard reporting procedures (how weak is weak? how strong is strong? Brian’s invitation to use more comparative data would be helpful along these lines)
–lack of any systematic procedure for making use of such information when reported (for example, for seeing the extent to which others agree with such evaluations, and figuring out what that means for one’s further theorizing. This goes way beyond the paper, but I think the squishiness here connects up to some more general squishiness in our attempts to use abductive inferences in our philosophizing.)
–high risk of susceptibility to various sorts of cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias
I think you’ll also want to show not just that some philosophers here or there (even Lewis) have done X is enough to show that our practices on the whole include X. At best that would show that the philosopher in question may be doing something that the rest of us should be doing. And even _that_ would require some sort of argument that what they did was actually successful.
Just to expand a teensy bit on why it’s going to be enough just to identify a place here or there where someone (even when of the greats) has made such an appeal: I did say “_largely_ unexplored”, after all. By Zeus, if I’m going to use hedge words, I want full credit for my hedginess!
Er, I meant, “…on why it’s _not_ going to be enough…”, of course.
I’m worried that two distinct phenomena are being conflated here. Jonathan W’s discussion focuses on “gradation in accompanying feelings of subjective certainty” - that is, a sort of phenomenological strength. Williamson’s discussion is about distinguishing “weaker [intuition]s from stronger ones in evidential impact” - that is, epistemic or evidential strength.
The relevant considerations seem different in each case. Jonathan W’s concerns seem well-placed as regards phenomenological strength. Moreover, it isn’t obvious that phenomenological strength is particularly epistemically relevant even if we were good at measuring it. But I think that Jonathan I’s position (that philosophers are already sensitive to the phenomena) is extremely plausible as regards epistemic strength, especially if (like Jonathan I) we construe intuitions broadly (so that beliefs and dispositions to believe in general count as intuitions). There we have mechanisms like offering reasons and giving arguments that are designed to help us evaluate epistemic/evidential strength (among other things). (Even Williamson should agree to this, given Jonathan I’s use of the term “intuition”, with the caveat we can’t assume that epistemic strength is ever settled once and for all.)
It isn’t clear to me which of these things people intend to be talking about when they talk about strength of intuitions. (For example, it isn’t clear to me which of these things Lewis has in mind in the passage Brian quoted.) It may be widely assumed that they go together.
This sounds like a useful distinction, Derek. Thanks.
I think, given the context of the discussion in JW’s paper, Weinberg needs to show insensitivity to epistemic strength. He’s accusing philosophical appeals to intuition of being ‘hopeless’, which means that the relevant methodology has insufficient resources for recognizing cases in which intuitions deliver false verdicts. One way that a practice can be hopeful is by encoding differential responses, depending on the strength of the data delivered. If my vision is fuzzy, that gives me reason to be suspicious of whether it’s operating veridically, and so I trust that data less than I do the clearer data.
If philosophical appeal to intuition includes differential responses, depending on the epistemic force of the intuition, then, even if the way we recognize differences in strength is some way other than phenomenological force, philosophical appeal to intuition does include mechanisms for sorting out more reliable intuitions from less reliable ones, on the basis of the quality of the data.
If you’re right, Derek — and I suspect you are — that there’s no obvious link between phenomenological strength and epistemic strength anyway, then it’s certainly no epistemic failure on the part of PAI that we don’t have rigorous ways to sort based on phenomenological strength.
[...] Weinberg wrote a comment on my last post that raises a question I’ve been wondering about for a little while. [...]
Where the bit of target text appears in my paper, I am clearly speaking about phenomenological strength — what is contained in the “signal” of intuition itself — and contrasting that with what is contained in perception itself. I go on, about a page later, to explicitly raise the question as to whether _other_ sorts of resources could be appealed to to do this kind of work, even if phenomenology can’t do it for us.
I would note that Lewis’ appeal to what is or is not clear in “common sense” in the text that BW quotes is very much of a piece with the recommendation I make in those latter paragraphs: “we could, as a profession, decide to be particularly cautious about using intuitions under circumstances far removed from ordinary conditions — such as cases involving wildly unusual or even nomologically impossible situations, or that can be described only using fairly highfalutin lingo.” That would be an example of a kind of non-phenomenological attempt to keep PAI operating within the margins.
“If you’re right, Derek — and I suspect you are — that there’s no obvious link between phenomenological strength and epistemic strength anyway, then it’s certainly no epistemic failure on the part of PAI that we don’t have rigorous ways to sort based on phenomenological strength.” Right — that would just mean that, of the many possible ways to get “hopefulness” for PAI, this ain’t going to be one of them. If they can get a sufficient amount of hope from somewhere else, either another way of detecting the margins or from yet one of the other possible kinds of sources, then that’d be great.
Sorry to butt in on this train of thought, but a friend of mine — whom I understand will soon be joining you at St. Andrews — just clued me into this blog post about intuitions and philosophers’ sensitivity to things like their strength and I just wanted to note, for anyone interested, that I’ve been conducting some studies exploring a closely related issue. Specifically, I’ve been studying the lay-folk’s sensitivity (in terms of things like their confidence levels in their judgments about concrete cases, etc) to the strength of their “intuitions” (I say “intuitions” because it may very well be something other than intuitions that people are using to form their judgments, it is always hard to be sure). I’d be happy to share these results. Some of them are discussed in a manuscript currently under review. Basically, the short of it is that when asked to determine whether or not a particular case counted as knowledge, the further away from paradigmatic cases people got, the less confident they were of their attributions. This is not unlike the philosophers’ strong vs. weak, clear vs. fuzzy intuitions. Like philosophers, the folk seem to have some degree of sensitivity to when a case invokes a strong/clear intuition and when it doesn’t; when they are warranted in being confident in their judgment and when they are not. Or so I would argue….
Thanks, Jen — that sounds very relevant indeed. I’d love to read your manuscript, if you’d be willing to send it to me. My email address is ichikawa@gmail.com. Thanks!
I know I’m fairly late to this thread. But I think Mark Schroeder is an example of a philosopher “sensitive to the strength of intuition.” In his book _Slaves of the Passions_ (2007) he uses the idea of weak versus strong intuitions (in this case, about having reasons). It comes up when discussing his “two-step” procedure for weakening certain intuitions about reasons (around p. 95). He argues roughly that the weakening of the intuition makes it not much of a worry for his view, etc.