The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? Brian Talbot (draft only)

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1 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? (draft only) While conceptual analysis is traditionally seen as a prototypical armchair, or a priori, project, this view has come under fire from a number of directions. Externalists have claimed that important facts about natural kind terms (among others) are a posteriori (Kripke, 1972). Others have argued that conceptual analysis must be informed by empirical findings on how concepts are structured in our minds (Ramsey, 1998, Stich & Weinberg, 2001). And experimental philosophers have tried to show that conceptual analysis should be based in part on data gathered from the folk, which of course must be obtained outside of the armchair (e.g. Knobe, 2003). Each of these, however, has been disputed by defenders of traditional armchair conceptual analysis (e.g. Fumerton, 1999, Wheatherson, 2003, Kauppinen, 2007), and none has been entirely successful in convincing conceptual analysts to abandon their armchairs. This is because each relies on premises that those staunchly committed to the a priori nature of conceptual analysis will find controversial. In this paper, I provide a new line of argument for the conclusion that conceptual analysis is not an armchair project. My argument does not start from disputed claims about language, concepts, or our minds, but rather from uncontroversial facts about the ordinary practice of conceptual analysis. I argue that these facts imply that conceptual analysis is not purely a priori. Instead, the ordinary, traditional practice of conceptual analysis requires holding empirical views. What s more, there is a specific set of empirical claims endorsed (possibly tacitly) by mainstream conceptual analysts, which I will argue are unwarranted and dubious. 1. Some Theoretical Beliefs Underlying Conceptual Analysis One of the most commonly employed tools of conceptual analysis is the thought experiment or intuition pump: subjects are presented with a specific situation (described in varying levels of detail), and asked whether or not a given concept intuitively applies in that situation (in many cases, the subject whose intuitions are studied and the philosophy studying those intuitions are one and the same; this makes no difference for any of the arguments in this paper). By observing subjects intuitions about the application or non-application of concepts to various situations, we take ourselves to be gathering data on the conditions that govern the application of the concept. 1 This is a fairly difficult and inefficient process, however. One has to come up with a number of clever thought experiments and then synthesize the data produced by them, neither of which is easy, and there is always the concern that one has overlooked an important type of case when pumping intuitions, and thus produced an incomplete or inaccurate analysis of a concept. The great number of papers giving intuitively based counterexamples to proposed analyses testifies to the difficulty of getting things right. Why do we employ such a difficult and inefficient process rather than one that seems 1 Here, and for the rest of this paper, I am only talking about the analysis of concepts that are nonstipulative, since that is what most seem to mean by conceptual analysis, and since the analysis of concepts created by stipulation works in a very different way than ordinary conceptual analysis. Thanks to Michael Tooley for pointing this out.

2 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 2 much simpler and more efficient one: simply asking people the conditions under which applying a given concept is appropriate? The only reason for this could be that we take analysis via intuition pumping to be generally more accurate than analysis via directly asking people how they apply concepts. Why is this? The reason is obvious: we don t think that concepts are entirely transparent to their possessors. That is, we do not think that a person who is in possession of a concept can always become directly and consciously aware of the criteria they use to determine when the concept should be applied, and further, we think that most people are not aware of these criteria in most cases. (By directly aware I mean aware due to introspection, rather than due to something like conceptual analysis.) What s more, we also do not think that the workings of the mental processes people use to determine how to apply concepts are entirely transparent, since if we did, we could just ask people to tell us about those mental processes and thereby come up with the criteria they use (via those processes) to determine when a concept should be applied. The significance of the widespread acceptance of the non-transparency of our concepts and concept producing mental processes will be more apparent in a moment, but for now let s put it to the side. Think about how we do conceptual analysis once we ve determined what situations a concept intuitively applies to. In order to analyze a concept, we look for correlations between the application of a concept and the presence or absence of various sorts of stuff in intuition pumps and thought experiments. If a concept is applied in the absence of a given sort of thing, we say that the presence of that thing is not a necessary condition for application of the concept; for example, since subjects sometimes say someone is responsible for doing something even in situations where that person could not have done otherwise (Frankfurt, 1969), we might conclude that be able to do otherwise is not a necessary condition for application of the concept RESPONSIBLE. On the other hand, if subtracting some stuff from a case results in the concept not being applied when it had been before, we say that that stuff is necessary for concept application. Analyzing concepts in this manner requires holding some beliefs about what I ll call intuition producing processes, although these beliefs can be and often are held only tacitly. I will be using the term intuition producing processes frequently, so I ll give a definition here and highlight it for later reference: intuition producing processes: the mental processes that produce intuitions about concept application, among which are those that take in and process data presented in thought experiments. Analyzing concepts based on correlations between intuitions and the presence or absence of things in thought experiments requires holding beliefs about what information our intuition producing processes are sensitive to, and the forms in which that information can be presented in so as to play a role in the generation of our intuitions. For example, the inference from the fact that In cases in which people are told that X is not present, they intuit that concept C does not apply, to the conclusion X is a necessary condition for application of concept C, (if rational) requires believing that subjects intuition producing processes took in the information that X was not present in the cases presented.

3 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 3 To illustrate everything I have just said, consider the work for which Edmund Gettier is most famous. Prior to Gettier, so history tells us, philosophers generally accepted the view that knowledge was justified true belief. Gettier developed thought experiments that showed that this could not be the correct analysis of our concept; the thought experiment involved people who were described so as to have justified, true beliefs, but whose beliefs did not intuitively count as knowledge. Since the introduction of Gettier cases into the debate on knowledge, there has been a great deal of controversy about what analysis of knowledge is immune to Gettier cases. This bit of history shows several things. First, it shows that the concept KNOWLEDGE is not fully transparent, since prior to Gettier philosophers who had done quite a bit of reflection on the concept accepted the view that knowledge was justified true belief even though (so the story goes) it actually is and was not. Second, the history of Gettier cases shows that the processes that produce intuitions about Gettier cases are not transparent. If they were, we would all know why it is that we have the intuition that Gettier cases are not cases of knowledge, yet we do not; there are a number of competing claims about the matter, with only the vague it s got something to do with luck being widely agreed on. Further, if our intuition producing process were transparent, we should be able to reflect on how our intuitions about Gettier cases were produced and figure out how to avoid whatever it is that causes these intuitions, and the analysis of KNOWLEDGE would be much easier than it is. Finally, the use of Gettier cases shows that conceptual analysts accept, at least tacitly, some claims about our intuition producing processes; specifically, that they attend to the facts presented in thought experiments. If we thought that they did not if we thought, for example, they just ignored the point that such and such a person s belief is justified then Gettier cases would not be taken to be counter-examples to the justified true belief analysis of KNOWLEDGE. So, the ordinary practice of conceptual analysis requires holding beliefs about our intuition producing processes, and conceptual analysts believe that the mental processes that produce judgments about concept application (that is, intuition producing processes) are not entirely transparent. Putting these together, we get the following: conceptual analysts base their practice on beliefs (about intuition producing processes) for which they cannot acquire evidence by introspection or any other direct method. Here s the rub: if the conclusions of conceptual analysts are justified, then the beliefs that are the foundation for their practice ought to be justified as well. But the non-transparency of our intuition producing processes puts limits on how these beliefs can be justified. In the next section, I will argue that, given the non-transparency of our intuition producing processes, beliefs about them (of the sort that conceptual analysis must involve) ought to be strongly empirically informed. In other words, one cannot do conceptual analysis without taking some sort of stand on empirical questions. This is only appropriate to do so if one s stand is founded on empirical research (either one s own or that of others). If this is true, it means that conceptual analysis has never been a discipline that is appropriate to practice entirely from the armchair. 2. Conceptual Analysis is Founded on Empirical Claims In the previous section we saw that doing conceptual analysis requires holding beliefs (or theories) about how the processes that produce intuitions about concept application work. Let s call such theories theories of intuition producing processes. My

4 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 4 claim in this section is that any theory of intuition producing processes is an empirical theory and one holding it should do so based on empirical research. If a theory is not based on empirical research, and it is based on anything, then it must be based on introspection or a priori theorizing (or some combination of these). Introspection cannot be the sole basis for investigating intuition producing processes, since the processes that produce conceptual intuitions are not entirely transparent. A priori theorizing about intuition producing processes should also not be the sole basis for such an investigation, since it will only generate limited results; how limited these results are depends on the data we have to start with. If we start our theorizing armed only with the knowledge that we have intuitions about concept application that are based in some way on intuition pumps, a priori theorizing will give us a vast range of possible theories of what information in intuitions pumps is used and how it is used, many of which will conflict. For example, it is logically possible that none of the information given in intuitions pumps is used (and these intuitions are wholly random), or that 10% is used (determined randomly), or all is used on Tuesdays but none on Sundays, and so forth. Of course, we might eliminate some of these theories by combining a priori theorizing with introspection; this will allow us to eliminate those theories that make claims that conflict with our experience of intuitions. This will still only get us so far, since there is a vast range of theories that can explain the phenomenology of our intuitions. So to generate a justified theory of intuition producing processes, we need to eliminate more of these contenders, which requires more information about intuitions, both ours and those of others. Given enough well generated data, both about ourselves and others, we might be able to narrow our set of possible theories to a manageable range that only conflict in rare cases; we might thus get something good enough for our purposes. But at this point we ve left a priori theorizing behind, since once a theory is based on a large body of data gathered through experience (as this must be) it is disingenuous to call it a priori. So, the only appropriate way of picking a theory of intuition producing processes it to look to empirical research; since conceptual analysis requires endorsing some theory of intuition producing processes, it should involve consideration of empirical research. Judging from the literature on conceptual analysis, such consideration is relatively rare; there are few citations of psychological research on our intuition producing processes relative to the number of papers out there doing conceptual analysis. In the remainder of this paper, I will show why this should worry conceptual analysts. 3. The Standard View of Intuition Production Conceptual analysis requires acceptance (tacit or otherwise) of a theory of intuition producing processes, and such a theory ought to be founded on empirical research. Such research is not very commonly cited in papers doing conceptual analysis (although I m certainly not saying that it is never cited, or never considered, by conceptual analysts). Is this really much of a concern? Should this cast doubt on the results of ordinary conceptual analysis? Human beings regularly utilize investigative practices that require (tacit) acceptance of empirical claims about our mental processes (e.g. perceptual processes, ordinary cognition, memory, and so forth), and relatively few of us have done much empirical research into the truth of those claims. Yet most people still hold largely justified beliefs as a result of those investigative practices, and, more

5 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 5 importantly, still come to hold mostly true beliefs as well. So, while I might have so far shown that we would be more intellectually virtuous as philosophers if our theories of intuition producing processes were based on empirical research, I have not yet shown that we actually need to change the way we do conceptual analysis, or that a truly empirically based theory of intuition producing processes will tell us anything particularly exciting. However, I think we have good reasons to be worried about the theories of intuition producing processes that are held by mainstream conceptual analysts, and that looking to empirical research to base such a theory of intuition producing processes will give us surprising results and have important consequences for conceptual analysis. To argue for this, I will criticize what I will call the standard view of intuition production or the standard view, which is the view that that is at least tacitly held by the mainstream of philosophers doing conceptual analysis. I won t lay out this view in an exhaustive manner, but will instead focus on several core aspects of it. By showing that these aspects of the standard view are dubious, I will show that we have reason to be doubtful about the results of standard conceptual analysis, and have reason to look for a more solid foundation for a theory of intuition producing processes. To see what the standard view claims, let s consider a few examples of conceptual analysis via intuition pumping. When a subject is told Norman s ESP is reliable, but Norman does not realize that he has ESP, and the subject tells us that beliefs that are the result of Norman s ESP are not justified, the conclusion that is drawn is that production by a reliable process is not sufficient for application of the concept JUSTIFIED. When a subject is told that Jones decided to do something, but had he not decided to Black would have caused him to do it anyway (Frankfurt, 1969), and responds that Jones is responsible for his actions, the conclusion that is drawn is that the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition for application of the concept RESPONSIBLE. To return to a point I made earlier in this paper, these conclusions, and the countless others like them that philosophers draw in paper after paper, only make sense if we take our respondents to have actually used the information given to them; if, for example, they paid no attention to the stipulation that Norman s ESP is reliable, or that Black would cause Jones to do what he anyway did, then these conclusions would not follow. Standardly, the default assumption when doing conceptual analysis is that subjects reporting their intuitions employ all the information they are presented with when we pump their intuitions, or at least all of it that is relevant to application of the concept in question. Further, we assume that they apply only the facts given them (or what follows naturally from those facts) when generating intuitions. Of course this is not taken as an incontrovertible fact; one often attempts to see intuitions explained away based on claims that subjects are ignoring aspects of specific thought experiments, or importing in information that was not given to them. But the burden of proof is taken to be on those who want to explain away intuitions in this way to show that this is happening; the burden is not seen to lie on those using thought experiments to establish that their subjects actually take in all and only the information given to them. That is, it is taken as legitimate to assume that subjects use all and only the relevant information presented to them in thought experiments. This gives us a rough idea of some of the core

6 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 6 claims of the standard view of intuition production, but to really spell out these claims I need to introduce some concepts and vocabulary Some vocabulary Intuition pumps explicitly contain a number of pieces of information about some (hypothetical) situation. Further, there will be a number of facts about the situation deducible in a straightforward fashion from this information. For example, if a thought experiment explicitly states that Henry is looking at a barn, then the thought experiment is implicitly saying that Henry is looking at a building, at a solid object, and so forth. Let s call these facts obvious facts and all other things that one might believe about a thought experiment non-obvious facts. obvious fact: facts about a (hypothetical) situation that are either explicitly presented (e.g. stated in an intuition pump) or are easily deducible from those facts. non-obvious fact: anything that might be believed about a given (hypothetical) situation other than obvious facts about it. For the second term, facts is in quotes because among non-obvious facts are claims about a situation that contradict the obvious facts. If a thought experiment explicitly states that Henry is looking at a barn, one non-obvious fact is that he is looking at a red barn (this is non-obvious because it is neither stated nor deducible from what is stated), and another non-obvious fact would be that he is looking at a thing made of liquid (this is non-obvious because it cannot be true given the obvious facts). When our intuition producing processes produce an intuition in reaction to some thought experiment, some of the information presented in that thought experiment some of the obvious facts plays a role in the production of that intuition, and (typically) some does not. So if I am told that Henry is looking at a barn that is 30 tall, the height of the barn likely plays no role in my intuition that Henry knows he is looking at a barn. Obvious facts might not play a role in the generation of an intuition for a number of reasons, two of which interest me. One reason is that some obvious facts are not relevant to the concepts one has the intuition about, as the height of that barn Henry looks at is not relevant to the application of the concept KNOWS. Obvious facts might not play a role in the generation of intuitions for another reason, however. Imagine that one is told that Henry is looking at une grange (which means barn in French), but that one speaks no French. In this case, the information that Henry is looking at a barn can play no role in any intuition one has about this case, whether or not it is relevant to the concepts one ends up deploying, because the subject s mind cannot use that information in the form it 2 To reiterate a point I made earlier, although I am talking about analyzing concepts via the intuitions of subjects, my arguments still apply if the subject is oneself. One might think they do not, on the view that we can be more certain of what information informs our own intuitions through introspection. However, since conceptual analysts who use thought experiments on themselves (almost all of them) take their own intuition producing processes are non-transparent (otherwise their use of thought experiments is hard to explain), and they cannot determine what information their intuitions were based on via introspection.

7 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 7 is presented. Whatever intuitions the non-french speaker has about Henry s knowledge of barns in this case tell us nothing about our concept KNOWLEDGE. So, information in thought experiments might not affect intuitions about a given concept because that information is not relevant, or because that information is not usable by one s intuition producing processes (at least, not in the way it is presented). So we can make a distinction between facts I will call accessible and those that are inaccessible: accessible: able to play a role in production of intuitions about a given concept if relevant to the application of that concept. If an obvious fact is inaccessible, then it will not play a role in the production of intuitions about a given concept whether or not it is relevant to the application of that concept. Not every accessible obvious fact is actually used when we produce intuitions; for example, the fact that Norman is named Norman might be accessible but not affect our intuitions about the justification of his beliefs. Nor does this definition say that if a fact does play a role in producing intuitions, it is relevant to that concept, because facts may be accessible but misused for one reason or another, although the use of a fact does give evidence that it is relevant. What facts are accessible and inaccessible can vary from thought experiment to thought experiment, since in principle a given fact could be accessible in one thought experiment and not another, and it also depends on how that fact is presented: an obvious fact may be accessible if presented in one language but not in another, for example. This distinction raises a question: how can we tell accessible but irrelevant facts from inaccessible ones, since neither sort plays a role in the application of a given concept? If a fact (when presented one way) does play a role in determining application of a concept, then that fact is definitely accessible as presented. This is also prima facie evidence that it is relevant to application of that concept, although facts can be misused to some extent in making judgments about the applicability of concepts, so this evidence can be defeated. 3 If that same fact, when presented another way, plays no role in the application of a concept, then we should generally conclude that it is inaccessible when presented that way, since we have good reason to think it is relevant. These conclusions can be contested, but they give a good rule of thumb for determining whether facts that play no role in producing a given intuition are relevant to the application of the concepts that intuition is about or not. There will also be cases where a fact simply must be relevant to application of a given concept. For example, we know that the fact that something is an animal is relevant to determining whether or not the concept CAT applies to it. So if that fact did not play a role in application of that concept in some situation, then that fact was inaccessible as presented. 3 It might seem that I m contradicting myself here. One of the main points of this paper is that we shouldn t be quick to draw conclusions about concepts based on reactions to thought experiments, because we don t know what facts are used to generate those reactions. However, I m also claiming that the use of a fact is prima facie evidence that it is relevant to concept application. This might look contradictory at first but it isn t; my worry is that we often can t tell what facts are used to generate intuitions we certainly can t tell just by looking at thought experiments and intuitions. But if we can tell what facts are used, then we can draw conclusions about relevance.

8 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? Two theses of the standard view Now that we have some vocabulary, let s lay out the aspects of the standard view of intuition production that I m interested in contesting. Standardly, it is assumed that when a person has an intuition about a thought experiment, their intuition is based just on the situation described in the thought experiment, and that any facts about that situation that played no role in the production of that intuition did not play a role because they were irrelevant to application of the concepts that intuition was about (rather than being overlooked). These assumptions can be disputed, but the burden of proof is taken to be on those who wish to dispute it. From this we can derive the following two theses of the standard view: Accessibility thesis: the ratio of inaccessible to accessible obvious facts is quite low (much less than 1:1), nor are obvious facts systematically inaccessible. Non-non-obviousness thesis: The frequency with which non-obvious facts play a role in production of intuitions is very low, and does not occur in a systematic manner. How do I get these theses from the facts about normal philosophical practice and views of burden of proof I ve just cited? The ordinary practice of conceptual analysis involves presenting subjects with various thought experiments and observing the resulting intuitions. Each thought experiment mentions or implies the presence or absence of a number of factors the obvious facts. If subjects apply a concept in the absence (from the obvious facts) of a certain factor we are interested in, the normal conclusion is that that factor is not necessary for application of that concept. However, if they are unwilling to apply a concept when a certain factor is absent (from the obvious facts), we have evidence that that factor is necessary. Likewise, if the presence of one factor by itself is correlated with application of a concept, we might conclude that that factor is sufficient for application of the concept. All of these conclusions require the assumption that obvious facts are accessible, and that non-obvious facts are not playing a role in the production of our intuitions. If obvious facts are often inaccessible, then drawing conclusions about concepts based on correlations between obvious facts and concept application is unjustified, since these obvious facts are often not able to play a role in generating intuitions about the concept. Likewise, if non-obvious facts often play a role in generation of intuitions, then we have a number of possibly confounding variables that could explain our intuitions, again undermining conclusions based on correlations between obvious facts and concept application. For example, in BonJour s Norman case, if we took the stipulation that Norman s ESP is reliable to be inaccessible, then we would not be justified in concluding from the intuition that Norman s beliefs are unjustified that being reliably formed is not sufficient for a belief s being justified. Now, of course everyone who does conceptual analysis accepts that sometimes obvious facts are inaccessible and that non-obvious facts do account for some intuitions, and so accepts that the natural conclusions one draws from intuitions can be disputed on these grounds. But the burden of proof is taken to be on those who wish to dispute an analysis on these grounds to give evidence of inaccessibility or use of non-

9 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 9 obvious facts, and evidence is rarely if ever given to support the initial assumptions of accessibility or non-use of non-obvious facts. This shows that mainstream conceptual analysts endorse the accessibility and non-non obviousness theses. If one believed that obvious facts were very frequently inaccessible let s say they were inaccessible 50% of the time one would be expected to provide evidence that the obvious facts in one s thought experiment were accessible before drawing conclusions about concepts based on (claimed) reactions to those obvious facts. Even if one thought that obvious facts were accessible quite frequently say 70% of the time given the high stakes in philosophy and the difference ignoring one fact could make, we would still expect those who want to do conceptual analysis in the way I have described to present evidence that the obvious facts in their thought experiments were accessible. Likewise, if we thought there were systematic ways in which obvious facts were inaccessible, before one could draw a conclusion about a concept based on (claimed) reactions to obvious facts, we would expect them to present evidence that the conditions in which facts were likely to be inaccessible did not obtain in their thought experiment. Since the burden of proof is not taken to be on those who do conceptual analysis in the natural way I have described, but rather on those who wish to argue that some obvious fact is inaccessible, it must be that obvious facts are taken to inaccessible only very rarely, and not systematically. This entails the accessibility thesis. A parallel argument about the use of non-obvious facts shows why mainstream analysts must accept the non-non obviousness thesis. So we see that those who practice conceptual analysis in a certain way are at least tacitly endorsing two theses about our intuition producing processes. Why do I claim that this is the standard view among conceptual analysts? Simply put, because the practice I have just described is quite common. To support this claim, I will consider just a narrow range of research. However, in this range I include research by so-called experimental philosophers. Data from experimental philosophers is, I think, particularly telling on this point because experimental philosophers are supposed to be particularly sensitive to concerns about the workings of the mind and how they affect intuitions. If experimental philosophers assume the accessibility and non-non-obviousness theses, overlooking possible mental foibles, it is good evidence that non-experimental philosophers largely do as well. Let s first consider the famous research on cultural differences in epistemic intuitions put forth by Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (2001). They consider intuitions about versions of a number of famous thought experiments from epistemology. One aspect of their research is the suggestion that different cultures are differently sensitive to communal versus individualist facts when generating epistemic intuitions. They support this claim by adding obvious facts of an either communal or individualistic nature to their thought experiments, and track the differences in intuitions generated. At no point do they argue or provide any evidence for the claim that these facts are accessible, or that the differences they see from thought experiment to thought experiment are not due to recruitment of different non-obvious facts in different versions of the thought experiment. 4 This indicates that they take the burden of proof to be on those who dispute this claim, rather than on themselves to support it. Further, the originators of the thought experiments they consider e.g. Edmund Gettier and Keith 4 See Talbot (forthcoming) for more on the sorts of non-obvious facts subjects might be drawing upon in these cases.

10 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 10 Lehrer draw conclusions from these thought experiments without providing evidence that the obvious facts in their thought experiments were accessible or that non-obvious facts were not used, indicating that they also endorse the standard view. We see something similar in experimental research by Nahmias et al (2006) on intuitions about compatibilism. Nahmias et al presented subjects with thought experiments describing situations in which determinism was true, and then asked subjects about the freeness of specific actions described in their cases. Nahmias et al do not completely ignore the possibility of obvious facts being inaccessible: they admit that One might object that in the [first experiment], by trying to avoid a question-begging description of determinism, we did not make the deterministic nature of the scenario salient enough to the participants. (Nahmias, et al, 2006, p.569) However, their method of addressing this possibility is to employ another thought experiment that they think more explicitly presents the obvious fact that determinism is true, and they explicitly take the burden of proof to now be on those who question the accessibility of this obvious fact in this experiment: We suggest that in the absence of further studies contradicting our results or alternative explanations of them these studies suggest that ordinary people s pre-theoretical intuitions about free will and responsibility do not support incompatibilism. (Ibid, p. 570) This looks like acceptance of the standard view. In his famous research on the folk concept INTENTIONAL, Joshua Knobe seems to embrace the standard view as well. His research is on the relationship between moral blameworthiness and intentionality; he argues that there is some tie between the moral status of an action and how we ascribe intentionality. I will give just one example to illustrate how he adopts the standard view. A possible objection to Knobe s view that he considers (the details of why this is an objection are irrelevant for my purposes) is that his subjects may first attribute blame and then infer from that that the act must have been intentional, due to a commitment to the theory that only intentional acts can be blameworthy. To determine if this is occurring, Knobe first presents his subjects with a case where a drunk driver hits a car, an act that we expect is both blameworthy and unintentional. Then he presents his normal thought experiments. The idea is that, if subjects responses are driven by the sort of belief about the connection between intentionality and blame that his opponents claim, then their reactions should change after being given the drunk driver case: Once they see that a behavior can be unintentional even if it is blameworthy, they should be willing to say that the immoral/no-skill behavior, though highly blameworthy, is nonetheless unintentional. (Knobe, 2003, p.317) But of course this is only plausible if we expect that judgments about the drunk driver case are accessible when subjects generate intuitions about the second case; since Knobe does not give any reason to think this is the case, it seems that he accepts the standard view as well, at least tacitly. The fact that this range of philosophers, including a number of prominent experimental philosophers, tacitly endorses the accessibility and non-non obviousness theses gives us good evidence that what I call the standard view of intuition production is in fact widely held.

11 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? Against the Standard View There are two points I would like to make about the standard view: first, our acceptance of it is unwarranted, and second, it is quite dubious. These give rise to an urgent need for us to look to empirical science either for support for it or for a replacement. To make both points, I will bring up a number of pieces of evidence that go against the standard view, evidence that obvious facts are often inaccessible, that nonobvious facts often play a role in the production of intuitions, and evidence that we philosophers are not (absent some specialized knowledge) particularly good judges of when these are likely to occur. I will appeal to two types of evidence. The first type will consist of commonplace examples that we should all have encountered on a regular basis. This will support the claim that acceptance of the standard view is unwarranted, since it will indicate that we currently possess evidence that the standard view is dubious. The second type of evidence will be derived from psychological research, to suggest the degree to which the standard view is false, and the urgency with which we need an empirically supported theory to replace it. I find that many philosophers are dubious about the relevance of empirical research generally, and the specific research I cite, to philosophical intuitions. I hope that I have addressed the first concern adequately so far, so let me address the second. None of the research I will cite comes from conceptual analysis. This should not be surprising, however: my claim is that conceptual analysis accepts the standard view, so we should not expect conceptual analysts to produce research undermining it, and psychologists typically do not engage in philosophical conceptual analysis. However, the research I am citing is still relevant to the standard view because it illustrates the workings of our intuition producing processes. Now, one might claim that different processes produce the intuitions we rely on for conceptual analysis from those that produce the sort of intuitions psychologists study, and thus that the psychological research I cite tells us nothing about how philosophical intuitions are generated. 5 That might turn out to be true, but it is an empirical claim that must be empirically supported. 6 In the absence of empirical support for this claim, we ought to take the simpler view that intuitions generally are formed by the same sorts of processes, given their similarities. Those who argue that philosophical intuitions are different in kind from those psychologists have studied have tried to point out differences between the types (other than their subject matter), with the idea that such different intuitions must be produced differently. I do not have the space to explore this argument in detail, but I will briefly consider the alleged difference between intuitions used by philosophers and studied by psychologists that, in my experience, is most compelling. The claimed difference is that philosophical intuitions are, in one form or another, about modality, and those that psychologists study are not (Bealer, 1998, Pust, 2000). 7 This cannot be a claim about the content of intuitions as they are experienced, since (as Pust, 2000 admits) a great many commonly used philosophical intuitions those 5 For an argument along these lines, see Bealer, See Talbot (manuscript) for an argument that empirical evidence does not in fact support the claim that different sorts of intuitions are generated by different processes, as well as a more detailed exploration of the differences between philosophical and ordinary intuitions claimed by philosophers. 7 Another cited difference is the great stability of philosophical intuitions, but as we ll see below, this is shared by many ordinary intuitions.

12 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 12 about specific cases typically not have modal claims as their content; e.g. my intuition about a Gettier case is just that So and so does not know such and such. However, it might be claimed that philosophical intuitions always are associated in some way with modal claims they entail modal claims, or they are associated with dispositions to make modal claims. But this is true about a great many intuitions studied by psychologists as well: for example, those about actual things (almost all of them) will have associated modal intuitions about possibility, and those about relationships between categories (widely studied by psychologists) will have associated modal intuitions about necessity. So this does not establish a difference in kind between the intuitions used by conceptual analysts and those studied by psychologists (and cited by me as evidence against the standard view). The other, less compelling, differences cited in the literature fail to establish such a difference as well if one is sufficiently familiar with what psychologists study. Before I go on to make my argument against the standard view, let me make clear what I am not arguing. I am not making any argument about the reliability of our intuitions, or about the role they should play in conceptual analysis. Everything I say here is perfectly compatible with the claim that our intuitions are entirely reliable evidence about our concepts, and should continue to play a vital role in conceptual analysis. My conclusion is, instead, that we should be doubtful of our current ability to determine what it is that our intuitions tell us about our concepts they may be great evidence, but we do not currently know what for Against the accessibility thesis Every philosopher can think of cases in which their intuitions contradict something their conscious mind knows, indicating that the mental processes that produced them ignored available data. Further, these intuitions will often persist even when one concentrates on the conscious belief or the evidence that underlies that conscious belief, and thus makes that belief or that evidence obvious. Finally, we can all think of cases where these beliefs are or must be relevant to application of the concepts these intuitions are about, thus showing that obvious facts are sometimes inaccessible. This fact about intuitions is so central to our experience of them that George Bealer, a prominent advocate of the use of intuitions in philosophy, works it into his definition of intuition and also uses it as part of the basis for his argument that intuitions are not beliefs (Bealer, 1998). Here are some specific and common examples of this. A number of people (myself included) have told me that they continue to have the intuition that there are more integers than even numbers despite knowing (and concentrating on) the proof that this is false. 9 In a somewhat similar vein, there are a number of counter-intuitive facts about probability, intuitions about which persist even when one considers the proof that those intuitions are incorrect. For example, I find it wildly counter-intuitive that, given a group 8 A helpful analogy might be the following: say Frank thinks the water temperature gauge on his dashboard is in fact the fuel gauge, or imagine that Frank thinks the gauge is the water temperature one but that the left side of the gauge is the hottest position (rather than the coolest). Pointing out that Frank is (or might be) wrong about what the gauge does, or how to read the gauge, does not impugn the reliability of the gauge; rather, it just says that Frank should learn what the gauge in fact tells him before trying to use it. 9 This might not be a good example of the inaccessibility of hidden facts, though, if one thinks that our ordinary concept of LARGER does not map perfectly on how the term larger is used in math.

13 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 13 of 23 people, the odds that two of them share a birthday are better than even, even though I am well aware of the proof that this is true. I also find the base-rate fallacy intuitively compelling (and I am not alone in this) despite knowing that it is a fallacy. 10 Thus, we have good evidence here that obvious facts are inaccessible at times. Outside of philosophy, we have all experienced cases where mistaken first impressions persist on an intuitive level despite our conscious knowledge that they were in fact mistaken; if someone comes off badly the first time we meet them, we will often have negative intuitive reactions to them down the road, even if we learn that their initial bad impression was due to some fact of the situation rather than about them. This is so common that we have platitudes about it. We can of course control our behavior in such situations, but these intuitions generally persist for quite a while even when the fact that they are unsupported is obvious. This information is relevant to application of the concepts in question, since if we had it when first meeting this person we would have different intuitions about them. Thus, this is a case where obvious facts are inaccessible. Research psychology has produced a large body of evidence that obvious facts are often inaccessible. I will consider only a few. Studies have demonstrated the persistence of intuitive judgments despite later information that they are false, similar to our ordinary experience of lasting first impressions. Subjects were given information about two (hypothetical) people, one a criminal and one the lawyer prosecuting them (Wilson, et al, 2000). Later, they were told that the dossiers had been mixed up, and the person they were told was the lawyer was the criminal, and vice versa. Their intuitive reactions to these people differed from the reactions of those who were initially given the information in a non-mixed up way. This indicates first that the information about who was who was relevant to application of the concepts being tested, and that some of the information (that presented later) was inaccessible. Related findings are seen in the literature on unconscious stereotypes: subjects who have stereotypes that influence their intuitive thoughts and actions generally continue to have these stereotypes despite coming to consciously hold beliefs that contradict these stereotypes and that are based on good evidence (for an overview see Wilson, et al, 2000). Another example comes from research on decision-making; while this was not a study of conceptual intuitions directly, it sheds light on them by shedding light on our unconscious cognitive processes more generally. In one study (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994), subjects were given the opportunity to draw a single jellybean from one of two bowls. They were told that if they drew a red one, they would be paid, and they were told the odds of drawing a red bean for each bowl. The bowl with lower odds of winning also clearly contained more red jellybeans than the other bowl, although the proportion of red beans to other beans was lower. Over 60% of the subjects made at least some choices from the bowl with lower odds; many even chose from this bowl when the odds of winning from it were only half of what they were from the other bowl. Furthermore, even subjects who always made the correct choice sometimes reported feeling tempted by 10 In both of these cases, it would be very surprising for the ordinary concept of PROBABLE to be so different from the mathematical notion of probability that these intuitions are actually true. In addition, even if the ordinary concept PROBABLE differs significantly in extension from the mathematical term probable, in both of these cases my intuitive estimations of probability are wildly divergent from actual probability; if my ordinary notion has anything to do with how likely something is to occur, these intuitions are incorrect.

14 The End of the Armchair for Conceptual Analysis? 14 the other bowl. This indicates that the non-optimal choices were to a significant degree due to unconscious processes rather than conscious beliefs about decision-making, since those subjects who could consciously reason to the correct conclusions still felt the pull of the wrong choice. Facts about the actual odds are clearly relevant to application of the concepts in question (concepts having to do with what would be a better choice), and were inaccessible to a large body of subjects. These are just a few of these results; for more, one can look at findings about the fundamental attribution error (Gilbert, 2002), where subjects intuitive judgments about character do not employ relevant facts about the situations people are observed in, or the conjunction fallacy in which subjects made intuitive probability judgments that contradicted what they knew about probability, and which persisted (on the intuitive level) even when that conflict was made salient (Tversky & Kahneman, 2002). More generally, one can look to psychological research on associative thinking; this indicates that our intuitive judgments are largely based on temporal and similarity relationships (Sloman, 1996, p.4) and information that is presented so as to not properly exemplify such relationships will not be used to make intuitive judgments. Related research abounds, but this should be enough to show that the accessibility thesis is dubious Against the non-non-obviousness thesis Our intuition producing processes also draw upon non-obvious facts when producing intuitions. We have all likely experienced the phenomena of seeing what we want (or expect) in the world around us, even when the world does not in fact conform to our desires or expectations, and when those who lack those desires or expectations do not draw the conclusions we do. We should typically attribute this to intuitive (and thus unconscious) processes, since people who are perfectly sincere and well intentioned can still experience this phenomenon. Like the persistence of first impressions, this experience is so common that it is platitudinous. Psychological studies on what is called hidden covariation detection experimentally demonstrate that non-obvious facts play a role in generating intuitions, and also give some insight into the conditions under which this is likely to occur. In these studies, subjects learn patterns without being aware of either the patterns or the fact that they are learning anything (see Lewicki, 1986, Lewicki, et al, 1987, Lewicki, et al, 1994). These patterns involve correlations between two stimuli or aspects of the same stimulus, which subjects learn through repeated exposure. For example, in several studies subjects were shown (faked) brain scans and told how intelligent each person scanned was; their intelligence was correlated with certain subtle differences between the scans. Subjects responses to stimuli that followed the pattern became faster and more accurate over time, yet at the end of these studies, subjects reported that the data they had been given evidenced no pattern and that they had learned nothing. 11 In several of these studies (Hill, et al, 1989, Lewicki, et al, 1989), once the subjects had learned the correlations, they were given data in which one correlated item was present but not the other. Subjects reacted to this data as if the second correlated item was present: for example, subjects who were trained to spot the position of a number based on a certain 11 Subjects given the same data and told that there was a pattern could not find it; this was true of subjects paid to find the pattern (Lewicki, et al, 1987), and of subjects who were trained experimental psychologists (Lewicki, et al, 1988).