Philosophical Psychology: To Cite This Article: Joachim Horvath (2010) : How (Not) To React To Experimental Philosophy

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How (not) to react to experimental

philosophy
Joachim Horvath
Version of record first published: 16 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Joachim Horvath (2010): How (not) to react to experimental philosophy,
Philosophical Psychology, 23:4, 447-480
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Philosophical Psychology
Vol. 23, No. 4, August 2010, 447480
How (not) to react to experimental

philosophy
Joachim Horvath
Downloaded by [University of Guelph] at 04:49 13 September 2012
In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based

armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a
restrictionist stripe, which I will call the master argument. I will then discuss a number
of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on
its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next,
I will consider two more promising objections, the grounding objection and the expertise
objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this
background, I will then suggest what I call conservative restrictionism as the most
reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of
the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism.
Keywords: Conceptual Differences; Epistemic Self-Defeat; Epistemology; Expertise;
Experimental Philosophy; Metaphilosophy; Philosophical Methodology
1. Introduction
In traditional armchair philosophy, thought experiments like the famous Gettier
cases (Gettier, 1963) often play a crucial argumentative role. The standard and
usually tacit methodological assumption here is that we have the intuitive ability to
competently evaluate these cases as instances of justified true belief that nevertheless
fail to be knowledge. Experimental philosophers, especially those referred to as
experimental restrictionists,1 are out to challenge this kind of assumption with
empirical findings that suggest a significant variation of our intuitions about Gettier
cases, and other such hypothetical cases, with the cultural or socio-economic
background of the tested subjects (Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich, 2001), with the order
in which a number of different cases are presented (Swain, Alexander, & Weinberg,
2008), or with the affective content of the relevant case descriptions (cf., Nichols &
Knobe, 2007).
Joachim Horvath is Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Cologne, Germany.
Correspondence to: Joachim Horvath, Philosophisches Seminar, Universitat zu Koln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz,
50923 Koln, Germany. Email: joachim.horvath@uni-koeln.de
ISSN 0951-5089 (print)/ISSN 1465-394X (online)/10/040447-34 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2010.505878
448 J. Horvath
In this paper, I am going to reconstruct what I regard as the most straightforward
argument against intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been advanced by
experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will refer to as the master
argument. I will then discuss some popular armchair philosophers objections to this
argument and argue that they either fail to cast sufficient doubt on its first, empirical
premise or at least do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will
consider two more promising objections to the second, epistemic premise of the
master argument, namely the grounding objection and the expertise objection.
Against this background, I will suggest what I call conservative restrictionism as the
most reasonable default reaction to the challenge from experimental philosophy,
which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological
conservativism.
2. The Master Argument against Intuition-Based Armchair Philosophy

Sophisticated proponents of experimental restrictionism have more and more refined
their challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy over the last few years
(cf., Alexander & Weinberg, 2007; Weinberg, 2007). As of now, they typically
formulate their charge against the philosophical use of intuitions in something like
the following way:
Intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments are sensitive to factors
irrelevant to the content of the thought-experiments themselves. . . . Standard
philosophical practice had not allowed that the facts about what knowledge
(or meaning, or responsibility) is should depend on such factors. (Alexander &
Weinberg, 2007, pp. 6566)
This way of putting the challenge suggests a rather simple and straightforward
argument against intuition-based philosophy, which I will call the master argument:
(1) Intuitions about hypothetical cases vary with irrelevant factors.
(2) If intuitions about hypothetical cases vary with irrelevant factors, then they
are not epistemically trustworthy.
(C) Intuitions about hypothetical cases are not epistemically trustworthy.
Premise (1) of the master argument is mainly supported by experimental results of

the above cited kind, which suggest that intuitions about hypothetical cases vary with
irrelevant factors such as the social and cultural background of the subjects, the order
of the presented cases, or the affective content of the relevant case descriptions.
Experimental restrictionists need to assume, of course, that these factors are actually
irrelevant to the subject matter of philosophical thought experiments. But this is
typically granted by traditional philosophers, who otherwise would have to accept
some rather uneasy form of philosophical relativism, e.g., one that makes the nature
of knowledge dependent on ones cultural background.2 Experimental restrictionists
must also hold that the supposed variation with irrelevant factors is both significant
and pervasive. For firstly, if the variation were only minimal or insignificant, it would
not alter the relevant intuitions very much, and thus their epistemic status would not
Philosophical Psychology 449
be affected in any serious way. And secondly, if the supposed variation were only
a problem for a few isolated intuitions, then this would hardly affect the epistemic
status of the relevant intuitions in general. At most, one would have to quarantine
those few defective intuitions once one becomes aware of their problematic character.
As we will see in the following section, the majority of extant reactions to the
experimentalist challenge take issue with premise (1) of the master argument.
Premise (2) is the crucial epistemic premise of the master argument, and it claims
that the (significant and pervasive) variation with irrelevant factors noted by premise
(1) is sufficient for the epistemic untrustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical
cases. The convenient term epistemic untrustworthiness, which I have borrowed
from Weinberg (2007), merely stands for a rather thin epistemically normative
notion here. What it does, in effect, is not much more than to mark off those kinds of
evidence on which one should not rely from those on which one should rely. This
raises two important questions: What is it that actually grounds such a norm? And
who exactly is supposed to be the addressee?3 Concerning the first question, we
typically do not take it as a brute fact about a kind of evidence that one should or
should not rely on it. Rather, we expect there to be some more substantial epistemic
property in the background that actually grounds such a norm. In a sense, then, the
term epistemic untrustworthiness merely figures as a placeholder for some more
substantial negative epistemic property here, which is supposed to imply that one
should stop relying on intuitions about hypothetical cases (and conversely, epistemic
trustworthiness stands for the corresponding positive epistemic property). As a
consequence, the plausibility of premise (2) strongly depends on the precise way in
which one decides to flesh out this placeholder, and we will discuss some of the
available options in section 4.1 of this paper. Surprisingly, this proves to be a much
harder task than one might at first think, for many tempting ways to flesh out the
notion of epistemic untrustworthiness burden the master argument with unduly
skeptical consequences. As to the second question, experimental restrictionists
ultimately want to say that it is philosophers who should stop relying on intuitions
about hypothetical cases, so they clearly take professional philosophers to be among
the addressees of the relevant epistemic norm. Given that almost all of the available
experimental studies have been carried out with non-philosophers, this is anything
but an unproblematic assumption, as we will see in section 4.2 on the expertise
objection. Furthermore, the plausibility of premise (2) also depends on how exactly
one understands the irrelevance of the irrelevant factors here. In the quoted passage
above, Alexander and Weinberg (2007) characterize them as factors that are
irrelevant to the content of the thought-experiments themselves. However, the
general epistemic principle that corresponds to a literal interpretation of this
characterization does not stand up to scrutiny, for it is not always the case that a
putative kind of evidence is epistemically untrustworthy if it varies with factors that
are irrelevant to its content. To see why, consider the example of vision. Our visual
perceptions vary systematically with neural activity in the visual cortex, yet their
content is typically not about neural activity, but e.g., about the shape and color of
objects in our environment. But this is clearly not a reason to conclude that visual
450 J. Horvath
perception is epistemically untrustworthy, for this variation with neural activity is
actually part of the explanation why visual perception is a trustworthy source of
evidence. A more promising strategy would be to understand irrelevance as
irrelevance to the correctness or truth of the putative kind of evidence in question,
which also seems a more charitable interpretation of Alexanders and Weinbergs
own characterization of irrelevance.4 This works well in the case of visual perceptions,
for the corresponding neural activity is precisely not irrelevant to their correctness or
to the truth of our corresponding perceptual beliefs. In contrast, the factors studied
by experimental philosophers, like cultural background or affective content, really do
seem to be irrelevant to the correctness of our intuitions about the respective
hypothetical cases, at least prima facie. So from now on, I will interpret premises
(1) and (2) of the master argument in this more promising way.5
Conclusion (C) of the master argument then simply follows from (1) and (2) by
modus ponens. As pointed out above, it is crucial for experimental restrictionists that
(C) also has the normative implication that intuitions about hypothetical cases should
not be used as evidence for philosophical claims anymore, because this is just the
kind of methodological advice that they would like to offer to the broader
philosophical community.
3. How Not to React to the Master Argument

In this section, I will discuss some popular armchair philosophers objections to the
first, empirical premise of the master argument and argue that they either fail to cast
sufficient doubt on its plausibility or do not go deep enough in order to make for
a lasting rebuttal.
3.1. Methodological Objections

A number of objections to experimental philosophy primarily engage with the
methodological set-up of its experimental studies, and thus question the empirical
support that is cited in favor of premise (1) of the master argument.
One worry of this kind is due to Ernest Sosa. In his reply to Weinberg et al.
(2001), he argues that the relevant experimental subjects may simply interpret the
descriptions of the relevant thought experiments differently, due to their culturally
and socially differing background assumptions (Sosa, 2009, pp. 107108). However,
if this should really be a significant problem for ordinary subjects, then it might
equally affect philosophers from different cultures and social classes. Thus, prior to
extensive biographical research, not even two philosophers could actually be sure
that they interpret a given case description similar enough to be arguing about the
same hypothetical case, and so this objection is likely to backfire as a defense of
intuition-based philosophy (cf., Alexander & Weinberg, 2007, pp. 6768).
Other methodological objections to experimental philosophy are more narrowly
concerned with the details of the experimental design of the studies. For example,
a further worry of Sosas is that the subjects in the seminal study about a Gettier case
were forced to choose between the two options that the protagonist really knows or
only believes that his friend drives an American car (see Weinberg et al., 2001,
p. 443). But maybe some of the subjects were not really sure how to react to the case
description, and so would have preferred an option like I am not sure what to say.
Given such a third option, the measured cultural variation might then very well
disappear (cf., Sosa, 2009, p. 108).
Simon Cullen (2010) argues in a similar direction in his recent paper Survey-
driven romanticism, but on the less speculative basis of a number of his own
replications of some well-known studies from experimental philosophy. Among the
many interesting results and methodological worries that grew out of his empirical
work, he found that slight differences in the wording of survey questions can make
a considerable difference to their outcome. For example, it makes a significant

difference if one replaces the two options really knows and only believes in the
above cited study with the simpler and less suggestive options knows and does
not know (cf., Cullen, 2010).
These and other methodological objections point to potential shortcomings of
the existing experimental studies, and so experimental philosophers should probably
repeat many of their studies in methodologically improved ways in order to gain
more solid and stable empirical resultsjust as it is common practice in the course of
any empirical investigation. One general problem with methodological objections of
the present kind, legitimate and important as they may be, is that they can hold
experimental philosophy at arms length only for a little while (cf., Nadelhoffer &
Nahmias, 2007). But it would be folly for proponents of armchair philosophy to just
hope for less troublesome outcomes once all of the required methodological
adjustments and refinements are made. Therefore, defenders of the philosophical
tradition either need some deeper objection to premise (1) in addition to these
merely technical worries or they should at least confront the conditional question
what they would say if something like the existing results turned out to be stable
under all reasonable replications, and maybe even more unfavorable results were
added to the present stock.
3.2. The Genuine-Intuitions Objection

This objection takes issue with the fact that the experimental studies cited in
support of premise (1) of the master argument only test for spontaneous responses
to the relevant descriptions of thought experiments (cf., Weinberg et al., 2001,
p. 432). The complaint now is that not all intuitive responses to hypothetical
cases are eo ipso genuine intuitions in the philosophically relevant sense, which
may only be those responses that, for example, flow from conceptual competence
alone. Therefore, the master argument, as it stands, is at best a challenge to
spontaneous intuitive responses to hypothetical cases, but it does not affect the
real intuitions that philosophers actually use to support their claims.
The following passage by Kirk Ludwig expresses a particularly telling instance
of this type of objection:
452 J. Horvath
Responses to surveys about scenarios used in thought experiments are not ipso facto
intuitions, that is, they are not ipso facto judgments which express solely the
subjects competence in the deployment of the concepts involved in them in
response to the scenario. . . . The task when presented with responses which we
know are not (at least all) intuitions is to try to factor out the contribution of
[conceptual] competencies from the other factors [italics added]. (Ludwig, 2007,
pp. 144145)
One initial worry here is that the objection simply tries to immunize intuition-
based philosophy from any kind of empirical criticism by in effect construing
intuitions as infallible pieces of evidence. So, whenever an experimental philosopher
points to some unfavorable variation in the intuitive responses to a hypothetical case,
proponents of the present objection may then simply claim that these are not
genuine intuitions in the above sense.

Also, it seems unlikely that the relevant judgments which express solely the
subjects [conceptual] competence form a distinct kind of mental states. Thus, the
only thing that distinguishes genuine intuitions from quasi-intuitions, according
to the present proposal, is their distinctive causal origin, that is, the fact that they
stem from conceptual competence alone and not from some other cognitive ability or
resource. Now, when Ludwig puts forward his methodological advice that we need to
factor out the contribution of [conceptual] competencies from the other factors,
what he has in mind here is a thoroughly first-personal process of sorting out genuine
intuitions from quasi-intuitions (Ludwig, 2007, p. 155), that is, anything that can
safely be done from ones armchair alone. However, it is unclear why philosophers
indeed, why anyoneshould be able to factor out, from a purely first-personal
perspective, the causal contribution of their conceptual competence from a number
of other potential causal mental sources, most of which will at least be partly
unconscious anyway (see also Henderson & Horgan, 2001). Even though many
philosophers still argue that we have some privileged first-personal access to the
contents of (some of) our own mental states, nobody seriously claims any longer that
a comparable privilege also extends to the causes of our mental states. To make things
even worse for the present proposal, there is already ample empirical evidence from
cognitive psychology that our introspective beliefs concerning the causal origins of
our intuitive judgments are in fact quite unreliable (see e.g., Wilson, 2002).
So, Ludwigs specific proposal of how to draw the line between genuine intuitions
and quasi-intuitions does not look very promising from a methodological point of
view, and I doubt that other purely armchair attempts to distinguish the good
intuitive responses from the bad ones will be more successful. There simply does
not seem to be any discernible introspective or phenomenological difference between
our various intuitive responses to hypothetical cases,6 or at least none that is widely
accepted by those philosophers who work on issues of philosophical methodology
(cf., Weinberg, Crowley, Gonnerman, Swain, & Vandewalker, unpublished manu-
script, p. 2).
3.3. The Reflection Objection
This related objection to the master argument also takes issue with the fact that the
existing studies only aim at spontaneous responses to hypothetical cases, but with
a slightly different tack. The opposing claim now is that what we actually rely on in
philosophy are reflective intuitions, which are, it is suggested, of a much better
epistemic quality than the typically spontaneousand unreflectiveintuitive
responses of the folk (cf., Kauppinen, 2007). But if the intuitions that figure in
premise (1) of the master argument really have to be understood as reflective
intuitions, then the available experimental studies do not contribute much to its
support, or so the objection goes.
In their seminal (2001) paper, Weinberg et al. already reply to this kind of worry
that many of their subjects did reflect at least minimally before answering, which
they take to be evidenced by the fact that their subjects wrote brief explanatory
comments after their answers on many survey forms (p. 453). Yet surely,
proponents of the present objection have more in mind than such a bare minimum
level of reflection.
Weinberg et al. (2001) also note that, e.g., the variation of Gettier intuitions
between East Asian and Western subjects was not just an arbitrary finding, but rather
a systematically predictable result on the basis of Richard Nisbetts prior psycho-
logical research (p. 453). This research suggests that there are fundamental
and comprehensive cognitive differences between the two cultures, so why should
reflective intuitions be any exception here? Yet, there are in fact significant exceptions
to the cognitive variation between East Asian and Western culture. For example,
there seems to be no relevant difference between East Asian and Western engineering
or physics. Thus, the argument of Weinberg et al. is at least inconclusive here,
because extensive reflection could very well lead to intercultural convergence on
epistemological issues, just as reflection on matters of engineering and physics does.
There are, however, empirically documented effects, like confirmation bias (cf.,
Oswald & Grosjean, 2004) or polarization (cf., Sunstein, 2009), which suggest that
reflection sometimes even tends to have a negative epistemic effect on us. But given
that it is at least prima facie plausible that reflection makes things epistemically better
in philosophyif anywhereit is nevertheless incumbent upon experimental
restrictionists to offer specific evidence that would suggest similar distorting effects
in case of philosophical reflection.
In fact, Weinberg and his collaborators are already working in this direction, for
they have recently repeated their study on Keith Lehrers well-known case of
Mr. Truetemp (Swain et al., 2008), but this time they distinguished their subjects
according to a so-called Need For Cognition test which reflects the extent to which
a person is intrinsically motivated to engage in sustained and effortful cognitive
tasks (Weinberg, Alexander, & Gonnerman, 2008). They found that the response
pattern of subjects with a high Need For Cognition score looked like the complete
reverse image of the responses of less reflective subjects, but there was still a
significant variation in their intuitive responses depending on the order in which the
454 J. Horvath
case descriptions were presented. It may be unclear how exactly these results are to
be interpreted, but they definitely constitute a serious blow for those who hold that
reflection just by itself tends to improve the epistemic quality of our intuitions about
hypothetical cases. Nevertheless, these results still leave it open if, for example, a
suitable combination of reflection and philosophical expertise might do the trick for
the critics of the master argument (I will consider the role of expertise in section 4.2).
3.4. The Different-Concepts Objection

According to this objection, the findings of experimental philosophy are best
interpreted as expressing certain conceptual differences, and not as indicating a
variation of intuitions with irrelevant factors. In other words, the objection denies,
like the previous objections, that the experimental findings really support premise (1)
of the master argument. Rather, they are only taken to reflect certain conceptual
differences that quite naturallyand rationallylead to diverging intuitive responses
to the tested hypothetical cases. So, the factors that intuitions are experimentally
observed to vary with are not regarded as irrelevant to their truth, as premise (1)
effectively claims, for they are presumed to give rise to conceptual differences, and
thus to the acceptance of different propositions as well, which will often enough
differ in truth-value.
More specifically, the objection proceeds from the observation that, strictly
speaking, the existing experimental studies only record the spontaneous verbal
responses of the tested subjects to certain verbal descriptions of hypothetical thought
experiment cases. But experimental restrictionists also need to assume that these
spontaneous verbal responses are in fact expressive of intuitions concerning the same
propositional content (cf., Sosa, 2009, p. 108). For example, in the above cited study
about a Gettier case the relevant propositional contents would be that Bob really
knows that Jill drives an American car and that Bob only believes that Jill drives an
American car. In the experimental situation, however, the subjects were only able
to accept these propositional contents by assenting to the corresponding verbal
descriptions. But what if some of the subjects associate one kind of concept with the
word knows, say KNOWLEDGE, and others associate a different kind of concept with
knows, say SCHMOWLEDGE? Then, the first group would accept one propositional
content when they assent to the English sentence Bob really knows that Jill drives an
American car (that Bob knows that Jill drives an American car) while the second
group would accept a different propositional content (that Bob schmows that Jill
drives an American car). This kind of conceptual divergence is surely a live possibility
in many cases (cf., Jackson, 1998, p. 32; Lycan, 2006, pp. 164165). Often, we are able
to recognize such a divergence simply by having a more extensive conversation about
various cases involving the relevant words. However, in case of the existing
experimental studies almost no such questions were asked and no conversations
between the experimenters and their subjects were conducted. Therefore, the
hypothesis that some conceptual difference is responsible for the observed variation
in verbal responses constitutes a serious alternative explanation of the empirical data
(cf., Sosa, this issue).
In other words, proponents of the different-concepts objection argue that there are
two competing hypotheses about how to interpret the available experimental data
that both have a similar degree of prima facie plausibility, but only one of which
actually supports premise (1) of the master argument:
(H1) Real Intuitive Disagreement: The varying verbal responses of the tested
subjects really express intuitions concerning the same propositional
content, and do not just share their linguistic surface appearance.
(H2) Merely Verbal Disagreement: The varying verbal responses of the tested
subjects only reflect a difference in some of the concepts that are associated
with the English words used to describe the relevant hypothetical cases, even
though they share their linguistic surface appearance.
One major problem for the different-concepts objection is that (H2) is at best
applicable to a small proportion of the findings that experimental restrictionists cite
in support of premise (1), namely those that suggest a variation with cultural and
socio-economic background.7 Since different cultures and social classes probably
differ in many of their cognitive habits as well, it does not seem unreasonable to
expect a number of conceptual differences between these groups. It is quite another
matter to hypothesize conceptual differences even in cases where intuitions vary with
the affective content or order of presentation of the tested cases.8 At the very least, the
explanation for why all these different factors trigger conceptual differences would
have to be a rather different one in each case, and proponents of the different-
concepts objection would be committed to the extremely ambitious claim that there
really is such an explanation for every factor. Without relying on substantial
empirical theorizing, this looks like an argumentative burden that is far too heavy to
shoulder. All in all, then, (H2) does not seem to be a convincing hypothesis for the
whole range of presumably irrelevant factors that experimental philosophers have
studied so far.
But even if we focus only on the findings that suggest a variation with cultural and
socio-economic background, there is yet another powerful rejoinder to the different-
concepts objection, namely that hypothesis (H1) is prima facie more plausible than
hypothesis (H2) in the cases at issue. For, all of the subjects who took part in the
studies were fluent speakers of English, and most of them had a fairly high level of
formal education as well, that is, they were at least undergraduate college students.
So, prima facie it seems more plausible that such people accept the same
propositional content when they assent to an English sentence that is neither
unusual, nor overly complicated, nor in any obvious sense ambiguous or context-
sensitive. Could it nevertheless be that verbal impediments like ambiguity,
metaphor, and various contextual factors . . . rise to the level of major obstacles
when we deal with one-shot, survey responses (Sosa, this issue), as Ernest Sosa
argues in defense of the different-concepts objection? To establish this as a plausible
alternative hypothesis, Sosa in effect has to claim that such verbal impediments
constitute a widespread and serious obstacle to mutual understanding in situations of
456 J. Horvath
everyday communication. Even if we should find these impediments more often
in casual conversations than among serious inquirers, as Sosa puts it, it is still
implausible that they constitute anything like a significant or pervasive problem for
successful everyday communication. All in all, it seems, we do understand each other
pretty well, even when we are just talking to each other at our local street corner.9
And the mere possibility of verbal impediments is clearly not enough for Sosas
purposes here.
Moreover, experimental restrictionists have pointed out that the current objection
would have some fairly unhappy consequences even if it were otherwise completely
successful. Thus, it would at best constitute a rather pyrrhic victory for the defenders
of intuition-based philosophy. The reason is that an interpretation of the findings of
experimental philosophy in terms of conceptual differences, rather than as real

intuitive disagreements, would result in an implausible proliferation of concepts, for
all the experimentally observed linguistic disagreements about hypothetical cases
would then also indicate a corresponding conceptual difference (cf., Nichols, Stich,
& Weinberg, 2003). In addition to that, all of these disagreements would be turned
into merely verbal disagreements.
Thus, one can advance the following dilemma on behalf of experimental
restrictionism here: If (H1) is indeed the better interpretation of the experimental
data, then this is good news for the plausibility of premise (1) of the master argument;
if (H2) is the better interpretation, then this is admittedly bad news for the soundness
of the master argument, but it is equally bad news for the traditional project of
intuition-based philosophy, for it threatens the substantiality as well as the universality
of many central philosophical debates. To see why, take the example of knowledge
again. If different cultures and social classes were to associate different concepts with
the English word knowledge, as proponents of the different-concepts objection
would, for example, have to claim in response to the findings of Weinberg et al.
(2001), then many debates about the nature of knowledge would not only be merely
verbal, and thus insubstantial, but also of rather local interest to only those people who
happen to share one of the many candidate concepts. Furthermore, it would be an
almost intractable methodological problem to unravel these various concepts and
straighten out how the corresponding kinds of knowledge relate to each other and
fare in comparison. In other words, if something like hypothesis (H2) were generally
true, then intuition-based philosophy would be a mess.
When confronted with this kind of dilemma, Ernest Sosa, one of the main
proponents of the different-concepts objection, responds to it in the following
puzzling way:
However, this presupposes that the fact of disagreement between street corner
respondents and serious inquirers is mirrored by disagreement among the latter.
[Footnote: No claim of expertise is required on behalf of the serious inquirers for
the defense to be developed presently in the main text. It is claimed only that some
potential for interfering ambiguity, metaphor, and the like, and relevant linguistic
context, is reduced through extensive communication . . . .] The defense argues that
this is not necessarily so. (Sosa, this issue)
Since Sosa obviously does not want to concede the greater plausibility of
hypothesis (H1), he seems to accept the second horn of the dilemma here, given that
he also does not challenge the dilemma as such. And what he appears to argue is that
the second horn is not a real problem for philosophers and other serious inquirers
because they are typically able to resolve their linguistic confusions, at least in the
long run. However, this response does not even begin to address the worry that a
manifold of conceptual differences would threaten the substantiality and universality
of philosophy. At most, Sosa establishes that philosophers are in a better position to
realize and resolve their verbal disagreements. But by itself, this does not eliminate
the supposed conceptual differencesit only helps to avoid some of their pitfalls.
Still, philosophy under the conditions of such a plurality of concepts would have to
struggle very hard to even establish a common topic. This runs counter to the
standard assumption in epistemology, and other main areas of philosophy, that we
already have such a common topic, and are thus not in need to work through a
jumble of conceptual differences first. So, no matter how we look at it, Sosas
envisaged way out of the above dilemma implies a serious departure from the
standard philosophical practice that he tries to defend.
I conclude that the different-concepts objection is not convincing as it stands,
at least if it takes the form of a general strategy to counter the master argument.10
Moreover, even if it were successful, it would have some rather unhappy
consequences for the standard practice of intuition-based armchair philosophy.
Thus, it would at best yield a pyrrhic victory for its proponents.
4. Better Ways to React to the Master Argument

Next, I will discuss two more promising objections to the master argument which
aim at its second, epistemic premise, namely the grounding objection and the expertise
objection.
4.1. The Grounding Objection

I have already pointed out in my initial discussion of the master argument that the
term epistemic untrustworthiness partly figures as a placeholder for some more
substantial epistemic property that actually grounds the normative implications of
the argument (see section 2). Thus, at some point the critics of intuition-based
philosophy will have to say more about precisely which substantial negative epistemic
property E they take to be conferred on intuitions about hypothetical cases in virtue
of their variation with irrelevant factors. This turns out to be a much harder task than
one might at first think, at least if the result of fleshing out property E is still
supposed to yield a plausible challenge to intuition-based philosophy, i.e., one that is
well-supported by the experimental data and neither unduly skeptical nor self-
defeating (cf., Weinberg, 2007).11 So, according to the grounding objection to the
master argument, its crucial epistemic premise (2) comes out too strong on most
458 J. Horvath
extant construals of property E. To see why, let us take a closer look at a number of
tempting proposals.
For a start, the challenge cannot just be that intuitions about hypothetical cases are
fallible, because this is true of pretty much every human way of belief-formation and
cognition (cf., Alexander & Weinberg, 2007, p. 70), and if all fallible sources of
evidence are declared epistemically untrustworthy, then radical skepticism follows.
The challenge also better ought not be that intuitions about hypothetical cases are
susceptible to a number of cognitive biases that were not expected from the armchair,
like anchoring or priming, because such unexpected distorting effects have also been
found for other prima facie trustworthy sources of evidence, for example change
blindness in case of perception or hindsight bias in case of memory. So, if one
concludes from the mere occurrence of such effects that intuitions about hypothetical
cases are not epistemically trustworthy, then one should equally draw such a
conclusion in case of perception or memory. However, this would more or less
amount to global skepticism about human cognition (cf., Sosa, 2007; Weinberg,
2007). It is of course open to the experimental restrictionist to simply embrace global
skepticism. As a matter of fact, no experimental restrictionist has actually taken this
route, because what they primarily aim for is a methodological reform of certain
aspects of philosophical practice, and not a sweeping skeptical blow against large
areas of human cognition.12
Given that an appropriately qualified version of premise (1) of the master
argument claims that intuitions about hypothetical cases vary significantly and
pervasively with factors that are irrelevant to their truth, may unreliability be a good
candidate for property E? One worry here is, of course, whether the existing
experimental studies already support the claim that the observed variation with
irrelevant factors is indeed pervasive. This seems more plausible in case of a variation
with cultural background, because this factor is in fact always present. But many
philosophical thought experiments are, for example, entirely free from affective
content. And ordering effects also cannot occur if we only consider one thought
experiment at a time, which is often enough the case in philosophy. Therefore, the
pervasiveness of an influence by affective content and order of presentation seems
highly questionable, and thus the relevant findings do not much to undermine the
reliability of intuitions about hypothetical cases. So, is the observed variation with
cultural background alone sufficient to cast doubt on the reliability of these
intuitions? The main problem here is that the number of studies that have been
devoted to this particular factor is still very small (mainly Machery, Mallon, Nichols,
& Stich, 2004 and Weinberg et al., 2001), at least outside the moral domain. At
present, then, it looks like a massive overgeneralization to conclude that intuitions
about hypothetical cases vary pervasively with cultural background, for maybe there
is a large area of intercultural intuitive agreement that still awaits its experimental
discovery. But suppose that variation with cultural background indeed turns out to
be significant and pervasive, and that it is in fact irrelevant to the subject matter of
the tested thought experimentswould intuitions about hypothetical cases be shown
to be unreliable, then? Reliability is, of course, a matter of degree, so the relevant
variation needs to be significant and pervasive enough to push the reliability of these
intuitions below the threshold that marks off unreliable from reliable sources of
evidence, which may actually require quite a lot of pretty strong variation. But
suppose again that experimental philosophers are able to meet this further challenge
as well and thereby show that intuitions about hypothetical cases are in fact
unreliable. At first glance, it seems fairly plausible that this would undermine their
epistemic trustworthiness, at least once this fact is explicitly noted by the
philosophical community. But even under such highly favorable circumstances,
experimental restrictionists would still have to face a further intricate problem.
For, the experimental challenge might easily lead to epistemic self-defeat because
some of the relevant intuitions are themselves needed in order to justify the epistemic
principles that form the very basis of the experimental restrictionists own
methodological criticism.13 Consider again the master argument itself, and in
particular its epistemic premise (2). If we have good reasons to believe something like
premise (2) at all, no matter how exactly we spell out property E, then these reasons
are plausibly of an intuitive kind. Although it has occasionally been tried to justify
epistemic principles like premise (2) in an empirical way (see e.g., Weinberg, 2007),
there still seems to be no widely agreed on alternative to their justification on an
intuitive basis. But what would happen if the master argument were actually
successful and we would thus be justified in accepting its conclusion (C)? We would
possess an undermining defeater for all of our beliefs that are justified on the basis of
intuitions about hypothetical cases. Let us suppose that premise (2) is at least partly
justified on the basis of such intuitions, which prima facie looks like a plausible claim
for epistemic principles in general. Given our awareness of this fact, we would
thereby lose our justification for believing premise (2) in the first place. But if we are
no longer justified in believing one of the premises of the master argument, then we
are also no longer justified in believing its conclusion (C). Yet, it was only on the
basis of (C) that we came to possess an undermining defeater against premise (2),
and so we would also lose this defeater as soon as we lose our justification for (C).
But if premise (2) is no longer defeated, we then regain our justification for (C), and
we also regain our defeater against premise (2), and so on and so forth. This kind of
oscillation between defeat and non-defeat is clearly a particularly awkward epistemic
predicament.14 But would it really be a problem for epistemic restrictionists?
Couldnt they simply turn the tables on armchair philosophers and claim that the
very fact that this self-defeating situation arises speaks strongly against justifying
epistemic principles like (2) on an intuitive basis? No, this would be much too quick.
For, in order to avoid this particular instance of epistemic self-defeat it is already
enough to reject one of the premises of the master argument. But none of the two
premises makes any general unconditional claim about the epistemic status of
intuitions or about the whole practice of intuition-based philosophy. Even if the
empirical evidence for premise (1) were absolutely compelling, one would at most
have to give up premise (2) of the master argument. This may still seem like a high
prize to pay, because premise (2) does indeed look quite intuitive, but it would hardly
amount to anything like the collapse of intuition-based philosophy in general.
460 J. Horvath
More importantly though, the experimental restrictionist would also lose the crucial
epistemic premise of her main argument against intuition-based philosophy, and
would thus have to look elsewhere in order to maintain her challenge.
However, the discussion so far leaves room for a seemingly viable construal of the
experimentalist challenge that restrictionists could try to embark on in order to save
the master argument. For, one of the considered candidate properties for E turned
out to be clearly less implausible than other extant suggestions, namely unreliability.
There were only two residual problems. First, to actually establish the unreliability of
intuitions about hypothetical cases requires a lot more evidence than the existing
experimental data provide, but in principle this should be a feasible empirical
research project. Second, to charge intuitions about hypothetical cases with
unreliability easily leads to the problem of epistemic self-defeat, at least if the

epistemic principles that are needed to complete the experimentalist challenge, like
premise (2) of the master argument, are themselves partly justified on the basis of
intuitions about hypothetical cases. But there is an obvious alternative here. The
experimental restrictionist could simply deny that intuitions about hypothetical cases
play any role in the justification of those epistemic principles that she may need for
her case. Rather, she could claim that the crucial epistemic premise of the master
argument is directly intuitive, without any recourse to intuitions about cases.15 So,
with unreliability as her candidate property for E, the restrictionist would have to
argue that the truth of something like the following epistemic principle is directly
intuitive:
(UR) If intuitions about hypothetical cases vary significantly and pervasively with
factors that are irrelevant to their truth, then they are unreliable.
Since this principle comes pretty close to being a conceptual truth, it does in fact
seem plausible to regard it as directly intuitive. In this respect, (UR) is similar to
standard analytic truths, like bachelors are unmarried or vixens are foxes, which
also do not require additional support from intuitions about particular cases. But
remember that it is crucial for the experimental restrictionist that the master
argument also has the right normative implication, namely that one should not
continue to rely on intuitions about hypothetical cases. So, she would need a further
premise here to move from unreliability to epistemic untrustworthiness. The
following principle would be the most straightforward way to achieve this goal:
(EU) If intuitions about hypothetical cases are unreliable, then they are not
epistemically trustworthy.
Unfortunately, this principle is not correct as it stands, for at least two reasons that
we have already touched upon in the preceding discussion. Firstly, since the ultimate
point of the argument is to offer methodological advice that can guide our actual
philosophical practice, the unreliability at issue here has to be explicitly noted or even
known by the philosophical community instead of just being a fact of the matter, for
an unnoted or unknown reliability can hardly guide us in our methodological
activities.16 Secondly, even an explicitly noted or known unreliability is only
sufficient for epistemic untrustworthiness if it does not give rise to epistemic self-
defeat, as I have argued above. Therefore, experimental restrictionists would have
to invoke at least something like the following more complex principle:
(EU) If intuitions about hypothetical cases are unreliable and their unreliability
is explicitly noted and explicitly noting their unreliability does not give
rise to epistemic self-defeat, then they are not epistemically trustworthy.
But this modified principle hardly looks directly intuitive, and thus it is not at all
akin to analytic truths like bachelors are unmarried and their ilk. Rather, on the way
to formulating (EU) we had to go through all kinds of complex methodological and
theoretical considerations that explicitly or tacitly depend on a number of further
epistemic and methodological principles. At this point, then, the onus seems to be
on the experimental restrictionist to actually show that something like (EU) can
indeed be justified without relying on intuitions about hypothetical cases along the
way. Given how the larger debates in epistemology and philosophical methodology
unfold, this seems prima facie quite implausible. Thus, I conclude that the
combination of construing property E as unreliability and claiming direct intuitive
support for the needed epistemic premises also fails to save the master argument
from the grounding objection.
At this point, there seem to be only two further options for experimental
restrictionists to make their challenge more tenable. First, they could try to restrict its
scope in order to avoid the problem of epistemic self-defeat. And second, they could
try to find some other epistemically undesirable property E that only intuitions about
hypothetical cases have, such that there would be no skeptical implications for other
prima facie trustworthy sources of evidence, like memory or perception. Jonathan
Weinberg (2007) has tried out both of these options. On the one hand, he primarily
wants to criticize the philosophical practice of appealing to intuitions from the
narrower subclass of intuitions about esoteric, unusual, far-fetched, or generally
outlandish (Weinberg, 2007, p. 321) hypothetical cases. On the other hand, he
introduces what he calls hopefulness as a novel suggestion for a substantial
epistemic property that is sufficient to ground epistemic trustworthiness.
By choosing the first option, experimental restrictionists would effectively concede
that intuitions about ordinary hypothetical casesthose that are neither far-
fetched nor esotericare not empirically challenged so far and thus remain
acceptable as philosophical evidence for the time being. The problem is, of course,
that these intuitions typically do not suffice to resolve any more contentious
philosophical issue. It is not clear, however, that some non-arbitrary and scientifically
respectable distinction between intuitions about ordinary and far-fetched
hypothetical cases is actually forthcoming, i.e., one that really supports the inductive
and abductive inferences which experimental restrictionists want to draw from their
empirical data. Rather, it looks like a pretty ad hoc distinction that serves no other
discernible purpose than to attack intuition-based philosophy.17 Now, one might
object that certain theories from the psychology of concepts could help one to
establish a scientifically respectable distinction between intuitions about ordinary and
462 J. Horvath
far-fetched hypothetical cases. Exemplar theorists about concepts claim, for example,
that we store concrete exemplars for each conceptual category in memory and then
classify objects according to their similarity to these exemplar representations. So,
why couldnt one just say that those cases count as ordinary which bear a fairly
high similarity to the relevant exemplars, while those cases which only bear a rather
low similarity to them count as far-fetched?18 One could certainly introduce such
a distinction, but experimental restrictionists would first have to show that it actually
counts the right cases as far-fetched, namely those that philosophers typically
appeal to in their thought experiments. Gettier cases, for example, come pretty close
to paradigm cases of knowledge. In fact, they are deliberately designed for being
almost cases of knowledge. Moreover, exemplar theory at best supports a gradual
relation of similarity to the mentally stored exemplar representations, but nothing

like a clear-cut distinction between the class of ordinary and far-fetched
hypothetical cases.19 Thus, any such distinction on the basis of exemplar theory
would have to involve a stipulation of arbitrary boundaries for the intended
categories. This is simply grist to the mill of my above complaint that no non-
arbitrary distinction of this kind is actually forthcoming. What experimental
restrictionists really need, then, is an established (or at least clearly implied)
distinction between intuitions about ordinary and far-fetched cases in a
successful scientific theory, one that actually plays a serious explanatory role there.
So far, I am not aware of any such distinction. Even if we assume that some other
plausible and non-arbitrary distinction between ordinary and far-fetched cases can
somehow be drawn, e.g., in terms of their modal distance to the actual world, it is still
not clear that our intuitions about the latter kinds of cases would come out as
problematic in general, because there seem to be a great many of them where we
undoubtedly get things right. For example, if aliens were to beam me on a distant
planet against my will, then this would be a far-fetched yet intuitively clear case
of abduction (see also Weatherson, 2008). Of course, a single counterexample,
however convincing it may be, cannot establish any general claim about the
trustworthiness of a certain class of intuitions. But the problem is that the good
cases, like my abduction case, can seemingly be multiplied indefinitely, so
experimental restrictionists would first have to convince us that the bad cases
really outweigh the good ones if we group them according to their modal distance
to the actual world. Another suggestion would be to understand the far-
fetchedness of a hypothetical case in terms of its being a borderline case of the
relevant concept.20 The main problem here is that borderline cases are typically
understood as cases where our intuitions become shaky and conflicting. Once we
know that a certain case is a borderline case we already know that unclear and
divergent intuitions about it are to be expected. As a consequence, there would be no
need to conduct any experimental studies to that effect. Moreover, some of the cases
where experimental philosophers have actually observed conflicting intuitions, e.g.,
the Gettier cases, are precisely not cases which had been readily classified as
borderline cases by the philosophical community before the advent of experimental
philosophy. So once again, this does not make for an independent and non-arbitrary
construal of the category of far-fetched hypothetical cases.
As to the second option, Weinberg argues that mere reliability is not enough for a
source of evidence to count as epistemically trustworthy. In addition, our practice of
using the relevant source must also have the resources to identify and correct the
sources own errors. If our respective practice has some of these resources, then
Weinberg calls the source in question a hopeful and thus trustworthy source, but
if such resources are absent, then he calls it a hopeless and thus untrustworthy
source. Hopeless sources make us helpless in the face of their own errors and ensuing
disagreements, which arguably should not be the case for trustworthy sources.
Weinberg now identifies four basic kinds of hope that sources of evidence may have,
namely external corroboration, internal coherence, detectability of their margins of

error and theoretical illumination (cf., Weinberg, 2007, p. 330), and he argues that
intuition, unlike perception or memory, fails to partake in any of them. This is a very
strong claim indeed, and I am inclined to think that at least one of the four kinds of
hope is likely to be found in intuitions about hypothetical cases as well. For, if the
basic reliability of a source is granted, then rational subjects will typically be able to
weed out many of the sources problematic outputs just through considerations of
logical and explanatory coherence. Thus, they will typically be able to correct many of
the sources errors merely on the basis of the internal coherence of its output, at least
given that the subject matter of the output is not completely unrelated or overly
fragmented.21 The source in question will thus be hopeful because it partakes in
internal coherence, which is one of the four sources of hopefulness. For illustration,
let us look at the following example. Suppose you have an electronic acid detector
that delivers the right result in nine out of ten cases. To simplify a bit, let us assume
that it only has two outputs, namely positive if an acid is detected and negative
otherwise. Now, if you test a few samples and come across an incoherency, say that
two chemically closely related substances prompt a different output, then the natural
thing to do would be to test the two conflicting samples a few more times and see if
one gets a more plausible and stable result. One possibility could be that the two
samples only gave rise to a different output on the very first measurement, but that
the next nine measurements deliver a more coherent and stable result, e.g., that both
samples are tested positive. This would enable one to correct the erroneous first
measurement of the acid detector just be using its own output and general logical and
explanatory considerations. In the example, it was assumed that we have some
limited background knowledge, e.g., about the chemical similarity of the two sample
substances. This seems unproblematic for drawing an analogy with intuitions about
hypothetical cases, because we surely have some background knowledge or
understanding of the philosophically relevant similarities and dissimilarities between
various hypothetical cases. Since Weinberg does not challenge the basic reliability of
intuitions about hypothetical cases, it will be very hard for him to resist this line of
reasoning. However, to fully elaborate this objection to Weinbergs interesting
proposal is a task that goes well beyond the scope of the present paper.22
464 J. Horvath
All in all, then, proponents of intuition-based armchair philosophy are in a pretty
robust dialectical position here. On the one hand, it is not incumbent upon them
to justify the use of intuitions about hypothetical cases by offering any independent
reasons in favor of their basic reliability or hopefulness, for such a demand would
clearly have unwanted skeptical implications, given that it cannot be satisfied in case
of perception or memory either. On the other hand, many tempting candidate
properties for grounding the charge of epistemic untrustworthiness also engender
skepticism. In addition, any sweeping argument against the basic reliability or
hopefulness of intuitions about hypothetical cases, which are the most promising
candidate properties for E, is likely to get entangled in epistemic self-defeat. Yet,
plausible restrictions of the scope of the experimentalist challenge are hard to come
by. Thus, the grounding objection poses a serious problem for the plausibility of the
second, epistemic premise of the master argument, and extant proposals to deal with
this problem are not convincing.
4.2. The Expertise Objection

As a matter of fact, the existing experimental studies cited in support of premise (1)
of the master argument were almost all conducted with subjects who had no or only
very little philosophical expertise. Well-trained professional philosophers, however,
can reasonably be expected to have intuitions about hypothetical cases that typically
do not vary with irrelevant factors, at least not significantly and pervasively, as the
appropriately qualified version of premise (1) requires. So, the intended normative
implications of the master argument, and in particular the charge of epistemic
untrustworthiness, just do not seem to apply to professional philosophers and their
own intuitions about hypothetical cases. Thus, if they were taken to be among the
addressees of the relevant epistemic norms, then it would be natural for them to
simply deny premise (2) of the master argument. For, this premise is at best plausible
if the addressees of the charge of epistemic untrustworthiness are explicitly restricted
to non-philosophers. Given that this would render the master argument irrelevant to
professional philosophers own use of intuitions, though, they may readily grant this
more limited claim.
Thus, in order to defend the master argument against the objection from
philosophical expertise, experimental restrictionists have to establish something like
the following claim, which would make it plausible that professional philosophers are
among the proper addressees of the relevant epistemic norms:
(EQ) Philosophers intuitions about hypothetical cases vary equally with
irrelevant factors as those of non-philosophers.
But why should professional philosophers grant to the experimental restrictionist

that their own intuitions about hypothetical cases vary equally with irrelevant factors
as those of the folk? Surely, no chess grandmaster, mathematician or physicist would
grant anything remotely like that to an experimental psychologist (see e.g., Ludwig,
2007). In fact, a lot of research on the psychology of expertise begins with the fairly
natural assumption that expert intuitions are superior to folk intuitions, because it
seems prima facie eminently plausible that people who have thought long and hard
about a certain issue will also make better intuitive judgments in their area of
expertise (cf., Kornblith, 2007, pp. 3435).
However, the dialectical situation is complicated by the fact that some armchair
philosophers actually regard folk concepts as their proper methodological target (e.g.,
Jackson, 1998). So, these philosophers may already appear to be challenged by an
unrestricted interpretation of the normative implications of the master argument.
And most philosophers would surely agree that the primary targets of philosophical
analysis are not certain technical or merely stipulated philosophical notions, but
rather our ordinary concepts of, say, knowledge or justice, which already ancient
Greek philosophers like Socrates or Plato were concerned with. Yet, these
philosophers typically see no contradiction between the view that certain folk
concepts are the proper targets of philosophical analysis and the additional claim that
well-trained professional philosophers are simply better in analyzing these folk
concepts and in evaluating the relevant thought experiments (see e.g., Ludwig, 2007).
In other words, one standard view about intuition-based armchair philosophy is that
philosophers are experts in the analysis of folk concepts.
Alexander and Weinberg refer to positions of this kind, somewhat derogatorily, as
a variety of intuition elitism, and they complain that there is considerable variation
even among the intuitions of the supposed philosophical experts (Alexander &
Weinberg, 2007, pp. 5859). However, the relevant philosophical experts agree widely
on the intuitive evaluation of many key philosophical thought experiments, even in
cases where they start out with incompatible theoretical commitments. For example,
even those philosophers who championed the analysis of knowledge as justified true
belief immediately accepted the Gettier cases as intuitive counterexamples (cf.,
Grundmann, this issue; Williamson, 2004, pp. 127128). Admittedly, philosophers
do not agree on a few other thought experiments, but it would once again be an
unduly skeptical move to insist that their intuitions can only be trustworthy if they
are in perfect agreement with each other (or something close to it).
Weinberg and his colleagues, though, have recently argued that the empirical
literature on expertise suggests that the practice of intuition-based philosophy may
not be the kind of practice that would benefit from the ways of intense training that
are characteristic of the development of expertise in paradigmatic areas of expert
performance, like chess or mathematics (cf., Weinberg, Gonnerman, Buckner, &
Alexander, 2010). To evaluate this claim, let us first get clear on how their argument
bears on the plausibility of (EQ). The most straightforward way to establish (EQ)
would be by performing the same kinds of experiments with professional philosophers
and then to observe a similar variation of their intuitions about hypothetical cases
with irrelevant factors. However, Weinberg and his coauthors readily concede that
they have not done anything like that so far (nor anybody else, for that matter):
Ideally, what would follow at this point would take the form of an empirical
study, like the ones that experimental philosophers have conducted on
466 J. Horvath
folk intuitions. We dont have any such study to offer at this time . . . . (Weinberg
et al., 2010, p. 335)
So, in the absence of any direct experimental evidence for the susceptibility of
philosophers intuitions to irrelevant factors, Weinberg et al. (2010) attempt to
formulate an indirect argument in order to establish (EQ), or, as they themselves call
it, an ampliative inference from the patterns disclosed concerning the ordinary
subjects to the predicted occurrence of those patterns in professional philosophers
(p. 332). To this end, they probe the empirical literature on expertise for hypotheses
as to the basis of the improved performance of different expert populations
(Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 335). They come up with three suggestions that strike them
as most plausible and that jibe at least somewhat with some of the hand-waving
appeals to expertise in the extant philosophical literature (Weinberg et al., 2010,

pp. 335336):
The three hypotheses that we will consider are that philosophers have superior
conceptual schemata to the folk; that they deploy more sophisticated theories than
the folk; and that they possess a more finely-tuned set of cognitive skills than the
folk. (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 336)
What follows is an attempt to establish, for each of these three suggestions, that
philosophers either lack the respective psychological characteristic, or that it is
unclear that the respective characteristic would help them against the observed
variation with irrelevant factors, or that the respective characteristic would introduce
new forms of problematic variation instead, or, finally, that the respective
characteristic presupposes other resources whose availability has not yet been
established. Let us assume that Weinberg et al. (2010) are largely right about this.
Does it follow that they have successfully rebutted the expertise objection to the
master argument?
In order to answer this question, we have to step back a bit once again. The basic
point behind the expertise objection is simply that (EQ) is prima facie more likely to
be false than true, because it is prima facie plausible that philosophers are experts on
philosophical issues, and therefore less likely to be susceptible to the influence of
irrelevant factors on their intuition-based theorizing. So, the crucial question here is
if the complex empirical argument by Weinberg et al. really provides a defeater that is
sufficient to undermine this prima facie plausibility. My main reason to be skeptical
here is that they themselves admit that the three psychological hypotheses they
consider are not an exhaustive account of all possible hypotheses of philosophical
expertise (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 336). But then, it really matters how much a
prima facie plausible account of the relevant philosophical expertise is affected by the
dismissal of these three hypotheses. I have already pointed out above that one of the
standard views about intuition-based philosophy is that philosophers are experts in
the analysis of folk concepts. Which abilities on the philosophers part are prima facie
involved in this kind of expertise? Mostly, it seems, a superior ability to apply the
relevant concepts, like KNOWLEDGE or FREE WILL, to a wide range of actual and
hypothetical cases. There are two prima facie plausible reasons why philosophers are
experts in this respect. First, as a result of their philosophical training, they are much
more sensitive to potential ambiguities, unclarities or incoherencies in applying these
concepts (at least if they are educated in the Analytic tradition). At the very least,
this should help them to avoid many of the performance errors which plague
untrained applications of these concepts. Second, descriptions of thought experiment
cases are typically rather sketchy and incomplete, and therefore do not rule out a lot
of philosophically unintended interpretations (cf., Malmgren, forthcoming;
Williamson, 2007). Standard descriptions of Gettier cases, for example, do not rule
out that the subject has additional evidence for the crucial proposition of a strength
that is sufficient for knowledge. Trained philosophers immediately recognize this and
other deviant interpretations as unintended, or, rather, they do not even consider
such weird interpretations from the outset. So, philosophers plausibly have a
superior ability when it comes to the adequate interpretation of hypothetical cases
for philosophical purposes (cf., Grundmann & Horvath, unpublished manuscript).
To have a convenient shorthand, let us call the first of these two abilities conceptual
sensitivity and the second interpretative competence. The crucial question now is: does
the empirical argument by Weinberg et al. (2010) actually cover these two prima facie
plausible abilities? Or, more precisely, does it provide an undermining defeater for
the prima facie plausible assumption that these two abilities tend to improve the
epistemic quality of professional philosophers intuitions about hypothetical cases?
Take the case of conceptual sensitivity first. Superior conceptual schemata may
certainly accompany this ability, as well as more sophisticated philosophical theories,
but it does not seem to depend crucially on any of these two of the three
psychological manifestations of expertise that Weinberg et al. consider. For, as I
understand it here, this ability essentially comes down to a superior sensitivity with
respect to the application of the same folk concepts that philosophers and non-
philosophers share alike, e.g., KNOWLEDGE or TRUTH. So, if it is addressed by the three
hypotheses that Weinberg et al. discuss at all, it seems best covered by the claim that
philosophers possess more finely-tuned cognitive skills than non-philosophers. What
about interpretative competence, then? Here, superior conceptual schemata sometimes
seem to be involved, because it plausibly helps professional philosophers to have a
better understanding of e.g., key epistemic concepts like JUSTIFICATION or DEFEAT when
it comes to the evaluation of Gettier cases. Weinberg et al. (2010) rightly insist that
such specialized conceptual schemata have to consist of epistemically virtuous
concepts or rules, and they also claim that that the experts specialized conceptual
schemata often introduce new forms of error in many domains (p. 341). However, it
is not clear how great the risk of having conceptual schemata that lack the relevant
epistemic virtue really is. In particular, I find it very hard to evaluate if it is actually
great enough to undermine the prima facie presumption in favor of the virtuousness
of well-established philosophical notions, like JUSTIFICATION or DEFEAT. Moreover,
Weinberg et al. (2010) concede that at least certain key philosophical distinctions
seem to be virtuous after all, like the one between use and mention, or semantics and
pragmatics. But what is it, in their view, that makes these distinctions exceptional
in terms of their epistemic virtue? It is the fact that we philosophers have ways of
468 J. Horvath
explicitly inculcating sensitivity to these distinctions in our students, [and thus] we
can train them in ways that one should expect to be epistemically successful
(Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 342). Since they concede this as a live possibility, though, it
seems incumbent upon them to present specific evidence that would suggest that the
distinctions that actually inform philosophers interpretative competence in a given
case are among the non-virtuous ones. Given that they do not offer any specific
evidence of this kind, I am inclined to regard their worry as inconclusive here, in
particular because they point out that the research on expertise has shown that it
typically develops highly narrowly and task-specifically (Weinberg et al., 2010,
p. 335). Finally, the possession of (better) philosophical theories does not seem to
matter so much for interpretative competence, because even those philosophers, for
example, who were committed to an incompatibleand falsetheory about

knowledge, namely the view that it is justified true belief, had readily accepted the
Gettier cases (see above). At the very least, this suggests a significant degree of theory-
independence of philosophers interpretation and intuitive evaluation of the Gettier
cases.23 Moreover, the ability to make sense of some linguistic item by means of
interpreting it, e.g., a philosophical text or the description of a hypothetical case,
looks like the paradigm of a procedural cognitive resource, for it cannot typically be
realized by a mere set of explicitly represented schemata, principles or rulesno
matter how large that set may actually be (short of being infinite, of course). All in all,
then, the superior interpretative competence of philosophers with respect to
hypothetical cases seems to be largely a matter of having a better cognitive skill as well.
Consequently, we have to take a closer look at what Weinberg et al. (2010) find
so problematic about the prima facie plausible claim that professional philosophers
possess certain superior cognitive skills, like conceptual sensitivity and interpretative
competence, which tend to improve the epistemic quality of their intuitions about
hypothetical cases. They start out with considering the following reasonable
hypothesis:
So one might conjecture that philosophers, due to the specific training of their
profession, might well outperform novices in intuition-mongering even if they
were using the same evaluative capacities as the novices. So we wish to explore the
question: can philosophers be expected to have any particular expertise in the
procedural aspects of intuition-mongering? (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 347)
They continue with the rather puzzling complaint that it is not quite clear what
specific hypotheses of such expertise might be good contenders here and that there
are no obvious candidates for what a philosophers procedural expertise might consist
inif it is to be something that would provide an appropriate . . . response to the
restrictionist challenge (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 347). Now, I have already
presented a brief sketch of two plausible and almost self-suggesting abilities that
appear highly relevant to the procedural aspects of evaluating thought experiments,
namely conceptual sensitivity and interpretative competence. In effect, then, we can
regard this complaint as already answered. Weinberg et al. (2010) go on to consider
some quite unconvincing suggestions what the procedural expertise of philosophers
might consist in, for example that philosophers have a better ability to properly get
all [the] details out of the description of [a hypothetical] scenario, and entertain them
fully in their imaginations (p. 347). However, this suggestion does not come very
close to the two specific abilities that I have proposed above. The only suggestion that
is actually relevant here, at least to some degree, is the hypothesis that philosophers
training produces a standardization of what does or does not get filled in [when
descriptions of hypothetical cases are interpreted] (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 348).
Indeed, this does come fairly close to the prima facie plausible suggestion that
philosophers possess a superior interpretative competence with respect to the
interpretation of thought experiments. Weinberg et al.s (2010) main objection to
this hypothesis is, strikingly, that whether or not this is so is also an empirical
question that would require some systematic investigation to decide (p. 348). This is
a highly revealing passage, for it constitutes one of their many attempts to shift the
burden of proof on the armchair philosopher in an arguably illegitimate way. It
would of course be very interesting to investigate this hypothesis about philosophers
expertise in a more thorough, empirical way. But it is unclear why anything like that
should be required of the armchair philosopher for the mere purpose of fending off
the experimental restrictionists challenge. Rather, as I will argue below, it is enough,
at least for a start, if the armchair philosopher can indicate some specific resources
that plausibly improve her intuitions about hypothetical cases in comparison with
non-philosophers. Since Weinberg et al. (2010) do not present any empirical
evidence against the claim that philosophers are superior in terms of their conceptual
sensitivity and interpretative competence, the challenge is in effect already met here,
because there simply is no specific challenge in the first place.
Here is another way to look at this really crucial point. Experimental restrictionists
need something like (EQ) in order to rebut the expertise objection to the master
argument. Prima facie, however, (EQ) is more likely to be false than true, for there are
many differences between philosophers and non-philosophers that are prima facie
conducive to the epistemic quality of their intuitions about hypothetical cases.24 So,
it is the experimental restrictionist who actually needs to present some convincing
positive (empirical) evidence in favor of (EQ), of a strength that is sufficient to defeat
the prima facie implausibility of (EQ). But it is not incumbent on the armchair
philosopher, who merely wants to defend her established methodology against the
restrictionist challenge, to present any positive (empirical) evidence against (EQ),
over and above pointing out its prima facie implausibility.
At this point, I see three main options for experimental restrictionists to counter
the expertise objection to the master argument. First, they could go on to dispute
even the prima facie implausibility of premise (EQ). This strikes me as a desperate
move that would at best lead to a dialectical impasse here, and it does not seem to
be the considered view of any actual experimental restrictionist either.
Second, experimental restrictionists could object that a mere prima facie
plausibility in favor of the intuitive expertise of professional philosophers is simply
not enough for the purpose at hand, which is in effect to carry the whole epistemic
and methodological weight of the practice of intuition-based philosophy.
470 J. Horvath
However, it is actually not this prima facie plausibility alone which is supposed to
bear the whole epistemic weight here. Rather, I would argue, it is this prima facie
plausibility in combination with a reasonable form of methodological conservatism.
The gist of this conservatism is that one should be very reluctant to reform, or even
abandon, an established and well-entrenched methodological practice, in particular
as long as it continues to produce such sophisticated and illuminating work as
intuition-based armchair philosophy (this latter point will surely and inevitably be
controversial, though). But there is also a reason why even the prima facie
plausibility of philosophers intuitive expertise alone may already suffice to bear the
relevant epistemic weight here, which is once again the threat of skepticism. For,
if one tries to make it a general rule that one first has to provide substantial
(empirical) evidence in favor of ones own expertise in order to be entitled to a

certain methodology, then skeptical implications seem unavoidable. Experimental
restrictionists must surely accept this as a general rule that properly applies to all
kinds of methodologies, on pain of merely pursuing an ad hoc case against
intuition-based philosophy. However, the consequences of a general application of
this rule would simply be devastating. Just think about the psychology of expertise
itself. If professional psychologists first had to offer substantial (empirical) evidence
for their expertise in performing psychological experiments, then psychology would
never even get started. Rather, the prima facie plausibility that professional
psychologists are sufficiently competent in performing such experiments is enough
here, unless defeating evidence concerning their experimental expertise arises.
Analogously, professional philosophers are entitled to continue with their
intuition-based armchair theorizing, unless defeating evidence concerning their
intuitive expertise arises. And it was the point of my above discussion, of course,
to argue that the existing results from the psychology of expertise do not (yet)
constitute any defeating evidence of this kind.
The third option for the experimental restrictionist to resist the expertise objection
is to extract some more general lesson from the empirical literature on expertise that
is not tied to any specific hypothesis about what the relevant philosophical expertise
might consist in. The main result that might spell trouble for intuition-based
philosophy here is the following:
One of the most robust consensus findings of the study of expertise is that expert
judgments can only become more reliable where experts are readily confronted
with clear, reliable feedback on which to train. (Weinberg et al., 2010, p. 340)
Weinberg et al. (2010) then complain that it is questionable if philosophers
actually do receive the needed clear, reliable feedback in their training and everyday
practice:
Philosophy rarely if ever (outside its formal subareas) provides the same ample
degree of well-established cases to provide the requisite training regimen. Feedback
on errors in thought-experimenting is more limited, usually only coming when we
offer our arguments publicly in some way; such feedback is much more unclear and
ambiguous even when it comes . . . . (p. 341)
However, I doubt that it makes much sense to debate the issue of adequate
feedback on such a high level of generality. Rather, we need to go back to the two
specific and prima facie plausible hypotheses about what the relevant philosophical
expertise might consist in, namely conceptual sensitivity and interpretative compe-
tence. And here it does indeed seem prima facie plausible that we get clear and
reliable feedback when we develop conceptual sensitivity in our philosophical
training. Especially for Analytic philosophers it is of the greatest import to cure
their students from all kinds of conceptual confusion and imprecision, and the
relevant feedback in classroom situations or in response to student essays is typically
as clear and unambiguous as it can get, e.g., that they should not slide back and forth
between different senses of free action when they argue about the compatibility of
freedom and determinism, or that they should not conflate sense and reference in
debates about the nature of meaning. Furthermore, the development of philosophers
interpretative competence with respect to thought experiments is prima facie rife with
clear and reliable feedback. To repeat, what is crucial here is that one attends only to
the philosophically relevant aspects of a hypothetical case and that one recognizes or
properly ignores philosophically deviant or unintended interpretations. And when
students of philosophy are introduced to famous thought experiments, like the
Gettier cases or Putnams Twin Earth, then their philosophical teachers spend a lot of
time to introduce the relevant philosophical notions and distinctions, like DEFEAT
or INTENSION, and they also take a lot of care to direct their students to the
philosophically relevant aspects of the case, e.g., that Smiths belief is merely
accidentally true or that Twin-Oscar is not in a position to notice any difference
between H2O and XYZ. Moreover, students of philosophy are taught all the time to
distinguish between philosophically central and merely peripheral issues when they
read and interpret philosophical texts, and this general ability arguably helps them to
better see through to the essential features of a given hypothetical case. Therefore,
we have ample prima facie reason to believe that the relevant cognitive skills of
professional philosophers have been exposed to enough clear and reliable feedback to
constitute true expertise concerning the intuitive evaluation of hypothetical cases.
I conclude that experimental restrictionists have not (yet) offered us any positive
(empirical) reason to accept (EQ), that is, to accept the prima facie implausible claim
that professional philosophers intuitions about hypothetical cases vary equally with
irrelevant factors as those of non-philosophers. Throughout I have emphasized the
prima facie character of the expertise objection to the master argument, which is not
to be confused with any dogmatic resistance to the metaphilosophical relevance of
empirical evidence. Rather, I have argued that the empirical evidence presented by
experimental restrictionists so far is not convincing and specific enough to defeat the
prima facie plausible claim that professional philosophers have a number of
distinctive cognitive skills, like conceptual sensitivity or interpretative competence,
which tend to improve their intuitions about hypothetical cases in significant ways.
Yet, there is an obvious and logical next step for experimental restrictionists in this
dialectic, namely to go out and directly test the intuitive expertise of well-trained
472 J. Horvath
professional philosophers. Personally, I am very much looking forward to the results
of such an investigation.25
5. Conservative Restrictionism as a Reasonable Default Reaction

So far, what we have in the debate about the metaphilosophical consequences of
experimental philosophy are largely two opposing parties. On the one side, we have
traditional armchair philosophers who aim to defend the trustworthiness of their
intuition-based methodology against the experimentalist challenge, while mostly
staying in their armchair in the course of doing so. On the other side, there are those
experimental philosophers who think that the available experimental evidence

already calls for a restriction, or at least suspension, of intuition-based philosophy
until certain substantial empirical issues are actually settled, e.g., concerning the role
of philosophical expertise or the interplay of intuition and reflection. Following
Weinberg et al. (2010), let us call these two parties cathedrists and experimental
restrictionists.
Now, what has emerged from our discussion of various important reactions to the
experimentalist challenge is that both of these metaphilosophical parties have certain
problems of their own. Cathedrists, for example, tend to underestimate the empirical
defeasibility of philosophical methods and to downplay the force of potentially
relevant empirical counterevidence, maybe in part because they overestimate the
introspective transparency of their methods and the trustworthiness of our natural
cognitive abilities. Thus, they have to be reminded at times that it is ultimately
a highly contingent fact that human beings have the cognitive resources to
philosophize at all and arrive at epistemically acceptable results by doing so. What
experimental restrictionists bring to the fore, then, is the epistemic fragility of our
methodological self-understanding as armchair and non-armchair philosophers alike.
On the other hand, restrictionists tend to underestimate the difficulties in presenting
a non-skeptical challenge to an epistemic practice that is as fundamental as that of
appealing to intuitions about hypothetical cases. Furthermore, they are also prone
to downplay that intuition-based armchair philosophy is prima facie in good
methodological standing, and that it has a lot of dialectical resources to maintain its
standing even in the face of recalcitrant experimental data. Finally, experimental
restrictionists often set the bar much too low for what it takes to impeach an
established and well-entrenched methodology. Therefore, they tend to be overly hasty
and impatient in their calls for a radical reform of the standard practice of armchair
philosophy. So, what cathedrists should emphasize much more in the face of the
experimentalist challenge is the dialectical robustness and worthiness of trust that our
standing philosophical methods possess. This, at least, would be my unashamedly
opinionated summary of the preceding discussion of important reactions to the
experimentalist challenge.
As a consequence, I neither want to take sides with cathedrism nor with
experimental restrictionism, at least not without substantial qualifications. For this
reason, I would like to propose something like a third way that hopefully preserves
both of their respective insights, while at the same time avoiding various pitfalls
of these more extreme positions. In contrast to the radical restrictionism of
experimental philosophers like Stephen Stich or Jonathan Weinberg, I would like to
call this view conservative restrictionism. Its core idea is a twofold one, which has
already emerged from our discussion of the grounding objection and the expertise
objection. On the one hand, it is to be truly open to the empirical defeasibility of our
philosophical methods, and thus to readily allow for certain local restrictions of
intuition-based philosophy when empirical research suggests that particular appeals
to intuitions about hypothetical cases are in fact problematicthis is the restrictionist
part of conservative restrictionism.26 On the other hand, the idea is to be very
reluctant with respect to calls for a more global and radical reform, or even
abandonment, of an established and well-entrenched methodology like intuition-
based philosophywhich is the conservatism in conservative restrictionism.
What is the rationale for the local restrictionism in conservative restrictionism? The
main motivation here is to evade the inconvenient grounding objection to the master
argument. For, as we have seen, there is presently no epistemic construal of the
challenge to intuitions about hypothetical cases that is free from serious epistemic
problems, like skeptical implications or self-defeat. The root of all these problems
seems to be that the master argument aims for some more general negative
conclusion about the epistemic value of these intuitions. So, if one does not aspire for
any more global claims about the use of intuitions in the first place, it should be
much easier to avoid the pitfalls of the grounding objection. If we observe that our
intuitions about a specific type of hypothetical case vary strongly with irrelevant
factors, then it seems fairly unproblematic to conclude that there is something
epistemically dubious about our intuitions about this particular case. For, as long as
one only challenges intuitions about specific types of cases, then this has as many, or
as little, skeptical implications as to challenge, say, our visual perceptions under
conditions that give rise to change blindness. Of course, in order to draw analogous
conclusions about the relevant philosophical experts, one will ultimately have to
observe the corresponding variations with irrelevant factors in a representative
sample of well-trained professional philosophers, but the local restrictionist has no in
principle concerns against the possibility of doing this. First and foremost, however,
we should focus on what the experimental findings imply for the use of intuitions
about specific thought experiments, e.g., about those types of Gettier cases which
have actually been tested by experimental philosophers, namely those that involve
reasoning from a false premise. But the local restrictionist would be very hesitant to
generalize from these findings to intuitions about other, structurally different types of
Gettier cases, like the fake-barn case (cf., Goldman, 1976, p. 143). Thus, she would
caution experimental philosophers to investigate even the narrow class of Gettier
cases more broadly before drawing any more general conclusions here, while always
keeping an eye on the danger of epistemic self-defeat along the way. But even this
more cautious approach of local restrictionism has the potential to generate
methodologically significant results. For a start, if intuitions about a standard type of
474 J. Horvath
Gettier case turn out to be robustly susceptible to irrelevant factors, then this
definitely calls for more empirical research on Gettier cases and other epistemological
thought experiments. And if experimental philosophers were able to confirm their
pioneering results even for well-trained professional philosophers, then this would
surely have a substantial methodological impact on the practice of intuition-based
epistemology. It could even call for the suspension of intuitions about a Gettier case
on which Western philosophers widely agree, e.g., if equally well-trained philoso-
phers from other cultures happen to have substantially different intuitions about the
same type of case. At the very least, findings of this kind would make life a lot harder
for purely cathedrist approaches to epistemological issues, because philosophers
could not simply continue to appeal to intuitions about this particular type of Gettier
case without any serious attempt to address the problematic experimental results.
Given the huge importance of Gettier cases for the theory of knowledge, even local
restrictionism thus allows for some fairly radical metaphilosophical consequences.
Secondly, what speaks in favor of the methodological conservatism in conservative
restrictionism? On the one hand, it is the observation that an established and well-
entrenched methodological practice, like intuition-based philosophy, is typically
prima facie plausible in a number of ways. First, there is the easily overlooked fact
that it has obviously made a lot of sense to a large number of extremely smart
practitioners over a longer period of time. One reason for this fact is surely that it
continuous to produce interesting, fruitful and highly sophisticated results, at least
unless professional philosophers are massively self-deluded. This is particularly
impressive in the case of intuition-based philosophy, for philosophers are in general
anything but shy or reluctant when it comes to criticizing their own discipline or
methodology, which is evidenced by the very existence of experimental philosophy
and other forms of philosophical naturalism. Second, there is typically a prima facie
plausible story about why the methods of such an established practice are good
methods, and why its practitioners are experts in performing these methods. My
discussion of the expertise objection to the master argument can be read as a case
study here. Taken together, these two observations constitute a strong prima facie
presumption in favor of established and well-entrenched methodological practices.
Consequently, it takes a pretty impressive array of counterevidence to impeach such
a practice. In Kuhnian terms, one cannot change an established scientific paradigm
with just a few recalcitrant data. Rather, it takes such an overwhelming mass of
problematic findings that the established paradigm runs out of resources to deal with
them in any kind of plausible way, and only then does a call for a scientific revolution
seem well motivated. And this makes good methodological sense, for quite a few
would-be revolutions in the history of science turned out as complete non-starters or
dead ends after a while. Thus, the risk of throwing away an established and time-
proven method much too prematurely ultimately recommends methodological
conservatism as the most reasonable attitude here. Now, I take it that radical
restrictionists really aim for something like a paradigm change in philosophical
methodology, which one might sum up with the slogan out of the armchair and
into the lab. What conservative restrictionists want to hold against their
revolutionary impatience is that, after not even a decade of research in the new,
experimental paradigm, radical restrictionists are simply not quite there yet.
There is also a more constructive side to methodological conservativism, for it has
the resources to explain why it is nevertheless rational to pursue experimental work
in philosophy even though the majority of philosophical research should still
continue in the standard paradigm of intuition-based armchair philosophy. To this
end, one must turn away from focusing on the perspective of the individual
researcher and instead take the level of whole communities of researchers into
consideration. One important question that arises on this collective level is how to
allocate ones total scientific, intellectual and institutional resources to a number of
competing research projects within a certain area of inquiry. And here it turns out
that it is often collectively rational that a minority of researchers keeps pursuing a

maverick research project, even though this may appear quite irrational from an
individual point of view (cf., Kitcher, 1990). A good example from the history of
science that nicely illustrates the merits of this strategy is Alfred Wegeners theory of
continental drift, which seemed fairly implausible to the geologists of his time when
he first proposed it in 1915, but which became nevertheless the universally accepted
view in the 1970s. If one accepts the underlying idea of a division of cognitive labor,
then there are some intriguing lessons for the metaphilosophical debate about the
experimentalist challenge. First, given that experimental restrictionism is obviously
the maverick research project here, it will continue to be rational to devote the
majority of research resources in philosophy to the dominating paradigm of
intuition-based armchair philosophy, even if potentially challenging experimental
results should further accumulate (until, of course, something like an evidential
tipping point is reached). Second, it will at the same time also be rational that
experimental restrictionists get a certain minority share of these total resources, and
it will even be rational that their share keeps growing as long as they continue to
produce interesting new results. Moreover, even the staunchest proponents of
armchair philosophy should acknowledge this, at least insofar as they are concerned
with the collective rationality of philosophy as a whole. All in all, then, this
sophisticated socialized form of methodological conservativism bears the promise
of showing a way out of the dialectical impasse between cathedrism and
restrictionism that is beginning to loom at many points in the metaphilosophical
debate.
On balance, even the comparatively modest position of conservative restrictionism
has the potential to affect the practice of intuition-based philosophy in significant
ways, but without having to struggle with many of the problems that confront radical
restrictionism, e.g., how to properly demarcate the good from the bad intuitions
or how to generalize from the limited amount of still quite unsystematic
experimental results to some groundbreaking general methodological claim.
Against this background, conservative restrictionism looks like a reasonable default
reaction to the challenge from experimental philosophy, which at the same time does
not entirely take out its anti-traditional sting.27
476 J. Horvath
6. Conclusion
In this paper, I have first offered a reconstruction of the experimentalist challenge to
the practice of intuition-based armchair philosophy, which I have called the master
argument. Then, I have discussed a number of popular armchair philosophers
objections to the first, empirical premise of this argument, and concluded that they
either fail to cast sufficient doubt on its plausibility or do not go deep enough in
order to make for a lasting rebuttal of the experimentalist challenge. Purely
methodological objections, for example, at best constitute a rather superficial
response to the challenge. On the other hand, the different-concepts objection, which
is one of the more fundamental objections, either fails to establish the plausibility
of the alleged conceptual differences or to preserve enough of the substance of
intuition-based philosophy as we know it. The grounding objection is a better way to

react to the master argument, and it brings out that the epistemic underpinnings of
the experimentalist challenge are at present anything but clear or compelling.
Another promising reaction is the expertise objection, which insists that professional
philosophers are prima facie entitled to regard themselves as philosophical experts,
and thus need not yet be troubled by experimental results that suggest a variation of
non-philosophers intuitions with irrelevant factors. In light of my discussion of
important objections to the master argument, I have finally argued for conservative
restrictionism as the most reasonable default reaction to the challenge from
experimental philosophy, which is a combination of the two views of local
restrictionism and methodological conservativism.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joshua Alexander, Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Thomas
Grundmann, Jens Kipper, Max Seeger, Jonathan Weinberg and Tomek Wysocki for
their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Notes
[1] Not all experimental philosophers have such a decidedly anti-traditional aim. There are
other strands in experimental philosophy which see it rather as a continuation of traditional
philosophical methods, like conceptual analysis, with experimental means or even as not
being in the business of addressing first-order philosophical questions, e.g., about the nature
of knowledge, at all, but instead as a philosophically inspired empirical investigation into the
workings of the human mind, e.g., concerning the relationship between folk psychology and
moral cognition (cf., Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007).
[2] There are some traditional philosophers, though, who think that the subject matter of
philosophical thought experiments really is not, for example, knowledge itself but merely
our concept of knowledge (see e.g., Goldman, 2007; Goldman & Pust, 1998). For them, the
factors mentioned in the text may actually not be irrelevant to what concepts people have,
and therefore not be irrelevant to the subject matter of philosophical thought experiments,
either. Similar remarks apply to various forms of contextualism (for discussion, see e.g.,
Swain et al., 2008).
[3] Thanks to Brendan Balcerak Jackson for discussion.
[4] Thanks to Joshua Alexander for discussion here.
[5] Given this understanding, variation with irrelevant factors ends up being nothing but a
special case of unreliability here. For, it surely holds that a putative kind of evidence is
unreliable if it varies significantly and pervasively with factors that are irrelevant to its
correctness or truth (thanks to Thomas Grundmann for helping me to realize this
connection).
[6] In a more recent paper, Ludwig (this issue) seems to agree with this point.
[7] Thanks to Thomas Grundmann for reminding me of this point.
[8] In some cases, though, a contextualist solution might do the trick for proponents of the
different-concepts objection (for a brief discussion of contextualism related to order effects,
see Swain et al., 2008).
[9] Strangely enough, though, Sosa even seems to acknowledge this point, e.g., when he
remarks: we thus constantly interpret each other. And we seem mostly to get it right, and
reasonably so (Sosa, this issue).
[10] However, the different-concepts objection may be more plausible in particular cases,
especially if an intuitive disagreement persists even in the face of extensive discussion and
reflection (cf., Chalmers, unpublished manuscript). Thanks to Brendan Balcerak Jackson
for pressing me on this point.
[11] I discuss these issues in more detail in my Experimental Philosophy: What is the
Challenge? (Horvath, unpublished manuscript).
[12] This attitude is particularly clearly expressed in the title of Jonathan Weinbergs (2007) key
methodological paper: How to Challenge Intuitions Empirically Without Risking Skepticism
[italics added].
[13] Compare also Bealers (1992) and BonJours (1998) charge of epistemic self-defeat against
Quinian naturalism, which bears some similarities to the present problem.
[14] There is also a different, more static way to describe this predicament, namely as a form of
epistemic inconsistency. The basic idea is that premises (1) and (2) of the master argument
can only both be justified if its conclusion (C) is actually false. For, if (C) were true, then
premise (2) could not be justified, given that its justification (partly) depends on the
trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases (thanks to Thomas Grundmann for
pointing this out to me).
[15] Thanks to Joshua Alexander for discussion here.
[16] This may be one of the points where pure epistemology and methodology can come apart,
because for reliabilists about epistemic justification unreliability by itself would already
be sufficient for epistemic untrustworthiness.
[17] I discuss a few more attempts to spell out such a distinction in my Experimental
philosophy: What is the challenge? (Horvath, unpublished manuscript), but I conclude that
all of them are either somewhat arbitrary or fail to draw the line between intuitions about
ordinary and far-fetched hypothetical cases in a way that actually supports the case of
experimental restrictionism.
[18] Thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for the objection.
[19] Something analogous is also true of related psychological theories, like prototype theory.
[20] Thanks to Thomas Grundmann for the suggestion.
[21] It is true that coherence considerations may not suffice to correct all of a sources errors, but
to demand this would amount to requiring perfect hopefulness for epistemic trustworthi-
ness, which again seems to have unwanted skeptical implications (thanks to Thomas
Grundmann for prompting this clarification).
[22] I undertake this task in my Experimental philosophy: What is the challenge? (Horvath,
unpublished manuscript); for further discussion of hopefulness, see also Grundmann (this
issue) and Ichikawa (unpublished manuscript).
478 J. Horvath
[23] I am fully aware that these reflections do nothing to actually settle the complex issues that I
raise in this section. As almost always here, I merely claim a certain degree of prima facie
plausibility for them. But this is enough for the purposes at hand, as I will argue below.
[24] Without these prima facie plausible differences in epistemic quality between philosophers
and non-philosophers, however, the armchair philosopher would have a hard time to get the
expertise objection going. For, it would be quite unclear, then, why the fact that someone is
a philosopher should pose any kind of problem for the relevant ampliative inference. To see
this point, consider the following analogy. Suppose that all the existing experimental results
were in fact obtained on a weekday. Someone could now try to mount a weekend
objection to the master argument, by claiming that the burden of proof is on the
experimental restrictionist to show that her results actually generalize to Saturdays and
Sundays as well. Clearly, this would be an absurd move. And the reason is simply that it is
not even prima facie plausible that the day of the week is likely to make any significant
epistemic difference to ones intuitions about hypothetical cases. So, all I really claim here is
that the expertise objection should be held to the same standards as the ominous weekday
objection (thanks to Thomas Grundmann for prompting this clarification).
[25] Maybe Thomas Nadelhoffer and his colleagues are already on the way to present their
respective results in the near future (cf., Nadelhoffer, 2008).
[26] Some armchair philosophers may protest that they have been committed to this kind of view
all along. If so, then all the betterwe may refer to these philosophers as sensible
cathedrists, then. Nevertheless, my impression is that many armchair philosophers are much
more reluctant than the local restrictionist, and at times even hostile, to accept the results of
experimental philosophy as potentially defeating evidence with respect to their methodol-
ogy. So, given that these truly anti-experimental philosophers actually exist, I would
maintain that local restrictionism, and eo ipso conservative restrictionism, really marks
something like a third way in between anti-experimentalism and radical restrictionism.
[27] In fact, I think that conservative restrictionism would also be a reasonable reaction to
empirical challenges to other methodological practices or sources of evidence, for example to
psychological findings like change blindness that seem to cast doubt on the trustworthiness
of visual perception (thanks to Thomas Grundmann for bringing this wider significance of
conservative restrictionism to my attention).
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How (not) to react to experimental

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How (not) to react to experimental

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based

ISSN 0951-5089 (print)/ISSN 1465-394X (online)/10/040447-34 2010 Taylor & Francis

2. The Master Argument against Intuition-Based Armchair Philosophy

Premise (1) of the master argument is mainly supported by experimental results of

3. How Not to React to the Master Argument

3.1. Methodological Objections

a considerable difference to their outcome. For example, it makes a significant

3.2. The Genuine-Intuitions Objection

genuine intuitions in the above sense.

3.4. The Different-Concepts Objection

though they share their linguistic surface appearance.

experimental philosophy in terms of conceptual differences, rather than as real

4. Better Ways to React to the Master Argument

4.1. The Grounding Objection

unreliability easily leads to the problem of epistemic self-defeat, at least if the

relation of similarity to the mentally stored exemplar representations, but nothing

namely external corroboration, internal coherence, detectability of their margins of

4.2. The Expertise Objection

But why should professional philosophers grant to the experimental restrictionist

appeals to expertise in the extant philosophical literature (Weinberg et al., 2010,

example, who were committed to an incompatibleand falsetheory about

(empirical) evidence in favor of ones own expertise in order to be entitled to a

5. Conservative Restrictionism as a Reasonable Default Reaction

experimental philosophers who think that the available experimental evidence

that it is often collectively rational that a minority of researchers keeps pursuing a

intuition-based philosophy as we know it. The grounding objection is a better way to

Ludwig, K. (this issue). Intuitions and relativity. Philosophical Psychology.

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