Restrictionism and Reflection

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt has become increasingly popular to respond to experimental philosophy by suggesting that experimental philosophers haven't been studying the right kind of thing. One version of this kind of response, which we call the reflection defense, involves suggesting both that philosophers are interested only in intuitions that are the product of careful reflection on the details of hypothetical cases and the key concepts involved in those cases, and that these kinds of philosophical intuitions haven't yet been (and possibly cannot be) adequately studied by experimental philosophers. Of course, as a defensive move, this works only if reflective intuitions are immune from the kinds of problematic effects that form the basis of recent experimental challenges to philosophy's intuition-deploying practices. If they are not immune (or at least sufficiently less vulnerable) to these kinds of effects, then the fact that experimental philosophers have not had the right kind of thing in their sights would provide little comfort to folks invested in philosophy's intuition-deploying practices. Here we provide reasons to worry that even reflective intuitions can display sensitivity to the same kinds of problematic effects, although possibly in slightly different ways. As it turns out, being reflective might sometimes just mean being wrong in a different way.1. Reflections on the Restrictionist ChallengeHere's one rather popular way of thinking about the role that philosophical intuitions play in contemporary analytic philosophy. We advance philosophical theories on the basis of their ability to explain our intuitions, defend their truth on the basis of their overall agreement with our intuitions, and justify our philosophical beliefs on the basis of their accordance with our intuitions. Intuitions are part of our standardjustificatory procedure (Bealer 1998), and are part of what defines uniquely philosophical method- ology (Levin 2004, Goldman 2007). Let's call this the orthodox way of thinking about philosophical methodology.Over the years, the orthodox way of thinking about philosophical methodology has been repeatedly challenged.1 Here's one recent challenge, which has become known as the restrictionist challenge, in a nutshell.2 Our intuition-deploying practices are in good standing to the extent to which philosophical intuitions are appropriately sensitive- sensitive only to those things that are relevant (or, at least, that philosophers commonly take to be relevant) to the truth or falsity of the claims for which the evidence is supposed to provide evidence. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that at least some philosophical intuitions are problematically sensitive-sensitive to things (e.g., ethnicity, gender, affectivity, and presentation order) that haven't traditionally been thought to be relevant to the truth or falsity of philosophical claims (see, for example, Weinberg et al. 2001, Buckwalter and Stich 2011, Nichols and Knobe 2007, and Swain et al. 2008). The situation is made only worse by the fact that we currently lack the means either to correct for this kind of problematic sensitivity or even to predict from the armchair when or where else it will appear. We find ourselves in the unenviable, and ultimately untenable, epistemic position of suspecting that some intuitional evidence is problematically sensitive without being able reliably to predict what intuitional evidence is problematically sensitive. What makes this position so challenging is that almost any way of responding to it that begins by accepting the empirical results themselves would seem to involve a radical departure from the orthodox way of thinking about philosophical methodology. At the very least, it seems like we must either explain away our concerns about these kinds of intuitional sensitivities or place limits on what intuitional evidence we employ and when we can safely employ it. But, placing even these sorts of local restrictions on our intuition-deploying practices would seem to require a global shift in how we think about and approach these practices. …