Thought experiments, real experiments, and the expertise objection

European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (2):205-218 (2012)
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Abstract

It is a commonplace that in philosophy, intuitions supply evidence for and against philosophical theories. Recent work in experimental philosophy has brought to bear the intuitions of philosophically naïve subjects in a number of different ways. One line of response to this work has been to claim that philosophers have expertise that privileges their intuitive judgments, and allows them to disregard the judgments of non-experts. This expertise is supposed to be analogous to the expertise of the mathematician or the physicist. This paper critically evaluates this appeal to philosophical expertise.

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Christopher Hitchcock
California Institute of Technology

Citations of this work

Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge.Joachim Horvath & Alex Wiegmann - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (10):2701-2726.
Experimental Explication.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):672-710.
Thought Experiments.Yiftach J. H. Fehige & James R. Brown - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 25 (1):135-142.
Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options.Joachim Horvath, Karina Meyer & Alex Wiegmann - 2020 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 275-310.

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References found in this work

Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.Nelson Goodman - 1983 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Causation.David Lewis - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (17):556-567.
A System of Logic.John Stuart Mill - 1829/2002 - Longman.

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