1 X - Phi Without Intuitions ? 1 Herman Cappelen

X-Phi without Intuitions?

One central purpose of Experimental Philosophy (hereafter, x-phi) is to criticize the alleged reliance on intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In my book Philosophy without Intuitions (2012; hereafter, PWI), I argue that philosophers don’t rely on intuitions. If those arguments are good, experimental philosophy has been engaged in an attack on a straw man. The goal of this chapter is to bolst...

Intuitions in Philosophy: A Minimal Defense∗

In Philosophy Without Intuitions, Herman Cappelen focuses on the metaphilosophical thesis he calls Centrality: Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories. Using linguistic and textual analysis, he argues that Centrality is false. He also suggests that because most philosophers accept Centrality, they have mistaken beliefs about their own methods...

A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design

Evidence for contextualism primarily consists of intuitions generated in response to a variety of thought experiments. I argue that these intuitions are subject to experimenter bias and bias that results from exclusive reliance on absolute truth-value judgments. Unless these forms of experimental bias are controlled for, both contextualists and their opponents are attempting to give semantic an...

Semantics and Pragmatics: Some Central Issues

Binding Arguments and Hidden Variables

In recent years, several philosophers have appealed to evidence about binding relations to show that various linguistic expressions are represented (at some level of linguistic representation) as having hidden variables (e.g., Stanley (2002), 368–369; Stanley and Szabó (2000), 243). In particular, the idea is that binding interactions between the relevant expressions and natural language quanti...