Champions of the methodological movement of experimental philosophy have challenged the long-standing practice of relying on intuitive verdicts on cases in philosophical inquiry. They argue that th...

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 60, Issue 2, Page 154-172, June 2022.

Avner Baz argues that the philosophical method of cases presupposes a problematic view of language and linguistic competence, namely what he calls "the atomistic-compositional view". Combining key elements of social pragmatism and contextualism, Baz presents a view of language and linguistic competence, which he takes to be more sensitive to the open-endedness of human language. On this view, there are conditions for the "normal" and "felicitous" use of human words, conditions that Baz thinks are lacking in the context of the (...) philosophical method of cases, and which make the question that philosophers are prone to ask in that context and the answers they give to that question to be pointless. However, in this paper, I argue as follows. First, Baz's conditions for the "normal" and "felicitous" use of human words are in tension with the open-endedness of human language and the use of human words. Second, it is not even clear that those conditions are really missing in the context of the philosophical method of cases. And third, even if we grant that those conditions are missing in that context, this does not licence his damning conclusion on the philosophical method of cases since we are not forced to embrace the view of language and linguistic competence on which that damning conclusion is plausible. This last move is secured by advancing and defending a skill or virtue-based view of language and linguistic competence inspired by the later work of Donald Davidson. (shrink)

Thought experiments play a prominent role in philosophical inquiry. And yet we lack a good understanding of how they work and how they are supposed to supply evidence or knowledge in inquiry. This dissertation offers a novel account of the epistemology of philosophical thought experiments, namely, the reason-responsiveness view. The view is inspired by a virtue ethical tradition that flowers in John McDowell (1994) and Miranda Fricker (2007). Drawing on this virtue ethical tradition, I argue that knowing in philosophical thought (...) experiments is achieved through the exercise of the virtue of sensibility, which has three distinct features. First, it is social in origin, acquired through our training in a human language and as ordinary members of a community. Second, it is recognitional in the sense that although our sensibility gives us the ability to classify situations, whether real or hypothetical and to resonate with rational considerations for or against a given classificational judgement (i.e., the judgements we form in thought experiments), it does not equip us with a reflective ability to fully articulate those reasons in an infallible way. And third, it allows us to project across various contexts, both in real and in hypothetical situations. And this ability to project, I argue further, does not come from the ability of people to grasp concepts or to have certain mental episodes or phenomenology or to grasp universals or to have mastery of the application conditions of rules or from belonging to some exclusive club or from enjoying a certain superior access to concepts or access to philosophically interesting phenomena not available to ordinary people. On the contrary, that we do comes down to “our sharing routes of interest and feeling, mode of response, senses of humour and of significance, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the while of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (Cavell, 1969, p.52). The account is then used to shore up the claim of epistemological continuity, which asserts that the epistemology of thought experiments is an extension of social cognition or social epistemology (Cappelen, 2012; Deutsch, 2015; Williamson 2007), and to offer a claim of epistemological-continuity-style defence of philosophical thought experiments against two major objections in the literature, namely, the negative experimentalist challenge (see Machery, 2017) and the ordinary language challenge ( Baz, 2016, 2017). (shrink)

According to an influential characterisation of reflective equilibrium, it is a kind of algorithm for licensing explicitly normative claims in philosophical inquiries. Call this the machine-view of reflective equilibrium. The machine-view implies a causal relation between input and output data that is devoid of human agency in any significant sense. In this paper, I argue for a neo-Aristotelian alternative view. According to this view, the judgement that is called forth in the decision procedure of reflective equilibrium is a rational response (...) of an epistemic agent, which integrates the whole of her character as a knower, both cognitive and affective, and which cannot be reduced to the explicit following of rules or an algorithm. Unlike the machine-view, this alternative account is able to support the dynamic structure and the normative status of the decision procedure. (shrink)