Philosophy 391, Examples and Intuitions
Fall 2000, J. W. Powell; 1 credit, CRN 43757, 2 Thurs (NOTE CHANGE) in HGH 204
Office hours 11-12 UH, 3-4 W, and by appt. E-mail jwp2@humboldt.edu.
Question and background: Does philosophy have data? Can we resolve disagreements regarding cases relevant to philosophical problems? When philosophers are in agreement about cases, can we trust their judgments?
This reading group is another in a series of reading groups in which we have been investigating questions about philosophical methods. Past groups have taken up questions
--in philosophy of language, e.g. about how we tell whether intentions are parts of meaning;
--in philosophy of knowledge, about whether certainty as philosophers use that term has anything to do with certainty and how we tell;
--in philosophy of logic, about what the standards are for good argumentats;
--in philosophy of philosophy, about the relations of philosophical accounts to the things about which those accounts are supposed to be accounts.
Some of the materials for those earlier reading groups are on my website www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2 under the links for this course. My "Ins and Outs of Language," at http://www.humboldt.edu/~jwp2/innoutla.htm, articulates one alternative.
The Problem: Sometimes philosophers will say something like the following:
"It has been said that the achievement of Edmund Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? [1] is that it demonstrates that the traditional analysis of knowledge is inadequate. This definition may be explicated as:
S knows that p = df
i) S believes that p
ii) It is true that p
iii) S is justified in believing that p.
Gettier offered a couple of counterexamples as refutation. For our purposes an example adapted from Russell will serve to illustrate.[2] Ed has worked in an office for forty years and has observed a clock working reliably that whole time. One morning Ed glances at the clock and as a result believes that it is nine oclock. What he does not know is that the clock stopped precisely twelve hours previously. Thus it is true that it is nine o'clock, Ed believes that it is nine o'clock, and Ed is justified in his belief that it is nine o'clock. However, the intuition of most is that Ed does not know that it is nine o'clock. Something seems to be missing. Over the years we have seen a number of ingenious attempts to specify what this something missing is, the search for the elusive fourth condition."
("The Concept of Gettier," Mark Walker, University of Sydney Preprint Series in History and Philosophy of Science, March 2000; from http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/hps/preprints/preprint7/Walker.html. Footnotes [1] and [2] omitted.)
Mark Walker is using "intuition" as a crucial but unremarked part of the argument that the Gettier examples show the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief is inadequate. We are going to investigate; to what extent may we use "intuition" in this way? This is a real investigation: I have not thought this through even though I am, as some of you know, quite suspicious about the things that philosophers cite as intuitions.
These examples could be multiplied. Michael Tye, author of Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind (Bradford Books, MIT: 1995), uses the language of intuitions in a similar way. Kant cites intuition in a way that suggests he too thinks it is a valuable piece of our armament. Some other locutions can perhaps be explained by appeal to intuition, as Walker has done above with Gettier. Alexander Levine at Lehigh Univ. claims this kind of argument has been a staple of epistemology, and has been routinely used in other philosophical areas, for over 500 years.
The issue is a live issue in part because of the possibility that philosophers can be in the grip of what Wittgenstein calls a picture, a simplified or diagrammatic sketch of the subject matter which guides our thinking. We might think of this as a worry about projections: a philosopher investigating beliefs, for instance, might start seeing beliefs under every bed (or in every head), and a philosopher investigating illusions might do the same with those.
(This has very little to do with citing a range of things like "women's intuition" or whether some people are more intuitive than others. We will touch on why this might be so.)
Format: We will meet for an hour a week, read about ten articles over the semester, write a half page every other week (without my nagging or looking after the process), and then write a two page wrapup at the end of the semester. What we write we will share with the group, preferably by e-mail. I will write at least as much as you. This is a lot of work for one credit. Tough. It's not about credit or grades but about the opportunity to do philosophy on a current issue. You may take it for a grade or for Credit/NonCredit. We will begin serious work on the 7th August with the paper I hand out on the first day. I'll put copies on my door.