Postgraduates work in progress

Speaker: Rick Sendelbeck (University of Edinburgh)

Title: What kind of evince are intuitions?

Abstract: In this presentation, I will compare two accounts of how intuitions can be understood as evidence – the standard account of evidence and the contextualist account of evidence. I will argue that the contextualist account of evidence would allow philosophers, who are relying on intuitions, are stronger foundation less vulnerable to the attacks coming from experimental moral philosophy, and thus is to be preferred.

I will present two independent arguments for why the contextualist account of evidence is to be preferred.

For most moral philosophers, the use of intuitions as evidence is essential for their philosophising. Such philosophers should uphold the most favourable account of evidence to justify their use of intuition as evidence. Thus, the question they need to answer is: What would be the best account of evidence to defend the use of intuitions as evidence? The best account of evidence would allow these philosophers to maintain the stability of evidence as long as possible, which is the chief characteristic of evidence, in spite of the seemingly pervasive variations of intuitions according to the findings of Experimental Philosophy.

I will argue firstly, that according to the standard account of evidence, a significant difference (strength or manifestation) between expert’s and laypeople’s intuition would be expected, however, this predicted difference cannot be found in experimental data, and is thus unsupported. This is one argument against the usefulness of the standard account of evidence. The contextualist account is indifferent of the epistemic status of experts and laypeople and thus favourable.

The second argument is that variation in intuitions would lead, according to the standard account of evidence, to the conclusion that the evidence is not robust, thus they would conclude, that one should not rely on this kind of evidence. The contextualist account of evidence, however, can accommodate a certain amount of variability, without sacrificing the robustness of evidence, by attributing this variation to the experimental setup, i.e. the method of cases, and argue that this set-up leads to a deteriorated apprehension of the evidence/intuitions, which, however, does not alter the evidence itself. Thus, despite variation of intuitions, the contextualist can still maintain the stability of intuitions as evidence and needs only to establish that our capacity to perceive/apprehend intuitions is reliable enough to warrant the use intuitions as evidence.

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