Introduction
Philosophers who are interested in what philosophical intuitions can tell us owe a story that explains how philosophical intuitions can tell us anything at all about ourselves and the world around us.
As Alvin Goldman (2007) argues, this story might be particularly hard to tell for philosophers who are interested in what philosophical intuitions might tell us about the non-psychological world.1 The problem isn't that philosophical intuitions are mental states; so are perceptions and we needn't worry about their ability to tell us things about the non-psychological world. Instead, the problem is that we lack a naturalistically acceptable model of the mechanisms that would connect our philosophical intuitions to the non-psychological world they are supposed to be telling us something about. This kind of worry has motivated some philosophers to turn their attention to what philosophical intuitions can tell us about ourselves. On this view, philosophical intuitions might not be able to tell us what the world is really like, but they can tell us something important about the ways that we think about the world - in particular, about our individual or shared concepts. class=a0 style='text-indent:18.0pt;line-height:105%'>In more traditional circles, this interest in what philosophical intuitions can tell us about our individual or shared concepts is associated with conceptual analysis. Conceptual analysis aims at identifying the precise meaning of philosophical concepts, and typically involves measuring proposed definitions of philosophical concepts against our philosophical intuitions about the application conditions of those concepts. For example, analytic philosophers might try to identify the precise meaning of knowledge by measuring various potential definitions of knowledge against our intuitions about when it is, and when it is not, appropriate to attribute knowledge to someone.The interest in what philosophical intuitions can tell us about ourselves takes a different shape in experimental circles. Many experimental philosophers are less interested in identifying the precise meaning of philosophical concepts than they are in identifying the factors that influence our applications of these concepts.
So, for example, experimental philosophers would be less interested in identifying the precise meaning of knowledge than they would be in identifying why we have the intuitions that we do about when it is, and when it is not, appropriate to attribute knowledge to someone. The goal is not, or at least not only, to use our intuitions to help explain the meaning of our philosophical concepts, but to explain our intuitions themselves.In this chapter, we will look at one particularly influential example of this kind of experimental philosophy: namely, recent experimental work on the apparent influence that normative considerations have on people's ordinary ways of thinking about the world. Much of this work has focused on how normative considerations exert this influence, and whether they form part of our conceptual competence or simply figure into our conceptual performance. It turns out to be quite difficult to determine whether or not normative considerations are part of our conceptual competence, in part because it proves quite difficult to determine precisely how they exert their influence on our ordinary ways of thinking about the world. But, as Hume long ago taught us, even knowing how they do influence our ordinary ways of thinking about the world wouldn't suffice to tell us whether they should have such an influence. And, one of the important lessons from this work is that more (and different) work will be needed before we can determine whether normative considerations are part of our conceptual competence or simply figure into our conceptual performance.
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