Intuitional Diversity
We tend to believe that our philosophical intuitions are more or less universally shared. This is what seems at least partially to underwrite our intuition deploying practices.
We think of these practices as more than mere intellectual autobiography, and appeal to philosophical intuitions, when we do, because we anticipate that others share our intuitive judgments. But, recent empirical work suggests that we might be wrong: instead of universality, we find diversity.One of the most widely discussed kinds of intuitional diversity has been cultural diversity: our philosophical intuitions seem to be sensitive to our own cultural background.1 Stephen Stich (1988, 1990) was the first to seriously put forward the idea that cultural background might play a role in shaping our philosophical intuitions. But it wasn't until he teamed up with Jonathan Weinberg and Shaun Nichols (Weinberg et al. 2001, Nichols et al. 2003) in a series of cross-cultural studies on our epistemic intuitions that this idea really began to take root. These cross-cultural studies revealed that, in fact, people from different cultural backgrounds have significantly different epistemic intuitions. Consider the following vignette:
American Car
Bob has a friend Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it?
If cultural background plays no role in shaping our philosophical intuitions, then we should expect people from different cultural backgrounds to form similar intuitive judgments about this case.
Remarkably, this is not what we find. Instead, we find that, while most people from Western backgrounds judge that Bob only believes that Jill drives an American car, most people from East Asian or South Asian backgrounds judge that Bob actually knows that she does.2 It seems that our intuitions about this case are tracking more than we might have anticipated, and that cultural background is playing some role in generating them.Although we don't know precisely what role cultural background is playing in generating philosophical intuitions about this case, we do know that this case is not unique. Not only is cultural diversity not limited to our epistemic intuitions about this particular hypothetical case, it's not limited to epistemic intuitions at all. Recent work in experimental philosophy suggests that some of our semantic intuitions are also culturally diverse (Machery et al. 2004, Mallon et al. 2009). Consider, for example, the following two versions of Kripke's famous Godel case:
Godel
Suppose that John has learned in college that Godel is the man who proved an important mathematical theorem, called the incompleteness of arithmetic. John is quite good at mathematics and he can give an accurate statement of the incompleteness theorem, which he attributes to Godel as the discoverer. But this is the only thing that he has heard about Godel. Now suppose that Godel was not the author of this theorem. A man called “Schmidt” whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Godel somehow got a hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work, which was thereafter attributed to Godel. Thus he has been known as the man who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic. Most people who have heard the name “Godel” are like John; the claim that Godel discovered the incompleteness theorem is the only thing that they have ever heard about Godel.
Tsu Ch,ung Chih
Ivy is a high school student in Hong Kong.
In her astronomy class she was taught that Tsu Ch'ung Chih was the man who first determined the precise time of the summer and winter solstices. But, like all her classmates, this is the only thing she has heard about Tsu Ch'ung Chih. Now suppose that Tsu Ch'ung Chih did not really make this discovery. He stole it from an astronomer who died soon after making the discovery. But the theft remained entirely undetected and Tsu Ch'ung Chih became famous for the discovery of the precise times of the solstices. Many people are like Ivy; the claim that Tsu Ch'ung Chih determined the solstice times is the only thing they have ever heard about him.Remember that our semantic intuitions about cases like these are supposed to help us decide between descriptivist and causal- historical theories of reference. Interestingly, we find that people from East Asian backgrounds are more likely to be descriptivists (believing, for example, that John is referring to Schmidt) than are people from Western backgrounds.3 This suggests that, while most analytic philosophers followed Kripke's lead by adopting some kind of causal-historical account of reference, this move might be rather unique to Western culture.4
It seems that Stich was right: cultural background plays a role in shaping at least some of our philosophical intuitions. But, the story doesn't stop here. Not all intuitional diversity is cultural diversity, and recently focus has shifted to another kind of interpersonal intuitional diversity, namely gender diversity (Zamzow & Nichols 2009, Stich & Buckwalter 2011, Buckwalter & Stich, forthcoming). Consider the following two versions of the famous Trolley case:
Stranger
You are taking your daily walk near the train tracks and you notice that the train that is approaching is out of control. You see what has happened: the driver of the train saw five people working on the tracks and slammed on the brakes, but the brakes failed and the driver fainted.
The train is now rushing toward the five people. It is moving so fast that they will not be able to get off the track in time. You happen to be standing next to a switch, and you realize that the only way to save the five people on the tracks is to throw the switch, which will turn the train onto a side track, thereby preventing it from killing the five people. However, there is a stranger standing on the side track with his back turned, and if you proceed to throw the switch, the five people will be saved, but the person on the side track will be killed.Child
You are taking your daily walk near the train tracks and you notice that the train that is approaching is out of control. You see what has happened: the driver of the train saw five people working on the tracks and slammed on the brakes, but the brakes failed and the driver fainted. The train is now rushing toward the five people. It is moving so fast that they will not be able to get off the track in time. You happen to be standing next to a switch, and you realize that the only way to save the five people on the tracks is to throw the switch, which will turn the train onto a side track, thereby preventing it from killing the five people. However, there is a 12-year-old boy standing on the side track with his back turned, and if you proceed to throw the switch, the five people will be saved, but the boy on the side track will be killed.
We might expect men and women to have roughly the same intuitions about what the morally acceptable course of action is in these cases. As it turns out, we'd be wrong. Jennifer Zamzow and Shaun Nichols (2009) found that women are less likely than men to think that it is morally acceptable to redirect the trolley in the Child case, while men are less likely than women to think that it is morally acceptable to redirect the trolley in the Stranger case.5 Gender diversity becomes even more pronounced when we move from ethical intuitions to epistemic intuitions and metaphysical intuitions.
Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich (forthcoming), for example, describe a fascinating study conducted by Christina Starmans and Ori Friedman (forthcoming). Starmans and Friedman asked people to consider the following vignette:Watch
Peter is in his locked apartment and is reading. He decides to have a shower. He puts his book down on the coffee table. Then he takes off his watch, and also puts it on the coffee table. Then he goes into the bathroom. As Peter's shower begins, a burglar silently breaks into Peter's apartment. The burglar takes Peter's watch, puts a cheap plastic watch in its place, and then leaves. Peter has only been in the shower for two minutes, and he did not hear anything.
The results were striking: women are considerably more likely than men to say that Peter knows that there is a watch on the table.6 Similarly striking results are found when we consider some of our metaphysical intuitions. In another study reported on by Buckwalter and Stich (forthcoming), Geoffrey Holtzman asked people to consider the following vignette:
Determined Killer
Suppose scientists figure out the exact state of the universe during the Big Bang, and figure out all the laws of physics as well. They put this information into a computer, and the computer perfectly predicts everything that has ever happened. In other words, they prove that everything that happens has to happen exactly that way because of the laws of physics and everything that's come before.
He then asked people whether it is possible for someone in this world to freely choose whether or not to murder someone else and found that women were much more likely than men to think that this was possible.7 While future studies will be conclusive, it is beginning to seem like interpersonal intuitional diversity exists not only between cultures but also within cultures.8
Intuitional diversity presents a significant challenge to our intuition deploying practices.
Anyone who wants to select one from among those philosophical intuitions generated in response to a specific hypothetical case will have to explain why the other intuitions should be discounted. In some cases, it won't be hard to find a plausible story to tell. As Goldman (2007) points out, there are a number of ways in which intuitions can go wrong: we might be misinformed or otherwise insufficiently informed about the case at hand; we might forget or lose track of the relevant details about the case; or our intuitive judgments about the case might be clouded by our theoretical commitments. The trouble is that, while such moves might seem plausible when we are confronted with small-scale intuitional disagreements, they seem considerably less plausible in the cases at hand, cases of large-scale systematic intuitional diversity. At the very least, it's hard to imagine how such a story would go. (In the next chapter, we will consider one rather popular story that places restrictions on whose intuitions can count as evidence.)The alternative is to explain away our concerns about intuitional diversity. One way to do so would be to follow Goldman (2007), who argues that we should think of philosophical inquiry as aiming to help us better understand our individual or shared concepts.9 As Goldman (2007, p. 13) writes,
A chief attraction of [this view] is that it nicely handles challenges to the reliability of intuition arising from variability or conflicts of intuitions across persons. If the targets are construed as concepts in the personal psychological sense, then Bernard's intuition that F applies to x is evidence only for his personal concept of F, and Elke's intuition that F doesn't apply to x is evidence only for her personal concept of F. If Bernard intuits that a specified example is an instance of knowledge and Elke intuits otherwise, the conflict between intuitions can be minimized, because each bears evidentially on their own personal concepts, which may differ. This may be precisely what transpires in the cases reported by Weinberg et al.
The idea is that intuitional diversity reflects conceptual diversity, and not all kinds of conceptual diversity are necessarily problematic. But, this way of responding to intuitional diversity trades a view of philosophy as telling us something about the world for a view of philosophy as telling us something about the ways in which we think about that world and invites a shift towards certain kinds of philosophical relativism anathema to many philosophers.
3.