Restrictionism Defended: Lessons from the Past

This is not the first time our intuition deploying practices have been challenged, and it is worth asking what lessons the restrictionist challenge has learned from those that came before it.

external phenomena” (Kornblith 1998, p. 135). The problem with this way of challenging philosophy’s intuition deploying practices is that it rests on too narrow a conception of philosophy. Of course, some philosophers aren’t interested in our concepts of things but in the things themselves, and Kornblith might be right that philosophical intuitions don’t have a significant role (or at least as significant a role) to play in philosophical discussions of the non-psychological world. But, other philosophers are interested in our concepts of things, and rightly so. This interest might be coupled with an interest in things themselves together with the view that only by first understanding our concepts of things can we begin to understand things themselves.

Another thing that we’ve learned from earlier challenges to our intuition deploying practices is that a successful challenge shouldn’t be so strong that it threatens to undermine all of our evidential practices. Let’s look at two examples. The first example concerns the fallibility of philosophical intuitions, and can be treated rather quickly. Michael Devitt (1994) and Catherine Elgin (1996) both argue that philosophical intuitions cannot be treated as evidence because they are fallible. The problem with this move should be clear: all putative sources of evidence are fallible, so this move would lead to global skepticism. Since most of us think that global skepticism should be avoided, we can’t rule out intuitional evidence, or any other kind of evidence, just because it’s fallible. The second example concerns the reliability of philosophical intuitions, or more precisely how we come to believe that they are reliable. Robert Cummins (1998) argues that philosophical intuitions cannot be treated as evidence because we have no independent justification for thinking that they are reliable guides to the truth. We cannot establish that philosophical intuitions are reliable without relying on philosophical intuitions. Setting aside any concerns that we might have with epistemic internalism, the problem with this move is that it also leads to global skepticism (Pust 2000, Goldman 2007). To see why, let's start with perception. The most natural way to establish the reliability of perception is by offering some sort of inductive argument over past accurate perceptions, but this kind of inductive argument relies on measuring perceptions against one another.

There is another lesson to be learned from worries about epistemic bootstrapping, namely, that a successful challenge to our intuition deploying practices shouldn't demand the epistemically impossible. Consider, again, the idea that philosophical intuitions cannot be treated as evidence unless we have independent justification for thinking that they are reliable guides to the truth. As already observed, the most natural way to establish the reliability of a putative source of evidence is by offering some sort of inductive argument over past accurate reports made by that source of evidence. Unless we allow some kind of epistemic bootstrapping, this requires that we check the reports of that putative source of evidence against the reports of another putative source of evidence. So, if we are trying to establish the reliability of philosophical intuitions in a way that avoids epistemic bootstrapping, we must appeal to some putative source of evidence other than philosophical intuition - call this putative source of evidence E₁. Of course, the constraint that we cannot treat something as evidence until we have established its reliability applies no less to E₁ than to intuition. As such, if we are to appeal to E₁ in order to establish the reliability of philosophical intuition, we must first establish the reliability of E₁ and do so on the basis of some other putative source of evidence - call this putative source of evidence E₂.

We have a sense for some of the problems faced by earlier attempts to challenge our intuition deploying practices. These provide some guidelines for what a successful challenge must look like: it shouldn't rest on too narrow a conception of philosophy; it shouldn't be so strong that it threatens global skepticism; and it should demand the epistemically impossible. How well, then, has experimental restrictionism learned these lessons? Pretty well, it seems. While experimental restrictionism might seem to motivate a move towards one particular conception of philosophy, namely, one that treats our philosophical intuitions as telling us only about our individual or shared concepts, it is not motivated by any particular conception of philosophy. What's more, experimental restrictionism seems neither to invite global skepticism by threatening the status of our other evidential practices nor to demand the epistemically impossible. Most of our evidential practices are hopeful, and so don't face the same methodological challenges that our intuition deploying practices currently face. With most of our evidential practices, we have a fairly good sense of what evidence to use and when to use it, and so the methodological challenges faced by our intuition deploying practices are fairly localized to those practices. And, far from being impossible, the methodological prescriptions endorsed by restrictionists aren't even epistemically unreasonable: we are simply called to reconcile our views about philosophy, philosophical evidence, and our intuition deploying practices with the existence of certain kinds of intuitional sensitivity; and asked to spend more time and energy thinking carefully about the nature of intuitional evidence, where it comes from, what mechanisms are responsible for producing it, and what factors influence it.

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