Restrictionism Explained
These studies don't provide the last word, but they do strongly suggest that some philosophical intuitions are sensitive to cultural background, gender, affectivity, and context.
Sensitivity alone is not problematic. We want our evidence to be sensitive, but we want it to be sensitive to the right kinds of things. In particular, we want our evidence to be sensitive only to those things that we think are relevant to the truth or falsity of the set of claims for which the evidence is supposed to provide evidence. What makes this kind of intuitional sensitivity problematic, then, is that it is unwelcome: some philosophical intuitions, it seems, are sensitive to things that most philosophers don't want them to be - or at least, haven't wanted them to be. Most philosophers don't think that the truth or falsity of claims about knowledge or meaning depends on facts about who is evaluating the relevant hypothetical cases. Most philosophers don't think that the truth or falsity of claims about moral responsibility or morally right action depends on whether or not our affective states have been engaged. And most philosophers don't think that the truth or falsity of claims about knowledge or moral responsibility depends on the context in which those claims are evaluated. Of course, the fact that these things haven't traditionally been taken to be relevant to the truth or falsity of philosophical claims doesn't mean that they are, in fact, irrelevant.18 Philosophers might just be wrong about what is relevant to the truth or falsity of philosophical claims. But, it does put pressure on our intuition deploying practices. At the very least, philosophers face a dilemma: either we must explain why these kinds of intuitional sensitivity are welcome or we must stop appealing to these philosophical intuitions as evidence and place local restrictions on our intuition deploying practices. (The name “restrictionism” derives from the second horn of this dilemma.)Whatever option we choose, the challenge to our intuition deploying practices doesn't end there. Not only is this kind of intuitional sensitivity unwelcome, it was unexpected. Even now, we lack the means to predict when or where else this kind of intuitional sensitivity will appear, and find ourselves in the untenable epistemic position of suspecting that some intuitional evidence is problematically sensitive without being able to reliably predict what intuitional evidence is problematically sensitive.
Jonathan Weinberg (2007) calls this kind of epistemic position “hopeless”, but not hopelessly so. We lack the ability to detect and correct problematic intuitional sensitivity, but this condition need not be permanent. According to Weinberg, four things contribute to hope: external corroboration (agreement between sources of evidence); internal coherence (agreement within sources of evidence); detectability of margins (awareness of a source's limits); and theoretical illumination (awareness of how sources work when they do and why they don't when they don't). If intuitions aren't hopelessly hopeless, the question becomes what we can do to restore hope.
Ernest Sosa (2007a) has suggested that maybe we just need to be more careful. Drawing on the comparison between intuitional evidence and perceptual evidence, Sosa writes,
[S]urely the effects of priming, framing, and other such contextual factors will affect the epistemic status of intuition in general, only in the sort of way that they affect the epistemic status of perceptual observation in general. One would think that the ways of preserving the epistemic importance of perception in the face of such effects on perceptual judgments would be analogously available for the preservation of the epistemic importance of intuition in the face of such effects on intuitive judgments.
The upshot is that we have to be careful in how we use intuitions, not that intuition is useless. (p. 105)The idea is that we should treat worries about the epistemic standing of philosophical intuitions in the same way that we treat worries about the epistemic standing of perceptions. We know that perceptions are problematically sensitive too (think, for example, of perceptual illusion or hallucination) and yet we don't think that our perception deploying practices are significantly challenged by this fact. Instead, we are careful about what perceptual evidence we use and when we use it.
It pays to be careful, but only when we know what it means to be careful, and here is where the analogy between intuitional evidence and perceptual evidence breaks down. We have a pretty good understanding of when sense perception goes wrong, something that is reflected in our perceptual practices and reinforced by a communal scientific understanding of the mechanisms responsible for our perceptual judgments. This prevents worries about problematic perceptual sensitivity from giving rise to global concerns about the epistemic standing of perceptual evidence. The problem is that we aren't in the same position with respect to intuitional evidence. Our inability to predict or explain problematic intuitional sensitivity puts us in a different epistemic position with respect to intuitions than we are in with respect to perception. In a sense, we haven't learned yet what it would mean to be careful. Learning how to be careful means developing a better understanding of how intuitions work. If we are going to learn what intuitional evidence can be used and when intuitional evidence can be used, our intuition deploying practices must be informed by an understanding of the relevant psychology, cognitive science, and an empirically informed philosophy of mind. We need to know more about where philosophical intuitions come from, what mechanisms are responsible for producing them, and what factors influence them. Only then will it be possible to exercise greater care in our intuition deploying practices.
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