What Intuitions Matter?
Of course, there are other ways of trying to reduce the significance of experimental philosophy. One increasingly popular way has been to shift our attention from whose intuitions are relevant to what intuitions are relevant.
Jonathan Weinberg and Joshua Alexander (forthcoming) call this the thickness defense because it typically involves adopting one or another of the thick conceptions of philosophical intuition outlined in Chapter 1. The basic strategy of the thickness defense is to argue that, whatever it is that philosophical intuitions are, they are not the kind of thing that can be studied using the kinds of experimental studies that have been stock-in-trade for experimental philosophers. Kirk Ludwig (2007) provides a particularly clear example of the thickness defense:10The first point to make is that... responses to surveys about scenarios used in thought experiments are not ipso facto intuitions, that is, they are not ipso facto judgments which express solely the subject's competence in the deployment of the concepts involved in them in response to the scenario... The task when presented with responses which we know are not (at least all) intuitions is to try to factor out the contribution of competencies from the other factors. This requires an understanding of what the various factors are that may influence responses and enough information about each subject to be able to say with some confidence what factors are at work. It is clear that in the circumstances in which these surveys are conducted we do not have this kind of information. (pp. 144-5)
The basic idea is that, because not all survey responses reveal our philosophical intuitions, experimental philosophers inherit the burden of distinguishing philosophical intuitions from other kinds of mental states that might be revealed by those responses, a burden that their methods currently prevent them from being able to discharge.
This is an attractive strategy, especially when faced with the kind of methodological challenge rehearsed in the previous chapter. If experimental philosophers haven't been studying the right kind of thing, then whatever methodological worries they've raised aren't worries about the actual methods used in philosophical practice.
As Weinberg and Alexander (forthcoming) point out, however, this strategy only works if certain conditions have been met, conditions having to do with the propensity of philosophical intuitions to track the truth and with our ability to successfully identify in practice which of our mental states count as genuine philosophical intuitions.11 If it turned out that philosophical intuitions were no more likely to track philosophical truth than the kinds of mental states studied by experimental philosophers, then there would be little comfort in finding out that experimental philosophers haven't been studying philosophical intuitions all along. Likewise, there would be little comfort in knowing that experimental philosophers haven't been studying the right kind of mental states unless we have the resources needed to pick those mental states out in actual philosophical practice. And the problem is that no version of the thickness defense clearly meets both conditions. The problem with some versions is that they simply don't provide the goods, treating philosophical intuitions in such a way that we either have good reason to worry that they won't track philosophical truth or else lack the means to distinguish them from other kinds of mental states. But, the more common problem is that most versions of the thickness defense simply leave it open whether or not the conditions have been met. And this means that more experimental work will be needed, not less, even if that experimental work needs to take greater care to determine that the right kinds of mental states are being studied.4.