Jennifer Nado (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)

Abstract: Proponents of the expertise defense have often tended to link philosophical expertise with improved intuition - thus potentially undermining the claims of 'negative' experimental philosophy. Authors like Deutsch and Cappelen, meanwhile, have denied that intuition plays a substantive role in philosophical theorizing. I'll try to present a view of philosophical expertise that is, first, more amenable to the Deutsch/Cappelen view of philosophical inquiry, and second, perfectly compatible with the ambitions of negative experimental philosophers. On my view, philosophers do possess a variety of forms of expertise - but many of these are non-intuitive, and none of them suffice to undermine the challenge of experimental philosophy.

Joachim Horvath (University of Cologne)

Abstract: Various findings from experimental philosophy suggest that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are untrustworthy because they are sensitive to irrelevant factors, such as order of presentation or affective content. The expertise defense tries to counter this challenge with the prima facie plausible claim that professional philosophers possess intuitive expertise for judging hypothetical cases. There are two basic possibilities how the expertise defense could turn out successful: first, professional philosophers are equally sensitive to irrelevant factors as lay people, but they are so much better in judging hypothetical cases that this problematic sensitivity does not really matter – call this the ‘grandmaster model’ of intuitive expertise; second, there is no substantial difference between professional philosophers and lay people in their judgments about hypothetical cases, but the former are much better in resisting the influence of irrelevant factors – call this the ‘immunity model’ of intuitive expertise. Unfortunately, there is little to no direct evidence that professional philosophers possess intuitive expertise of either the grandmaster or the immunity variety. Moreover, the science of expertise provides indirect evidence against intuitive expertise in philosophy, given that there is no plausible model how professional philosophers could have acquired such expertise. It might thus be time to leave the expertise defense behind and develop more promising responses to the challenge from experimental philosophy.

Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh)

Abstract: Many philosophers have proposed to understand philosophizing by analogy with scientific or mathematical theorizing or more narrowly by analogy with scientific model building. This talk challenges this conception of philosophy.

Pierre Saint-Germier (Aarhus University)

Abstract: It has been pointed out that paradigmatic thought experiments, such as Gettier's (1963), have deviant realizations and that deviant realizations raise a difficulty for the logical analysis of thought experiments (Williamson 2007). Grundmann and Horvath (2014) have shown that it is possible to enrich the scenario of a thought experiment in order to rule out deviant realizations. The authors then hypothesize that the enriched scenario corresponds to the way expert epistemologists implicitly interpret the original one. I would like to raise two questions about this. First, no precise account of this implicit enrichment is offered, which makes the proposal somewhat ad hoc. Second, the role of expertise in the implicit generation of this interpretation is unclear. Drawing on the pragmatics of default interpretations, I propose a pragmatic account of the enrichment of the Gettier scenario. If this account is correct, then expertise plays no decisive role in the process.

Jonathan Weinberg (University of Arizona)

Abstract: Should we take as a prima facie default that professional philosophers’ intuitions are so much more reliable than the folks’, that we can thereby prima facie dismiss experimental work suggesting that the intuitions of the folk are susceptible to various sorts of foibles? I will argue, first, that even on a generous construal of a plausible expertise hypothesis here, it is nonetheless inadequate to support a prima facie dismissal of the challenge from this experimental work. Second, I will contend that we have good reason to expect that often, philosophers’ intuitions will be either no better than the folk, and perhaps, in some ways, even worse.

Sören Häggqvist (Stockholm University)

Abstract: Williamson’s optimistic assessment of the method of cases turns on a presumed general competence for evaluating counterfactuals, along with what we may call a gradualist thesis for counterfactuals: the claim that there is no basis for thinking that our competence with counterfactuals is restricted to ones whose antecedents are mundane or close to the actual world. But Williamson also offers a recipe for evaluating counterfactuals by developing the supposition that the antecedent is true. I provisionally endorse this recipe but note, first, that this recipe is rarely followed by either philosophers or laypeople when they issue case judgements. I then suggest that actual judgements are sometimes (but perhaps not often) plausibly explicated as a sort of meta-judgement, concerning what development of the suppositions contained in case scenarios would ensue in. Such judgements are also counterfactuals. I then discuss the kinds of expertise that seem pertinent to the reliability of both first-order and second-order counterfactuals about philosophical cases. I argue that for neither type is it plausible that philosophers are particularly likely to possess reliability-enhancing expertise.

Samuel Schindler (Aarhus University)

Abstract: In this paper, we seek to strengthen the expertise defense against those results of experimental philosophy that suggest that the gap between folk and expert intuitions is reason for concern. We argue that the analogy underlying the expertise defense is best drawn between judgements in thought experiments in philosophy and physics. We present preliminary results of the study in which we investigated whether a similar gap can be found between the folk and the experts also in thought experiments in physics. But if such a gap in physics would be neither surprising nor problematic, then the gap highlighted by experimental philosophers should not be either.

Anna Drożdżowicz (Aarhus University)

Abstract: The so called expertise defense recently proposed as a reply to experimental philosophers postulates that philosophers are experts qua having improved intuitions. However, this model of philosophical expertise has been challenged by studies suggesting that philosophers’ intuitions are no less prone to biases and distortions than intuitions of non-philosophers. Should we then give up on the idea that philosophers possess some sort of expertise? In this paper I argue that instead of focusing on intuitions we may understand the relevant results of philosophical practice more broadly and investigate other kind(s) of expertise they would require. My goal is to suggest where and how to look for expertise in the results characteristic for philosophical practice. In developing this model I discuss the following three candidates for such results: arguments, theories and distinctions. Whether philosophers could be shown to be expert intuiters or not, there are interesting domains where we could look for philosophical expertise.

Ana Butković (University of Zagreb)

Abstract: The main methodological question that dominates recent debates in the analytic philosophy is the plausibility of the armchair intuitional methodology, i.e. appealing to intuitions in the philosophical analysis of relevant concepts as its distinctive a priori method. Intuitions are said to provide sufficient evidential reason for or against philosophical claims. However, by conducting surveys on intuitions that people have about well known philosophical thought experiments, experimental philosophy provided a series of challenges to the armchair intuitional methodology, maintaining that reliance on intuitions is not a reliable method of doing philosophy. One of the responses to experimentalists’ criticism is appealing to what has become known as the expertise defense. The crucial part of the most versions of the expertise defense is the strength of the argument from analogy according to which scientists in other scientific areas are considered to be experts without any additional empirical support, so consequently, the same should apply to philosophers. I will argue that the analogy between philosophy and science cannot be vindicated since the following divergence features seriously undermine it: (i) unlike philosophical intuitions, intuitions in other sciences are mostly not considered to be evidence for their theories (ii) intuitions in philosophy are not analogous to intuitions in science, but rather to observation (perception) in empirical science (iii) unlike philosophers who maintain that intuition-based methodology is a priori, scientists in other areas are not liable for the influence of underlying empirical theories, and (iv) philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated. Furthermore, it seems that the attempt to save the armchair intuitional methodology by advocating expertise defense, which in many ways includes improvement in the empirical sense, leads to serious deprivation of traditional a priori status of intuitions. I will argue that this empirical improvement cannot be of an enabling but only of evidential kind. Consequently, expertise defense and the fail of the argument from analogy lead to the self-defeat of the a priori intuitional methodology.

Eugen Fischer (University of East Anglia)

Abstract: This talk draws on findings and methods from psycholinguistics to explore ways in which the expertise defence could be empirically developed, and to assess the resulting claims to expertise – in particular, their ability to support objections to the practice of working with non-experts as participants in experimental philosophy’s Warrant Project. There is a strong but hitherto neglected case for the relevance of a psycholinguistic perspective: The Warrant Project seeks to assess the evidentiary value of intuitions prompted mainly by verbal descriptions of possible cases. Intuitions are judgments generated by largely automatic processes duplicating inferences with heuristic rules (Kahneman&Frederick, 2005). Psycholinguistic research has identified automatic association processes in semantic memory (Neely&Kahan, 2001), which duplicate heuristic inferences and routinely occur in text/speech comprehension and production (Pickering&Garrod, 2013). We therefore started exploring how routine language processes can shape the intuitions philosophers have about cases when reading or stating their verbal descriptions: The process of stereotypical enrichment (with the I-heuristic; Levinson, 2000) involves automatic inferences from explicit case-descriptions to judgments about what else is also true of the cases described, making it a likely source of many case-intuitions (Fischer&Engelhardt, 2016, in press; Fischer et al. 2015, under review). This talk uses an empirically well-supported dual-route model of language processing, the graded salience model (Giora, 2003), to identify possible anchors of ‘intuitive expertise’ and give empirical content to the expertise objection: By comparison with laypeople, expert philosophers might have (a) formed different stereotypes associated with topical vocabulary, or (b) formed different implicit theories, or (c) benefit from more effective integration mechanisms, including richer situation schemas, with more differentiated verbal triggers. With a focus on (a), the talk explains how methods from psycho-linguistics and computational linguistics (distributional semantics [DS] analysis; Erk, 2012) can be used to empirically examine these suggestions, and brings out potential consequences for experimental philosophy’s Warrant Project. Progress permitting, the talk may present results of an ongoing comparative DS analysis (with A.Herbelot) of an expert philosophical corpus and an ordinary discourse corpus.

Miguel Egler and Lewis Ross (University of St. Andrews) Abstract: Recent studies in experimental philosophy indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew people’s intuitions, and that at least some degree of scepticism about appeals to intuitions in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions–this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Key to our arguments is a reformulation of the notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. We then offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal discussions of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence.