Krzysztof Sękowski and Adrian Ziółkowski
Affiliation: University of Warsaw
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: experimental philosophy, intuitions, methodology of philosophy, metaphilosophy
Date: Tuesday 2nd of September
Time: 16:00
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Blame & the Knobe Effect
Recently, it has been suggested (Knobe, forthcoming) that inconsistency of philosophical intuitions at an interpersonal level may be a widespread phenomenon. As a result, people’s judgments on philosophical cases should be understood not as reflecting stable, well-defined intuitions about a given concept but rather as expressing internal conflicts regarding that concept. This perspective calls for a shift in at least some areas of experimental philosophy, emphasizing the need to explain why individuals express seemingly inconsistent judgments on philosophical cases and to account for such conflicts in methodological discussions concerning empirical studies on intuitions. In particular, Knobe calls for challenging the traditional view according to which philosophical intuitions express people’s established philosophical views or conceptual competence. On the contrary, he suggests that these intuitions might emerge from competing cognitive mechanisms that push individuals toward different, and sometimes contradictory, judgements. Therefore, experimental results should be interpreted against this backdrop. The interpretations should focus on possible explanations of these intuitions rather than analyzing people’s judgements as direct expression of their philosophical opinions. This raises an important question about the extent to which disagreements between folks (or maybe even philosophers) may stem from deep-seated cognitive structures rather than from mere differences in conceptual analysis or cultural background.
This study extends Knobe’s findings by investigating whether similar conflicts arise between two distinct types of intuitions, drawing on Craig’s (1990) distinction between intuitions of intension (which concern general conceptual principles, e.g. “if someone knows something, it has to be true”) and intuitions of extension (which concern the application of concepts in specific cases, e.g. ascribing knowledge to a protagonist in a certain hypothetical scenario). The hypothesis concerning such differences is tentatively supported by previous research, e.g., by Knobe and Nichols (2007), who demonstrated that judgments about moral responsibility vary depending on whether cases are presented in abstract or concrete terms, or by Wiegmann (2023), who found similar inconsistencies in judgments about lying, where individuals clash between stating that lying always requires falsehood and accusing someone of lying when they attempt to deceive but unintentionally tell the truth. We examined four philosophical concepts, each representing a different subfield: lying (philosophy of language), knowledge (epistemology), fact (metaphysics), and moral responsibility (ethics). Additionally, we grouped these concepts into two categories: those with an inherent moral dimension (lying, moral responsibility) and those without (knowledge, fact), allowing us to explore whether moral considerations influence possible patterns of inconsistency. Using a within-subjects design, we measured participants’ agreement with general conceptual statements (intuitions of intension) and their judgments about specific cases (intuitions of extension).
Every participant was presented with a series of statements attributing certain properties to relevant concepts (e.g. “If news media states something, it is a fact”; “A person can be morally responsible for their negligence”) along with additional, masking sentences involving an irrelevant notion (happiness). Among those, one statement was the measure of the target intuition of intention (e.g., for the concept fact: “If something is a fact, it has to be something that really happened”). Afterwards, respondents evaluated hypothetical cases and answered whether a given concept can be applied in the case at hand. The scenarios were designed in such a way that providing a certain answer could be qualified as a clear instance of inconsistency with the intuition of intension expressed earlier (e.g., for the concept fact, agreeing that something was a fact, although it was never the case).
Our results showed significant differences between intuitions of intension and extension expressed by our participants across all four investigated concepts, confirming the presence of intrapersonal inconsistencies in philosophical judgments. However, we also observed noticeable differences between concepts with regards to the likelihood of exhibiting the relevant intensional intuition and conflict between the two types of intuitions. Whereas only 17.3% of participants agreed that knowledge demands truth, 47.8% claimed that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise, 59.8% agreed that lying involved saying something false, and 75% said that a fact is something that must have really happened. Among those, the frequency of conflicting intuition of extension expressed in judgments regarding hypothetical scenarios was as follows: fact – 43.6%; knowledge – 47.1%; moral responsibility – 97.7%; lie – 100%. Hence, the most pronounced inconsistencies between intuitions of intention and extension were observed in judgments concerning lying and moral responsibility, although intuitions of intension for these concepts were not unanimous in our sample. This suggests that moral considerations may intensify conflicts between different types of intuitions or that the cognitive processes governing moral concepts differ from those involved in non-moral ones.
Overall, our findings support and extend Knobe’s claims that responses to philosophical cases should not be interpreted as direct reflections of stable conceptual competence. As we argue, these results strengthen methodological approaches that emphasize the importance of distinguishing between intensional and extensional intuitions in philosophical methodology, particularly in the context of neo-pragmatic analyses (Craig, 1990) and conceptual engineering (Sękowski, 2024), where the intuitions are not treated as a source of evidence, but rather as a sort of data to be captured or a possible basis for normative arguments in favor of conceptual revision. By demonstrating that these two types of intuitions frequently come apart, our study highlights the need for a more nuanced approach to interpreting experimental data in philosophy and raises the need for an explanation of the cognitive underpinnings of conceptual judgments.
References: Craig, E. (1990). Knowledge and the state of nature: An essay in conceptual synthesis. Clarendon. Knobe, J. (forthcoming), Conflicting Intuitions, Ergo. Nichols, S., & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions. Noûs,41(4), 663–685. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00666.x Sękowski, K. (2024). Concept Revision, Concept Application and the Role of Intuitions in Gettier Cases. Episteme, 21(3), 901–919. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2022.49 Wiegmann, A. (2023). Does lying require objective falsity? Synthese, 202(2), 52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04291-3