Herman Cappelen
speaker
421 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2013
last heard Jan 2013
Herman Cappelen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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methodological rationalists like Beeler on the one hand and experimental philosophers like Stitch on the other hand they had common ground in that they thought the fundamental method of philosophy was that of appealing to intuitions and so I thought well it would be worth trying to at least explore that assumption so the more I thought about it the more implausible it seemed to me and so I thought I think it's worth trying to
trying to write this book and try at least to get people to be a bit more explicit about why they make that assumption before they make it and before they go on to create research projects based on it.
That is the sort of more immediate background for the book.
Yeah, before I say why I think it's false, let me just say a bit how the kind of picture that underlies the thesis that I call centrality is one that should be familiar, I think, to most practitioners of the profession and any of the undergraduates getting into the profession or into the subject.
So the picture is very, very natural when you read contemporary literature.
But what we do as our most professional
basic methodological tool at the starting point of theorizing.
There's an activity roughly like this.
We construct thought experiments or cases.
It might be about trolleys.
They might be about twin earth, they might be about bank cases, they could be zombies, whatever your area is in, there's some kind of canonical set of cases.
And then we just have some kind of immediate spontaneous reaction to those cases and those are intuitions.
And now theorizing is the project of trying to make coherent, systematize, predict,
Whatever your model is of some sort or other, this sort of core group of judgments, the intuitive ones, that's what we're trying to capture.
And so on this picture, intuitions serve as evidence in philosophy, and philosophical theorizing has those kinds of judgments at the origin.
But I...
What I found interesting is that this assumption that that's how we go about doing things is, I think we should think of it as an empirical hypothesis.
It's something to be checked whether that is what philosophers really do.
And when you go and look into philosophical texts, and this is what I do, I think the most interesting way to look at this is the second part of the book when you go
careful study of the kinds of cases where that's alleged to be what is going on.
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