Herman Cappelen, “Philosophy Without Intuitions” (Oxford UP, 2012)
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What is the central claim of Philosophy Without Intuitions about the role of intuitions in analytic philosophy?
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese. In our fortnightly interviews, we talk with philosophers about their ideas as elaborated in their newly published books. Today's interview is with Herman Capellan, professor of philosophy at the Art Day Philosophical Research Center at the University of St. Andrews. His new book is Philosophy Without Intuitions, which came out this year from Oxford University Press. It's taken for granted among contemporary analytic philosophers that some of their primary areas of inquiry, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language in particular, involve a special characteristic methodology, one that depends essentially on the use of intuitions as evidence for philosophical positions.
a thought experiment is developed in order to elicit intuitive judgments and these judgments have a special epistemic status paradigm cases of this methodology include thought experiments by gettier in which we determine whether we intuitively think that the subject in the scenario has or does not have knowledge or Putnam's twin Earth cases, in which we claim, again intuitively, that while Oskar on Earth thinks about H2O, his molecule-by-molecule duplicate on twin Earth thinks about another item called XYZ. The new experimental philosophy movement also accepts that this methodology is in fact rampant and is premised on rejecting it by conducting real experiments rather than thought experiments,
to see whether we really do hold these intuitions, or who does. Capellan argues that as a descriptive claim about the practice of philosophy, this is all false and muddled. The idea that intuitions play a critical role in contemporary analytic philosophy is a claim made by philosophers in moments of what he calls confused meta-reflection on their own practices. On his view, a detailed look at the thought or experiments themselves shows that the term intuition or intuitively, all of these Uses of intuition talk don't have a single interpretation. In many cases, it's just an unfortunate verbal tick. In others, it means a claim is a snap judgment with no special epistemic status. In others, it just makes explicit some sort of background or pre-theoretic information that all parties to the dispute take for granted.
What is not going on, he claims, is that the judgments elicited have bedrock epistemological status, are considered justified without appeals to experience or without inference, that inclinations to believe these judgments tend to be recalcitrant to further evidence, or that these judgments are based on conceptual competence or have a special phenomenology. So let's go to the interview. Hello, Professor Kaplan. Hello. Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thanks very much for having me on. Well, I'm very excited to be talking about your new book, Philosophy Without Intuitions, because it's a very challenging, critical look at the practice of contemporary analytic philosophy, a sort of sociology of philosophy.
Before we get into the details of the book, maybe you could give us a little bit of background on how you came to this topic and how you came to write the book.
Well, I think all the work I've done in philosophy has been in part methodologically self-conscious. In fact, I think it's very hard to do any philosophy without thinking all the time about how we go about doing it. I think it's one of the characteristics of philosophy that we're constantly thinking about how to do what we're doing while we're doing it. So from the very beginning when I started doing philosophy, these very general questions about how you could go about doing this, those questions were always central to me. In my first type of work, the first book was called Insensitive Semantics, and one of the topics of that book was what kind of evidence, what kind of data could be used to support certain kinds of thesis about context sensitivity in natural language.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central claim of Philosophy Without Intuitions about the role of intuitions in analytic philosophy?
0:03–12:27
2
How does Herman Cappelen describe his methodological background and the origins of his critique?
12:27–23:47
3
What is the ‘centrality’ thesis and why does Cappelen argue it is false?
23:47–35:37
4
How does the book examine classic thought‑experiment cases (Gettier, Twin‑Earth, Perry) for evidence of intuition‑driven methodology?
35:37–44:43
5
What does Cappelen identify as the three diagnostic features of genuine philosophical intuitions?
44:43–54:45
6
Why does Cappelen consider experimental philosophy’s focus on non‑philosophers’ intuitions to be misguided?
54:45–1:04:53
7
How does Cappelen challenge the notion of conceptual analysis as a core philosophical method?
1:04:53–1:05:47
Speakers
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