Abstract
AbstractAccording to the expertise defense, practitioners of the method of cases need not worry about findings that ordinary people’s philosophical intuitions depend on epistemically irrelevant factors. This is because, honed by years of training, the intuitions of professional philosophers likely surpass those of the folk. To investigate this, we conducted a controlled longitudinal study of a broad range of intuitions in undergraduate students of philosophy (n = 226), whose case judgments we sampled after each semester throughout their studies. Under the assumption, made by proponents of the expertise defense, that formal training in philosophy gives rise to the kind of expertise that accounts for changes in the students’ responses to philosophically puzzling cases, our data suggest that the acquired cognitive skills only affect single case judgments at a time. There does not seem to exist either a general expertise that informs case judgments in all areas of philosophy, or an expertise specific to particular subfields. In fact, we argue that available evidence, including the results of cross-sectional research, is best explained in terms of differences in adopted beliefs about specific cases, rather than acquired cognitive skills. We also investigated whether individuals who choose to study philosophy have atypical intuitions compared to the general population and whether students whose intuitions are at odds with textbook consensus are more likely than others to drop out of the philosophy program.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Social Sciences,Philosophy
Reference76 articles.
1. Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01
2. Beebe, J. R., & Undercoffer, R. J. (2015). Moral valence and semantic intuitions. Erkenntnis, 80(2), 445–466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9653-6
3. Beebe, J. R., & Undercoffer, R. J. (2016). Individual and cross-cultural differences in semantic intuitions: New experimental findings. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 16(3–4), 322–357. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342182
4. Bergenholtz, C., Busch, J., & Praëm, S. K. (2023). Further insights on fake-barn cases and intuition variation. Episteme, 20(1), 163–180. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2021.12
5. Bochyńska, A. (2021). Badanie eksperymentalne efektu Knobe’a dla języka polskiego. In Efekt Knobe’a w świetle rozważań językoznawczych i metodologicznych. Studium teoretyczne i eksperymentalne efektu Knobe’a i problemu Butlera (Vol. 2, pp. 75–95). Semper.
Cited by
1 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献