Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

STE V E N D. H A LE S Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy Rel...

Author: Steven D. Hales

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STE V E N D. H A LE S

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

Steven D. Hales

A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

( 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] .edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Sabon on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hales, Steven D. Relativism and the foundations of philosophy / by Steven D. Hales. p. cm. ‘‘A Bradford book.’’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-262-08353-9 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-262-08353-1 (hc: alk. paper) 1. Relativity. 2. Philosophy. 3. Methodology. I. Title. BD221.H33 2006 149—dc22 10

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To my colleagues at Bloomsburg University: Richard Brook, Gary Hardcastle, Wendy Lee, Scott Lowe, and Kurt Smith. Their collegiality and encouragement have made it possible for me to think and write about these issues.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1

Intuition and Philosophical Propositions

9

2

A Problem for Philosophical Knowledge

49

3

The Relativist Solution

4

The Naturalists’ Challenge Notes 187 References 195 Index 207

97 147

Preface

Relativism was one of the ﬁrst philosophical topics to capture my imagination. I remember grappling with the self-refutation objection back in my undergraduate days in a philosophy of science course under Robert Frederick. Even then I had the suspicion that claiming relativism to be merely relatively true wasn’t really going to work, although I had no idea why not. I set the issue to the side for a long time though, going to graduate school and pursuing other philosophical matters. I returned to relativism through the back door. As a graduate student at Brown, I was made a T.A., and the department chair at the time, Jaegwon Kim, asked all the grad students to submit a ranked listing of the courses in which they would prefer to assist. I put Existentialism dead last on my list, since I knew next to nothing about it. Naturally, that was course Jaegwon assigned me. A more senior grad student, Rex Welshon, was teaching the course. As a dutiful T.A. I struggled to understand the readings, and I became interested in making sense of Nietzsche, especially his thoughts about truth. Eventually Rex and I wound up writing some articles on Nietzsche and ultimately a book, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (2000). Thinking about the issues Nietzsche raised led me back to the topic of relativism apart from any historical ﬁgure or context. Initially I just wanted to provide a successful solution to the self-refutation problem, but the more I thought about philosophical methodology and the role of intuitions in argument, the more I thought (to my surprise!) that a sort of relativism is right after all. Such relativism is the subject of the present book. I was one of the late Roderick Chisholm’s last two students. The other one, Dean Zimmerman, once told me that he thought that Rod must be rolling in his grave, what with me writing on Nietzsche, supporting metaphysical perdurantism, defending relativism, and no doubt engaging in other heresies. Perhaps Dean is right. Yet one of Rod’s many

x

Preface

virtues was his downright enthusiasm for criticism—for Rod the highest compliment one could pay a philosopher was to take him seriously enough to try to refute him. I don’t try to refute Rod in what follows, at least not directly, but I like to think that he would have approved of my waywardness. Certainly my own hope for this book is to be complimented in the Chisholmian sense. Besides Rod, others who have been inﬂuential, helpful, or supportive have been my Bloomsburg colleagues named in the dedication; audiences at an assortment of universities and conferences in the United States and Europe; Michael Devitt, Michael Lynch, Ernest Sosa, and my wife, Susan Hales. My sincere thanks to all of them. Special thanks to Greg Kenenitz and Ryan Wanttaja for compiling the index.

Introduction

This book is a defense of relativism. It must be admitted that most arguments for relativism are not very persuasive. Often they seem presented in a playful, ironic, Puckish sort of way that is inimical to serious philosophy.1 Such proposals are hard to evaluate because they are hard to pin down; one can’t have an earnest discussion with the class clown. Other kinds of relativism attempt to show that human reason itself is a contingent, historical artifact with no especial credentials as the royal road to truth. Thus the deliverances of reason are supposed to be truths ‘‘for us,’’ and not absolute or objective ones. Of course, this argument itself is a bit of reasoning, as would be any attempts to refute it. It seems that reason is on the agenda no matter what we might do, and so the wouldbe relativist is hard put to offer a genuine alternative.2 Many relativists cannot resist making grand and sweeping claims about which propositions are merely relatively true. They claim, for example, that everything is relative, or at least everything except the thesis of relativism is relative. Such declarations raise the hackles of those who note that, particularly in the physical sciences, humanity has made deﬁnite, evident progress in the advancement of knowledge. If relativism were true, such advance would be impossible. Who would want to ﬂy with a relativist pilot who thought the laws of aerodynamics were radically subjective, or undergo an operation by a relativist surgeon who thought modern medicine had no greater claim on truth than the theory of the bodily humors? I will not be supporting any of the preceding forms of relativism. The sort defended here is much more circumscribed and circumspect: I will defend a form of relativism that applies speciﬁcally to philosophical propositions alone. This, then, is the main thesis of what follows: Philosophical propositions are true in some perspectives and false in others.

2

Introduction

While (I hope) this thesis will be more plausibly defended than some of the more comprehensive and radical relativisms current in the marketplace of ideas, nevertheless I trust that it is sufﬁciently controversial. Obviously, much needs to be said just by way of explanation. What are philosophical propositions? What are perspectives? What is it to be true in one perspective and false in another? These questions will all be addressed. One that will be ignored is the nature of propositions in general. For the purposes of this book it doesn’t matter whether propositions are abstract objects, whether they are Fregean or Russellian, or whether they are reducible to sentences, statements, or even beliefs. The key point is that propositions are truth-value-bearers whose truth-value is perspective dependent and which are philosophical in nature. Many defenses of relativism are grounded in the philosophy of language. For example, different cultures, languages, persons, and so on are reputed to have distinct concepts, incommensurable with each other, which carve reality along different lines. Or it is claimed that concepts are vague and indeterminate, and that any precisiﬁcation is an arbitrary, artiﬁcial construct.3 Or there are problems for truth-conditional semantics for future contingents or epistemic modals that a relativistic approach is thought to solve.4 The present approach is orthogonal to these; I have no brief against philosophers of language who also want to be relativists, although I am inclined to think that the philosophical value of concepts is overrated with respect to relativism. An underexplored and more direct path to relativism is epistemological, stemming from a recognition of rationally irreconcilable methods of acquiring noninferential beliefs. Not everyone would employ the same methods of acquiring beliefs about philosophical propositions, even if everyone held their beliefs in wide reﬂective equilibrium and shared precisely the same set of concepts. Furthermore, these varying methods do not all lead to the same results. As we will see, this is the diversity that matters for establishing relativism. The book is divided into four somewhat lengthy chapters. In chapter 1 I consider the familiar methodology by which contemporary analytic philosophers ply their trade—the use of intuition. There is an important distinction between physical intuitions, which are informed expectations of future experience and of which principles will turn out to be the correct generalizations of nature, and rational intuition, which is the proper province of philosophy. Descartes, unsurprisingly, provided the canonical account of rational intuition, maintaining that it was of propositions, that the propositions known through rational intuition

Introduction

3

were necessary truths, and that intuitive knowledge is both foundational and certain. Since the linguistic turn in Frege’s Grundlagen helped found analytic philosophy, philosophers have often considered their task to be one of acquiring beliefs about how concepts can be factored into sets of necessary and sufﬁcient conditions. Whether or not conceptual analysis is at the heart of the philosophical enterprise, it is clear that rational intuition, with its corollary techniques of hypothetical examples and counterexamples, is the method by which philosophers come to have the beliefs they do. Moreover, the results of intuitive reﬂection and analysis are modal ones: often the mere metaphysical possibility of some case shows that a philosophical principle is false, a procedure that would work only if the principle in question were an ostensible necessity. Bounding the class of what is properly philosophical is extremely difﬁcult, and historically some things once thought to be a priori turned out to a posteriori after all. I have no general account of what makes a proposition a philosophical one and will rest content with pointing to a few familiar examples as paradigm cases. Yet why think that intuition provides any sort of justiﬁcation for belief? Contemporary philosophy may be saturated with intuitions and possible cases, but unless we have some reason to think that rational intuition is going to produce knowledge, then we are all spinning our wheels. I argue that, on pain of contradiction, we are compelled to accept that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is selfjustifying. In other words, a form of foundationalism must be true for intuition-driven philosophy to get off the ground. The deliverances of intuition are supposed to be basic, noninferential kinds of evidence. Accepting that there is noninferential data upon which reason operates does not entail accepting that this data is known with certainty. There are plenty of good reasons for thinking that rational intuition is fallible and can be refuted both empirically (at least some of the time) and through the further use of intuition. I offer an explanation of how this works within the rationalist framework. At the end of chapter 1 I conclude that the most plausible, and widely employed, means of settling on a philosophical view is to try to achieve wide reﬂective equilibrium within one’s set of beliefs. Overall, chapter 1 presents a synoptic vision of analytic rationalism—a broad-brush overview of the structure of the rationalist, intuition-driven approach to answering philosophical questions. I sketch the general features of rationalism, arguing that its central features include the foundational reliance on rational intuition as a

4

Introduction

method of acquiring basic beliefs. These beliefs are then adjusted to achieve wide reﬂective equilibrium, a process of adjustment and reﬁnement that continues to operate as one encounters new thought experiments and arguments that depend for their appeal on intuition. While I am giving a sympathetic reading of rationalism in chapter 1, let me emphasize that I’m not defending it. In one sense the whole book might be viewed as an assessment of rationalism: I am presenting a challenge to rationalists, one that becomes clear in chapter 2. Once the case has been made for the widespread use and virtues of rational intuition as a belief-acquiring method, in chapter 2 I argue that there are other belief-acquiring traditions whose doxastic structure is isomorphic to rationalism. That is, there are other means besides intuition that people use to gain beliefs about philosophical topics. Moreover, these methods are foundational ones that produce beliefs used as noninferential data, which are then systematized and adjusted in an effort to achieve wide reﬂective equilibrium. The methodological difference between intuition-driven philosophy and these alternative methods is solely at the level of what provides the basic beliefs. The two other methods I consider are Christian revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. Although one may be tempted to summarily dismiss these ways of forming beliefs as nonrational, I believe that they are strikingly analogous to intuition and much harder to write off than one might think. I try to provide the most charitable reading of revelation and hallucinogen use that I can while still remaining true to the historical record of those traditions. If revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens were simply alternative, equally legitimate paths to discovering philosophical truths, there would be no problem. However, the results of these approaches often conﬂict with the results of rational intuition. More exactly, there are key philosophical propositions that are core elements of the Christian religion or are widely accepted on the basis of a culturally sanctioned ingestion of psychotropic plants and yet are generally eschewed by philosophers employing rational intuition. If revelation or hallucinogens deliver a belief that p and intuition recommends a belief that not-p, which should we prefer? Naturally, advocates of intuition will try to show the superiority of their own method. I consider four arguments to this conclusion. The ﬁrst is that intuition is the best method for gaining philosophical beliefs because the set of beliefs that it generates is more stable, cohesive, and comprehensive than the networks of beliefs produced by the competition. Therefore, intuition is our best bet for arriving at philosophical beliefs in reﬂective equilibrium. The second argument is that the use of rational

Introduction

5

intuition is our standard justiﬁcatory practice, and we are entitled to use intuitions as evidence until confronted with powerful reason not to do so, a reason that we do not have. The third argument is the Reidian one that our epistemic faculties are all equally trustworthy, and so reliance on rational intuition is just as reasonable as our trust in sense perception. The fourth argument is that all parties agree on the value of reason: reason is used to operate on our basic beliefs and develop more comprehensive philosophical theories. That is, reason is the fundamental way we have to acquire epistemically virtuous beliefs; it is the standard package. Other methods are optional features. So in case of conﬂict, these optional methods are the ﬁrst to go. It is intuition that remains. I argue that, for one reason or another, all of the preceding arguments fail. The noninferential results of rational intuition have no more credibility than the deliverances of revelation or the ritual use of hallucinogens. This is a serious problem to which there are only three possible outcomes. (1) Skepticism: since we don’t know which is the right way to gain beliefs about philosophical propositions, we have no philosophical knowledge. It would be mere luck if we picked the method that actually led to truth. (2) Nihilism: there are no philosophical propositions. Putatively philosophical propositions are either noncognitive, or, more likely, covertly empirical. (3) Relativism: the truth of philosophical propositions is relative in some way to doxastic perspectives. I argue that the skeptical alternative should be rejected because it results in a paradox. Nihilism I largely bracket and return to in chapter 4, with a fuller consideration of epistemological naturalism. In chapter 3 I defend the relativist alternative. The ﬁrst task is to consider the best-known argument against relativism, namely, the charge that it is self-refuting. I argue that ‘‘absolutely’’ and ‘‘relatively’’ function as kinds of modal operators, and just as no one would defend ‘‘everything is possible’’ while all would ﬁnd ‘‘everything true is possibly true’’ to be the most modest of assertions, so too relativists ought to abandon ‘‘everything is relative’’ and instead embrace ‘‘everything true is relatively true.’’ Treating relativism in this way provides a nice solution to the selfrefutation problem. ‘‘Everything is relative’’ is inconsistent, whereas ‘‘everything true is relatively true’’ is not. Moreover, the well-known relativist relation of commensurability is shown to be formally on a par with the accessibility relation in modal logic. As a result, Davidson’s critique of conceptual schemes has no bite on the present account. Of course, even if there is a formulation of relativism that is internally consistent, that alone is no reason to be a relativist. Just as one could think that everything true is possibly true and still maintain that

6

Introduction

all truths are necessary ones, so too one could agree that everything true is relatively true and still consistently believe that all truths are absolute ones. However, I argue that there are good reasons to be a relativist about philosophical propositions. The key steps along the way are (1) philosophical propositions are knowable (skepticism is false); (2) there is no way to rationally prefer one method of acquiring basic beliefs about philosophical matters over another; and (3) different belief-acquiring methods lead to different, mutually inconsistent beliefs. The only way to make sense of all these things is to conclude that the very truth of philosophical propositions is perspective relative. The chapter concludes by considering and rebutting a variety of possible objections to the account. The ﬁrst is the idea that even if there are numerous ways to gain beliefs about philosophical propositions and these lead to different results, nevertheless convergence and agreement is in principle possible, and so relativism is not needed as a solution after all. Another objection is that relativism is inconsistent with the pursuit of wide reﬂective equilibrium, which I have considered a crucial component of all legitimate means of coming to have philosophical knowledge. The third objection is that I have failed to demonstrate relativism about truth. The most that can be inferred from the epistemic arguments presented is an epistemic conclusion, that justiﬁcation or warrant is perspective dependent. The fourth objection is a subtle revisit of the selfrefutation objection. If all philosophical propositions are merely relatively true, then the axioms and theorems of the relativist logic I develop are merely relatively true. However, I am committed to the view that those axioms and theorems must be absolutely true (true in all perspectives). The ﬁnal objection is that relativism is committed to an epistemic theory of truth. Since the epistemic theory of truth is wrong, so is relativism. All of these arguments are found wanting. In chapter 4 I examine the most sweeping objection: philosophical propositions are not merely relatively true, because there are no philosophical propositions. This is the contention of the naturalists, who hold that all propositions are ultimately empirical and that only the methods of science can yield knowledge. There are several ways to understand naturalism. One is as a primary methodological assumption that simply assumes that the scientiﬁc method is the correct way to gain knowledge. Another is to treat naturalism as a research program; that is, given various failures of rationalist epistemology, perhaps the thing to do is turn to the natural and social sciences as a way to save the business. Some push this point harder—intuition-driven epistemology has proven to be an un-

Introduction

7

mitigated disaster, and so the only course of action is to throw it out and start again with what does have a track record of success: empirical science. If naturalism is simply an undefended methodological assumption, then it is difﬁcult to see why fans of nonnaturalistic belief-acquiring methods should climb on board; no argument has been provided. The other forms of global naturalism suffer from two defects. The ﬁrst is that the alleged failures of rationalist epistemology are largely due to a failure to conclusively refute skepticism about the external world and to provide a self-evident foundation for science. Even granted this complaint, it does not show that rationalist epistemology has failed to produce knowledge about speciﬁcally philosophical issues like the nature of the mind, the scope of moral obligation, and the like. The second failure of global naturalism is that the scientiﬁc method itself seems riddled with normative principles. As an example, I consider Ockham’s Razor and argue that it cannot be justiﬁed on the grounds that it is truth conducive or even pragmatically helpful. Its value is irreducibly normative. But if normativity is an ineluctable component of science itself, then the naturalistic approach is not going to eliminate the normative in favor of a purely scientiﬁc picture of the world. There are more local naturalistic arguments that bear on the theses of this book as well. Some naturalists have recently argued that social science can actually debunk rational intuition as a legitimate beliefacquiring method. If intuition, revelation, and the ritual use of hallucinogens are all in the same boat together (as I maintain), and intuition has no value, then all can be dismissed. Another naturalistic approach is to question empirically the usefulness of ethnographic data for demonstrating that different cultures have interculturally inconsistent beliefs and attitudes. If such inconsistency cannot be demonstrated, then I cannot make out the case that different basic belief-acquiring methods lead to mutually inconsistent beliefs, and so the motivation for relativism disappears. I argue that neither the debunking approach nor ethnographic skepticism is ultimately successful. I concede that the relativist conclusions defended in this book are disturbing. But we should not grasp at ﬂimsy arguments in a desperate attempt to avoid them. However, I do not yet know of good arguments that would permit a rejection of the relative truth of philosophical propositions. The matter is more subtle and difﬁcult than sometimes supposed. It seems that intuition-driven philosophy does produce knowledge, but not knowledge of absolute truths.

1

Intuition and Philosophical Propositions

What do we want philosophy to do for us?1 What is the point of the pursuit of philosophy? The only real answer is that we (we modern Western intellectuals) hope that philosophy can answer certain questions, questions that science cannot. How should we live? What is the good life? Are there gods? What is the nature of peculiar things like properties, surfaces, color, events, and art? Pilate’s question: what is truth? What can we know, and how? Science has generally seemed ill equipped to address these sorts of issues; whether a Duchamp ready-made is genuine art or a clever put-up job just doesn’t seem soluble though observation, experimental testing, or mathematical explanation. Philosophy has traditionally addressed such issues through a different methodology, namely, through an appeal to common sense, ‘‘what we would say,’’ or a kind of intellectual intuition. This sort of methodology goes as far back as the Platonic dialogues. In book 1 of the Republic, Cephalus proposes that justice is treating others honestly and paying back what one has received from anyone (Republic, 331). Socrates rebuts Cephalus by claiming that it would be unjust to return weapons to a friend who had gone mad. Given that, it cannot be that Cephalus’ understanding of justice is correct. Socrates offers no other reason or argument to support his counterexample than ‘‘everyone I presume would admit’’ that it is true. In other words, he assumes that everyone shares his intuition that it is not in the interest of justice to return weapons to an insane person. All one need do is reﬂect on the claim, and through a kind of intellectual inner vision one comes to see both its truth and how it confutes Cephalus’ deﬁnition of justice. Indeed, Cephalus and the other interlocutors do just that (although Polemarchus tries to hold out against Socrates for a bit before capitulating). Socrates is aware of his own method and thinks it to be no more than the drawing-out of commonsense ideas possessed by everyday folk. He

10

Chapter 1

remarks to Theaetetus, ‘‘being only ordinary people, we shall prefer ﬁrst to study the notions we have in our own minds and ﬁnd out what they are and whether, when we compare them, they agree or are altogether inconsistent’’ (Theaetetus 154e). Theaetetus, of course, concurs. This way of trying to gain philosophical knowledge has not changed too much in the last 2,500 years. The idea that the intuition of philosophers is nothing other than common sense, distilled and puriﬁed, is a recurring theme, from Thomas Reid to G. E. Moore to Roderick Chisholm. Today it is difﬁcult to imagine the pursuit of philosophy without the use of intuition. Why have we all been persuaded that knowledge must be more (or other) than justiﬁed true belief? Because Edmund Gettier showed us cases in which a person has a justiﬁed true belief, but our intuitions are that the person still does not have the relevant knowledge. Why do we think that existence is not a perfection? On the grounds that it is counterintuitive to suppose that existence is a property that a thing may or may not have. Why are we convinced that torturing babies for pleasure is wrong? Either because it seems intuitively immoral, or because it falls out from more general moral principles that we ﬁnd intuitively plausible. Why do we think that predicate logic is an improvement on sentential logic? Because there are intuitively valid arguments (such as the famous (1) All men are mortal, (2) Socrates is a man, therefore (3) Socrates is mortal) whose validity cannot be captured by symbolization into sentential logic. Without appeal to intuition it is hard to see how we might even begin to settle such issues as whether compatibilism is an adequate notion of freedom, or whether intentional harm is morally worse than foreseen harm, or if parts are essential to their wholes, or whether multiple realizability arguments undercut token-identity theories of the mind. Indeed, philosophical ethics appears hopeless without intuition. For example, Leon Kass’s argument against human cloning is no more than a raw appeal to intuition. He writes: Repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it. Can anyone really give an argument fully adequate to the horror which is father-daughter incest (even with consent), or having sex with animals, or mutilating a corpse, or eating human ﬂesh. . . . we are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings not because of the strangeness or novelty of the undertaking, but because we intuit and feel immediately without argument, the violation of things we rightfully hold dear. (Kass 1997, p. 21)

Cloning is wrong because we directly intuit that it is. QED. While one can always dress up this intuition in argumentative clothing, such argu-

Intuition and Philosophical Propositions

11

ments themselves will depend for their ultimate force on moral intuitions and so will be no more than embroidery upon Kass’s brute intuiting. Even those who claim that intuition is a mysterious, heretofore unexplained faculty cannot resist the repeated use of it. As an example, Paul Boghossian writes that ‘‘no one has succeeded in saying what this faculty [of intuition] really is nor how it manages to yield the relevant knowledge’’ (2001, p. 6), yet in the very same article he asserts that ‘‘there is no intuitive sense’’ in which certain epistemic facts are analogous to other kinds of facts (p. 3), worries about ‘‘intuitive constraints’’ concerning justiﬁcation (p. 11), claims that circular arguments could prove ‘‘intuitively unjustiﬁable’’ conclusions (p. 11), discusses principles that are ‘‘intuitively too strong’’ (p. 25), and maintains that there are reliably formed beliefs that are ‘‘in some strongly intuitive sense, epistemically irresponsible’’ (p. 30). Moreover, he often uses language that amounts to the use of intuition in other terminology: in one instance he writes that ‘‘I don’t see . . . how this idea [that there are presumptively but defeasibly justiﬁed beliefs] could plausibly apply to the case at hand’’ (p. 7). Boghossian is not merely reporting his personal mental limitations here, something that would be of fairly narrow interest outside his circle of intimates. He is making an argument based on how things seem to him and his own common sense—in short, on rational intuition. These observations are not meant to pick on Boghossian especially, simply to note that even writers ofﬁcially skeptical of intuition seem to ﬁnd appeals to it irresistible. On the other hand, many philosophers are up front in admitting that their arguments are ultimately grounded in intuition and that philosophy essentially depends on it. For example, David Chalmers explicitly states that ‘‘all these arguments [on the nature of the mind] are based on intuition’’ (Chalmers 1996, p. 110). His defense of this claim is a familiar one: ‘‘I have tried to make clear just how natural and plain these intuitions are, and how forced it is to deny them’’ (ibid.). Daniel Dennett contends that much of what philosophy does is bandy about considerations that are meant to promote one or another intuition, what he calls ‘‘intuition pumps.’’ ‘‘The point of such thought experiments,’’ writes Dennett, ‘‘is to entrain a family of imaginative reﬂections in the reader that ultimately yields not a formal conclusion, but a dictate of ‘intuition’ ’’ (Dennett 1984, p. 12). Saul Kripke is wonderfully explicit about how crucial intuition is. In Naming and Necessity he writes, ‘‘I think having intuitive content is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one

12

Chapter 1

can have about anything, ultimately speaking’’ (Kripke 1980, p. 42). The bold central thesis of Laurence Bonjour’s recent (1998) book is that we must accept rational intuition ‘‘more or less at face value as a genuine and autonomous source of epistemic justiﬁcation and knowledge,’’ and that ‘‘philosophy is a priori if it has any intellectual standing at all.’’2 Of course, it could be that philosophy ought to have even less intellectual standing than it does. We need to give reasons to think that intuition is a way of gaining any sort of knowledge at all. Unfortunately, this foundational issue has not generally received the attention is deserves. In 1984, Dennett wrote that we fail to recognize the centrality of intuition owing to ‘‘a fairly vigorous institution of professional repression’’ (1984, p. 17). Since then philosophers have become increasingly concerned about the justiﬁcatory status of intuition. In their editors’ preface to Rethinking Intuition, Michael R. DePaul and William Ramsey write, ‘‘we do not think it is an overstatement to say that Western analytic philosophy is, in many respects, undergoing a crisis where there is considerable urgency and anxiety regarding the status of intuitive analysis. It is becoming increasingly clear that philosophers need to provide a clear and strong justiﬁcation for the important role intuitions play in their research’’ (DePaul and Ramsey 1998, p. x). Jaakko Hintikka has even suggested a moratorium on publishing papers that appeal to intuition without some theory of how intuition can provide the right kind of information or insight. He asserts that ‘‘blind faith [in intuition] is below the intellectual dignity of philosophers for whom unexamined intuitions should not be worth intuiting’’ (Hintikka 1999, p. 130). Clearly a detailed examination of how—or whether—intuition can provide knowledge is overdue. Two Kinds of Intuition There seem to be two sorts of intuition. One kind of intuition is scientiﬁc or physical intuition, and the other is philosophical or rational intuition. Physical intuition is a hunch, an expectation of how the world works based on one’s previous experience, and is to be conﬁrmed or disconﬁrmed by future experience. Intuition about empirical facts has gotten bad press because human beings turn out to be frequently in error about the natural world. The universe seems intuitively Newtonian to us, not relativistic. The sun’s apparent motion through the sky is best explained intuitively by the hypothesis that it really does move relative to a stable Earth. The thesis that a benevolent creator is responsible for the order

Intuition and Philosophical Propositions

13

and complexity we see evident around us has tremendous intuitive appeal. The idea that after ﬁve bad poker hands one should bet the house on the sixth (after all, one is due some good cards) is irresistible to novice gamblers. Yet such hypotheses generated by our empirical intuitions must eventually face the impartial tribunal of experience, and all these seemingly plausible inferences have been laid waste by science. Some recent writers have attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of empirical intuition. Evelyn Monsay has argued that there is an important difference between sensible intuition (i.e., naive commonsense) and physical intuition, which is a more sophisticated, informed sort of subconscious intellection in the practice of normal science. While still fallible, this sort of intuition plays an important role in creativity and originality in scientiﬁc work (Monsay 1997). Richard Feynman agrees. He contrasts ‘‘the inexperienced and crackpots,’’ who make simple, wild guesses about the consequences of an experiment or the outlines of a future physical law, with veteran scientists who, in advance of rigorous proof or experiment, are able to imagine what will be the case with accuracy (Feynman 1965, p. 171). Imagination, guessing, and intuition all contribute to the advance of science, but Feynman notes that it is ‘‘imagination in a terrible strait-jacket.’’ Empirical intuition is restricted by one’s prior knowledge of what’s physically possible and perhaps subconscious induction from prior experience about what results will follow from an experiment. Moreover, the expectations of even Feynman’s intuitions are capable of being proven wrong by empirical experience.3 Philosophers do not rely on this sort of intuition. Our intuition is rational, not empirical; it is the pure light of reason that shines upon philosophical propositions. We are never hauled before the tribunal of experience. Instead, as David Lewis observes,4 our intuitions are tested against one another, and their logical entailments drawn out and presented as evidence. Weaker, less well-rooted intuitions get trumped, and ultimately eradicated, when one squarely faces the implications of one’s deeper, more ﬁrmly held intuitions. The familiar system of example, counterexample, and straight-up appeals to naked intuition is entirely closed. Furthermore, the most cursory survey of the history of philosophy shows that it is thought experiments, not empirical ones, that constitute the great leaps forward. Think of Plato’s cave; Descartes’s evil genius; Locke’s prince and the cobbler; Rousseau’s state of nature; Nietzsche’s blond beasts of prey; Quine’s linguists translating ‘‘gavagai’’; Goldman’s papier-maˆche´ barns; Searle’s Chinese room; Putnam’s Twin Earth; Rawls’s original position; Nozick’s experience machine;

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Thomson’s kidnapped violinist; and no end of runaway trolleys, brain transplants, and teleportation. These are the common currency of our profession, and not a one is fundamentally empirical in nature, or even indicative of scientiﬁc insight. They all appeal in some fashion to our rational intuitions. The contemporary understanding of ‘‘intuition,’’ like many concepts in epistemology, ﬁnds its origins in Descartes. In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, he writes, Let us now review all the actions of the intellect by means of which we are able to arrive at a knowledge of things with no fear of being mistaken. We recognize only two: intuition and deduction. By ‘‘intuition’’ I do not mean the ﬂuctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive judgment of the imagination as it botches things together, but the conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding. Alternatively, and this comes to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a clear and attentive mind which proceeds solely from the light of reason. (Descartes 1628 [1985], Rule 4, §368)

Descartes claims that he is the ﬁrst to use ‘‘intuition’’ in this technical sense. He writes, ‘‘In case anyone should be troubled by my novel use of the term ‘intuition’ and of other terms to which I shall be forced to give a different meaning from their ordinary one, I wish to point out here that I am paying no attention to the way these terms have lately been used in the Schools’’ (Rule 4, §369). As examples of things one can know by rational intuition he lists ‘‘that [one] exists, that [one] is thinking, that a triangle is bounded by just three lines, and a sphere by a single surface, and the like’’ (Rule 4, §368). Subsequent writers have generally taken Descartes to mean that what one knows through rational intuition are necessary propositions. It is possible that one fails to exist, or that one think, but not when one is considering those claims. It is a necessary truth that ‘‘if I am cognitively grasping the proposition that I am thinking, then it is true that I am thinking.’’ Similarly, it is a (putative) necessary truth that ‘‘if I am thinking about whether I exist, then it is true that I exist.’’ Likewise it could not be the case that a triangle fail to be bounded by three sides or a sphere by a single surface. Information about such claims is not gleaned through experience (the ﬂuctuating testimony of the senses) or any kind of imaginative guessing, but through the faculty of intuition, which utilizes the light of reason. For Descartes, rational intuition is a method that one can employ to acquire beliefs about certain kinds of

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propositions. It is ‘‘only though intuition’’ that we arrive at ﬁrst principles, and it is upon these that deduction operates to yield additional knowledge. The conception of rational intuition ﬁrst laid out by Descartes has changed little. He claims that: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Intuition is of propositions. The propositions known through intuition are necessary truths. Intuitive knowledge is foundational. Intuitive knowledge is indubitable.

To get a better grasp of rational intuition, let us consider these in turn. Propositions and Concepts Since the linguistic turn of the early twentieth century, analytic philosophers have focused on concepts as the sort of objects about which we have intuitions. The philosophical enterprise itself has been recast as conceptual analysis, the attempt to formulate sets of necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for concepts like ‘‘knowledge,’’ ‘‘causation,’’ and ‘‘free will.’’ Ancient debates have been reinterpreted as, at heart, debates over deﬁnitions. For example, in Euthyphro, when Socrates asks the eponymous hero to provide him with moral instruction and share his knowledge about things divine, contemporary philosophers interpret Socrates’ request as asking for the deﬁnition of ‘‘piety.’’ It is the concept of piety that is at issue, a concept to be probed by consulting intuitions that presumably are shared by the debating parties. Thus when Euthyphro, on his way to court to prosecute his father for murdering a serf, replies that piety is doing as he is doing, namely, prosecuting murderers, Socrates rejoins that this is an unsatisfactory reply, as he is looking for a general deﬁnition of ‘‘piety’’ that would allow him to evaluate various different acts as pious or impious. Euthyphro tries again, this time deﬁning ‘‘piety’’ as those acts which the gods love. Socrates notes an ambiguity here: are the pious things those which only some of the gods love, or those which all the gods love? If the former is correct, then Hera might consider an act to be pious, whereas Hephaestus might regard the same act as impious. This would make obeying the gods a difﬁcult matter indeed. Euthyphro replies that pious acts are those which all the gods love. Socrates proceeds to examine difﬁculties with this deﬁnition also, raising the now-famous question of whether acts are pious because the gods love them, or whether the gods love them because they are pious.

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Thus Euthyphro can be seen as illustrating a classic bit of conceptual analysis. It begins with Euthyphro offering a deﬁnition, or analysis, of a concept, that is, explaining the problematic concept ‘‘piety’’ in more familiar terms. This proposal is then tested to see if it is genuinely explanatory (Euthyphro’s ﬁrst deﬁnition of ‘‘piety’’ was not), unambiguous and resistant to equivocation (Euthyphro’s second deﬁnition was not), and has acceptable implications (an issue they pursue with the third definition). Socrates, as is well known, argues that the gods love pious acts because they are pious; it is not the antecedent love of the gods that makes acts pious. His defense of this view is grounded in intuitions about the nature of love. Frank Jackson has recently defended the view of philosophy as conceptual analysis. For Jackson, ‘‘conceptual analysis is the very business of addressing when and whether a story told in one vocabulary is made true by one told in some allegedly more fundamental vocabulary’’ (Jackson 1998, p. 28). Jackson claims that one tests proposed conceptual analyses through the use of rational intuition. Once an analysis is proposed, it is must survive the method of possible cases. Various hypothetical scenarios are imagined, ones that need no more than bare logical possibility, and we consult our intuitions as to whether the analysis is applicable in the imagined scenario. Thus Jackson writes that Gettier ‘‘invited us to agree with his intuition that [Gettier cases] should not be described as cases of knowledge,’’ and that ‘‘Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke refuted at least some versions of the description theory of reference by appeal to intuitions about possible cases’’ (1998, pp. 28–29). What are the philosophical questions to be answered by this method? Jackson writes that when we inquire into free will, for example, ‘‘what we are seeking to address is whether free action according to our ordinary conception . . . exists and is compatible with determinism’’ (1998, p. 31, emphasis in original). As Socrates said, we are ordinary people and must ﬁrst study the notions we have in our own minds. Jackson suggests that we can identify our ordinary notions of philosophical concepts through introspecting our intuitions about what seems most obvious and central about free action, determinism, belief, and so on. Intuition seems to be a universal faculty that, when coupled with reﬂection on possible cases, reveals the nature of one’s concepts. Not only is the faculty of intuition common among nondefective thinkers, but Jackson also believes that conceptual content of philosophical concepts is uniform among the learned and the vulgar alike. At least, it is largely uniform; he acknowledges that there may be people who have oddball,

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deviant ideas of philosophical terms. They just use words like ‘‘knowledge’’ in a way that is different from the norm. But in the end he is convinced that ‘‘often we know that our own case is typical and so can generalize from it to others’’ (1998, p. 37). There are several difﬁculties with Jackson’s vision of philosophy as conceptual analysis through the use of rational intuition. The ﬁrst is that concepts themselves are notoriously vague and slippery entities that may not be up to the rigorous demands placed on them. Many philosophers have wearied of the endless post-Gettier debates over the correct analysis of knowledge, and it may well be that this muddle is a result of the fact that ‘‘knowledge’’ does not have a univocal meaning, one that all competent speakers can come to see after a parade of possible cases and counterexamples. Yet Jackson writes that ‘‘we are simply concerned with making explicit what is, and what is not, covered by some term in our language’’ (1998, p. 51), as if matters are cut-and-dried and the true nature of knowledge, the real, objective fact of its meaning in normal English, is just waiting for a clear explanation by a clever philosopher. I think we ought to be quite skeptical of such conceptual optimism. Russell was closer to the truth when he wrote: A certain difﬁculty as regards the use of words is unavoidable here, as in all philosophical inquiries. The meanings of common words are vague, ﬂuctuating, and ambiguous, like the shadow thrown by a ﬂickering street-lamp on a windy night; yet in the nucleus of this uncertain patch of meaning, we may ﬁnd some precise concept for which philosophy requires a name. If we choose a new technical term, the connexion with ordinary thought is retarded; but if we use the common word with a new precise signiﬁcance, we may seem to run counter to usage, and we may confuse the reader’s thoughts by irrelevant associations. It is impossible to lay down a rule for the avoidance of these opposite dangers; sometimes it will be well to introduce a new technical term, sometimes it will be better to polish the common word until it becomes suitable for technical purposes. (Russell 1914a, pp. 128–129)

Concepts are our tools for communication and understanding the world. It is important that we understand how to employ these tools, but it is equally important to understand their limits. Ordinary, pre-analytic concepts may not be up to the relentless demands of conceptual analysis.5 A second objection to Jackson is that whatever intuition is, it is not the simply the humble Socratic procedure of uncovering the ordinary folk notions of ‘‘free action,’’ ‘‘belief,’’ and so on. Socratic commonsensism is premised on the assumption that there is some folk theory of freedom, knowledge, morality, and so on, that, if not universally accepted, is

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at least very widely the object of tacit agreement; through the Socratic method, reﬁned into the method of imaginary cases and counterexamples in the pursuit of conceptual clariﬁcation, we can uncover our commonly shared theory. This theory might need revision or amendment to make it consistent, but, so it is assumed, there is still much widespread agreement. The problem here is the blithe assumption of universality. While Jackson takes conceptual analysis to elucidate what governs our classiﬁcatory practice, he thinks that this social practice can be discovered from the armchair. No social science, no polls or studies are needed. Or, at most, a foray into a classroom is all that’s required: ‘‘everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class of students is doing their own bit of ﬁeldwork, and we all know the answer they get in the vast majority of cases’’ (Jackson 1998, p. 37). Philosophers who take scientiﬁc methodology seriously have rightly taken Jackson to task on this point. Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg have criticized Jackson for failing to control for sample bias (the participants in his polls are advanced philosophy students at elite universities), and experimenter bias (no blinding of the experimenter, who has strong antecedent beliefs about how things should turn out). Furthermore, polling through a public show of hands or some other public expression tends to suppress dissenting opinions (Stich and Weinberg 2001). Stich and Weinberg go on to argue that when genuine polls are conducted, ones that meet the requirements of authentic social scientiﬁc methodology, what is revealed is that there is no common, underlying folk theory of philosophical concepts. Instead what one ﬁnds is systematic variation of the intuitions of the folk across ethnic, educational, and economic class backgrounds. Stich and Weinberg take their arguments to undermine the use of intuition in philosophy entirely; I will examine their claims in greater detail in chapter 4. There I will argue against their more extravagant thesis that the method of intuition is worthless. However, it does seem that they have provided compelling reasons for rejecting the Socratic, commonsense model of philosophy as unveiling a commonly shared folk theory of concepts like ‘‘knowledge,’’ ‘‘free action,’’ ‘‘duty,’’ and the like. A third objection to Jackson is that it is unclear why he thinks that to analyze a concept is to use a more fundamental vocabulary, as he claims. It is unclear what ‘‘fundamental’’ even means in this context: that sentences involving the deﬁniendum could be eliminated in favor of sentences using only the deﬁniens? that molecular concepts are composed out of atomic ones? As Nietzsche commented in The Gay Science (§355),

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what we want from knowledge is the reduction of the strange to the familiar. Euthyphro’s deﬁnition of piety in terms of what the gods love is supposed to provide a way to judge whether an act is a pious one, namely by seeing whether it is loved by the gods, something that is presumably easier to ﬁgure out. What the gods love is supposedly less mysterious than which acts are pious. The JTB analysis of knowledge is the hypothesis that the strange concept ‘‘knowledge’’ can be explicated in terms of the supposedly more familiar concepts ‘‘justiﬁcation,’’ ‘‘truth,’’ and ‘‘belief.’’ It is not that ‘‘justiﬁcation,’’ ‘‘truth,’’ and ‘‘belief’’ are elements of a more fundamental vocabulary than ‘‘knowledge’’; it is simply that those terms are supposed to be more familiar ones. This is the reason one looks up deﬁnitions in the dictionary—not to discover a more ‘‘fundamental’’ vocabulary, but to reduce (in the Nietzschean sense) the strange word to more familiar ones. This is even clearer when one considers that there are instances of one-term ‘‘analyses.’’ For example, utilitarians argue about the nature of the good based on competing intuitions, and come to identify the good with some nonnormative property like pleasure or preferencesatisfaction. For a hedonistic utilitarian, the purported ‘‘analysis’’ is that X is the highest good iff X is pleasure. Yet this is no longer an explication of a complex concept in terms of its component concepts, but the brute positing of the truth of a proposition about the nature of the summum bonum. The good is identiﬁed with pleasure—a proposal that may be helpful to someone ignorant of moral language yet familiar with pleasure, or that may play a theoretical role in a more comprehensive moral theory, but not a claim that reduces the summum bonum to a more fundamental cluster of concepts. In this case it does not seem that rational intuition is delivering a conceptual analysis of goodness, but is instead directed upon the proposition that the highest good is pleasure. Whether intuition is ultimately of the nature of concepts or of propositions is not crucial to the central theses of the present book, although I think there are some reasons to be less than sanguine about Jackson’s insistence that rational intuition is devoted to conceptual analysis. What is important is that intuition is a method of acquiring beliefs. Jackson seems to think that intuition delivers de re beliefs about concepts that they are such-and-such; I will focus on intuition as a way to gain beliefs about a certain class of propositions. This is the way that many philosophers have understood rational intuition, from Descartes (as we saw earlier) to Hintikka, who writes that ‘‘philosophers’ intuitions have typically pertained to the truth or acceptability of various propositions’’

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(Hintikka 1999, p. 134). The question to consider, then, is just what kinds of propositions intuition supposedly makes credible. Philosophical Propositions and Necessity Rational intuition is traditionally distinguished from empirical intuition by claiming that rational intuition generates beliefs about putative necessary truths, whereas the most that empirical intuition produces is beliefs about contingent truths. This is, of course, Descartes’s view, and it is one that has gained a wide following among contemporary philosophers. For example, George Bealer writes, ‘‘For you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A’’ and then adds that he means a priori intuitions about what is necessary (Bealer 1996, p. 5). Ernest Sosa concurs that intuitions are ‘‘a priori intellectual seemings, which present themselves as necessary’’ (Sosa 1996, p. 151). Bonjour writes, ‘‘It is common to refer to the intellectual act in which the necessity of [an analytic] proposition is seen or grasped or apprehended as an act of . . . rational intuition’’ (Bonjour 1998, p. 102). Chisholm also argues that rational intuition yields knowledge of necessities, and traces this view to Aristotle (Chisholm 1977, pp. 38–39). There are two points to be made here: ﬁrst, not all necessary truths are known by rational intuition. Some necessary propositions are known as a result of logical inference from other necessities. One could derive that necessarily q from the premises that necessarily (if p then q) and that necessarily p. According to the sense in which ‘‘intuition’’ is generally understood, the truth of the premises might be known or justiﬁed through intuition, but the conclusion that necessarily q is not. Whatever intuition amounts to, it is not an inference procedure. To pick another example, one could derive ‘‘necessarily, if p then p’’ from the empty set using modal conditional introduction. In such a case, a belief that ‘‘necessarily, if p then p’’ is justiﬁed as a result of a valid derivation. On the other hand, one could just directly apprehend the truth of ‘‘necessarily, if p then p’’ without the derivation; one can just see that it is impossible for ‘‘if p then p’’ to be false without further proof. It is this latter case that is supposed to be an example of the use of rational intuition. Second, it is generally considered that there are necessary truths that are not philosophical propositions. For example, logical and mathematical truths are traditionally taken to be necessary. Intuitionists in mathematics hold that mathematical axioms, like philosophical proposi-

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tions, are justiﬁed through intuition, but I will not enter into that debate here. Part of what is traditionally taken to separate philosophical propositions from empirical ones is that the former and not the latter are either metaphysically necessary or impossible. What marks out speciﬁcally philosophical propositions from mathematical ones is a bit harder to say; certainly many mathematicians (e.g., Pythagoras, Descartes, Leibniz, Russell) drew no such distinction or saw the foundations of mathematics as contiguous with philosophy and philosophical logic. For the purposes of this book, all that matters is that we can pick out philosophical propositions ostensively. Rational intuition is supposed to bear upon propositions like these: Intended harm is morally worse than foreseen but unintentional harm. Psychological facts supervene on microphysical facts. All of the parts of a whole are essential to it. Gettier cases prove that knowledge is something other than justiﬁed true belief. If S knows that P and S knows that P implies Q, then S knows that Q. If determinism is true, libertarian free will is impossible. ‘‘The F is G’’ is equivalent to ‘‘There is an F, there is no more than one F, and anything that is an F is G.’’ Multiple realizability arguments refute token-identity theories of mind. Apparent organization in the universe is best explained by positing an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent God. Physical objects wholly exist at each moment of their existence and endure through time.

All of these propositions are taken to be implicitly prefaced with ‘‘j’’. Necessarily, if determinism is true, libertarian free will is impossible; there is no possible world in which determinism is true and yet there are agents that are free in the libertarian sense. The nature of these necessary propositions, whether they are a priori, analytic, or whatever, is irrelevant. All that matters here is that these are the sorts of propositions whose truth-value is supposedly apprehended by rational intuition or not at all. (N.B.: I am not asserting that any members of the preceding list are true; I am simply observing that they are generally taken to be putative metaphysical necessities whose truth-value is demonstrable solely though rational intuition and philosophical reason.)

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In traditional analytic philosophy we use possible cases—even examples that are physically impossible in our universe—to try to refute propositions like those above. If those propositions were not taken to be necessary truths, then refutation by demonstration of what’s possible would not work. The usual pattern of argument is for someone to assert j p, and for an interlocutor to rejoin ‘‘but wait; Uq, and Uq ! Usp; therefore it is not the case that j p.’’ For example, in the debate over secondary qualities, dispositionalism about color is the view that colors are dispositional properties, much like solubility is a dispositional property. Salt is soluble in water, even when it is in solid form and is not actively dissolving. Under normal conditions, salt will dissolve in water (assuming the water is not already saturated, the salt sample is not super dense, and so on). So salt has a dispositional property, the property of solubility, and tennis balls have a dispositional property, the property of yellowness. A typical dispositionalist deﬁnition of color is the following: x is yellow ¼ df. x appears yellow to normal observers in normal conditions. This sort of deﬁnition is a familiar bit of analytic philosophy. The deﬁnition is meant to express a true proposition if it justiﬁed by intuition, and it is to be rejected if an appropriate counterexample is found. Justin Broackes has devised the following counterexample to color dispositionalism. Imagine a yellow object that also emits death rays. These rays are incredibly fast acting—so fast, in fact, that anyone who looks at the object is killed before he can see its color. Ex hypothesi, the object will be yellow, but will have no disposition to produce experiences of yellow in normal observers. Thus colors are not dispositions. Since there are no death rays, and no yellow objects that emit them, why is this a counterexample? Because it seems logically possible that there could be such an object. The bare logical possibility of a phenomenon won’t refute an empirical truth, though. Richard Dawkins has said that he would consider that Darwinism has been refuted at a stroke if a rabbit fossil were found that radiometrically dated to 2,000 million years old. Yet Dawkins doesn’t think Darwinism has been refuted because we can imagine the bare possibility of a two-billion-year-old rabbit. The difference is, of course, that ‘‘x is yellow ¼ df. x appears yellow to normal observers in normal conditions’’ is supposed to be a necessary truth. If it is a necessary truth, then it is impossible for there to be a yellow object with no disposition to produce yellow sensations. Since it is possible (argues Broackes), yellow (and mutatis mutandis the other colors)

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isn’t a disposition. Notice that Broackes’s counterexample may not even be physically possible in the actual world; logical possibility is all that’s needed to play the game of intuition-driven analytic philosophy. Thus, unless philosophical propositions are metaphysically necessary, Broackes’s counterexample refutes dispositionalism just as much as the mere possibility of a two-billion-year-old rabbit refutes Darwin—that is, not at all. The role of science, of empirical observation, in the assessment of philosophical propositions is, then, easy to discern. The most deﬁnitive way to show that something is possible is to show that it is actual. For example, suppose one were to offer a simple wavelength theory of color: Colors are identical with speciﬁc wavelengths of light; yellow is identical with 577 nm light, red is identical with 650 nm light, and so on. This proposal is supposed to be a metaphysical necessity—there are no other possible worlds in which color is something other than light wavelengths. It’s not as if a wavelength theory is true in the actual world, whereas dispositionalism or subjectivism is true in other possible worlds. Showing that there are metameric color matches to 577 nm light scientifically refutes the wavelength theory. That is, a spot of light that has just two components, monochromatic 540 nm light (which most people see as green) and monochromatic 670 nm light (which most people see as red), will appear indistinguishable from a spot of pure 577 nm light. Yet the 540 nm–670 nm blend contains no 577 nm light at all, as a photospectrometer would reveal. Thus the 540 nm–670 nm spot turns out on the wavelength theory not to be yellow, while appearing manifestly yellow, indeed just as yellow as 577 nm light. Therefore, by reductio, the wavelength theory is false.6 In this case it is the scientiﬁc discovery of metamers that refutes the wavelength theory, not, as in the case of color dispositionalism, a mere reﬂection on a logically possible case. This is not to suggest that all philosophical propositions can be falsiﬁed by empirical discovery. Normative propositions—at least if cognitivism is true—seem particularly resistant to science. Unlike the metaphysics of color, it is difﬁcult to see what empirical theory or discovery could refute a claim that ‘‘the highest good is pleasure,’’ or ‘‘one ought never to treat others merely as means,’’ or ‘‘Mozart was a better composer than Salieri,’’ or ‘‘Samuel Smith’s oatmeal stout tastes better than Miller Lite.’’ Social scientiﬁc polls could establish what most people believe about these propositions, even what most informed people believe about them, but barring more general philosophical reasons to accept noncognitivism about the normative, such surveys will be unable to

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rebut such propositions. Furthermore, many philosophers since G. E. Moore have argued that in the case of ethical claims, naturalism fails to capture their action-guiding nature. Ethical reasoning engages our preferences and desires in a way that mere descriptive facts cannot, so no purely naturalistic treatment of morality could be successful.7 In a similar vein, Kim (1988) argues that epistemological naturalism fails because it is powerless to address the ineliminable normative component in epistemology. He contends that epistemology, in particular the concept of justiﬁcation, is essentially normative, and thus a Quinean ‘‘naturalized epistemology’’ is not a form of epistemology at all. Whatever the Quinean program is, without a normative element it is an entirely separate subject and not properly viewed as a ‘‘successor’’ subject. One might give up normative inquiry and pursue science instead, Kim suggests, but that is not to use science as a means of settling the normative. Science also seems completely powerless to demonstrate the truth of a philosophical proposition. For example, although proposals about the nature of color obviously have to be consistent with scientiﬁc ﬁndings, it is hard to see what scientiﬁc discovery would settle what color actually is. Furthermore, if philosophical propositions are metaphysical necessities, then it is no surprise that the scientiﬁc method cannot show their truth. Science is in the business of discovering physical law and hence what must be the case in the actual world, what is physically necessary given the laws of nature. Yet even ﬂawless knowledge of natural law and physical necessity will not yield up what must be the case no matter what the laws of nature actually are, what must be true in every possible world. Noninferential Beliefs So far I have argued that traditional rationalist philosophy relies on rational intuition to acquire beliefs about an ostensively delimited class of philosophical propositions. These propositions, if true, are metaphysically necessary, which serves to explain how they can be refuted through appeals to possible cases and nonempirical counterexamples. The nature of rational intuition, as a belief-acquiring faculty, is left largely unexplained; this doesn’t make intuition magical or mysterious, as its detractors at times charge. One needn’t have a theory of perception to be an empiricist. Nevertheless, the question of how rational intuition is supposed to provide knowledge cannot be left unaddressed. A. J. Ayer

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wrote, ‘‘philosophers who ﬁll their books with assertions that they intuitively ‘know’ this or that moral or religious ‘truth’ are merely providing material for the psycho-analyst’’ (Ayer 1936, p. 120). Are there reasons to reject Ayer’s skepticism? Bonjour (1998) has given the following argument for the claim that there must be some a priori knowledge. Even the opponents of a priori knowledge agree on basic rules of logical inference; for example, they agree that there is such a thing as a logically valid argument. The most robust of naturalists would accept this argument: 1. 2. 3.

If naturalism is true, then there is no a priori knowledge. Naturalism is true. Therefore, there is no a priori knowledge.

However, one can conditionalize this argument and arrive at a sentence that is truth-functionally true, namely S: if [(if naturalism is true, then there is no a priori knowledge) and (naturalism is true)], then there is no a priori knowledge. S is knowable a priori; it is a logical truth that needs no empirical support or prior reasoning on its behalf. Therefore, concludes Bonjour, there is some a priori knowledge. I am sympathetic to Bonjour’s argument, but the a priori knowledge of truth-functional truths alone is too anemic to support the pretensions of rationalist philosophy. Logical truths are all well and good, but knowledge of them is not going to give us content-rich beliefs about substantial philosophical propositions. As Ayer suggests, it is moral and religious truths that are supposedly apprehended by intuition. What about them? Why should the fact that A seems true to me be evidence for A, or a justiﬁable reason to accept A? Another way of putting the question: why should our phenomenological sense of self-evidence be reliable? If a proposition seems self-evident to me, why should this seeming be accurate? Descartes and Sartre claimed that rational intuition yields certainty,8 but we need not suppose this. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking that intuition is quite fallible, as will be discussed in the next section. Nevertheless, a fallibilistic intuitionism still faces a challenge once posed by Ayer: ‘‘unless it is possible to provide some criterion by which one may decide between conﬂicting intuitions, a mere appeal to intuition is worthless as a test of a proposition’s validity’’ (Ayer 1936, p. 106). If intuition offers prima facie justiﬁcation of belief, and two people have conﬂicting intuitions, then they have two conﬂicting prima facie justiﬁed beliefs. In itself this is not too uncommon; but I take it that Ayer’s point is that if there is no way for the two opponents

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to settle their differences except by appeal to yet more intuitions which again conﬂict, then they have reached an epistemic impasse. If they cannot both be right, the method of ‘‘pure reason’’ has proven useless in ﬁnding the truth. But there is a more basic, and more troubling, problem than Ayer’s close to hand. He fears the irresolvability of conﬂicting root intuitions. What’s worse is that unless we have reason to think that the beliefacquiring method of intuition provides some degree of justiﬁcation for the beliefs that are premised on it, appeal to intuition is a total nonstarter to begin with. Establishing that intuition provides justiﬁcation proves exceedingly difﬁcult because it does not seem that rational intuition can be justiﬁed empirically, yet if we attempt to justify it intuitively, we encounter a circularity of a particularly vicious sort. That is, before we can even ask to what degree or under what circumstances intuition provides justiﬁcation of ostensibly necessary propositions, we must establish that intuition does justify at least some propositions at least some of the time. Let us put the key question this way: is the proposition ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ true? To answer this question, we need to see what reasons we have to accept the proposition, what arguments might be adduced on its behalf; in short, we need to determine whether we are justiﬁed in accepting the contention that intuition justiﬁes some propositions. It is in attempting to justify this last that the deep problem of intuition arises most acutely. The Problem of Intuition 1. If a proposition is epistemically justiﬁed, then it is justiﬁed either a priori or a posteriori. (Premise) 2. If a proposition is epistemically justiﬁed a priori, then its justiﬁcation depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions. (Premise) 3. If the proposition ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed, it is not justiﬁed a posteriori. (Premise) 4. ‘‘The method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed. (Premise) 5. Nothing is self-justifying. (Premise) 6. If ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed, it is justiﬁed a priori. (From 1, 3) 7. If ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed, then its justiﬁcation depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions. (From 2, 6)

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8. The justiﬁcation of ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ depends on the method of intuition justifying some propositions. (From 4, 7) 9. Thus ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is not epistemically justiﬁed. (From 5, 8) 10. ‘‘The method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is and is not epistemically justiﬁed. (From 4, 9) Bealer accepts most of the central claims of the problem of intuition argument (PI). He argues that intuition is not infallible, but that nevertheless it has a kind of modal reliability.9 It is worth noting that this modal link actually falls out of the preceding reﬂections. According to lemma 8 of PI, the justiﬁcation of ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ depends on intuition. Yet the deﬁnition of ‘‘intuition’’ tells us that the rational intuition of a proposition requires that the proposition seem to be necessarily true. Thus if we ﬁnd it intuitive that intuition justiﬁes some propositions, then the modal tie must also seem present to us—necessarily, intuition justiﬁes some propositions. To his credit, Bealer correctly acknowledges that demonstrating this reliability of intuition is a task that intuition itself must perform, as lemma 8 in PI states. He writes: ‘‘The thesis that intuitions have the indicated strong modal tie to the truth is a philosophical (conceptual) thesis not open to empirical conﬁrmation or refutation. The defense of it is philosophical, ultimately resting on intuitions’’ (Bealer 1996, p. 8). While Bealer is concerned with the possibility that this requirement leads to an undesirable circularity, he does not, I think, see how problematic it is. He writes: ‘‘There is nothing vicious about this circle, . . . denying that intuitions are evidence leads to epistemic self-defeat; it is impossible to have a coherent epistemology without admitting intuitions as evidence.’’10 My reply is to agree that Bealer is right: without admitting intuitions as evidence, we cannot construct a coherent epistemology. In fact, we cannot coherently do philosophy at all. There are two ways out of this conundrum. The ﬁrst is to insist, as Bealer does, that since we do coherently engage in philosophy, and we do construct sensible epistemologies, that the circularity of justifying intuition on the basis of intuition is not vicious. That is, there must be something wrong with the problem of intuition as I have presented it. The other alternative is to admit that the problem of intuition is deep and far-reaching, and upon its solution hangs the whole of rationalist philosophy. This, I submit, is the unpalatable truth. It is easier to see if one considers a Bealerian response to

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Hume. ‘‘Denying that the principle of induction is justiﬁed leads to epistemic self-defeat; it is impossible to have a coherent science without admitting that the future will, in a relevant way, be like the past. Therefore, the problem of induction is not really a problem.’’ There could be Bealerian answers to a host of philosophical problems. For example, if Quine’s thesis about the indeterminacy of translation is correct, then we could never genuinely translate from French to English. But we do construct genuine translations. Therefore the indeterminacy of translation is a pseudo-problem. If Cartesian-style skepticism is right, then we know nothing about an external world. But we do have knowledge of an external world; hence Cartesian skepticism is not a genuine problem. It is too easy to solve philosophical problems by this method; they are solutions by theft. While Bealer conﬁdently asserts (1996, p. 30) that no reason to discontinue using intuitions as evidence will be forthcoming, lemma 9 of PI tells us that ‘‘intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is not epistemically justiﬁed. Unless one of the ﬁve premises of PI is rejected, we have in hand as good a reason as we might want to discontinue using intuitions as evidence, Bealer’s protestations aside. PI doesn’t merely suggest that justifying the use of intuition via intuition has a funny odor of circularity; it shows that a logical contradiction results from the practice. This is a serious problem. I am sympathetic to Bealer’s view (and the view of many others already mentioned, like Bonjour and Sosa) that without intuition, philosophy is left high and dry. But our desperate need to count on intuition does not absolve it of the charge that its use is both justiﬁed and unjustiﬁed. I conclude that Bealer has not found a satisfactory way of escaping PI. Is there a way out? Let’s examine the premises. The ﬁrst premise states that if a proposition is epistemically justiﬁed, then it is justiﬁed either a priori or a posteriori. A priori justiﬁcation, traditionally conceived, is justiﬁcation that derives from pure reason alone and does not depend on experience.11 If understanding a proposition is all that is needed to be justiﬁed in believing it, then such a proposition is justiﬁed a priori. Propositions that are justiﬁed but not justiﬁed a priori are justiﬁed a posteriori. That is, the a priori and the a posteriori are exhaustive and exclusive categories of justiﬁcation. More positively, a posteriori justiﬁcation requires experiential input; it is the sort of justiﬁcation needed by empirical propositions, and the sort provided by science. This classiﬁcation is hardly news; the foregoing is a familiar distinction. Not everyone thinks this classiﬁcation is worthwhile, however. Radical empiricists

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like positivists and naturalizers deny that anything is justiﬁed a priori. As Michael Devitt writes, ‘‘[we should] reject a priori knowledge and embrace ‘naturalism,’ the view that there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science. From the naturalistic perspective, philosophy becomes continuous with science’’ (1999, p. 96). As far as justiﬁcation is concerned, it is a posteriori or bust. To this I have two responses. The ﬁrst is that PI is a powerful aid to the radical empiricist position; it concludes that the method of justiﬁcation through a priori intuition is not only circular but also inherently contradictory. It seems a tactical error for the naturalists to strive to reject the premises of an argument that dovetails so nicely with their own conclusions. The second response is that the intended audience of PI and this essay more generally are those philosophers who already rely on a priori reasoning and appeals to intuitiveness to establish their results. They are certainly in no position to deny premise 1. It is for them that PI is such a problem. The second premise maintains that if a proposition is epistemically justiﬁed a priori, then its justiﬁcation depends on intuition. My defense of premise 2 is conceptual: it is part of the very nature of rationalism that rational intuition is used to justify a priori propositions. That’s just what rationalism does. This observation isn’t a vindication or defense of the rationalist approach; indeed, we will see in the subsequent chapter that there are alternative methods of gaining beliefs about the a priori that have just as much claim to our allegiance as intuition. Even if the connection between intuition and a priori justiﬁcation seems something like the ‘‘secret power’’ Hume saw in causation, it is nevertheless clear that there is an intimate tie between them. Rational intuition is deﬁned in terms of the seemingly necessary truths. That is, intuition is supposed to apprehend or make manifest the truth of noncontingent propositions. The justiﬁcation yielded by intuition, Bonjour writes, ‘‘depends on nothing beyond an understanding of the propositional content itself’’ (1998, p. 102).12 We grasp a proposition like ‘‘necessarily, if A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C,’’ and the promise of its truth-value is available to our intuition. If we admit a priori justiﬁcation at all, it is hard to imagine why we would think a proposition is a priori justiﬁed if not either as a direct dictate of intuition or as a logical consequence of basic intuitions. At least, it is hard to imagine for traditional rationalist philosophers. Naturalists who deny that any proposition is justiﬁed a priori are logically committed to the truth of premise 2. The premise is a conditional, and they deny the antecedent, so, of course, the conditional is

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true. Thus naturalists are logically committed to premise 2, and rationalists are conceptually committed to it. Premise 3 states that however ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ itself gets justiﬁed, it cannot be justiﬁed a posteriori. Apparently, only Hilary Kornblith has directly argued against premise 3. He attempts to show how an a posteriori justiﬁcation of the method of intuition could be accomplished; his argument goes something like this.13 Naturalists accept externalist accounts of justiﬁcation, like reliabilism. So, for a naturalist, ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ means roughly ‘‘the method of intuition is a reliable way of acquiring true beliefs.’’ Now, rational intuition is supposed to apprehend the truth-values of necessities. If it does so reliably well, then we may conclude that the employment of intuition produces justiﬁed beliefs, that is, that we are justiﬁed in accepting ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions.’’ For empirical science to evaluate or test the effectiveness of intuition, it would have to compare the results of our intuitions with the correct assessment of logically necessary propositions as determined empirically. For example, suppose I ﬁnd it intuitive that the following proposition is necessarily true: ‘‘all the parts of a physical object are essential to the whole.’’ Let us suppose that my use of intuition justiﬁes (to some extent) this proposition for me only if my use of intuition is generally reliable. If I am to establish this reliability a posteriori, then I must be able to appraise various propositions like ‘‘necessarily, all the parts of a physical object are essential to the whole’’ in an a posteriori manner. Kornblith thinks that this could be accomplished if we take philosophical investigation to be the investigation of natural kinds and couple this with a causal theory of reference for natural kind terms (1998, p. 134, passim). Kornblith’s argument here is highly programmatic, and he does not give even one worked-out example of an a posteriori appraisal of a philosophical proposition. He offers up ‘‘work on the psychology of inference, concept formation, cognitive development, and so on’’ (p. 136) as examples of a wholesome naturalistic approach, but this contradicts his own view (p. 133) that ‘‘epistemologists ought to be concerned with the nature of knowledge, not the concept of knowledge; the proper subject matter of ethics is the right and the good, not the concepts of the right and the good, and so on.’’ Empirical studies of concept formation cannot be relevant to philosophy if we care not about the concept of the good, but only the good itself.

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There is a more difﬁcult problem latent in the Kripkean strategy that Kornblith favors. Kripke argues that there are a posteriori necessities. They occupy the logical space provided by the rigid designation of proper names and natural kind terms coupled with a causal theory of reference for such terms. Naturalists who blithely suppose that the Kripkean approach is all they need to save necessity ignore two important facts, which I will brieﬂy mention. The ﬁrst is that Kripke does not claim, nor does it follow from his arguments, that all necessary truths are justiﬁed a posteriori. To establish this point would require arguments and resources beyond those Kripke provides. Second, Kripke repeatedly and explicitly relies on rational intuition to bolster his arguments. He does so, for example, to determine which properties of a thing are essential and which accidental, which phrases act as rigid designators and which do not, and so forth. That is, intuition is used to justify modal propositions in Kripke’s theory, and this justiﬁcation is not a posteriori. Naturalists will have other ways of undermining premise 3, from a posteriori criticisms of intuition to more global arguments for the view that only the methods of science justify any propositions at all. However, I will bracket these broader concerns for now, with the promise that they will be more fully addressed and rebutted in chapter 4. For now, I conclude that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ cannot be justiﬁed a posteriori.14 Premise 4 states that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed. If this premise is false, then we are unjustiﬁed in believing that intuition provides justiﬁcation for anything. Given the evidence cited earlier that philosophy relies heavily on intuition, and that it cannot help but do so, the falsity of premise 4 would be a hideous turn of events for the profession. We think of intuition as a method of determining the truth of a priori propositions as epistemically preferable to reliance on palmistry, crystal balls, and Tarot cards. Yet if we are not justiﬁed in believing that intuition justiﬁes anything, it is difﬁcult to see how it is better than the occult. If two methods of discovering the truth are worthless, it is splitting hairs to ﬁgure out which is worse. Of course, the fact that everyone but the radical empiricists should be put out of a job unless premise 4 is true is no evidence that the premise is true. It will be argued in chapter 3 that the truth of ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is perspective dependent. Intuition can provide philosophical knowledge, but only granted a perspective, like

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that of analytic philosophy, in which it is an integral belief-acquiring method. The naturalist position that rational intuition has no legitimate role to play in procuring philosophical knowledge is set aside, pending a fuller discussion in chapter 4. For now I note that rationalist philosophers who rely on intuition in making arguments and gaining beliefs are committed to the view that intuition is an epistemically respectable way of gaining justiﬁed beliefs. Premise 5, the last assumption of the proof, states that nothing is self-justifying. What does this mean? The idea is that there are no basic propositions whose justiﬁcation stems from no source other than themselves that we are justiﬁed in accepting. That is, if we must already assume the truth of a proposition p in order to construct an argument showing that we are epistemically justiﬁed in accepting p, then p is selfjustifying. And so it is with intuition. We must assume that the method of intuition delivers justiﬁed propositions when we employ this method to show that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is true. It is this kind of self-justiﬁcation that is rejected in premise 5. This I believe expresses nothing more than a familiar rejection of foundationalism, a rejection now so common that Richard Foley has declared that we are now in a ‘‘postfoundationalist era.’’15 He argues that, if we want to hang on to necessary propositions and engage in traditional philosophy, we have no choice but to believe that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed.16 He is correct—the rejection of premise 4 spells disaster. Yet Foley does not recognize that in order to maintain premise 4, some other premise of PI must go. I have already argued that philosophers who are not radical empiricists are committed to premises 1 and 4, and that there are excellent reasons to accept premises 2 and 3. I believe that the only plausible way out is to reject premise 5. We must accept that some propositions are self-justifying and that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is one. Put another way, this proposition is axiomatic for traditional intuition-driven philosophy. In adopting such an axiom, we adopt a form of foundationalism.17 Modest foundationalism in this sense expresses the thesis that there are justiﬁed propositions whose justiﬁcation depends on nothing other than themselves. Obviously, various stronger versions have been defended, maintaining that such propositions are known with certainty; that all of our knowledge rests on basic propositions; and so on. I take no stand on these, and acceptance or rejection of them is beyond the requirements of the modest foundationalism discussed here.18 We cannot, despite Foley’s

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announcement of the postfoundationalist era, abandon all forms of foundationalism and continue to engage in traditional philosophy. To sum up, the ﬁve premises of PI form an inconsistent set. I have argued that there are only two ways to avoid commitment to the elements of this set: (1) become a radical empiricist/naturalist, give up the a priori, and abandon the use of rational intuition; or (2) accept that a modest foundationalism is true and that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is epistemically justiﬁed on the basis of nothing other than the method of intuition itself. The only way for a proponent of traditional a priori philosophy to avoid the problem of intuition is to reject premise 5, and by so doing, endorse a modest foundationalism. Here, then, is our choice: either a form of foundationalism is true or philosophy grounded in the use of rational intuition is bunk. Coherentists might object here that I have not demonstrated the truth of a modest foundationalism at all; rather, the credence of intuition might be justiﬁed via a chain of reasoning involving intuition itself and yet further epistemic resources. Coherentism can accommodate the selfjustifying character of intuition by admitting that its justiﬁcation is circular without conceding that it is foundational. I do not think that a coherentist reply is going to be successful. Crucial to the basic coherentist idea is the view that no proposition is special—all justiﬁably believed propositions tie together into a cohesive, mutually supporting network. The justiﬁcation of any particular claim is derivative from the global, holistic justiﬁcation that accrues to the whole. As one gains new information and tries to incorporate it into the set of justiﬁably believed propositions, adjustments must be made, with some former elements of the set stripped of their credentials as justiﬁed. Since no proposition is unshakeable in some foundationalist sense, any member of the set might get jettisoned. However, no rationalist argument will result in rejecting the proposition ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions.’’ To dislodge that proposition is to give up rationalism altogether. Giving up rationalism is of course what empiricists and naturalists are eager to do, but the point being made is that advocates of traditional a priori philosophy (again, most of us) have to hang on to the view that ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is itself justiﬁed. It’s just not up for grabs. Here’s another way of putting the point. Consider the set of justiﬁed a priori propositions (naturalists bear with me here). I have argued that each member of the set is justiﬁed, ultimately, through the use of rational intuition. A rationalist coherentist would have to argue that

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propositions previously considered to be justiﬁed on the basis of intuition can be rejected on the basis of new and improved intuition-based arguments. Now consider the proposition ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions.’’ To reject this proposition one would have to provide an argument, based on intuition, that gives us good reason to abandon ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ as truly being justiﬁed—surely a self-defeating procedure if ever there was one! A rationalist cannot remove that particular proposition without giving up the game entirely. Thus ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ is special: it is self-justifying and particularly resistant to rejection. This state of affairs seems best described as a sort of foundationalism. A coherentist might rejoin that there is a way to explain the specialness of ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions’’ without capitulation to foundationalism, namely by accepting a form of rulecircularity as a legitimate means of inference. Boghossian (2000) has mounted this sort of argument to defend the use of logic in argumentation. The problem there is that it seems that we are not entitled to use a rule of inference unless we are ﬁrst justiﬁed in accepting the corresponding general claim that the rule is valid. But any argument for the validity of a nonderived rule of inference will depend on that rule, which seems illegitimately circular. Boghossian’s strategy is to accept a conceptualrole semantics for logical connectives: connectives just mean what they do by participating in some inferences and not in others. To understand a logical connective is therefore to recognize which inferences it licenses and which it does not. Boghossian then proposes the following principle: (L) If M is a genuinely meaning-constituting rule for S, then S is entitled to infer according to M, independently of having supplied an explicit justiﬁcation for M. There’s nothing wrong with circularity, Boghossian claims, so long as the condition in (L) is met. For his approach to the knowledge of legitimate logical rules of inference to be exported to our knowledge that intuition is a legitimate means of gaining justiﬁed beliefs, we would have to suppose that a principle like this is correct: (L*) If M: ‘‘if intuition supports a belief in proposition P, then P is justiﬁed’’ is a genuinely meaning-constituting rule for S, then S is entitled to infer that P is justiﬁed on the basis of intuition, independently of having supplied a explicit justiﬁcation for M.

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Why accept principle (L)? One answer that Boghossian mentions is that it helps out with the circularity problem for knowledge of logic. Yet that reason makes (L) seem a bit ad hoc. His real defense of principle (L) is that it ‘‘is intuitively plausible’’ (Boghossian 2000, p. 250). To be sure, this is a traditional rationalist defense of an epistemic principle and may be an acceptable reason to accept (L). But is it a good reason to adopt (L*)? A coherentist needs to supply an explanation as to why intuition is justiﬁcation-conferring without admitting that it is foundational. The Boghossian-style answer under consideration is the conceptual-role semantics principle (L*). If the reason to accept (L*) is its intuitive plausibility, then we seem to have arrived back at foundationalism after all. Why think that if intuition supports a belief in proposition P, then P is justiﬁed? Because of principle (L*). Why think (L*) is justiﬁed? Because intuition supports it! That’s no more than saying that it is on the basis of intuition that we ﬁnd intuition to be justiﬁcation-conferring; it is selfjustifying—in short, it is foundational. I have argued that if intuition-driven philosophy has merit at all and can provide us with justiﬁed beliefs, some of the beliefs generated by rational intuition must be basic beliefs that are noninferentially justiﬁed. (In what follows, I will use ‘‘noninferential belief’’ and ‘‘basic belief’’ as synonyms.) The only proposition that clearly must be noninferentially justiﬁed on the basis of what has been argued so far is ‘‘the method of intuition justiﬁes some propositions.’’ The use of rational intuition itself is legitimated only through intuition. But what of the more robust and substantive philosophical claims that intuition claims to support? Consider this one: ‘‘Necessarily, Gettier cases prove that knowledge is something other than justiﬁed true belief.’’ The truth of this proposition is not something that is inferred from other beliefs, or that is the result of argument. Rather, once one understands what Gettier cases are and what the JTB analysis of knowledge is, rational intuition is supposed to deliver the belief that Gettier cases show that knowledge must be something other that justiﬁed true belief. As James Van Cleve writes, ‘‘There is such a thing as just ‘seeing’—by a kind of intellectual vision—that a proposition is true. . . . ‘Seeing’ of this sort is what many philosophers call ‘intuition’ ’’ (1983, p. 36). One just sees that knowledge is not mere justiﬁed true belief. Or again, to consider a moral example, if a deontologist rebuts act utilitarianism by citing a case in which one intentionally harms an innocent in order to prevent greater collective harm to others, the case is meant to prompt the intuition that act utilitarianism is mistaken in

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recommending the intentional harm of the innocent as one’s duty. Through intuition, reﬂection on the proffered case produces (or is meant to by the case-giver) a belief. Possible cases are supposed to trigger the faculty of intuition and directly produce a noninferential belief about some philosophical proposition. As Bonjour writes, ‘‘appeal to apparent rational insight is epistemologically so basic and fundamental as not to admit of any sort of independent justiﬁcation’’ (1998, p. 148). Bealer agrees: ‘‘there is no alternative but to identify intuition as a basic source of evidence’’ (1996, p. 31). This not to say that all philosophical beliefs are basic or the direct result of rational intuition. Accepting the consequences of elaborate and intricate arguments clearly produces plenty of philosophical beliefs. However, those arguments themselves frequently include premises that are not based on still more argument, but are justiﬁed through the appeal to intuition alone. In Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes made four claims about rational intuition: that it is of propositions, that the propositions known through intuition are necessary truths, that intuitive knowledge is foundational, and that intuitive knowledge is indubitable. I have defended the ﬁrst three of these. Let us now turn to a consideration of his fourth claim, that knowledge produced by rational intuition is indubitable. Indubitability and Reﬂective Equilibrium Descartes’s view that intuitive knowledge is indubitable has been repeatedly criticized. The history of philosophy is littered with examples of philosophers conﬁdently declaiming that one or another proposition is, in Descartes’s words, derived ‘‘from the light of reason, so that we cannot doubt their truth’’ (Descartes 1644 [1985], pt. 3, para. 80). For example, Descartes thought the light of reason showed that Euclidean geometry and mathematics explain all natural phenomena. Kant also thought that it was an a priori necessary truth, known by intuition, that space conforms to Euclidean geometry (Kant 1787 [1965], B41). Locke thought intuition showed it to be logically impossible ‘‘that things wholly void of knowledge, and operating blindly, and without any perception, should produce a knowing being’’ (Locke 1690 [1974], bk. 4, ch. 10, §5). Frege found it intuitive that any property determines a set—a proposition that he thought necessarily true. Wittgenstein declared that it is impossible to travel to the moon (although what exactly he meant may

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be difﬁcult to say) (Wittgenstein 1969, §286). All of these ostensible certainties are now considered to be false. Einstein showed that space is non-Euclidean; Darwin demonstrated that dumb bits of matter could, operating blindly, produce a knowing being; Russell discovered a paradox in Frege’s intensional speciﬁcation of sets; and, of course, there was Apollo 11. Scientists have often latched on to such examples as a means of a wholesale rejection of the contributions of rationalist philosophy. Steven Weinberg, for example, devotes an entire chapter of Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) to explaining why philosophy is at best useless for the pursuit of science and at worst positively harmful.19 He argues that theories such as veriﬁcationist-style positivism hindered the acceptance of atomic theory at the beginning of the twentieth century and that post-Kuhnian relativism serves only to turn a scientiﬁcally illiterate public against the advance of knowledge. I suspect that he is right about these examples. However, it is also true that allegiance to any theory, including purely scientiﬁc ones, can last longer than the warrant for those theories, and that such allegiance can impede the development and acceptance of superior successors. Indeed, quantum mechanics and general relativity could not win universal acceptance until an older generation of physicists actually died off, to say nothing of the difﬁculties faced by Galileo or Darwin. The truth behind Weinberg’s criticisms is that philosophers have made two mistakes. The ﬁrst is thinking that a proposition is logically necessary and demonstrable through rationalist means when in fact it is contingent and capable of being supported or disproved only through empirical evidence. This was the problem with the Cartesian and Kantian view about Euclidean geometry. Whether the geometry of the universe is Euclidean cannot be settled by the use of pure reason; it is a matter for physics determine. Interestingly, though, current physics seems to be supporting the idea that the density of the universe is on average about one hydrogen atom per cubic meter (i.e., a value called W is equal to 1), which means that the average curvature of spacetime is ﬂat, and Euclid was more or less right after all.20 If the universe is in fact less dense than this ðW < 1Þ, then it will expand forever, and ﬁnally thermodynamic entropy will reduce everything to an undifferentiated particle soup (‘‘The Big Chill’’). In such a scenario, the geometry of the universe is best described by Gauss-Lobachevskian geometry. If W > 1, then the expansion of the universe will eventually come to a halt, reverse, and mutual gravitational attraction will compress everything into an inﬁnitely

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dense singularity (‘‘The Big Crunch’’). In that case, the universe’s geometry is Riemannian. In any event, the geometry of the universe is an empirical issue, one that turns on the value of W, not one that is discovered by rational intuition and tested through logically possible counterexamples. The second mistake philosophers have made is in undervaluing or even discounting the relevance of scientiﬁc discoveries for the assessment of philosophical propositions. The assumption that we don’t need to know anything about the world beyond our armchair is depressingly common in philosophy. As I argued earlier, this assumption is false. Even granted everything a rationalist could want—the autonomy of philosophy, the metaphysical necessity of philosophical truths, the method of rational intuition as a way to acquire justiﬁed beliefs—it is still the case that scientiﬁc ﬁndings can disprove (some) philosophical theses. Ted Sider puts the point nicely when he writes, ‘‘science is certainly relevant to metaphysics since inconsistency with a ﬁrmly established scientiﬁc theory is as good a reason against a theory as one could ask for’’ (Sider 2001, p. xiv). We saw an example of such inconsistency earlier in the case of a simple wavelength theory of color. The nature of color is supposed to be a metaphysically necessary truth; thus under the wavelength theory, j (x is yellow iff x emits or reﬂects 577 nm light). It is impossible for x to be yellow without 577 nm light being involved. Yet the empirical discovery of color metamers shows that there are most deﬁnitely yellow things that neither reﬂect nor emit any 577 nm light at all. Even though an empirical discovery thereby refutes a putative metaphysical necessity, the nature of color still seems to be a metaphysical issue, and the truth about color may well be a necessary one. This is different from the case of the universe’s geometry, where the geometrical structure of the universe is a contingent fact, one dependent on the physical facts about how much matter exists and how spread out it is. Knowing the appropriate physical facts will enable one to know which geometry of the universe is correct, whereas it is not nearly as clear that knowing all the physical facts about the chromatic vision system and mental processing will enable one to know which theory of color is correct—at least, if the truth about color is metaphysically necessary, as many assume. Naturalists may reject the distinction I am drawing here between the nature of the universe and the nature of color, but their rejection is predicated on a more comprehensive rejection of metaphysical necessity. Science is relevant not only for metaphysical claims, which may not come as a big surprise, but also for normative ones. Suppose that fully

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speciﬁed moral propositions are either necessarily true or necessarily false. This would mean, as traditional moral philosophers have thought, that having all the empirical evidence in the world about actions, intentions, and the consequences of actions will not tell us which moral theory is the right one. However, physical evidence and scientiﬁc discovery can serve to set parameters as to which moral theories could be right. For example, if ‘‘ought’’ implies ‘‘can,’’ then one’s moral duty cannot be to perform a physical impossibility. What’s physically possible and impossible in our world (that is, what the laws of nature permit and what they exclude) is a matter for science to determine. Thus, if a proposed moral theory includes a commitment to the performance of p as a general moral duty, and scientiﬁc discovery has shown that p is nomologically impossible, the moral theory is thereby refuted. Another example from ethics is consequentialism. Consequentialists maintain that moral obligation is connected with the production of good consequences. While what counts as a good consequence may be beyond the reach of science and determinable only through rational intuition, the consequences themselves are caused by agents. The nature of causation and the prediction of expected outcomes are either within or at least overlap the domain of science. Others have recognized the relevance of science for a priori philosophy. For example, Henderson and Horgan (2000) maintain that there is a priori knowledge, and they defend the use of rational intuition. They go on to argue that knowledge of the a priori is intimately tied up with conceptual competence and to provide an externalist account of concept possession (which they admit is a bit tenuous), as well as a spirited defense of the value of wide reﬂective equilibrium for philosophical reﬂection. The upshot, they conclude, is that a priori knowledge is not wholly divorced from the empirical as defenders of classical ‘‘high-grade’’ a priori would have it. I pass over their account of concept possession without comment. However, I am in obvious agreement with their assessment of the importance of wide reﬂective equilibrium for philosophical reasoning and concur that scientiﬁc evidence is often relevant to philosophical conclusions. So in the end we have excellent reasons to reject Descartes: rational intuition is not infallible and does not produce beliefs that are indubitable. There are two ways for intuition-generated beliefs to be defeated: one is by empirical discovery, which has already been discussed. The second way that a belief produced by intuition could be overthrown is through further a priori reasoning.

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Undercutting the justiﬁcation of a belief acquired through rational intuition as a result of other beliefs generated by rational intuition is no more mysterious than defeating the justiﬁcation of a perceptual belief via other perceptions. Even if we consider perceptual beliefs to be foundational, this does not mean that they cannot be shown to be false through further beliefs also acquired through perception, even the perceptions of others. An analogous procedure holds in the case of rational intuition. Sometimes the purely a priori approach to rebutting the deliverances of intuition produces quite deﬁnite results; it was pure reason by which Russell discovered his paradox and so showed it to be false that there is a set that corresponds to every property. The derivation of a logical paradox or formal contradiction is a powerful reason to reject the supposition that allowed the derivation. In other cases additional intuition-based reasoning tends to make a host of propositions plausible, ones whose joint plausibility is greater than the intuitive motivation for some claim with which they are inconsistent. The attentive reader has no doubt noticed that the account I am presenting of philosophical method is related to the concept of reﬂective equilibrium. This notion has its origins in Goodman and Rawls. Goodman was concerned with how one might justify inferential rules: Principles of deductive inference are justiﬁed by their conformity with accepted deductive practice. Their validity depends upon accordance with the particular deductive inferences we actually makes and sanction. If a rule yields unacceptable inferences, we drop it as invalid. Justiﬁcation of general rules thus derives from judgments rejecting or accepting particular deductive inferences. This looks ﬂagrantly circular. I have said that deductive inferences are justiﬁed by their conformity to valid general rules, and that general rules are justiﬁed by their conformity to valid inferences. But this circle is a virtuous one. The point is that rules and particular inferences alike are justiﬁed by being brought into agreement with each other. A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. The process of justiﬁcation is the delicate one of making mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences; and in the agreement achieved lies the only justiﬁcation needed for either. All this applies equally well to induction. (Goodman 1954, pp. 63–64; italics in original)

Goodman is attempting to explain the justiﬁcation of deductive and inductive inferences, both for the inferences themselves and for the rules of inference. In Stich’s assessment of Goodman, he curiously ignores Goodman’s own contention that rules and particular inferences alike are justiﬁed by being brought into agreement with each other. Instead,

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Stich interprets Goodman as offering a test for inference procedures: a system of inferential rules is justiﬁed just in case it passes the reﬂective equilibrium test (Stich 1990, p. 78). Stich then proceeds to criticize this idea by noting that there is much evidence that even upon reﬂection many people accept provably poor inference procedures like the gambler’s fallacy, thinking that the probability of a sequence of events is higher than that of any of the components in the sequence, and so on.21 I will set aside the matter of inference rules. My interest is in the idea of reﬂective equilibrium as procedure for adjusting and maintaining one’s system of beliefs. This is the use of the term as made famous by Rawls: When a person is presented with an intuitively appealing account of his sense of justice (one, say, which embodies various reasonable and natural presumptions), he may well revise his judgments to conform to its principles even though the theory does not ﬁt his existing judgments exactly. . . . From the standpoint of moral philosophy, the best account of a person’s sense of justice is not the one which ﬁts his judgments prior to his examining any conception of justice, but rather the one which matches his judgments in reﬂective equilibrium. As we have seen, this state is one reached after a person has weighed various proposed conceptions and he has either revised his judgments to accord with one of them or held fast to his initial convictions (and the corresponding conception). (Rawls 1971, p. 48)

This is the sort of procedure that I think is followed in the most promising sort of analytic, intuition-driven philosophy. The early modern philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza hoped that philosophy could be set upon the same kind of deﬁnitive, unassailable basis as mathematics and physics, with certain foundations and rigorous deductions leading to substantive philosophical conclusions about the mind, the divine, and the nature of knowledge. This has proven to be an unreasonable hope. I have argued that rationalism must take the deliverances of rational intuition as basic beliefs that are nevertheless defeatable ones. Philosophy takes these intuition-spawned beliefs and attempts to systematize them in an effort to show how they are explanatorily connected, conceptually linked, and on the whole hang together in some coherent way. Reﬂective equilibrium thus has two components. The ﬁrst is the idea of taking one’s considered philosophical intuitions and developing general theories that explain and unify the intuitions and can provide guidance on future philosophical questions. This is not quite the same thing as developing an inference procedure in Stich’s sense. For example,

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utilitarianism is supposed to capture prevalent intuitions about the importance of producing good consequences with our actions and also be capable of providing answers to moral questions that may not yet have been asked. For any question of the form ‘‘in situation X, ought agent A to do Y?’’ utilitarianism has, in principle, an answer based on the outcome of action Y and the outcomes of other actions that A might perform instead. In this sense the theory has predictive power. Reﬂective equilibrium requires not only that the theories we develop accommodate widespread intuitions, but also that our intuitive beliefs themselves be subject to rejection in light of truly excellent theories. So if we have a moral theory that makes good sense of the vast majority of our moral intuitions and has predictive power of the sort just mentioned, then its results ought to trump the occasional wayward intuition. Intuitive beliefs are like data points: further philosophizing is an attempt to give the best account of how to draw a line though them; the data inform the linedrawing project, while at the same time some data points are dismissed as outliers. The second feature of reﬂective equilibrium is that it is wide. That is, in developing philosophical theories we need to do more than consider only our abstract, a priori intuitions. We must also take into account the ﬁndings of other ﬁelds of inquiry in forming an overall picture of the world. Our philosophical beliefs should ﬁt together with our best scientiﬁc and social scientiﬁc theories. Rawls defends the idea of wide reﬂective equilibrium, arguing that moral philosophy and the best theory of justice must incorporate and take notice of psychological theories of the person and of agency along with economic concepts of rationality, decision making, and game theory.22 Sosa endorses the Rawlsian position, extending it (as I have) to the philosophical enterprise as a whole: ‘‘philosophical reﬂection enhances rational justiﬁcation through wide reﬂective equilibrium’’ (Sosa 1991, p. 266). Philosophy may be autonomous, but it is not isolated. This chapter has been an attempt to sketch out a version of rationalist philosophy that coheres with and explains common practice in a plausible and sympathetic way. I have argued that the force of intuitions drives most present-day philosophizing, and that the use of these intuitions is best seen as a belief-acquiring method that delivers beliefs about philosophical propositions. The nature of philosophical propositions I have indicated largely by ostension, although unless they are putative metaphysical necessities, the familiar use of merely possible counterexamples and cases has no evidentiary value. The beliefs that rational

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intuition produces are noninferential, basic ones that are nevertheless fallible and revisable. The resulting network of beliefs is then adjusted and modiﬁed to attain wide reﬂective equilibrium, with some intuitions ultimately rejected and others retained as we systematize our philosophical views and make them congruent with our scientiﬁc knowledge. In this manner philosophers reach a rational consensus about the nature of the mind, the scope and limits of knowledge, the ontology of objects, the existence and nature of the divine, moral obligation and permissibility, and the rest of our domain. Some Objections Objection 1 Kai Nielsen (1993) has argued that reﬂective equilibrium is equivalent to a coherence conception of justiﬁcation and that it is therefore antithetical to a foundationalist treatment of intuition such as the one presented here. This is mistaken. At least, it is mistaken for the present account of a fallibilist foundationalism. Rational intuition is the source of prima facie justiﬁed yet impeachable noninferential beliefs upon which reason operates to develop a more comprehensive system of philosophical beliefs. To achieve reﬂective equilibrium, one may need to reject some of the basic, intuition-produced beliefs with which one began. To be sure, one could not abandon all of one’s intuitive beliefs and continue to engage in rationalist philosophy. One could have philosophical beliefs based solely on the authority of others, but this is not to participate in the practice of philosophy. Rationalist philosophy is a doxastic practice, a way of knowing, grounded in rational intuition that aims toward comprehensiveness and reﬂective equilibrium among one’s philosophical views. As Rawls writes, ‘‘if the scheme on the whole seems on reﬂection to clarify and to order our thoughts, and it if tends to reduce disagreements and to bring divergent convictions more in line, then it has done all that one may reasonably ask’’ (Rawls 1971, p. 53). There may be few bedrock philosophical beliefs for rationalist philosophy, but nevertheless there are many basic beliefs in the sense of noninferential ones delivered by intuition, beliefs subject to reappraisal and even rejection in an effort to attain wide reﬂective equilibrium.23 What is bedrock for rationalists, and lays fair claim to being foundational, is a belief in the virtue of rational intuition as a means of gaining knowledge and a recognition of the need for some epistemic standards of appraisal and inference. To give that up is to give up rationalism altogether.

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Objection 2 In a related strand of thought, Catherine Z. Elgin has argued against the epistemic value of rational intuition. She acknowledges that such intuitions are supposed to be about modal matters but denies that they have any reliability or even any access to a modal realm. She has two arguments. The ﬁrst is that ‘‘my intuitions may conﬂict with yours, with my earlier intuitions, even with my concurrent ones. And they may conﬂict with considered judgments and conﬁrmed theories. . . . Intuitions then are not intrinsically reliable’’ (Elgin 1996, p. 54). This is a very bad argument. Elgin seems to be assuming that unless intuitions are universal and infallible, they have no epistemic value at all. This principle, applied across the board, would yield a quite comprehensive skepticism. My perceptions, memories, and interpretations of physical phenomena may conﬂict with yours, with my earlier perceptions, memories, and interpretations, and even with my concurrent ones. Should we then conclude that perceptions, memories, and interpretations of physical phenomena are all intrinsically unreliable and should be dismissed as legitimate methods of acquiring knowledge? If so, then it seems that we have little or no knowledge of anything at all. If perceptions, memories, and so on should not be so dismissed, what makes them any different from rational intuition? Elgin seems to confuse indubitability with reliability, and in dismissing the ability of intuition to produce the former she infers the latter. Elgin’s second strain of argument concerns alethic modality. Elgin agrees with the common view, defended here, that rational intuition generates beliefs about putative necessities. However, she denies that there are necessary truths. Therefore intuition has no epistemic role to play. Her argument is that a genuine necessity would be ‘‘undeniable’’ and yet ‘‘we can almost always ﬁnd a scenario in which a seemingly necessary truth looks merely possible’’ (Elgin 1996, p. 57). She thinks that to use modal locutions is to do no more than distinguish what is conceded and what is in question given some particular context of inquiry. As contexts of inquiry change, so do the propositions listed under the category of ‘‘necessary.’’ Therefore there are no authentically necessary truths that are so in all contexts of inquiry. First, I am less than sanguine that it is so easy to describe a plausible ‘‘context of inquiry’’ in which either ðp ! pÞ or j ðp ! pÞ looks merely possible. One could always assert that they aren’t necessary truths, but it hard to see how they could turn out to be false after some form of inquiry. How might one argue for their falsity without implicitly assuming their truth? Second, there may be a self-refutation problem

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lurking nearby. Elgin claims that which propositions are necessarily true is relativized to contexts of inquiry. Presumably, then, the modality of the proposition that ‘‘which propositions are necessarily true is relativized to contexts of inquiry’’ is itself relativized to contexts of inquiry. This means that there are contexts in which ‘‘which propositions are necessarily true is relativized to contexts of inquiry’’ might be false, that is, contexts that sanction possible worlds in which it is false. In such a context and world, the modality of propositions is invariant across contexts, something that doesn’t look good for Elgin’s modal relativism. The correct relationship between modality and relativism is difﬁcult and subtle, and will be explored in detail in chapter 3. Particularly strange about Elgin’s arguments is her support of the value of reﬂective equilibrium as the best way to tend to our beliefs. Certainly part of the appeal of reﬂective equilibrium is the recognition that however we have arrived at our beliefs and no matter what sorts of propositions they are about, they must be brought into some form of coherent system as far as possible. Nothing about this procedure implies that beliefs arrived at through rational intuition are ineligible for inclusion in our best picture of the world, or that intuition-based beliefs are incompatible with reﬂective equilibrium. Moreover, a system of beliefs in wide reﬂective equilibrium could well include the view that various propositions are necessarily true while also including the recognition that others might deny that there are any necessities. Believing that a proposition is necessarily true does not require also believing that everyone else agrees. Like Nielsen, Elgin seems tempted by the view that reﬂective equilibrium is at odds with foundationalism, and additionally, she is eager to saddle foundationalism with the traditional bugbears of indubitability and certainty. As we have seen, neither is required for an account of philosophical knowledge. Objection 3 It may further be objected that I have not shown that rationalism produces any knowledge at all. A skeptic might object that all I have done is describe a closed, self-vindicating process by which philosophers satisfy themselves. Philosophers decide that how things seem to them is how they are, and ‘‘investigate’’ an unreal world of abstracta and duties and oughts. As Nietzsche complained about Christianity: Neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (‘‘God,’’ ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘ego,’’ ‘‘spirit,’’ ‘‘free will’’— or ‘‘unfree will’’): nothing but imaginary effects (‘‘sin,’’ ‘‘redemption,’’ ‘‘grace,’’

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‘‘punishment,’’ ‘‘forgiveness of sins’’). A trafﬁc between imaginary beings (‘‘God,’’ ‘‘spirits,’’ ‘‘souls’’); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric, complete lack of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology . . . an imaginary teleology . . .—This purely ﬁctitious world is distinguished from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors actuality, while the former falsiﬁes, disvalues and denies actuality. (Nietzsche 1895 [1968], §15)

Rationalist philosophy is no more than a language game with implicit rules and acceptable moves and strategies, and it has no more connection to reality than Rorschach testing—which is to say, along with Nietzsche and Ayer, that the only truths intuition-driven rationalism reveals are psychological ones about those who participate. Skepticism is at the same time the easiest objection to make to an epistemology and the hardest to put to bed. One way to ﬂesh out the skeptical response above is to claim that the method of rational intuition and subsequent reﬂection cannot be shown to be more trustworthy than competitor methods that deliver different results about the same propositions. There are philosophical propositions, but we can’t know them because we don’t know which belief-acquiring method is the best one to use. This is a difﬁcult and serious objection that I will consider in the following chapter. There I will argue that a skeptical response to such a concern leads to a paradox and so is an untenable approach. Another way to endorse skepticism is to argue that there are no philosophical propositions at all (nothing but imaginary causes, effects, and beings), and so rationalist philosophy is much ado about nothing. This is of course the approach of the naturalists, one that has been touched on in this chapter and will receive a fuller treatment in chapter 4. With these promissory notes, I am temporarily setting aside the skeptic’s contention that rationalism is not a way of acquiring knowledge and proceeding with the provisional assumption that there are philosophical propositions and that rational intuition is a means of coming to know them. Objection 4 It might also be objected that in presenting a meta-epistemology of rationalist philosophical practice I have failed to provide an adequate treatment—indeed any treatment—of the familiar terms of epistemology. That is, there has been no discussion of the nature of justiﬁcation (e.g., whether it is to be understood internally as a capacity to give reasons for one’s beliefs or externally as a reliabilist link with truth), no analysis of knowledge (e.g., solving the Gettier problem, addressing Car-

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tesian skepticism), no discussion of the validity of closure principles for knowledge, and so on. To this charge I plead nolo contendere. These tasks are ones appropriate to ﬁrst-order epistemology. While it is the case that a fully ﬂedged epistemology needs to be able to account for itself and needs to be able to accommodate knowledge of propositions about epistemology, it is not so clear that a metaphilosophical assessment of methodology must ﬁrst settle every issue in epistemology. For philosophers to debate each other at all, there must be some shared, neutral procedure by which they can do so. If one insists that any explanation of this procedure incorporate speciﬁc commitments to, say, contextualism, internalism, virtue theory, proper functionality, or whatever, is to preclude the possibility of meaningful interaction among opposing camps on these issues. If one presupposes that proper functionality is integral to the very concept of rationalist philosophy, then of course it becomes very difﬁcult to offer intuition-based arguments against the view. Any such argument would be dismissed as incompatible with the very nature of a priori reason. It may turn out that substantive epistemological theses must be true for rational intuition to be a method of gaining knowledge at all. In fact I have argued that a version of foundationalism must be correct for it to be a successful methodology. However, it requires argument to show that rationalism is possible only under a particular conception of knowledge or justiﬁcation; it may be the case that the only robust epistemic claims that must be true for rationalism to be successful are ones concerning the source and structure of a priori knowledge. So pending arguments contrariwise, I prefer to be as neutral as possible on the nature of knowledge, justiﬁcation, and so on. Furthermore, I do not see that the chief theses of this book—in particular the problem for philosophical knowledge posed in chapter 2 or the solution to it presented in chapter 3— implicitly entail any speciﬁc view about the nature of knowledge or of justiﬁcation.

2

A Problem for Philosophical Knowledge

I have argued that the familiar way that most contemporary philosophers acquire beliefs about philosophical propositions is through the logical analysis of rational intuitions, intuitions that must be taken as foundational, basic data. In this chapter I will show that there are other belief-acquiring methods besides rational intuition that generate beliefs about philosophical propositions. At ﬁrst blush it may seem odd to present evidence for something so obviously true. But philosophers can be surprisingly blinkered. For example, after praising the widespread belief-acquiring methods of observation and deduction, one well-known philosopher promptly concludes that ‘‘[there is] nearly universal agreement about which epistemic principles are true.’’1 This person is a good representative of the insular armchair theorist who spends too much time in the cramped, hermetic philosophers’ world where snow is always white, no one can ﬁgure out that Hesperus is Phosphorus, the present King of France is forever bald, Goldbach’s conjecture stays unproven, and these topics are endlessly fascinating. Out in the wider world there are many, extremely diverse ways to gain beliefs, with partisans who insist that their favored method yields justiﬁed beliefs or even knowledge and detractors who dismiss the same method as sophistry or magic. It is risible to think that there is anything like universal agreement about which epistemic principles are true. Furthermore, the alternative belief-acquiring methods to be discussed presently are very similar to rational intuition along these dimensions: they supposedly produce basic, noninferential beliefs; the basic beliefs generated are not the ﬁnal word, but must be rationally evaluated for consistency, explanatory cohesiveness, and the like in order to achieve reﬂective equilibrium; and they are taken seriously by a great many people. I mention this last because I am not simply inventing bizarre philosophers’ scenarios which might be airily dismissed, but relating empirical

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facts about how people really come to believe what they do in the real world. The problem is that these alternative methods frequently produce beliefs that are inconsistent with those sanctioned by rationalist philosophy, and so rationalists bear the onus of defending rational intuition as the most preferable method. The two alternative belief-acquiring methods to be discussed are Christian revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. They will be treated in sections (1) and (2) respectively. For each of these methods I will be at pains to show how the beliefs they deliver are regarded as foundational by their adherents and that they are used as data which must then be systematized and brought into reﬂective equilibrium. In addition I will argue that the doxastic results of both revelation and the use of hallucinogens are inconsistent with the beliefs most rationalist philosophers hold to result from the application of rational intuition. In section (3) I will examine four arguments designed to show the relative superiority of rational intuition over the competitors of revelation and psychoactive drugs. I will conclude that none of these arguments is successful and that there is an irreconcilable conﬂict among the outputs of different epistemic methods that produce beliefs about philosophical propositions. There seem to be only three possible responses to this conﬂict: skepticism, nihilism, and relativism. These will be canvassed at the end of the chapter. Christian Revelation In this section I will attempt to show that, according to mainstream traditions in Christian theology and scholarship, (1) revelation is an epistemic method that yields beliefs about a class of philosophical propositions; (2) the beliefs generated by revelation are foundational ones, upon which reason then operates to produce a more elaborate theology; and (3) revelation and rational intuition are apt to produce inconsistent results—that is, one method might produce the belief that p, whereas the other might produce the belief that not-p. Not only is there a substantial tradition within Christian scholarship to this conclusion, but there are many mainstream Christian views that a majority of rationalist philosophers reject. Revelation Is an Epistemic Method of Acquiring Beliefs about Philosophical Propositions It is an easy matter to show that, historically understood, ‘‘revelation’’ denotes an epistemic method of coming to acquire certain beliefs. There

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are a good many controversies about Christian revelation, even for those sympathetic to the concept. One is whether God revealed various truths to some special people in the Middle East about 2,000 years ago and has pretty much kept quiet since, or whether all of us have an innate capacity to sense the divine and just need to tap into this ability. John Calvin defended the latter view. Calvin argued that revelation is a universally available method of gaining beliefs about the divine; whatever training or education might be required to interpret or understand the dictates of revelation, all nondefective persons have a sense of the divine (sensus divinitatis) just as all nondefective persons have sight, hearing, and th