A critique of Inspiring Philosophy's commentary on Trinity Radio

It’s rare that I encounter a video where I am confident almost every remark someone makes is mistaken in some way. This is one of those videos. I am going to systematically evaluate what Inspiring Philosophy/Michael Jones (who I will abbreviate hereafter as IP) says throughout this video, because the assumptions and errors are so pervasive that it requires that level of systematicity.

The video begins, literally at 0:00, with a strange and objectionable claim from IP:

Free will is intuitive. It’s our starting point, we start with what we intuitively believe.

(1) The first problem with this claim is the lack of specificity about what is meant by the various working parts of the remarks. It’s vague, and vague in ways that make it very difficult to interpret what claims are being made. First, let’s start with the use of “our” and “we.” Who is IP referring to? Who is this we/our? I suspect IP means something like “everyone.” That is, I suspect IP thinks all (or nearly all) people, or at least competent people whose intuitive faculties are functioning properly, have the same intuitions. I can’t be sure, because the use of our/we is just too vague to assess. Either way, we have a dilemma: either IP is referring to pretty much everyone, or he’s not. Here’s why:

Claims about what people find intuitive are empirical claims. And if the claim IP is making presupposes all or most people share a given intuition, this claim is subject to empirical investigation. First, the onus would be on IP to present empirical evidence that all/most people share the same intuitions about free will. I don’t think IP would be able to point to a substantive body of high quality empirical literature to support that claim. So from the very outset, we’d be dealing with what is at best a speculative empirical hypothesis for which (a) we haven’t been given any empirical evidence and (b) for which there probably isn’t any.

Since I study experimental philosophy, I actually am familiar with the empirical literature on this, and it does not support the presumption that everyone shares the same intuitions about free will. Quite the contrary, available evidence suggests otherwise.

Second, suppose IP is not referring to all or most people. Then who is IP referring to? Christians? People from WEIRD populations? Philosophers? Himself? Again, the lack of specificity makes the claim hard to evaluate, but regardless of who IP is referring to, if other people’s intuitions differ, it’s unclear why the intuitions of whoever IP is referring to should be privileged over everyone else’s. Paulogia pointing to having a contrary intuition is a completely legitimate point to raise: if our intuitions conflict, IP cannot appeal to his own intuitions to resolve the dispute, any more than we can appeal to our contrary intuitions, unless IP has good arguments for why his intuitions are better than ours. I very much doubt IP would have a good argument for that.

(2) It’s unclear what it would even mean to say that we (whoever that is) have the intuition that we have free will. What is meant by “free will” here? One of the central disputes in academic philosophy about free will is what free will even amounts to, with a variety of accounts of free will, including libertarian and compatibilist accounts of free will. So if IP says people find free will intuitive, what is it that they’re finding intuitive? Libertarian free will? Compatibilism? If one of these, which form of them in particular? Or is it just that they think we have “free will” in some general sense? If so, what sense is that? That question is important, because I don’t know what it’s like to have an undifferentiated intuition that we have “free will” that isn’t determinate between libertarian and compatibilist conceptions. Since different conceptions of free will are conceptually distinct, it’d be weird to say one has the intuition that we have “free will,” where “free will” presumably refers to some concept, but it’s indeterminate which concept it is.

In other words, suppose there’s a dispute about whether an object is an apple or an orange. And suppose some people have the intuition that it’s an apple, and others have the intuition that it’s an orange. And there’s an ongoing dispute, which we call the “fruit dispute.” Some people believe there is a real fruit dispute: there’s a fruit, but we don’t know what it is! Others deny there’s any fruit. We can call them “fruit nihilists.” This leaves us with three positions:

(1) Apple

(2) Orange

(3) Fruit nihilism

People could have the intuition that (1), (2), or (3). These would be analogous to the intuition that we have (a) libertarian free will (b) compatibilist free will, or (c) no free will. In principle, someone could have the intuition that we have free will, but are unsure whether it’s (a) or (b). Is that what IP is claiming people have, or is he claiming people specifically have the intuition that (a), or specifically the intuition that (b)? If it’s the more general intuition, what is its conceptual content? That is, what is it people find intuitive? I’m not sure, because again, I’m not sure what undifferentiated free will is. I’m not saying people don’t or can’t have such an intuition. I’m pointing to a serious underspecificity in the claim.

We’re six seconds into the video and I already have a mountain of criticisms. Let’s keep going.

We make it another one second before there are yet more issues. At 0:07 IP says:

...and the skeptic of something, say like Consciousness or free will, has to provide evidence that our intuitions are wrong on this

Why? What privileges IP’s intuitions that we have free will or consciousness over my intuitions that we don’t? And before you ask: yes, I am claiming that I do not find it intuitive that we have free will or, indeed, consciousness. Balk as much as you like. That’s what I’m claiming. Am I lying? Am I confused? How would you know? And what would be your case for that?

There is far more to say as to why I don’t find either free will or consciousness intuitive, but I’ll make a brief point about both: I consider both to be pieces of technical jargon invented by philosophers, and I regard both as being largely meaningless, conceptually muddled amalgamations of mistakes academic philosophers make due to misunderstandings about how language, meaning, and concepts work, and extrapolating far too much from their own parochial ways of thinking to how people in general think. In particular, analytic philosophers are trained into specific intellectual traditions that, I believe, instill in them precisely those ways of thinking that prompt the confusions and mistakes that lead them to report having the intuition that we “have free will” or that “we are conscious.”

Yet when asked to give an account of what free will and consciousness are, I consider the mainstream philosophical accounts offered by analytic philosophers to be variously wrong or in some cases downright unintelligible. I am not beholden to, nor am I required, to think specifically in terms of the parochial conceptions of contemporary analytic philosophers, and I reject, outright, the insistence on the part of those trained in such traditions that I and everyone else must think precisely in terms of the categories and distinctions they are disposed to think in. No, I am not required to do so, and I in fact don’t do so. And if philosophers want to claim, e.g., that “people” or “we” think a certain way, well, where’s your evidence? Because you’re making an empirical claim about human psychology. So get out your clipboards and run some surveys.

Philosophers are not entitled to make proclamations about how the entirety of humanity thinks merely by consulting how they think, any more than I’m entitled to say chocolate chip mint is everyone's favorite flavor of ice cream because it’s my favorite. Psychologists can’t even figure out how everyone thinks by running surveys on thousands of people, because results in one population won’t generalize to others.

Does IP know what intuitions people have all over the world about free will or objective morality or anything else? If so, how? Does IP study conduct cross-cultural experimental philosophy? I very much doubt it, largely because I do study this work, and there simply isn’t enough of it to sustain sweeping claims about how humanity as a whole thinks about any given philosophical issue. Claims about how people in general think about philosophical issues are, at present, little more than speculative hypotheses. Does everyone, everywhere, find it intuitive that we have free will? There are researchers doing such work, but there isn’t a lot of it, it hasn’t been done for most questions in most populations, it’s not even remotely conclusive, and, in any case, to the extent that we have such data, it suggests that people often have quite different philosophical intuitions from one another. Do people from all populations find free will intuitive? We don’t know. Do most populations find it intuitive? We don’t know. We don’t even know if all populations have a concept of free will, and if so, what the concept amounts to. Philosophers are simply not in a position to make claims about how everyone, everywhere thinks, without presenting empirical evidence that would justify inferences about how everyone, everywhere thinks. Such questions are empirical, and they cannot be resolved by philosophers appealing to their own intuitions.

(2) IP’s next mistake is to claim that Paulogia’s claim not to find free will intuitive simply isn’t an intuition. Although Paulogia says, “I’ve read books on this, I’ve read papers on this, I’ve’ thought about this…” it does not follow that this entails that Paulogia once found free will intuitive, but no longer does in virtue of having read and thought about the matter. I myself do not find free will or moral realism intuitive, and do not recall any time when I did so. I’ve also read books and articles on these topics, and thought about them. And I still don’t find them intuitive. I didn’t overturn my initial intuitions. Reading and thinking only reinforced my existing intuitions. The same may not be true for Paulogia. Perhaps Paulogia started out with the intuition that we have free will and this was overturned by studying and thinking, but this may not be the case, and in any case, it isn’t the case for me, and it need not be the case for anyone else.

Some of us don’t find it intuitive that we have free will.

(3) IP points to an interesting remark about intuitions at 3:49:

A person may appeal to an intuition as evidence without having to provide further evidence for the intuition.

Intuitions are a funny kind of evidence. They’re a bit like a private revelation or a personal experience. Suppose I saw what I took to be a ghost. That would provide some evidence that I saw a ghost. Suppose I told you that I thought I saw a ghost. Would that provide you with evidence that there was a ghost? Sure. But it wouldn’t very strong evidence. And in any case, suppose you were standing in the room with me, looking in the exact same spot, and you didn’t see a ghost.

Would I be entitled to claim that because I saw a ghost, that this somehow puts me in a better epistemic position than you? Can I say “you must prove there isn’t a ghost there”?

No. Other people are equally as entitled to how things seem to them as whoever claims that how things seem to them is evidence. If it seems to you that P, and to me that not-P, your seemings don’t take any special epistemic priority over mine.

(4) IP’s next mistake arrives about a minute later, at 4:32:

Intuitions are just sort of like these…the way we sort of act. Ok. We don’t act as if determinism is true. We act is we are conscious agents, that we are making our own choices, and that’s how we live our life.

Big mistake here. I agree that we don’t ask as if determinism is true. But I would also deny that we act as though it isn’t true, or that we act as though we have free will. Why?

Because I don’t think we’d act in any meaningfully different way if determinism is true or not true. In other words, how would we act if we believed determinism was true? And how would we act if we didn’t? What differences would there be? I contend that there would be no meaningful differences. I think determinism is true. I don’t act any differently than anyone else. IP seems to think that the way we act is somehow inconsistent with believing determinism were true. This is not true. IP gives us a few examples: “we act as if we are conscious agents.” I agree. But nothing about determinism or believing in determinism entails that we’re not conscious agents, nor would believing in determinism entail that we wouldn’t act like we’re not conscious agents.

In short: determinism, and for that matter the outright rejection of free will, does not entail that we aren’t conscious agents, unless one circularly defines “conscious agent” in such a way so as to preclude free will, in which case such a remark would amount to little more than saying that we don’t act as if determinism is true because we act as if it isn’t true, which would be vacuous. I don’t think we have free will, but there are certain construals of consciousness and agency according to which I certainly do think we are “conscious agents” and act like we are. And, for what it’s worth, the majority of philosophers endorse compatibilism: that is, they think free will is compatible with determinism. Do they think that determinism or belief in determinism entails we’d act as if we aren’t conscious agents? I very much doubt it.

Note that IP seems to be presuming specifically that we act as if a libertarian conception of free will were true. I don’t think we do, and I don’t think IP has given us any good reasons to think that we do so.

There’s a common misconception about belief in determinism that it would entail the notion that we don’t make choices. I’m surprised IP made this mistake, since IP is almost certainly aware of compatibilist conceptions of free will that accept determinism but nevertheless ascribe agency and the ability to make choices to people.

But even the outright rejection of free will, including both the rejection of libertarian and compatibilist conceptions of free will, may be taken to involve the notion that we don’t make choices. This is not true. Determinists can think that we make choices, but that choices are determined. And those who deny free will can believe that we make choices, but that our choices aren’t subject to desert-based conceptions of praise and blame, or whatever other conditions free will is purportedly necessary for. In short, you can believe

(1) We don’t have free will

(2) We do make choices

The denial of free will is not the denial that people make choices. I deny free will, and I’m choosing to type this right now. “Free will” isn’t the same thing as “the ability to choose.”

(5) At 6:07 IP says:

Even determinists will admit free will intuitive.

Sure, some do. We don’t all do so. Note, also, the use of the term “admit.” This is not the best word to use here, since it pragmatically implies that those who don’t claim that free will is intuitive aren’t “admitting” it – as though we’re being dishonest. Philosophers should avoid language that implies intent like this.

He then provides what I take to be a quote from Caruso at 6:12:

“We all subjectively feel that it is ultimately up to us what we choose and who we act [sic], and that we could have chosen or acted otherwise than we did in fact.”

First, simply quoting someone who says things that support your views is hardly a strong reason to believe you’re correct. So what if one person says this? Why should we think what they said is correct?

And in this case, I think its mistaken, presumptuous, and vague, all at the same time.

First, I don’t subjectively feel like what I do is ultimately “up to me,” nor do I feel like I “could have acted otherwise.” To the extent that I can make sense of these concepts, I simply do not have the subjective sense that I could have done differently than I did. However, the deeper issue is that I think notions like something being “up to me” and the notion that I could have “acted otherwise,” are philosophical buzz words that I suspect probably have multiple, possibly conflicting and at least distinct possible meanings, some of which I may regard as unintelligible. In which case, I wouldn’t even say I lack the intuition that these things are true, but that I suspect they’re meaningless. And I don’t have the intuition that [something meaningless], because I don’t think one can have intuitions of that kind.

Many times, philosophers will claim to have the intuition that P. We are supposed to take it for granted that P is an intelligible concept.

I am not willing to grant this to philosophers, no matter how many degrees they have or papers they’ve published. Simply because a philosopher can express a set of words does not mean that those words are meaningful. If a philosopher claims to have the intuition that “there are objective moral facts,” well, I very much doubt I have such an intuition, because I think the concept of objective moral facts is a kind of conceptual confusion, more like a square circle than anything meaningful.

We should stop presuming that when people claim to find something intuitive, that they’re saying something meaningful. If someone claims to have the intuition that P, before any of the rest of us can even assess such a claim, we’d first have to know what they mean by “P.” And in many cases, it may turn out on examination that it’s not clear what they mean, or if they mean anything in particular at all.

At the same time, even if Caruso were saying something meaningful and clear here, it’s still simply a claim Caruso is making, and a very strong claim indeed: that we *all* feel this way.

First, I don’t. So the claim is false. That’s easy enough to refute.

Second, even if the claim were amended to “All people other than Lance” or “most people,” these claims are still empirical claims. Does Caruso (or IP) have empirical evidence for the claim that all (or nearly all) people feel this way? I doubt it. And if they had it, why not present it?

(6) At 7:10 IP says something in the context of proponents of logic and skeptics of logic,

It’s not my job to prove they’re true, it’s your job, the skeptic, to sort of push me away from there

There is no dogma in philosophy that holds that skeptics have the burden to show non-skeptical positions are false. Is it the job of skeptics to prove Bigfoot doesn’t exist or that astrology doesn’t work?

No. Those with non-skeptical conclusions about an issue often rely not merely on the fact that the matter is one for which they aren’t skeptical, but rely on further assumptions about the degree to which the view is a “commonsense,” or intuitive view widely held by most people. But the mistake here is for philosophers to presume facts about how other people think and what other people find intuitive, again, in the absence of empirical evidence to support such claims. Sure, its reasonably enough to presume most people think trees exist. It’s quite another to presume everyone shares your specific philosophical position, replete with substantive metaphysical and epistemic assumptions, about what it means for a tree to exist. And yet philosophers often conflate simple, theoretically light notions of a claim like “trees exist” with more specific ones. I will focus on the “trees exist” claim to highlight just how serious of a problem this is, and just how pervasive it is.

We might take it to be completely obvious that everyone finds it intuitive that “trees exist” is true.

Not so fast. What do we mean by “true”? Many philosophers would endorse a truth-correspondence theory of truth. And they might take it to be the case that ordinary people share a truth correspondence notion of truth, and that, therefore, what we mean when we say that people find it intuitive that trees exist is that they think this is true in a truth correspondence sense.

Well, what if people don’t presuppose a truth correspondence theory of truth? There are only a few studies on this topic, and they do not provide any kind of strong, definitive support that most ordinary people do endorse a truth correspondence notion of truth. In fact, they suggest many people don’t.

Thus, even simple claims about how ordinary people allegedly, think, and what intuitions they purportedly have, could turn out to bake in philosophical presuppositions about how ordinary people think that themselves turn out to be empirical claims, and such empirical claims could simply turn out to be false. It could be that there’s no shared folk conception of truth, or it could be that folk conceptions of truth are deflationary, in which case what philosophers take to be obvious or uncontroversial claims about how people think can simply turn out to be false.

This represents a more general problem with the methods used by philosophers: they frequently make a wide variety of psychological assumptions, apparently without realizing that they’re doing so, or at the very least do so with a completely unjustified degree of overconfidence.

(7) IP makes another mistake here at 10:55:

He admitted that he studied and he read books and he came to the conclusion

No. He didn’t “admit” that. He didn’t explicitly state that he arrived at the conclusion that we don’t have free will because he studied. He simply said he did study, and he said that he had the intuition that we don’t have free will. Nothing the showed in the clip involved him stating that he concluded that we don’t have free will because he studied. That is an inference IP is making that wasn’t explicitly stated (unless it appeared in remarks that aren’t shown in this video, in which case I’d be mistaken). Paulogia’s original remark was:

“The trouble here is that my intuition is that we do not have free will. I’ve read books on this, I’ve read papers on this, I’ve thought about this..”

Nothing in this remark specifically states that he arrived at the conclusion that we don’t have free will due to reading and thinking. I grant that it's implied

And, in any case, it’s not clear why reading and thinking can’t cause you to form or change your intuitions.

(8) Note Johnathan Pritchett’s remark at 10:49, right before the remark above:

…the intuition you would say that you have, or that people have in general about free will

Claims about the intuitions that people have in general are empirical claims. What is meant by “people in general”? Most people? All people? Which people? All humans? Why the vague claims?

(9) Pritchett asks if it’s possible that in forming a conclusion, ones intuition’s could change so that their conclusion is now intuitive.

IP seems to think the answer is “No.”

IP is mistaken, yet again. IP gives the example of A-theory and B-theory of time. It may be that A-theory is intuitive, but IP is convinced that B-theory is correct. And yet it could be that IP never acquires the intuition that B-theory is correct.

Fair enough. It could be that we think P is true, even if we don’t have the intuition that it is true.

But this does not preclude the possibility that one’s intuitions can change to coincide with changes in one’s knowledge or a change in one’s beliefs.

It is also possible that one could not only change their beliefs about P, but their intuitions about P could also change. I know of no reason why this isn’t impossible or doesn’t occur. I am very confident if we surveyed philosophers (and nonphilosophers) that they will be able to provide examples of cases in which their intuitions changed, and not just their conclusions.

So yes, it is possible that Paulogia’s intuitions can change in response to reading and thinking.

(10) At 11:51, IP makes a strange remark about free will. IP says:

If I got arrested, and I was a determinist, I can’t just say well no my chemistry determined me so I’m not guilty.

I hate to be glib, but yes, you could say this. In any case, determinism wouldn’t commit you to saying this and it really depends on what you mean by “not guilty.” There’s a difference between desert-based conceptions of guilt and conceptions of guilt that aren’t cashed out in terms of presumptions about free will (e.g., whether one is causally responsible for the action in question). A determinist can deny that if someone performs an action (like stealing) that they deserve to be punished, in some cosmic or deep metaphysical sense of “desert,” but they can still appeal to the practical benefits of the utility of various kinds of laws and punishment as a basis for arresting people and charging them with crimes. Insofar as one construes guilt in terms of meeting certain agentic conditions, the determinist can still maintain that people can be guilty of things.

(11) At 11:42 we get this claim:

There’s moral subjectivists, there’s moral antirealists out there, but they still live as if morality is objective

No, antirealists like me do not live as if morality is objective. Being an antirealist doesn’t make any meaningful difference with respect to our moral behavior. Acting on one’s normative moral standards no more indicates that one is living as if moral objectivism is true than eating foods you like instead of foods you dislike implies that you think there are objective facts about what food is good or bad. We can and do act in accordance with our preferences, without this indicating that we take those preferences to be objectively correct. And we can do this with respect to our moral standards just as we do so with respect to our taste preferences. Moral antirealists don’t necessarily lack normative moral standards or values, and acting on one’s moral standards does not imply that one thinks those standards are objectively true.

IP then adds,

that’s just our intuition.

Again, who is “our”? I don’t have the intuition that moral realism is true.

IP seems to be operating under the mistaken assumption that people who reject free will or endorse determinism, or who reject objective morality, are somehow incapable of endorsing various normative standards, such as holding other people accountable or acting on our moral values. If so, IP is just mistaken about the behavioral implications of denying free will or moral realism.

(12) Johnathan Pritchett echoes the same mistake at 12:54:

The determinist likes chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream but when he walks into the ice cream store he functions as if he’s going to make a choice

No. Determinists don’t function as if they were going to make a choice. They do, in fact, make choices. Determinism is not the view that people don’t make choices.

(13) IP is engaging in the misuse of phenomenal conservatism I’ve been writing about. At 15:39 we get:

The skeptic needs to show me why my intuition is wrong … it’s not my job to show that my intuition is true

People are starting to appeal to how things seem to them as a kind of burden-shifting move. “It seems to me that P. So your job is to show that not-P.”

This is really strange. Typically, people have negotiated burdens of proof by treating whoever is making the claim in question as having a particular burden. I don’t think there’s any fact of the matter about how to resolve questions about burdens of proof. It’s a social matter, not a philosophical one.

So IP is welcome to say that it’s not his job to show his intuitions are true. Well, fine. But it’s also not our job to show his intuitions aren’t true. The roles we play in philosophical dialectic are voluntary, and are not ascribed to us in virtue of these kinds of philosophical maneuvers.

My concern with claims like IPs is that people are starting to appeal to their intuitions as conversation stoppers. That is, they’ll say “It seems to me that P. If you object, your job is to show that not-P.” This then puts the entire argumentative burden on anyone who doesn’t endorse P, without the person having to do anything to make a case for P beyond saying

“It seems like P to me.”

With respect, this is a poor excuse for abdicating the philosophical burden of actually developing and making a case for a position. Anyone can just claim to find their philosophical position intuitive, be content with that, and insist if anyone disagrees it’s their job to prove the position held via intuition is wrong. If nobody is willing to move past this, we can all exist on separate islands, each proclaiming our intuitions intuitive, awaiting challenges from others.

But why should I bother to refute someone’s claim that P is true because they find it intuitive? What’s the point? Go ahead and think P is intuitive. See where that gets you.

I’m interested in getting things done, solving practical problems, and living a better life. Convincing philosophers that some meaningless proposition, or in many cases a pseudoproposition that isn’t even meaningful isn’t true by spending all day devising defeaters isn’t a productive use of my time. This overreliance on phenomenal conservatism threatens to turn philosophy into a weird game of trying to claim priority onto our intuitions, shifting it away from appeals to publicly evaluable arguments for or against our positions.

What’s worse, claiming something is “intuitive” operates as an epistemic blank check. One can always claim that, no matter what arguments someone presents against your position, that your intuition is “stronger” than the arguments. Phenomenal conservatism functions, in practice, to allow the person claiming their position is intuitive to assign arbitrarily greater evidential weight to their intuitions than to any arguments or evidence against their position. When it functions in this way, it serves to completely undermine the purpose of philosophical dialectic, and serves as a severe impediment to making any kind of philosophical progress.

Skeptics no more have to prove non-skeptics are mistaken than non-skeptics have to prove skeptics are mistaken. What arguments we take up is not a matter to be resolved by appeals to notions about who “has” the burden of proof, as though there were some cosmic arbiter deciding whose job it is to present an argument. We should drop this notion that there is some principled position on who has the burden of proof. Burdens of proof are voluntary decisions to make a philosophical case for or against a position. That is all.