Thanks for your reply to my comment elsewhere. I want to say that I agree with Talis Per Se on this topic which is probably predictable given that I am a Huemerian. I want to respond ot a few main points and I can even make it in a post at some point if elaboration is needed. Though, I may do that in another substack profile because I am not sure the whole Greek root word naming is working for me, I may want to go a different direction overall.
Anyways, regarding three things you brought up; justification, ambi-tuitions, and first appearances.
Justification - I get that you do not consider intuitions as Huemer understands them as existing at all. What (if anything) does give justification to believe P? I think appearances in general can give justification for believing P, but I am wondering if you think any non-intuitive appearances can do this. Or if there is something else you call the experiences that give one justification for believing in P. (or if you believe there are no such ways whatsoever one can be justified in believing in P)
Ambi-tuitions - Do you consider your view on intuitions (in the sense you use it in) as you understand them, to be justified? In other words, do you see yourself as justified in believing that ambi-tuitions correctly describe the experiences people actually have when talking about intuitions (in the sense Talis, Huemer, and many others use it in)? If so, what sort of experience is it that gives you that justification? If not, I am curious again about the first point on justification in general up above.
First appearances - When someone talks about invisible witches, does your first appearance about them suck? Or is your first appearance highly in doubt that they exist? (I assume the two are mutually exclusive, correct me if I am wrong) If others have the first appearance that invisible witches are real, then I think there can be some work to be done to provide them with additional appearances that would make their position unjustified to continue to hold. I don't see why others fault first appearances should cause the rest of us to doubt our first appearances without a reason to do so.
I understand you are trying to give a sort of blanket reason to doubt them from now on, but I don't see the actual reason to doubt this class of appearances vs other classes nor do I see the actual reason to doubt all classes of appearances. It appears to me that the reason to doubt such appearances, if justified, would still count as reason to uphold first appearances until we doubt them (namely the first appearances of those that caused us to doubt our previously held appearances).
I have a clarificatory question. There are two claims someone can make. (1) Some people have ambi-tuitions. (2) Ambi-tuitions enable people to sense the truth. Apparently, you reject (2). But do you accept (1)? (I’m asking because, in some other posts, you (Lance) seem to have denied that people have intuitions, even construed as ambi-tuitions.)
I think we should separate the phenomenology associated with reports of intuitions from what people claim intuitions are able to do. This makes the comparison of intuition to tea leaves less problematic. For example, maybe people accurately report their phenomenology when reading tea leaves. But I don’t think people gain any insight about the world from reading tea leaves. I can grant that someone accurately reports her experience of reading tea leaves while denying that reading tea leaves allows you to do anything special. Can we do something similar for intuitions?
Short answer: No, I don't think are ambutuitions. It's more that I think that ambutuitions are the best you could do, if I conceded a bunch of ground. This article adopts a more ecumenical tone that gives as much ground for the sake of argument as one reasonably could but still finds fault with Talis's characterization of intuitions.
And yea, you could do something like that with reading tea leaves. I don't actually know what the phenomenology of intuitions is like for realists, but I do think it's possible to make systematic errors about your experiences so I'm skeptical their descriptions of their experiences are accurate.
Thanks. Why do you not think people have ambi-tuitions? Do you think that the concept of an ambi-tuition is incoherent or unintelligible, or do you think that people are inaccurately reporting their experiences? Or something else?
Roughly, I think philosophers have mistakenly collapsed various features of introspection and phenomenology and other aspects of their thinking into a kind of "phenomenon" when really it's just totally mundane and ordinary things going on: remembering, judging, thinking, finding one is disposed to think something, and so on, and they've taken all that, inappropriately smashed it all together, and have repeated the process and encouraged others to do the same over and over until they've now mutually convinced one another that something special is going on when they consider, e.g., a thought experiment. But nothing special is going on. It's just this or that typical, mundane psychological process.
More generally, I see little evidence of any distinct faculty or need to posit any special cognitive process to account for what philosophers do, I don't see any good reason to think anyone outside philosophy does it, and I think the practice shows all the hallmarks of a kind of learned behavior distinct to particular subcultures, a bit like claiming to see auras or to speak in tongues.
"[I]f [thinkers and writers] haven’t articulated their justificatory method, phrases like 'be justified' and 'is justified' are underspecified."
They will disagree if they analyze the concept of justification in terms of something other than a method, which, I take it, would be a procedure carried out intentionally and thus, most likely, with some awareness of what is being done. Externalists about epistemic justification, for example, think one's beliefs can be justified even if one is unaware of how they came to be justified.
In your about page, it says you're an "intensely skeptical" researcher, and that you critique typical methods.
I'm not sure how you mean "nonphilosopher", but I'm guessing its meaning includes someone not embedded in an academic setting. That's me.
I find the "via negativa" approach you take to the topics you address interesting, but, do you hold any beliefs at all on what it is people "should" do?
Do you just diagnose flawed methods, or do you also propose working ones?
The epistemological problems we've inherited from past history feel untenable. There are even those who deny the significance of philosophy altogether.
It feels as if anyone can say and believe anything, and we won't ever know if it's true in any meaningful sense.
Sorry this isn't narrowly specific to this article.
I mostly focus on critique. I'm not that focused on building theories. While I have some working ideas for them, my interests are often too grand and interdisciplinary and it would require me to basically drop everything to develop them in a satisfactory way. So, I've never really done so.
There are some hints of positive theories and methodological suggestions that appear towards the end of my dissertation but they're very brief compared to all the critique.
I think psychology and philosophy have both languished in a methodological morass largely resulting from the cultural and linguistic parochialism of the fields. I have some views on how this could be improved, but they largely involve institutional changes I have no power to implement.
“For me, intuition was the most important part of the process” - Albert Einstein. I included this quote when I commented on a previous post of yours Lance, but I don’t know if you saw it- my comment was made quite a while after you posted. My point was not to dispute your position (“hey, the quintessential brilliant thinker made use of intuition- how can you knock it”); to the contrary, I’m in essential agreement with you. Intuition in my view is a form of “right hemispheric” pattern recognition. The intuitive insight may “reveal” something important, but it in no way proves it. Einstein, followed up his intuitions by literally doing the math. The philosopher would need to justify the conclusion beyond simply announcing his intuition. A scientist would need to adduce evidence in support of what could only be taken as a hypothesis, no matter certain he or she is of its truth value.
I don't take Einstein and others who use the term "intuition" outside a philosophical context to even be employing the same concept. It's the same word, sure, but they're just talking about something else. Something similar, but not the philosophically-laden notions that I reject.
So what Einstein was up to was a perfectly sensible notion of intuition. The Kuntz and Kuntz paper that surveyed philosophers likewise emphasized the importance of intuition in discovery. Maybe that's worth a look.
Or consider the quote: "Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic."
He cites a study of 17 pairs of college women who took some testosterone and had to decide when some circle had more contrast than another. After consulting with their partner, each participant could either respond with her own judgment or rely on her partner's judgment. Participants were marginally more likely to rely on their own judgment in the testosterone condition, p=.02.
If someone thinks they saw a circle with slightly darker contrast and they don't defer to someone else about it, does this mean they're "cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic?" I don't think any honest, reasonable person would think so.
In short, Sapolsky tends to wildly extrapolate from the available data.
I can't access the whole article you shared due to the paywall, but it doesn't look like it characterizes his book as blanket unreliable or all of its research shoddy (correct me if I'm wrong). It's also the case that his remark about testosterone does not completely hinge on the one study you mention. However, it's great that you're providing criticism to consider, a move very "on topic" with the goal of this piece.
"Almost every time I looked up a social-psychology study cited uncritically in Behave, the results crumbled to dust at the slightest scrutiny[...] Clearly Sapolsky hasn’t kept up with what psychologists are calling the ‘Replication Crisis’ — the dawning realisation that many of our most exciting, newsworthy findings may have been flukes, and can’t be reproduced in independent labs."
I agree that Sapolsky cites other studies on testosterone. But given his propensity to misinterpret research, I don't have confidence in the rest.
If I had a genie I'd wish for a spreadsheet of Ritchie's findings; I'm finding his article quoted in some other places, and it looks like he has a mix of strong examples (e.g., a study whose findings were not replicated by a bigger study) and debatable ones (e.g., his "almost" hedge you quote, and his complaint of "marginal results").
I'm certainly interested in any studies that would undermine how we used the text in this article, because that would be cause to alter it.
1. I think any researcher who's contributed to solving the replication crisis in psychology would agree with Ritchie. I personally was so put off by the number of bad studies Sapolsky cited that I quit reading his book a quarter of the way through.
2. I think the neuroscience and endocrinology is entirely unnecessary. As one philosopher put it: "If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck. What exactly turns on knowing how far north?" I'd say the same here. We know people sometimes form beliefs quickly in a way that's unreliable. What does it matter if it's because the amygdala or thalamus are active vs the ventral tegmental area?
Regarding (2), I think that's a bad way to think about the role of neuroscience, endocrinology, and empirical considerations more broadly. The reason why it matters what processes cause any given "intuition" is, in part, that different processes can cause different intuitions, and some of these may be more or less of an epistemic concern on consideration than others.
Intuitions are the output of what is, for philosophers (and anyone else) ignorant of the causes of those outputs, effectively a black box. It seems strangely incurious and naive to me for philosophers to simply not care what is causing their "intuitions."
Any substantive and credible talk of human intuition should involve acknowledging that intuitions are a psychological phenomena. Disinterest in the actual psychology associated with that phenomena is strange and unjustified; it is important how and why we have the intuitions we have.
More generally, insofar as philosophical notions of intuitions rely on dubious armchair psychology, it may be that when we open the box up and peer inside, there won't be anything corresponding to their favored notions of intuition. In that case, if it turns out that a particular conception of intuitions doesn't map onto any psychological processes we have, that seems like a bit of a problem to me. It may be that the philosopher's favored notion may have no more merit in such cases than claims of telepathy.
Indeed, I agree that different psychological processes will have different epistemic status (e.g. wishful thinking vs ordinary visual perception). So it's worth interrogating which psychological processes our beliefs come from. But I don't see why it matters *where* in the brain those psychological processes are happening. What matters is *that* they are happening.
Thanks for your reply to my comment elsewhere. I want to say that I agree with Talis Per Se on this topic which is probably predictable given that I am a Huemerian. I want to respond ot a few main points and I can even make it in a post at some point if elaboration is needed. Though, I may do that in another substack profile because I am not sure the whole Greek root word naming is working for me, I may want to go a different direction overall.
Anyways, regarding three things you brought up; justification, ambi-tuitions, and first appearances.
Justification - I get that you do not consider intuitions as Huemer understands them as existing at all. What (if anything) does give justification to believe P? I think appearances in general can give justification for believing P, but I am wondering if you think any non-intuitive appearances can do this. Or if there is something else you call the experiences that give one justification for believing in P. (or if you believe there are no such ways whatsoever one can be justified in believing in P)
Ambi-tuitions - Do you consider your view on intuitions (in the sense you use it in) as you understand them, to be justified? In other words, do you see yourself as justified in believing that ambi-tuitions correctly describe the experiences people actually have when talking about intuitions (in the sense Talis, Huemer, and many others use it in)? If so, what sort of experience is it that gives you that justification? If not, I am curious again about the first point on justification in general up above.
First appearances - When someone talks about invisible witches, does your first appearance about them suck? Or is your first appearance highly in doubt that they exist? (I assume the two are mutually exclusive, correct me if I am wrong) If others have the first appearance that invisible witches are real, then I think there can be some work to be done to provide them with additional appearances that would make their position unjustified to continue to hold. I don't see why others fault first appearances should cause the rest of us to doubt our first appearances without a reason to do so.
I understand you are trying to give a sort of blanket reason to doubt them from now on, but I don't see the actual reason to doubt this class of appearances vs other classes nor do I see the actual reason to doubt all classes of appearances. It appears to me that the reason to doubt such appearances, if justified, would still count as reason to uphold first appearances until we doubt them (namely the first appearances of those that caused us to doubt our previously held appearances).
I have a clarificatory question. There are two claims someone can make. (1) Some people have ambi-tuitions. (2) Ambi-tuitions enable people to sense the truth. Apparently, you reject (2). But do you accept (1)? (I’m asking because, in some other posts, you (Lance) seem to have denied that people have intuitions, even construed as ambi-tuitions.)
I think we should separate the phenomenology associated with reports of intuitions from what people claim intuitions are able to do. This makes the comparison of intuition to tea leaves less problematic. For example, maybe people accurately report their phenomenology when reading tea leaves. But I don’t think people gain any insight about the world from reading tea leaves. I can grant that someone accurately reports her experience of reading tea leaves while denying that reading tea leaves allows you to do anything special. Can we do something similar for intuitions?
Short answer: No, I don't think are ambutuitions. It's more that I think that ambutuitions are the best you could do, if I conceded a bunch of ground. This article adopts a more ecumenical tone that gives as much ground for the sake of argument as one reasonably could but still finds fault with Talis's characterization of intuitions.
And yea, you could do something like that with reading tea leaves. I don't actually know what the phenomenology of intuitions is like for realists, but I do think it's possible to make systematic errors about your experiences so I'm skeptical their descriptions of their experiences are accurate.
Thanks. Why do you not think people have ambi-tuitions? Do you think that the concept of an ambi-tuition is incoherent or unintelligible, or do you think that people are inaccurately reporting their experiences? Or something else?
Roughly, I think philosophers have mistakenly collapsed various features of introspection and phenomenology and other aspects of their thinking into a kind of "phenomenon" when really it's just totally mundane and ordinary things going on: remembering, judging, thinking, finding one is disposed to think something, and so on, and they've taken all that, inappropriately smashed it all together, and have repeated the process and encouraged others to do the same over and over until they've now mutually convinced one another that something special is going on when they consider, e.g., a thought experiment. But nothing special is going on. It's just this or that typical, mundane psychological process.
More generally, I see little evidence of any distinct faculty or need to posit any special cognitive process to account for what philosophers do, I don't see any good reason to think anyone outside philosophy does it, and I think the practice shows all the hallmarks of a kind of learned behavior distinct to particular subcultures, a bit like claiming to see auras or to speak in tongues.
"[I]f [thinkers and writers] haven’t articulated their justificatory method, phrases like 'be justified' and 'is justified' are underspecified."
They will disagree if they analyze the concept of justification in terms of something other than a method, which, I take it, would be a procedure carried out intentionally and thus, most likely, with some awareness of what is being done. Externalists about epistemic justification, for example, think one's beliefs can be justified even if one is unaware of how they came to be justified.
In your about page, it says you're an "intensely skeptical" researcher, and that you critique typical methods.
I'm not sure how you mean "nonphilosopher", but I'm guessing its meaning includes someone not embedded in an academic setting. That's me.
I find the "via negativa" approach you take to the topics you address interesting, but, do you hold any beliefs at all on what it is people "should" do?
Do you just diagnose flawed methods, or do you also propose working ones?
The epistemological problems we've inherited from past history feel untenable. There are even those who deny the significance of philosophy altogether.
It feels as if anyone can say and believe anything, and we won't ever know if it's true in any meaningful sense.
Sorry this isn't narrowly specific to this article.
I mostly focus on critique. I'm not that focused on building theories. While I have some working ideas for them, my interests are often too grand and interdisciplinary and it would require me to basically drop everything to develop them in a satisfactory way. So, I've never really done so.
There are some hints of positive theories and methodological suggestions that appear towards the end of my dissertation but they're very brief compared to all the critique.
I think psychology and philosophy have both languished in a methodological morass largely resulting from the cultural and linguistic parochialism of the fields. I have some views on how this could be improved, but they largely involve institutional changes I have no power to implement.
“For me, intuition was the most important part of the process” - Albert Einstein. I included this quote when I commented on a previous post of yours Lance, but I don’t know if you saw it- my comment was made quite a while after you posted. My point was not to dispute your position (“hey, the quintessential brilliant thinker made use of intuition- how can you knock it”); to the contrary, I’m in essential agreement with you. Intuition in my view is a form of “right hemispheric” pattern recognition. The intuitive insight may “reveal” something important, but it in no way proves it. Einstein, followed up his intuitions by literally doing the math. The philosopher would need to justify the conclusion beyond simply announcing his intuition. A scientist would need to adduce evidence in support of what could only be taken as a hypothesis, no matter certain he or she is of its truth value.
I don't take Einstein and others who use the term "intuition" outside a philosophical context to even be employing the same concept. It's the same word, sure, but they're just talking about something else. Something similar, but not the philosophically-laden notions that I reject.
So what Einstein was up to was a perfectly sensible notion of intuition. The Kuntz and Kuntz paper that surveyed philosophers likewise emphasized the importance of intuition in discovery. Maybe that's worth a look.
It just seems to me that you two are stance-independently obligated to write a book together about metaphilosophy, for my benefit.
Your comment is intuitive.
The drawings are really nice!
Sapolsky isn't a reliable source. For example, see this review of his book for a discussion of the shoddy research he cites: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rules-of-behaviour/
Or consider the quote: "Testosterone makes people cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic."
He cites a study of 17 pairs of college women who took some testosterone and had to decide when some circle had more contrast than another. After consulting with their partner, each participant could either respond with her own judgment or rely on her partner's judgment. Participants were marginally more likely to rely on their own judgment in the testosterone condition, p=.02.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rspb.2011.2523
If someone thinks they saw a circle with slightly darker contrast and they don't defer to someone else about it, does this mean they're "cocky, egocentric, and narcissistic?" I don't think any honest, reasonable person would think so.
In short, Sapolsky tends to wildly extrapolate from the available data.
I can't access the whole article you shared due to the paywall, but it doesn't look like it characterizes his book as blanket unreliable or all of its research shoddy (correct me if I'm wrong). It's also the case that his remark about testosterone does not completely hinge on the one study you mention. However, it's great that you're providing criticism to consider, a move very "on topic" with the goal of this piece.
A quote from the review:
"Almost every time I looked up a social-psychology study cited uncritically in Behave, the results crumbled to dust at the slightest scrutiny[...] Clearly Sapolsky hasn’t kept up with what psychologists are calling the ‘Replication Crisis’ — the dawning realisation that many of our most exciting, newsworthy findings may have been flukes, and can’t be reproduced in independent labs."
I agree that Sapolsky cites other studies on testosterone. But given his propensity to misinterpret research, I don't have confidence in the rest.
If I had a genie I'd wish for a spreadsheet of Ritchie's findings; I'm finding his article quoted in some other places, and it looks like he has a mix of strong examples (e.g., a study whose findings were not replicated by a bigger study) and debatable ones (e.g., his "almost" hedge you quote, and his complaint of "marginal results").
I'm certainly interested in any studies that would undermine how we used the text in this article, because that would be cause to alter it.
1. I think any researcher who's contributed to solving the replication crisis in psychology would agree with Ritchie. I personally was so put off by the number of bad studies Sapolsky cited that I quit reading his book a quarter of the way through.
2. I think the neuroscience and endocrinology is entirely unnecessary. As one philosopher put it: "If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck. What exactly turns on knowing how far north?" I'd say the same here. We know people sometimes form beliefs quickly in a way that's unreliable. What does it matter if it's because the amygdala or thalamus are active vs the ventral tegmental area?
Regarding (2), I think that's a bad way to think about the role of neuroscience, endocrinology, and empirical considerations more broadly. The reason why it matters what processes cause any given "intuition" is, in part, that different processes can cause different intuitions, and some of these may be more or less of an epistemic concern on consideration than others.
Intuitions are the output of what is, for philosophers (and anyone else) ignorant of the causes of those outputs, effectively a black box. It seems strangely incurious and naive to me for philosophers to simply not care what is causing their "intuitions."
Any substantive and credible talk of human intuition should involve acknowledging that intuitions are a psychological phenomena. Disinterest in the actual psychology associated with that phenomena is strange and unjustified; it is important how and why we have the intuitions we have.
More generally, insofar as philosophical notions of intuitions rely on dubious armchair psychology, it may be that when we open the box up and peer inside, there won't be anything corresponding to their favored notions of intuition. In that case, if it turns out that a particular conception of intuitions doesn't map onto any psychological processes we have, that seems like a bit of a problem to me. It may be that the philosopher's favored notion may have no more merit in such cases than claims of telepathy.
Indeed, I agree that different psychological processes will have different epistemic status (e.g. wishful thinking vs ordinary visual perception). So it's worth interrogating which psychological processes our beliefs come from. But I don't see why it matters *where* in the brain those psychological processes are happening. What matters is *that* they are happening.