Introduction and Historical Overview

Chris Daly

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Philosophy is highly speculative. Yet not anything goes in philosophy: it is not a matter of

thinking or saying whatever takes your fancy. Philosophers have standards to keep. They

seek to evaluate and grade their speculations. Some speculations are assigned higher

credences – are judged to be more likely – than others. But on what basis is this done? What

distinguishes philosophy from sheer or idle speculation is the fact that philosophers argue

about their speculations. Philosophy then involves two components: in speculating it

devises interesting, novel, and general claims and in arguing it provides persuasive reasons

for accepting (or rejecting) those claims. The centrality of the role of argument in philosophy

raises at least three questions.

First, which patterns of argument are admissible in philosophy? One major and

influential tradition in philosophy (which we might call ‘deductivism’) required that

arguments in philosophy are necessarily truth-preserving, so that the truth of the premises

of an argument is transmitted to its conclusion. This ideal was upheld partly because of the

influence of work in pure mathematics on philosophy. Mathematical rigour is marked by the

truth-preserving character of proofs which transmit truth from the axioms of a system to

the theorems advanced in their conclusions. Another factor behind the ideal was one

internal to philosophy. This was the desire to produce arguments which are immune to

sceptical doubt. Restricting philosophical arguments to ones which are necessarily truth-

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preserving was taken to be a necessary first step in devising a philosophical system – a

coherent set of philosophical speculations – which there were compelling reasons to accept.

Even if philosophy is restricted to using only deductively valid arguments, there

remains the challenge of justifying claims about which patterns of argument are deductively

valid (Dummett 1978). And if the answer to this challenge should turn out to be appreciably

similar to the answer to the challenge of justifying claims about which arguments are

inductively good (Goodman 1955 pp.61-66), then the continuing exclusion of non-deductive

arguments from philosophy seems arbitrary and unwarranted. Lastly, deductively valid

arguments which have philosophical speculations as conclusions are significant only if they

have suitable and credible premises from which these conclusions can be derived (cf. Lycan

1975).

This takes us to the second question raised by the special role of argument in

philosophy: which premises are admissible in philosophy? Deductivism was historically

associated with the view that the premises of philosophical arguments are claims which

have a special epistemic and modal character. These claims are first principles. Their

epistemic status is special because they are indubitable; they are known with certainty.

Their modal status is special because they are necessarily true. Again the influence of pure

mathematics was at work in forming this view. The case of Euclidean geometry was taken to

illustrate how, in axiomatised systems of mathematics, the comparatively small collection of

claims which formed the axioms of the system were both necessarily true and known with

certainty. The method of proof extends the range of mathematical claims which we know by

deducing many further mathematical claims – the theorems of Euclidean geometry – from

these axioms. The axioms were themselves taken to be self-evident: just by understanding

them, it becomes evident to us that the axioms were true. Some philosophers (notably

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Spinoza in his Ethics and Leibniz in his Monadology) presented their philosophical theories in

this way. They took the first principles of their systems to be truths possessed of the same

certainty and necessity as Euclid’s axioms, and sought to derive important conclusions from

them by deductive reasoning alone.

Two challenges immediately face such rationalist approaches. First, are the principles

of their systems self-evident? Second, do the principles generate all the results that they are

supposed to? A general problem facing an appeal to first principles is its difficulty in meeting

both challenges. Spinoza faces the first challenge. The seventh axiom in his Ethics says that if

a thing can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence. Far from

finding the axiom compelling (even after reflection), some philosophers would reject it as

unintelligible (because they find talk of essences unintelligible) or untrue (because although

they understand talk of essences, they think that there are none) or unknowable (because

they think that we cannot know about essences). Descartes also faced the first challenge. In

his third meditations, he took as a first principle the claim that he can know that whatever

he perceives clearly and distinctly is true only if he first knows that God exists and is not a

deceiver. Yet he also claims that he can know that God exists and is not a deceiver only if he

first knows that whatever he perceives clearly and distinctly is true. The problem is that

Descartes knowing either one of these claims seems to depend on his already knowing the

other claim. This is the problem of the Cartesian circle (van Cleve 1979).

Empiricists weakened the requirements for what they took to be the foundations of

their philosophical systems. They allowed empirical and contingent claims to form part of

their foundations provided that those claims are known with certainty by those asserting

them. These efforts, however, face the second challenge. For instance, phenomenalism took

sentences about one’s conscious actual and possible experiences to be indubitable.

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Phenomenalists claimed that every sentence about a physical object is logically equivalent

to a set of such experiential sentences, and they took this to be a way of showing how we

can have knowledge of physical objects. Now, it might be thought that the sentence ‘the

wall has a white square painted on it’ entails that you would have an experience of a white

square on looking at the wall. But suppose that the conditions in the room are such that if

you observed the wall, it does not look like it has a white square painted on it, perhaps

because the room is illuminated by red light, or because you have taken a hallucinogenic

drug. There are indefinitely many such distorting conditions, many of them currently

unknown, and so the phenomenalists would be unable to specify them exhaustively and

thereby go on to rule them out (Chisholm 1957 appendix A). For this reason what

phenomenalism took as its foundations (sentences about one’s conscious actual and

possible experiences) did not generate all the results that they were taken to. (For a recent

update of this project, see Chalmers 2012).

The third question raised by the role of argument in philosophy concerns the nature

and degree of disagreement among philosophers. Disagreement is endemic and entrenched

in every sub-discipline of philosophy. Why is this? If, as deductivism claims, philosophers

should hold themselves to the most exacting standards of argument and to premises which

are rationally compelling, then why are philosophers so disputatious? Why don’t they

largely agree about which philosophical arguments are sound and which are not? In fact, the

problem is not confined to deductivism. Suppose, as many philosophers do, that we allow

non-demonstrative patterns of argument in philosophy and agree about which patterns to

admit. Suppose, as these philosophers also do, that we admit as premises claims which are

dubitable and corrigible. Nevertheless, philosophical disagreement has proved as intractable

as ever. We cannot agree about premises and we cannot agree about which arguments are

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good ones. Philosophy was supposed to be more than mere speculation. The difference was

supposed to be that philosophers argue for their speculations. Yet it seems that philosophy

is argument without end. Why is this? And what does it tell us about philosophy?

The protracted nature of disagreement in philosophy is sometimes taken to indicate

that there is no progress in philosophy. The contrast with science seems clear and painful.

Scientists widely agree on their methods, testing procedures, and results. Consequently,

they widely agree about which theories are plausible and which ones are not. The predictive

successes of the best theories are then taken to be evidence that science is converging on

the truth. By contrast, in philosophy there is precious little agreement about methods or

even about the data available to us. Consider the debate about consciousness. Some

philosophers (such as Joe Levine) take the data in this debate to concern how things seem

to us. But others (such as Georges Rey) take the data instead to be our judgements about

how things seem to us. So these parties disagree about what we ought to be addressing and

explaining when it comes to the mind-body problem (Rey 1983 and Levine 2001 chapter 5).

Unsurprisingly, then, philosophers widely disagree about which arguments and speculations

are good ones. If agreement is a requirement of a successful argument for a substantive

philosophical claim, then it seems that there are no such arguments (van Inwagen 2006

lecture 3. See Kelly and McGrath 2015 for a reply). To put it another way, it seems that

there is no philosophical knowledge (Lycan 2013). Some conclude that philosophy – or at

least analytic philosophy – is an intellectual failure (Kornblith 2012 and Unger 2014).

The growth of intense scholarship in philosophy need not itself be an intellectual

achievement. Humans have a remarkable propensity to spin tall tales and make them even

more elaborate still. Coupled with our facility for sustained self-deception, the result can be

a form of corporate fan-fiction of byzantine proportions in which the writers immerse

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themselves (Stove 1991 chapter 7). It might even be that human beings are constitutionally

incapable of doing good philosophy, where ‘doing good philosophy’ means solving

philosophical problems. Try as they might, human brains are not up to the task (Chomsky

1988 chapter 5).

Perhaps this despair is an over-reaction. What seems true is that philosophy’s

progress in the last two and a half millennia has been fitful and uncertain. But where the

mistakes of the past are signposted, future efforts seek to avoid them. Better still,

philosophy has witnessed increased sophistication and clarity in its formulation of claims, its

introduction of notions, and the distinctions that it draws – though backsliding is a constant

threat (Williamson 2007a afterword). Through its creativity in devising new notions and its

rigour in honing them, changes in philosophy need not be passing fads. Consequently, a

philosophical theory (such as utilitarianism or descriptivism about the semantics of proper

names) might have faced a series of objections in the past but it is now presented in a more

sophisticated form which overcomes those objections. This is also testified by the number of

notable spin offs that philosophy has seen in psychology, linguistics and mathematical logic.

Philosophy developed each of these subjects until they became viable as independent lines

of inquiry. It also continues to inform them. (See also Chalmers forthcoming).

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We now turn to a historical survey of some notable elements of philosophical methodology

from the twentieth century to the present. (Book length treatments of philosophical

methods written after 1945 include Passmore 1961, Rorty 1967, Fetzer 1984, DePaul and

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Ramsey 1998, Williamson 2007a, Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009, Gutting 2009, Daly 2010,

Dennett 2013, and Haug 2014).

Broadly speaking, each of these elements is associated with a certain conception of

the philosophical problems to be faced and what kind of solution is to be expected. It would

be a mistake to think that each new element of methodology replaces its predecessors.

Some philosophers have indeed thought in this way. Pioneers of ‘brave new world

philosophies’ offer:

an account of why things have taken so long to get going properly (the proper

method was lacking) and they present philosophy with a new justification for its

existence, should there be those that doubt its credentials on its track record (up

until now things were not so good, but from now on, trust us, things are going to get

better) (Simons 2000 p.72. Simons’s valuable article discusses a number of other

models of philosophical diachrony).

A consequence of the lack of consensus in philosophy has been a continuing proliferation of

methods rather than a diminution, and this handbook reflects this growth. New methods

take their place in the philosophical enterprise alongside the old ones. ‘New world

philosophers’, such as Descartes, Hume and the members of the Vienna Circle, repudiate

many of the old methods and conceptions of philosophy and champion fresh viewpoints. No

one, however, makes a genuinely clean sweep. In each case, some of the old methods are

retained along with the new. Some philosophers champion approaches that others have

discounted, such as ordinary language philosophy (Hanfling 2000 and Baz 2012) or the

philosophy of Wittgenstein (Hacker 1996 and Horwich 2013).

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Let us now turn to our survey of notable elements of philosophical methodology.

Logic and formal methods

At the turn of the twentieth century, Frege, Russell and Whitehead spearheaded a

revolution in philosophy by devising a logic of tremendous power and resourcefulness which

far outstripped preceding systems of logic (Frege 1879, Russell 1903, and Whitehead and

Russell 1910, 1912, 1913). These developments enabled them to provide analyses of a

wealth of types of sentences, including identity sentences, existential sentences, universal

sentences, conditional sentences, and sentences about numbers and classes in terms of an

extensional language with clear inference rules (Frege 1884 and Russell 1905, 1919). By

undertaking this work they founded analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on clarity, rigour,

and argument, and they also inaugurated a programme by which we are to clarify our

thoughts by means of the analysis of the logical form of sentences expressing those

thoughts. This programme was subsequently taken up by others and extended to other

types of sentence, including sentences describing physical objects, laws of nature,

explanatory and confirmation relations, and probabilities (Carnap 1928, Hempel 1945,

Carnap 1950, and Suppes 1968). What is more, the use of technical notions and techniques,

particularly from mathematics and mathematical logic, became a continuing influence on

philosophy. To mention just four examples, there was the use of set theory in formal

semantics (Tarski 1933, Montague 1973), the use of game theory in ethics (Gauthier 1967,

Skyrms 1996), the use of Bayes’ theorem in the study of reasoning (Howson and Urbach

1989), and the use of computer science in the study of belief revision and rational co-

operation (Grim, Mar, and St Denis 1998).

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If part of Russell’s role in the revolution in philosophy at the turn of the twentieth-

century was to promote path-breaking developments in logic, another part was to remove

(what he regarded as) the dead hand of Absolute Idealism (Russell 1911, 1914). This was the

view that reality is monistic – exactly one concrete object token exists, the Absolute – and is

fundamentally mental. Russell was joined in this liberation struggle by G.E. Moore, who

made a distinctive contribution of his own to it.

Common sense

Moore reacted against Absolute Idealism because many of its claims struck him as

inconsistent with what common sense plainly says. McTaggart, for instance, argued that

time does not exist (McTaggart 1908), but for Moore this contradicted the plain fact that he

had had breakfast that day before he had had his lunch. Weighing up McTaggart’s argument

against what common sense says, Moore declared that he was far more certain that his

common sense conviction was correct than that McTaggart’s argument was sound, even if

he was unable to diagnose where the error in that argument lay (Moore 1925). The

situation, as Moore saw it, was that many philosophical theories are abstruse. How are they

then to be evaluated? Moore offers an evidence base and a method of elimination. The

evidence base consists of common sense claims, of which he gives a raft of examples. The

method of elimination is to draw out the logical consequences of metaphysical theories and

to reject as false all those theories whose consequences are inconsistent with our stock of

common sense claims. Homely truths cut aberrant metaphysics down to size. Others have

since expressed similar sentiments. Roderick Chisholm offered a more concessive variant of

Moore’s strategy, whereby the tactic of forthright elimination is replaced by one of shifting

the burden of proof:

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Such facts as these [i.e. ‘the propositions we all do presuppose in our ordinary

activity’], then, are what we have a right to take as data in our philosophy. They are a

part of our pre-analytic or pre-philosophical data. Any philosophical theory which is

inconsistent with any of these data is prima facie suspect. The burden of proof will

be upon the man who accepts any such theory and not upon you and me. To show

that he is justified in accepting his theory he must show that it is based upon data

which are at least as respectable epistemically as the list of things that I have set

forth (Chisholm 1976 p.18).

A case needs to be made as to why Moore’s strategy is a rational procedure. After

all, science has overturned common sense (e.g. common sense beliefs about the

absoluteness of simultaneity). Now, if science can overturn common sense, then so too can

philosophy. For science makes philosophical presuppositions, and so we have to be at least

as confident of those presuppositions are we are of the scientific claims which presuppose

them. Accordingly, philosophy can overturn common sense (Rinard 2013). Furthermore,

even if a metaphysical theory inconsistent with common sense beliefs is thereby prima facie

false, subsequent reflection may lead one to endorse the metaphysical theory. To take a

case outside of philosophy, it seems obvious that there are more positive integers than even

positive integers and that any theory which denies this is prima facie false. Yet when we

think through Cantor’s theory it becomes reasonable to reject our initial judgment (Conee

2001). More generally, the credences we assign to claims at the start of a dispute need not

be the same as the ones we assign at the end.

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The linguistic turn

The work of Russell and Wittgenstein in the opening decades of the twentieth century

inspired a certain broad movement in philosophy: the linguistic turn. What was

characteristic of this movement was the view that the proper formulation and treatment of

philosophical questions requires a prior analysis of the logical structure of language. Such an

analysis would provide answers to those questions, often revealing the questions to have

arisen out of linguistic confusions. Accordingly, the study of the nature of linguistic meaning,

and of the meanings of philosophically significant classes of sentences, was taken to be

foundational in philosophy. The linguistic turn incorporated a number of notable sub-

movements including conceptual analysis, verificationism and ordinary language philosophy.

Conceptual analysis

Moore’s second major contribution to philosophical method was to offer a particular

conception of philosophical analysis (Moore 1903 chapter 1). Frege and Russell had devised

accounts of philosophical analysis, but Moore’s account became especially influential

because of its key role in his most significant book, Principia Ethica (Moore 1903). In asking

for an analysis of a given concept, Moore wanted to know what we ‘had in mind’ when we

contemplate that concept. He took an analysis to be a decomposition of a given concept

into the fundamental concepts which made it up. To test a given analysis Moore relied on

his ‘open question’ method. Suppose that you think that the concept of moral goodness, for

instance, can be analysed in terms of what maxmises happiness. But now, Moore notes, it

would make sense to ask ‘Is what is good what maximises happiness?’ That is an intelligible

question – the answer to the question would be ‘open’ – and if someone asked it, there

could be a point to them asking it. Yet if the proposed analysis were correct, Moore further

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claims, there would be no point in asking the question. It would like asking a ‘closed

question’ such as ‘Is what is good what is good?’ Moore concludes that the analysis is

incorrect: what we have in mind when we contemplate the concept of goodness is not the

concept of what maximises happiness. Indeed, Moore thought that this pattern of argument

shows that the property of goodness has no analysis but is simple and indefinable (Moore

1903 §13).

Moore makes a number of notable and debatable assumptions: that his judgements

about what concepts are ‘before his mind’ are reliable; that his pattern of argument could

be extended to undermine all other candidate analyses of the concept of goodness; and that

the concept of goodness (i.e. the meaning of the word ‘goodness’) is to be identified with

the property of goodness (i.e. the property which various actions have) (Rieber 1992,

Soames 2003a p.62, and Durrant 1970). Moreover, Moore’s pattern of argument threatened

to show that every conceptual analysis is either incorrect – because it is an open question

whether it is correct – or uninteresting – because asking whether it is correct is asking a

closed question. This is the paradox of analysis (Langford 1942 p.323).

Quine made even more severe criticisms. An analysis of a concept is supposed to

yield a claim which is knowable a priori and is true in virtue of the concepts concerned (i.e. is

an analytic truth). Quine argued that there is no clear and non-circular definition of the class

of analytic truths and he thereby repudiated the notion. He further argued that if a claim’s

being justified a priori implies that no empirical evidence can count against it, then the

history of science indicates that there is no such thing as a priori justification (Quine 1951).

Subsequent defenders of conceptual analysis have sought either to counter Quine’s

criticisms (Grice and Strawson 1956) or to accommodate them (Jackson 1998 chapter 1,

Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009).

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Verificationism

Meeting from 1924 to 1936 the loose grouping of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle

had a two-fold agenda. Its first task was ground-clearing: it was to distinguish linguistic

meaning from nonsense. In particular, it sought to distinguish the sentences of science –

which were taken to have meaning – from the sentences of metaphysics – which were taken

to lack it. This distinction was taken to coincide with the distinction between sentences

which can be verified by observation and those which cannot. Having demarcated the class

of meaningful sentences, the second task was to analyse them and identify their logical

forms (Carnap 1932, Ayer 1936).

Verificationism failed at the first task. The Vienna Circle was incapable of formulating

a principle which took all and only the sentences of science to be verifiable (Hempel 1950).

Too strong a formulation (such as one which required conclusive verification) excluded

many scientific sentences, and a weaker formulation (such as one which allowed indirect

verification in principle) accommodated scientific sentences about unobservables but failed

to bar many metaphysical sentences. Furthermore, the assumption that each meaningful

sentence has its own characteristic verification conditions was open to the objection that

only bodies of sentences can be verified (Quine 1951).

Ordinary language philosophy

In the immediate post-war period Oxford saw the rise of so-called ordinary language

philosophy. Like the Vienna Circle, there was a preoccupation with the distinction between

linguistic sense and nonsense. But guidance as to where this distinction lay was not given by

a single principle but by considerations about what speakers of natural language (typically,

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the English language) would ordinarily say in a given context (Ryle 1949, 1954). Like Moore’s

appeal to common sense, philosophical theories were to be assessed by homely non-

technical means. In this case it was whether these theories’ use of terms such as ‘knows’,

‘evidence’, or ‘reasonable’ conformed to the typical use of those terms by non-philosophers

(Austin 1946, Edwards 1949, and Strawson 1952 chapter 9).

Ordinary language philosophy (like verificationism) was partly a reaction against the

obscurity of much preceding philosophy. It was also a repudiation of the use of technical

devices and artificial languages in philosophy (Strawson 1950, 1963). Yet its unsystematic

and haphazard character, encouraged by dictates in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical

Investigations (such as Wittgenstein 1953 #109), militated against fruitful theorising of

precisely the kind which Carnap, Montague and other formal semanticists achieved. Ryle

(1949 chapter 1) made portentous claims about how Cartesian dualism committed a

‘category mistake’ in taking minds to exist in the same sense as bodies. But the background

theory of categories, and the allusion to Russell’s theory of types (Russell 1903 appendix B),

remained undeveloped. No criteria were offered as to when sentences committed category

mistakes as opposed to making surprising but insightful claims. The procedure was entirely

reliant on what sounds odd or jarring to the ear of an English gentleman. Such oddity was

taken to indicate that the target sentences were untrue. But alternative diagnoses are

available. In particular, ordinary language philosophers overlooked the interaction of

semantic and pragmatic factors in communication. What we communicate when we speak

often goes beyond what our sentences strictly mean. By uttering one particular form of

words in a given context, we may do more than assert the truth-conditional content of the

sentence formed by those words when spoken in that order. We may also pragmatically

convey certain information that goes beyond the meanings of the sentences we utter either

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because the particular words used in those sentences contribute to the non-truth

conditional aspect of those sentences’ meanings (what Grice called ‘conventional meaning’)

or because we utilise conversational norms (what Grice called ‘conversational implicature’)

(Grice 1975, 1978, 1981 and Soames 2003b part four). Where the ordinary language

philosophers went astray was to conflate pragmatic matters with semantic ones so that

sentences which in fact are true or false were called meaningless because in many contexts

it would be odd or conversationally misleading to utter them.

On the positive side, Austin’s work gave ordinary language philosophy two important

legacies. One was that in addressing philosophical problems we already have a complex

vocabulary which has been refined over generations for talking about their subject matter.

We should start by understanding this scheme, by considering ‘what we would say when’.

We may then want to improve the scheme, but it is our point of departure: ‘Certainly, then,

ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and

improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word’ (Austin 1957 p.11).

Right-minded scientifically thinking philosophers can accept this approach with equanimity

(Feigl and Maxwell 1961 p.496). The other legacy that Austin bequeathed was the idea that

the syntactic form of a sentence need not indicate what kind of speech act is typically made

in utterances of that sentence. For example, according to Austin, an utterance of the

sentence ‘I promise to repay you next week’ is typically used by the speaker to make a

pledge but not to describe what the speaker is doing. Austin’s approach was complemented

by others’ suggestion that ethical sentences are typically used by speakers not as descriptive

reports, but to express the speakers’ attitudes towards the subjects of the sentence (Ayer

1936 chapter VI and Stevenson 1944). This suggestion (namely, expressivism) has been

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developed in increasingly sophisticated forms and pursued across a wide range of sentences

(Blackburn 1984).

Intuitions

Moore’s judgements about what is before his mind when he contemplates a given concept,

and ordinary language philosophers’ avowals about what it would be natural to say in

certain situations, involve appeals to philosophical intuitions. It struck Moore that a certain

question is open and Malcolm thought it odd to say ‘I know I have a hand’ in normal

circumstances (Malcolm 1949). These philosophers take certain phenomenological data –

how things seem to them in entertaining a certain proposition – to be evidence about the

truth-value of that proposition. This appeal to intuitions seems widespread in analytic

philosophy (but see Cappelen 2012). It raises, however, a number of questions.

First, what is an intuition? Rival views variously take it to be a belief which

spontaneously arises when you consider the description of a certain case; an inclination to

have such a belief; or a sui generis state in which it intellectually seems to you that a certain

proposition is true. Second, what is the epistemological status of intuitions? Those who

appeal to intuitions take an intuition that p to provide prima facie evidence that p. But

unless we know more about the origin of intuitions and how they are generated, it is not

clear that intuitions should be taken to have this evidential role. Having a hunch that p or

wishfully thinking that p is not even prima facie evidence that p. Why should intuiting that p

be taken to be more like perceiving that p, something which does provide prima facie

evidence that p? (Pust 2001 and Chudnoff 2013). One response would be to understand

appeals to intuition in more familiar and acceptable terms. For instance, what are called

philosophical intuitions might be taken to be the operations of a general cognitive ability to

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understand and endorse counterfactual conditionals, an ability which is relatively well

understood (Williamson 2007b, though see Jenkins 2008 for a reply).

Furthermore, even it is agreed that an intuition that p provides evidence, it is a

further matter what it provides evidence of. Perhaps it does not provide evidence that p but

instead provides evidence that we believe (or are inclined to believe) that p. This would be

to take reports of our intuition to convey something about our social practices. Or perhaps

someone’s intuition that p provides evidence about what that particular person’s

psychology is like and nothing much beyond that. Moreover, the relation between what

people believe about (say) freedom, or what a given person believes about freedom, and

what the content of the concept freedom is not a straightforward one. So findings about

what a social community is inclined to think, or what a given person is inclined to think, do

not license a direct inference about the content of a concept that they are thinking with.

The import of a given intuition, or even a battery of intuitions, is then questionable. Lastly,

even if it is granted that an intuition that p provides evidential reason to believe that p,

there is a question of how much reason it provides and whether it is defeasible. Should even

powerful intuitions be overturned in the interest of preserving theoretical unity and

simplicity? (Audi 1999 and 2008, Weatherson 2003).

Reflective equilibrium

We have intuitions about particular cases and we have general claims or theories. There are

also conflicts between the two. According to reflective equilibrium, what we need to do is to

reconcile them – to achieve equilibrium – by a process of mutual adjustment. Theories are

adjusted to accommodate intuitions about particular cases, while intuitions themselves are

adjusted to conform to theories (Goodman 1955 pp.61-66 and Rawls 1971 pp.19-20). The

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thinking is that sometimes we consider variations on a particular case and evaluate a theory

or general claim on that basis, adjusting it so as to fit in with the intuitions. At the same time

we might revise our intuitions in so far as they conflict with theories or general claims which

we have reason to accept. In the case of normative ethics, this method would be played out

as follows. We start with our initial moral judgements. We filter these to reach our revised

moral judgements. We then propose a set of moral principles which capture these revised

moral judgements. Where a conflict arises between the two, we are to revise each of them

until the conflict is resolved.

But how is the use even of all of our initial moral judgements and theories as a

starting point for inquiry supposed to generate results which are not merely the result of

having an arbitrary starting point? If we had had a different starting point, perhaps we

would have begun our inquiry with a different total set of initial moral judgements and

theories and have resulted in a different total set again. To address this concern, Rawls

subsequently distinguished between narrow and wide reflective equilibrium:

We are interested in what conceptions people would affirm when they have

achieved wide and not just narrow reflective equilibrium, an equilibrium that

satisfies certain conditions of rationality. That is, adopting the role of observing

moral theorists, we investigate what principles people would acknowledge and

accept the consequences of when they have had an opportunity to consider other

plausible conceptions and to assess their supporting grounds. Taking this process to

the limit, one seeks the conception, or plurality of conceptions, that would survive

the rational consideration of all feasible conceptions and all reasonable arguments

for them (Rawls 1974 p.8).

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But this response to the charge of arbitrariness faces a charge of its own. It threatens to

make the method of reflective equilibrium vacuous:

But once the method has been broadened in the way just described, so that it

includes ‘the rational consideration of all feasible conceptions and all reasonable

arguments for them’ it seems to become empty as a methodological doctrine. It

becomes simply the truism that we should decide what views about justice to adopt

by considering the philosophical arguments for all possible views and assessing them

on their merits (Scanlon 2002 p.151).

A similar charge can be made to Norman Daniel’s influential interpretation of wide reflective

equilibrium (Daniels 1979). His interpretation draws all of philosophy into the process of

seeking equilibrium. Moreover, as things stand, guidance is not provided as to whether, in a

given case, we should revise our intuitions or whether we should revise our theories. If the

revision is not to be arbitrary, it needs to be reasonable or plausible. But whether a revision

is reasonable or plausible is not simply a matter of what intuitions or theories we happen to

have; it depends on external norms about belief revision. The official story about reflective

equilibrium stands in need of supplementation.

Epistemic conservatism

One such norm is offered by epistemic conservatism. This says that the fact that you hold a

certain set of beliefs provides epistemic (and not merely practical) reason to think that at

least part of that set of beliefs is true. Early proponents of this approach were Quine and

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Harman (Quine 1960 pp.20-21 and Harman 1973 p.159). Part of their motivation for this

approach was to find epistemic considerations which could replace appeals to self-evidence,

common sense or ordinary language practice. While they might endorse many of the claims

that these sources made, Quine and Harman drew upon considerations of epistemic

conservatism for their reasons for making these claims. Quine looked to scientific practice in

framing his epistemology and he found that science operates with a ‘maxim of minimal

mutilation’ in belief revision (Quine 1970 p.7), whereas Harman looked to considerations of

cognitive efficiency and ‘clutter avoidance’ (Harman 1986 chapter 4).

An allied consideration to epistemic conservatism is found in Donald Davidson’s

work on radical interpretation in the philosophy of language. Consider our beliefs about a

certain subject matter, say, plants. For these beliefs to be about plants (rather than rabbits

or planets or anything else) most of those beliefs have to correctly characterise plants. But

that is to say that most of those beliefs have to be true (Davidson 1975).

Despite Quine’s reorientation of epistemology away from appeals to the authority of

common sense and the deliverances of ordinary language, epistemic conservatism might

provide a rationale for these older methods and thereby achieve a useful partial unification

of philosophical methods. For instance, conservatism would say that it was more reasonable

for Moore to believe the proposition that he had breakfast before he had lunch that day

than to believe the proposition that time does not exist just because he believed the former

proposition but not the latter one. Accordingly, it was more reasonable for Moore to retain

his common sense belief and to reject McTaggart’s view (Kvanvig 1989). A logically weaker

claim for the conservative to make would be that we should not abandon our beliefs unless

we have special reason to do so. But McTaggart, of course, thought that he had given such a

reason: the argument which Moore could not fault beyond rejecting its conclusion.

20

Epistemic conservatism faces challenges of its own. First, it seems epistemically

partial. Suppose you and I disagree. Epistemic conservatism says that you have reason to

retain your view rather than adopt my view simply because it is your view, and likewise for

me. It seems a mistake to privilege one’s own beliefs over other people’s just because the

beliefs are one’s own (Christensen 2000). Second, epistemic conservatism allows that a

belief can ‘switch’ in a questionable way from its not being rational to its being rational.

Suppose that you form a belief through some process which doesn’t make the belief

rational. Suppose, for instance, that you form a belief about tomorrow’s weather on the

basis of whether a flipped coin lands heads. Having formed the belief, should you retain it?

Conservatism says ‘Yes’ because the fact that you have that belief provides epistemic reason

that your belief is true. So the mere fact that you now have the belief makes it rational for

you to have that belief, although when you formed the belief it was not rational for you to

have it (Foley 1983). Third, epistemic conservatism credits beliefs with illegitimate ‘extra

boosts’ in epistemic reason. Suppose you form a belief in a rational way. Conservatism

credits your belief with additional epistemic support just because you have formed that

belief. That seems implausible (Foley 1983, Huemer 1999). (For replies, see McGrath 2007

and McCain 2008).

Beyond the linguistic turn

With the demise of verificationism by the 1950s, metaphysics enjoyed a resurgence. There

was a growing realisation in the philosophical community that few, if any, philosophical

problems were the result of a misunderstanding of the workings of natural languages and

that those problems could not be dissolved by the careful analysis of how we ordinarily use

21

words. Furthermore, Quine offered a fresh blueprint about how metaphysical inquiry should

be conducted.

Confirmational holism

Quine’s rejection of both the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and the

notion of a priori knowledge had a number of consequences. In place of looking for

philosophical first principles – self-evident or indubitable claims on which to establish the

whole structure of inquiry – Quine offered the metaphor of ‘a web of belief’. All of our

beliefs occupy this web. Beliefs closer to the periphery of the web than to its centre are

more likely to be revised in the light of experience, but no belief is in principle immune from

revision (Quine 1951 §6). Quine’s approach here recapitulated two methods which we have

already seen: reflective equilibrium and epistemic conservatism.

Science and naturalism

A further consequence Quine drew was to take philosophy to be continuous with science

and not to differ in kind from it (Quine 1969b p.126). Quine exploited this result to

champion naturalism. His naturalism had two aspects. One aspect was that scientific

methods should be adopted by philosophy. The other was to take scientific findings and

theorising to be data informing philosophical inquiry (Quine 1969a). As illustrations of each

of these aspects, Quine applied to philosophy principles of simplicity and conservativeness

which he drew from science, and he also used evolutionary theory in tackling philosophical

problems facing confirmation theory, such as Goodman’s grue riddle (Quine 1969a p.126).

Others followed suit by highlighting the role of explanatory considerations in science and

importing them into philosophy (Harman 1965).

22

Quine’s ideas about naturalism inaugurated a highly influential research programme

in philosophy. It is important to bear in mind, though, that this is a very broad programme

and some of its practitioners have not shared all of Quine’s views. For instance, what is

known as ‘the Wisconsin school’ (principally Fred Dretske, Dennis Stampe, Berent Enç, and

Elliott Sober) denied that the proper methods of philosophy should mimic those of science

and did not follow Quine in rejecting appeals to a priori justification. Instead this school

maintained that, in a philosophical analysis, the terms of the analysans are either employed

in the natural science, or they describe phenomena which science provides an account of, or

their applicability is presupposed by scientific theory (Dretske 1981, Stampe 1977, Enç 2005

and Sober 1988). This variety of naturalism is relatively modest and conservative, especially

as compared with Quine’s more zealous strain. Lastly, philosophy being what it is, some

philosophers remain dubious about what Quinean naturalism amounts to and what it can

achieve.

Regimentation and quantification

The new blueprint which Quine offered for conducting metaphysical inquiry was as follows.

We select our best scientific theories. We regiment them in first-order logic. (Regimentation

is a form of paraphrase into a logical notation. The paraphrasing does not require

synonymy. For details, see Quine 1960 chapter 5). We then establish what the resulting

theories have to quantify over in order to be true. What these theories quantify over is what

these theories say exist. Given that we believe these theories, these results tell us what we

should believe exists: what we are ontologically committed to. For instance, consider the

metaphysical question of whether there are abstract objects (objects which are not located

in space and time). Quine applied his method in the following way. He contended that,

23

when regimented, our best scientific theories quantify over sets. Sets are a species of

abstract object. Therefore, abstract objects exist.

Quine’s method has been challenged at a number of points. Here are three. First, the

privileging of first-order logic is open to question. Quine prized it because it (unlike second-

order logic) is complete and carries no ontological commitments. But first-order logic has

weaknesses of its own which only second-order logic can remedy. The downside of

completeness and other characteristic properties of first-order logic is its expressive poverty

(Shapiro 1991). Second, suppose that we agreed about which theories are our best scientific

theories. Even so, there might be various ontologies, each of which is equally capable of

conferring truth on these theories. Quine would be without any means of selecting between

these ontologies because, ex hypothesi, we could not settle between them on the basis of

our best scientific theories. Third, should we believe even our best scientific theories?

Perhaps although T is the best theory we have come up with, we should come up with a

better theory T*, and so should not believe T. We could even be in a position to know that

there is such a better theory but be unable to specify it. For instance, perhaps our best

theory says that the average star has 2.5 planets. Whatever our best theory may say, we

know better: we know that there is no such thing as the average planet. But since there are

billions of stars and planets, we cannot know which sentence paraphrases talk of the

average planet (‘There are twenty-four billion planets and ten billion stars’, as it might be).

So we cannot know what the correct theory is even though we know that there is such a

theory (Melia 1995 pp.226-227).

The modal turn

24

Quine castigated de re modality as enmeshed in use-mention confusion and as committed

to Aristotelian essentialism (Quine 1953). But during the 1960’s and 1970’s his critics found

responses which dispersed the alleged confusion and they found versions of Aristotelian

essentialism which were congenial (Marcus 1967, Lewis 1968, Hintikka 1970, Kripke 1972).

These responses helped lead to a resurgence of interest in quantified modal logic and its use

in the analysis of a wealth of crucial philosophical notions (including belief, causation,

counterfactual conditional, property, proposition, and identity over time) (notably in Lewis

1973, 1986). The ingenious use of modal notions also enabled Kripke and Putnam to

revolutionise thinking about the semantics of proper names and natural kind terms (Kripke

1972, Putnam 1975). Moreover, in a striking break with established thinking, Kripke argued

that none of the notions of analyticity, necessity and the a priori are coextensive. The work

done by these and other philosophers greatly increased the expressive power available to

philosophical theories and it further showed how the solution of many philosophical

problems could not consist solely in the analysis of language.

Thought experiments

The use of thought experiments has been a feature of philosophy since antiquity, but from

the 1970s and 1980s thought experiments were given an extensive and crucial role in major

arguments in philosophy of language (Kripke 1972, Putnam 1975), philosophy of mind

(Jackson 1982), personal identity (Parfit 1983), and ethics (Thomson 1971). In a thought

experiment, imagining that certain propositions are true licenses modal conclusions:

conclusions about what is possible, impossible, or necessary. This is a device of considerable

power: a small investment of imagination promises to yield rich returns in knowledge of

how the world can or cannot be.

25

Nevertheless, there is no consensus about what a thought experiment is and how it

operates. First, in what sense (if any) is a thought experiment an experiment? It would be

extremely valuable if our understanding of experiments performed in the field or in the

laboratory by scientists could be used to shed light on the thought experiments of

philosophers, and vice versa (Sorensen 1992). But it needs to be shown that it is not a case

of polysemy to describe both kinds of activity as ‘experiments’. Part of the work that needs

to be done is to show how the notion of a thought experiment is constrained, so that not

any appeal to (say) introspection or to counterfactuals counts as a thought experiment.

Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, it is deeply puzzling how an apparently a priori

technique can produce knowledge that is at once synthetic, contingent, and near certain.

How is it that simply thinking about a particular and unperformed experiment should ever

yield general results which we are justified in believing? This is all the more puzzling since

many prized philosophical thought experiments concern imaginary situations which are

technologically, physically or even metaphysically impossible. Some critics reject thought

experiments which contravene one or other of these possibilities (Johnston 1987, Wilkes

1988). Otherwise we seem to have to credit any fairy story, however incredible, with

providing knowledge about the world. Yet some successful scientific thought experiments

seem to contravene these possibilities. James Clerk Maxwell imagined a demon operating a

trap door who allowed only swift molecules to move through it in one direction and only

slow molecules to move through it in the opposite direction. Maxwell concluded that it is

possible for the second law of thermodynamics to be violated. Yet the demon’s actions

could not be duplicated by any tiny physical gadget. Such a gadget would have to be built

from a very small number of atoms and that would rule out the ability to carry out the

complicated tasks assigned to it. But then on what basis should we distinguish between

26

good thought experiments and bad ones? If thought experiments are imaginative

speculations, how are we to assess and grade them? (Williamson 2007a chapter 6, Gendler

2010, and Frappier, Meynell and Brown 2012).

Experimental philosophy

Many philosophers appeal to people’s intuitions to support their analyses or the results of

their thought experiments. But do people in fact largely have such supporting intuitions?

There seems to be only one way to find out: we should ask them! This is the rationale of the

recent movement known as experimental philosophy (or x-phi). Advocates of this

movement do not conduct experiments about such phenomena as knowledge or reference.

Instead, they conduct experiments about what people say about knowledge or about

reference; they conduct polls on non-philosophers and extract lessons from their findings

(Knobe and Nichols 2008, Alexander 2012. This approach was anticipated by Naess 1960).

Part of the interest of this approach is that the results uncovered apparently differ markedly

from what comfortable orthodoxy has hitherto supposed. For instance, orthodoxy has it

that a Gettier case prompts the intuition that someone can have a justified true belief that p

without knowing that p. Experimental philosophers reported, however, that the East Asians

subjects they polled had the intuition that the person in question did know that p

(Weinberg, Nichols and Stich 2001). This suggested that there is significant cultural variation

among people’s intuitions. (Nagel, Juan and Mar 2013 report, however, that they were

unable to replicate the results).

One might expect that even philosophers would accept the hard data of empirical

findings. But it is not clear that these surveys and their findings have the status of hard dara.

The results of surveys (even properly formulated and well conducted ones) do not establish

27

what people’s intuitions are. We cannot read off what people’s intuitions are simply from

examining survey findings. Moreover, although experimental philosophers take many of

these findings to indicate that people’s intuitions about topics of philosophical interest

fluctuate, they might, at least in some cases, be better understood in terms of subjects’

reactions to subtle pragmatic cues found in the surveys (Petrinovich and O'Neill 1996 and

Cullen 2010. See also Horvath and Grundmann 2012 and Machery and N’Neill 2014).

Truthmaking

Very often philosophers try to make their claims about what is true fit their claims about

what exists. They argue about whether a true description of what there is provides a place

for truths about the past, the future, mathematics, modality, morality, and much else. Some

philosophers defend a certain thesis about the relationship between truth and reality. On

one formulation of the thesis, for every truth, there exists something which makes it true.

This is the truthmaker principle (Fox 1987). As a first pass, it is suggested that an entity e

makes a proposition p true if and only if it is necessarily the case that if e exists, p is true. So,

for instance, Jo’s being sleepy makes true the proposition that someone is sleepy because,

necessarily, if Jo is sleepy, the proposition that someone is sleepy is true. On another

formulation of the thesis, truth supervenes on what exists and on what the entities that

exist are like. Worlds which match with respect to what exists at them (the Nile, Saturn, the

Taj Mahal, . . .) and with what the entities that exist are like (the Nile is winding, Saturn is

massive, the Taj Mahal is beautiful . . .) match with respect to which propositions at those

worlds are true (Bigelow 1988 p.132. See also Lewis 2001). With this apparatus in place,

truthmaker theorists think that they have a powerful methodological device at their

disposal. It is the method of ‘catching the cheaters’: they seek to expose and reject any view

28

which takes certain propositions to be true but without saying how reality could be such as

to make those propositions true (Sider 2005 p.37). Behaviourism, phenomenalism and

presentism are arraigned as leading examples of such cheaters. Each of these views requires

a host of counterfactual conditionals to be true (about behaviour, experiences, and the past

or future, respectively) but they are allegedly incapable of saying what makes those

counterfactuals true.

Does truth depend on reality in any interesting and general way, as the truthmaker

theory claims in both formulations? The theory is contentious (Merricks 2007). The entities

it requires as truthmakers are unusual entities, namely facts (or states of affairs) which have

their constituents essentially (such as the fact that Jo is sleepy). Views criticised as ‘cheaters’

might attribute suitable properties to things to block the criticism. For instance, presentists

might attribute to everything that exists (i.e. to everything in the present) the property that

the Korean War began in 1950, that Kennedy was assassinated, and so on. Proponents of

truthmaking might decry such properties as ‘suspicious’ but it is controversial just what

makes a property suspicious and consequently just which properties are suspicious. The

truthmaking thesis is also open to apparent counterexamples. There are negative existential

truths, such as ‘There are no arctic penguins’, which seem to have no truthmakers. It would

then seem ad hoc to claim that some truths lack truthmakers but to require that all other

truths do.

These criticisms are themselves contestable (Beebee and Dodd 2005, Keller 2009,

Bennett 2011, and McDaniel 2011). Furthermore, recently the truthmaker theory has been

subsumed by accounts of the grounding relation: a relation of non-causal ontological

dependence. The dependence of truth on reality is taken to be just one instance of a

29

widespread phenomenon: of how some things depend on, or exist in virtue of, other things

(Schaffer 2008, Correia and Schnieder 2012).

3

Having completed our survey of philosophical methods from the beginning of the twentieth

century, let’s now consider how the influence of various methods has reflected views about

what is central to philosophy. Many of the methods which have been employed by

philosophers achieved prominence by being the methods favoured by a certain area of

philosophy when that area was taken to be foundational in philosophy. Descartes

inaugurated a long tradition that took epistemology to be foundational in philosophy. This

tradition took it that claims about the nature and scope of epistemology need to be

established before claims in other areas of philosophy can be established. The work of Frege

was taken by many to displace this tradition by taking the theory of informational content to

be foundational. Since informational content was itself taken to consist ultimately in

linguistic content, and since the study of linguistic content was the concern of philosophy of

language, philosophy of language became regarded as foundational (Dummett 1973 chapter

19). Partly as a consequence of Grice and others’ efforts to analyse linguistic content in

terms of mental content (Grice 1957, 1968), and partly as a consequence of the

development during the 1970’s and 1980’s of sophisticated theories of mental content

(Fodor 1975, Stampe 1977), philosophy of mind subsequently became regarded as

foundational. As Dretske quipped, ‘In the beginning there was information. The word came

later’ (Dretske 1981 p.vii). Proponents of the so-called ontological turn (Heil 2003 and Dyke

2007) seem to claim at least that metaphysics is more foundational than philosophy of

30

language, on pain of letting the linguistic tail wag the ontological dog (as Heil 2004 p.189

puts it).

But against all these approaches, we should reject the assumption that any branch of

philosophy is foundational: that the results of one branch have to be established before

those of any other branch can be achieved. After all, the different branches of science and of

mathematics do not proceed in this way. It is enough that each branch pursues its own

inquiries, is informed by the other branches’ findings where relevant, and reaches

equilibrium with them either by revising its own claims or those belonging to the other

branches. Consequently, we need not prioritize the methods associated with any one

branch of philosophy. But, by the same measure, we should not ignore the deliverances of

any of these methods, provided that we accept the reliability of these methods in the first

place.

Here is a case in point. Some accounts of fictional discourse posit unusual entities,

namely fictional characters. These are not flesh and blood things that you can run into, and

yet they are supposedly somehow brought into being by authors. What should we make of

such entities? It has been suggested in some quarters that, from the perspective of giving a

semantic theory for fictional discourse, such entities should be absolved of suspicion:

All of these presumed entities may well be undesirable to those pursuing a radical

nominalist agenda, and may eventually be ‘analyzed away’ within a suitably austere

ontological picture. But it is doubtful that such an improbable program of ontological

economy should be of immediate concern to those interested in developing an

intuitively adequate picture of the systematic behavior of ordinary English

expressions . . . (Predelli 2002 p.278).

31

What is of immediate concern is one thing, though, and what is of wider concern is another.

Our theoretical interests are not confined to providing a semantics for English expressions,

and whatever we offer by way of such a semantics needs to be integrated with our other

beliefs about language and the world, including our views about what there is and what we

can know about it. If our semantic theory posits fictional characters, it is incumbent on our

metaphysics to tell us what kind of things they are and how they are related to other kinds

of thing which we already posit, and it is incumbent on our epistemology to tell us how we

can get to know about such things with the means available to us. Failure to carry through

these ancillary projects would be a ‘crime against the intellect’, as W.D. Hart memorably put

it when writing in a related context (Hart 1977 p.125). And if the results of these projects

are found unsatisfactory, we have reason to think again at what semantics was asking us to

posit. More generally, every theory is tested by the data it is supposed to accommodate, but

pooling all the relevant data with the other theories we accept gives that theory a further

and more testing reckoning.

4

Western philosophy comprises two major traditions: the analytic and the continental.

For the purposes of thematic unity, this handbook is exclusively concerned with work in the

analytic tradition, broadly understood. The continental tradition has some important

methods and theoretical and practical goals of its own. The tradition began with German

Idealism, developing out of the work of Kant, and has gone on to include Marxism,

phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, the Frankfurt school of critical theory, French

32

feminism, structuralism, poststructuralism, the French ‘philosophy of difference’, and

philosophies drawing upon Freud or Lacan’s work in psychoanalysis. (Book length

examinations of philosophical methods in this tradition include Silverman and Welton 1988,

Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, and Roy 1999, Reynolds, Chase, Williams, and Mares 2010, Smith

and Sullivan 2011, and Chase and Reynolds 2011).

What follows are twenty-six papers which each address a particular aspect of

philosophical method in the analytic tradition. Some of these papers approach the same

issue but do so from different perspectives. The papers are organised into five parts.

Part 1, Philosophical Inquiry: Problems and Prospects, begins by considering the

status and viability of philosophical analysis (chapters 1 and 2), and goes on to examine the

nature of ontological debates about the existence of specific things (chapter 3). The

apparent intractability of such debates raises questions about philosophical disagreement.

Why is it so intractable and prolonged? What lessons should we draw from this (chapters 4

and 5)? Should we conclude that certain philosophical disputes, such as the dispute about

whether there are composite objects, are beyond our powers of solution (chapter 6)?

Part 2, Philosophical Explanation and Methodology in Metaphysics, begins by

examining the role of explanation in philosophy. A diverse range of modal notions are used

in explanatory reasoning in metaphysics and ordinary life, but is there an underlying unity to

them (chapter 7)? Are different notions of explanation at work in metaphysics? If so, what

might they be? (chapter 8)? It is near philosophical orthodoxy that philosophy should be

understood as a necessary, a priori, and truth-directed discipline. But are all of these

assumptions defensible? Perhaps a better understanding might dispense with some or all of

them (chapter 9). It is also philosophical orthodoxy to seek to minimize the number of

notions to be primitive whilst acknowledging that any notions can be taken as primitive. But

33

this laissez faire attitude should be put under scrutiny. Positing primitives can violate the

methodological norms that guide metaphysics (chapter 10) and pursuing parsimony may

have no merit in metaphysics (chapter 11). Some tough-minded philosophers seek to posit

only entities which can causally affect other entities. But when we try to formulate this

doctrine more precisely we encounter pitfalls and we might find that the best formulation

turns out to support a surprising overall view (chapter 12). Given these shortcomings, we

might strike out in a different direction and take inspiration from pragmatist approaches.

Such approaches are often thought to engender subjectivism and thereby to undermine

realism, but such concerns may rest upon various misapprehensions (chapter 13).

Part 3, Intuition, Psychology and Experimental Philosophy, explores each of these

factors and how they are related to allied notions. There is a debate about the proper role

of intuitions and concepts in philosophy. But the rival parties to the debate fail to distinguish

between importantly different kinds of intuitions. And instead of analysing the concepts we

happen to have, we might be better advised to develop concepts which are best suited to

our theorising about our environment, whilst acknowledging certain difficulties which arise

when seeking to implement this programme across the board (chapter 14). Thought

experiments play a major role in philosophical argument, although their nature remains

elusive. In particular, there is a large gap between the explicit case description of a thought

experiment and our total supposition of the relevant scenario. How is this to be bridged

(chapter 15)? Many thought experiments are notably framed in terms of the first-person

perspective of a rational inquirer. This is not an accidental feature because we need to use a

distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing

self-interpretation – in thinking about what a given type of entity is (chapter 16). Finally,

thought experiments are examples of armchair methodology and for that reason fall under

34

the suspicion of naturalistically-minded philosophers. Nevertheless, it seems that in order to

find out about essence, possibility and necessity, we have to use thought experiments. What

does this tell us about the differences between philosophical and scientific inquiry (chapter

17)?

Part 4, Method, Mind and Epistemology, begins by addressing the problem of how

facts about mental content fit into the physical world and seeks to answer in terms of the

notion of grounding (chapter 18). The reasons that are thought to support dualism are well-

known but debatable. But what those reasons might in fact support are that there can be a

theory of mind-independent objects and a theory of mind-dependent objects, although

there are also reasons why those theories cannot be integrated into a consistent whole

(chapter 19). What is the relationship between the linguistic properties of knowledge-how

ascriptions and the nature of knowledge-how? And how convincing is the linguistic

methodology used by defenders of the view that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-

that (chapter 20)? Philosophers of science appeal to detailed case studies in arguing for

general claims. Yet if case studies are intended to be inductive evidence for generalizations,

they are very poor evidence since they are isolated and particular. How, then, can case

study methodology be defended (chapter 21)? Philosophy of science is also concerned with

the extent to which we are justified in believing our scientific theories to be (at least

approximately) true. It is widely thought this debate should assume naturalism, that

philosophy of science is continuous with the scientific practices that it seeks to investigate.

But can we well what a naturalistic methodology requires without first knowing about the

scientific theories from which it is derived? Does pursuing such a methodology undermine

the possibility of a philosophical debate about scientific realism (chapter 22)?

35

Part 5, Metaethics and Normativity, examines methodological and epistemological

issues arising in metaethics and, more generally, in the topic of normativity. How defensible

is metaethical pluralism, the view that there is no single metaethical theory that provides

the best analysis of all of our moral thought and discourse (chapter 23)? What role should

be the direct plausibility and implausibility of general ethical principles in our ethical

reasoning? Are they incidental or should they have a foundational role (chapter 24)? What

role should intuitions have in our ethical reasoning? Do they have only a heuristic role or

should they have an evidential role as well? And if they do have an evidential role, how

persuasive should we find the model of reflective equilibrium as an account of how

intuitions and principles should be selected and defended (chapters 25 and 26)?

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