Intuitions and Thought Experiments

Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy |

village_of_the_damned.jpgBrandon has a more in-depth post on why he doesn’t like zombie arguments. It seems to me his main point boils down to “[it] gets its plausibility not from anything about the argument itself but from a variety of positions pre-argument that give it an antecedent probability. The best thing to do is not to play the zombie game at all.”

I think this is correct as far as it goes. But I think Brandon’s missing the point somewhat.

Some arguments aren’t arguing for something out of something intrinsic to the argument. There are arguments like that of course, although I think they are much rarer than it first appears.

Rather I think that a large part of philosophy is drawing out what one already believes and thinks. This goes back at least to Socrates - although he’s typically doing it in a negative rather than positive way.

I think we have to take the zombie argument like Gettier examples, Frankfurt examples, Davidson’s swampman, twin earth thought experiments and others of that ilk. That is what they are trying to do is bring into focus our preconceptions that may be muddled in how we discuss things. As such Brandon is completely right that they establish nothing ultimately beyond what we already believed in some way. But they never were trying to do more than that.

I’d add that knowing what we believed in a more clear fashion is, itself, tremendously helpful. Indeed I’d argue that’s one of the most useful functions of philosophy.

I also think we should contextualize the movement that brought these approaches. The linguistic turn in philosophy in effect redirected how we should think about philosophical questions. Effectively it said that to understand the questions, which are posed in language, we should understand the language of the terms our questions are phrased with. As soon as you do that you are focused in on intuitions. Recently folks wised up a bit and noted that perhaps what philosophers understood linguistically by these terms wasn’t what most people did. So there has been a move towards more empirical testing of what people mean by the terms - often using surveys and questions like the above that probe intuitions.

Here’s the problem. If our questions are about natural kinds then our linguistic meanings are largely irrelevant. (And I think this is ultimately what Brandon is getting at) So if we have an understanding of what it means to be conscious that is less significant than the reality of what it means to be conscious. Any thought experiment, to be useful, has to use the latter and not the former. The problem is that we don’t know the latter. When we use language arguments as if it is telling us about natural kinds we’ve really just deceived ourselves. It ends up being a kind of subtle kind of solipsistic argument wrapped up in pretty packaging.

This is why I tend to distrust philosophy that makes appeal to intuitions. (Which is most philosophy frankly) This is also why I tend to like better how continental philosophy took the linguistic turn. There’s much more appreciation of vagueness and how our language and ‘reality’ don’t map up quite right in the continental tradition. Rather ironic given that analytic philosophers often see continental philosophy as filled with muddle headed relativists and solipsists. When, to me, the exact opposite is often true.

(BTW - yes I know the picture I used isn’t a zombie. However the zombie experiment isn’t about brain eating zombies. It’s about folks who seem human but lack that normal consciousness. Cannibal decomposing zombies don’t really fit the bill since it is easy to tell them apart physically. While Village of the Damned doesn’t quite fit either it at least is better than Dawn of the Dead pictures.)

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