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ABSTRACT
The expertise defense is the best-known response by armchair philosophers to the challenge posed by experimental philosophers regarding the trustworthiness of intuitions. In a series of recent experiments, Experimental philosophers have recently focused on professional philosophers, claiming that, contrary to what the expertise defense assumes, philosophers’ intuitions are no less susceptible to the influence of irrelevant factors (the direct strategy). Additionally, drawing from literature on expertise, they contend that, unlike other domains of expertise, practice does not improve philosophers’ intuitions (the indirect strategy). In this paper, adopting a skill-based perspective on expertise, my primary objective is to defend the expertise defense against both direct and indirect strategies. Based on the skill-based account, I present three arguments against the direct strategy by challenging its power, scope and methodology. Furthermore, borrowing empirical findings from recent literature on expertise, I argue against the indirect strategy that four skills that constitute philosophical expertise regarding thought experiments can be improved through various forms of practice, including deliberate practice. However, my moderate defense departs from typical versions of the expertise defense since I argue that while recent experiments by experimental philosophers cannot undermine the expertise defense, they provide valuable insights into philosophical expertise.
Acknowledgement
This paper is the outcome of a project that was undertaken as part of the research group known as the Moral Cognition Project, led by Ebrahim Azadegan and financially supported by the Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Council (IR). I would like to thank Ebrahim Azadegan, Mahmood Vahidnia, and an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Psychology. I am also deeply grateful to Yasser Pouresmail for his comments and assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Another paper that can be considered as the starting point of this sort of research is Petrinovich and O’Neill (Citation1996).
2. See, for example, J. Greene and Haidt (Citation2002), Machery et al. (Citation2004), Nichols and Knobe (Citation2007), and Swain et al. (Citation2008).
3. See, for example, Kauppinen (Citation2007), Ludwig (Citation2007), Sosa (Citation2009), and Williamson (Citation2007, Citation2011).
4. See, for example, Schwitzgebel and Cushman (Citation2015), Tobia et al. (Citation2013), and Vaesen et al. (Citation2013).
5. See, for example, Clarke (Citation2013), Ryberg (Citation2013), and Weinberg et al. (Citation2010).
6. For two recent collections of various accounts of expertise in philosophical literature, see Farina, Lavazza & Pritchard (Citation2024) and Farina & Lavazza (Citation2024).
7. I think there are good reasons in favor of the skill-based view of expertise, but I do not argue for this position here. I just rely on this well-established view of the nature of expertise.
8. This kind of response is more frequently described using the term “automatic” rather than “spontaneous”. However, “spontaneous” is more appropriate since, as Railton (Citation2014, p. 821) argued, using the term “automatic” might erroneously imply that this response is an inflexible, push-buttons response.
9. For a recent anti-intellectualist account that defines propositional knowledge as a kind of skill, see Hetherington (Citation2020) and for a recent intellectualist account which describes skill as a kind of propositional knowledge, see Pavese and Beddor (Citation2023).
10. My distinction between the intellectualist norm and the anti-intellectualist norm is to some extent similar to Driver (Citation2020)’s distinction between expertise in analysis, on the one hand, and expertise in judgment and action, on the other. However, what I insist on and she does not explicitly endorse is that both of these conditions can be thought of as norms of expertise.
11. For lack of space, I cannot discuss all of the experimental studies that support this finding. Therefore, I will restrict myself to the three mentioned studies. For more recent experimental studies that support the same claim, see Horvath and Wiegmann (Citation2022), and Wiegmann et al. (Citation2020).
12. This case and its thought experiment is an imagined one. However, there was a real dispute over the possibility of vacuum between Hobbes, a philosopher who rejected it in an armchair way, and Boyle, a scientist who supported it by way of scientific experiments. See Adams (Citation2019), for a relevant discussion.
13. In the final part of the next section, I will discuss this sensitivity to relevant science in more detail.
14. I think that well-known proponents of expertise defense would agree on this constraint. As an example, Williamson (Citation2016: 22) writes:
The phrase “experimental philosophy” can mean many things. In a broad sense, it covers any experimental inquiry with a philosophical purpose (…). On that reading, few philosophers today object to experimental philosophy as such. For example, it is generally agreed that the philosophy of perception has much to learn from experiments on the psychology of perception. … Analogous considerations apply to the philosophy of space and time and experiments in physics.
15. For discussions on the gradibility of know-how and skill, see Pavese (Citation2017) and Ryle (Citation1949).
16. Although the question of whether we can generalize the results of recent experiments to most philosophers remains a topic of ongoing debate, it is worth noting that some more recent data does not support this generalization. See, for example, Schindler and Saint-Germier (Citation2023).
17. Of course, as will be clear in the next section, I agree that these experiments show that intuitions of many philosophers are objectionable for not satisfying one norm of expertise.
18. Therefore, the ability to provide fast, unreflective responses in a reliably successful way is not necessary for philosophy. Perhaps this is the idea behind Wittgenstein’s statement: “In the philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly” (Wittgenstein & Winch, Citation1980, p. 34).
19. Unlike Andow, however, I think that it is a deficiency in philosophical training and, as argued above, leads, at least, to problems in satisfying the anti-intellectualist norm of expertise.
20. Another source from which they borrow ideas is Camerer and Johnson (Citation1991). For a criticism of their argument focused on this source, see Bach (Citation2021).
21. As will be clear in what follows, the idea of deliberative practice has been criticized in the past decade. However, these criticisms have rarely been represented in philosophical debates over skill and expertise. One of the few criticisms of Ericsson’s view in the philosophical literature has been developed by Farina and Cei (Citation2018). They argue that the notion of concentration as a key concept in Ericsson’s view is not falsifiable. Moreover, they accuse Ericsson of overlooking the potentially fruitful links between the literature on expertise and the paradigm of embodied cognition in cognitive science. Farina and Cei (Citation2018) also invoke basic evolutionary theory to cast serious doubts on Ericsson’s defense of genotypic equivalency; see fn. 29 for a relevant discussion.
22. No doubt it would be better if I could test this training program in practice. However, as will become evident in the following paragraph, I actually use the scenario of this training program to defuse Weinberg et al. (Citation2010)’s disanalogy argument. There are, of course, empirical data in support of my claim that I discuss in the next paragraphs.
23. In fact, we can think of recent experiments of experimental philosophers not as examinations of philosophers’ intuitions but as one stage of such a program of deliberative practice on philosophical intuitions.
24. A further reason in favor of our claim is that some philosophers clearly endorse that deliberative practice can lead to better versions of philosophical intuitions. See, for example, Fridland and Stichter (Citation2021)’s discussion on the improvement of moral intuition.
25. See, also (Almashat et al., Citation2008), for a discussion on the kinds of practice that can reduce framing effects in medicine.
26. Here is another worry about Maćkiewicz et al. (Citation2023)’s project. They did not examine whether training reduces the influence of irrelevant factors on the philosophical intuitions of undergraduate philosophy students. Instead, they only investigated whether the students’ intuitions changed as a result of training or not. I do not think that the results of the latter examination alone can cast doubt on the plausibility of the Expertise Defense.
27. See, for example, Fridland (Citation2019) and Montero (Citation2016).
28. See Campitelli and Gobet (Citation2011) and Hambrick and Meinz (Citation2011) for other significant criticisms of the idea of deliberative practice.
29. Farina and Cei (Citation2018) believe that Ericsson underestimates the role of innate talent since he defends genotypic equivalency, according to which everyone has the genes necessary for the acquisition of expertise provided they are able to undergo sufficient training. They argue that Ericsson’s view is in conflict with the evolutionary theory. More specifically, his idea of genotypic equivalency clashes with genetic variability that is necessary for ensuring natural selection over evolutionary time. Farina and Cei (Citation2018, p. 317) put the issue in the following way:
If basic evolutionary theory is right (and it seems hard to disprove) then it follows that both random and nonrandom genetic variations in all areas of human performance and behavior (including skill and expertise) are absolutely crucial for continued species evolution. This casts serious doubts on the overall validity of Ericsson’s approach. (very strongly based on the idea of genetic equivalency)
See also Baker, Citation2007 for a similar line of reasoning.
30. In this paper, I sought to argue against Weinberg et al. (Citation2010)’s argument from indirect strategy. Ryberg (Citation2013, p. 8) develops a different kind of the argument from this strategy. See Andow (Citation2015) and Rini (Citation2014) for various responses to him.
31. As an example, Sutton (Citation2010) has argued that the extended mind thesis provides a more fruitful methodology than its rivals for a scientific research program investigating cognition. He also draws upon some cases of the scientific discipline of historical cognitive science in favor of the extended mind. The literature on extended mind and extended cognition contains several similar lines of defense for these theses based on findings from various empirical and scientific domains.
32. Interestingly, Pavese, in a recent paper coauthored with Pavese and Henne (Citation2023), goes to a laboratory and conducts several experiments to defend her intellectualist account of know-how and intentionality.