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Replies to Ichikawa, Martin and Weinberg

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Notes

  1. He refers the reader to Ichikawa and Jarvis (2008) for more details.

  2. Ichikawa and Jarvis (2008).

  3. Readers of this exchange between Ichikawa and me may be abnormally on the look-out for such loopholes, but even they cannot specifically anticipate each of them.

  4. In this respect knowing why is worth comparing with knowing how; see Stanley and Williamson (2001).

  5. In Shanteau’s terms, some armchair philosophers are clearly experts in philosophy, since he in effect defines an ‘expert’ in a field as someone generally regarded as an expert in the field by those who work in that field, and some armchair philosophers are clearly generally regarded as experts in philosophy by philosophers. Similarly, he defines ‘competence’ in a field as what the experts in the field generally regard as competence in the field; by that standard, there is clearly competence in armchair philosophy, since some of it is clearly generally regarded by those generally regarded by philosophers as experts in philosophy as showing competence in philosophy. Reliance on such operational definitions is widespread in the literature on expertise that Weinberg cites, because non-experts often have no expert-independent way of assessing expertise. This is one of several reasons why the bearing of that literature on the status of philosophy is much less direct than Weinberg appears to suggest. For the sake of argument, I will go along with his apparent assumption that Shanteau’s conclusions about the bearing of task characteristics on competence in experts apply similarly to real expertise; unless he is assuming that, it is not obvious why he cites Shanteau’s paper. I concentrate on that paper because the other work that Weinberg cites from the expertise literature, Ericsson et al. (2006), is even less relevant to his claims.

  6. Weinberg’s paradigm of an intellectual method that required abandonment rather than reform is introspectionism in psychology. The scope for feedback from others on introspective reports is notably narrower than it is on judgments in armchair philosophy.

  7. The importance of order effects in verdicts on thought experiments is, of course, already emphasized in Williams (1970).

  8. Attempts to reconcile the verdicts by contextualist hypotheses about their content would be far-fetched in most of these cases. Williamson (2005) suggests that the data used to support contextualist or subjective-sensitive invariantist hypotheses in epistemology are better explained in terms of errors induced by giving too much weight in some settings to factors that are psychologically salient in those settings.

  9. The possibility of framing effects in natural science should hardly come as a surprise after Kuhn (1962) and much subsequent empirical work on the practice of science. Weinberg speaks of scientific practices as ‘unchallenged’; they are not unchallenged in general, just by experimental philosophers.

References

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Acknowledgement

The author thanks the three commentators for their interesting questions, and to all the participants at the Arché workshop in St Andrews which led to this symposium for discussion, including Stephen Stich, who coauthored the paper with Jonathan Weinberg as presented there.

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Williamson, T. Replies to Ichikawa, Martin and Weinberg. Philos Stud 145, 465–476 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9406-6

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