Abstract
Psychological explanations of philosophical intuitions can help us assess their evidentiary value, and our warrant for accepting them. To explain and assess conceptual or classificatory intuitions about specific situations, some philosophers have suggested explanations which invoke heuristic rules proposed by cognitive psychologists. The present paper extends this approach of intuition assessment by heuristics-based explanation, in two ways: It motivates the proposal of a new heuristic, and shows that this metaphor heuristic helps explain important but neglected intuitions: general factual intuitions which have been highly influential in the philosophies of mind and perception but neglected in ongoing debates in the epistemology of philosophy. To do so, the paper integrates results from three philosophically pertinent but hitherto largely unconnected strands of psychological research: research on intuitive judgement, analogy and metaphor, and memory-based processing, respectively. The paper shows that the heuristics-based explanation thus obtained satisfies the key requirements cognitive psychologists impose on such explanations, that it can explain the philosophical intuitions targeted, and that this explanation supports normative assessment of the intuitions’ evidentiary value: It reveals whether particular intuitions are due to proper exercise of cognitive competencies or constitute cognitive illusions.
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Notes
See (Cappelen (2012), Chaps. 2–3), for comprehensive review of the various different uses of the term in ordinary English and philosophy, respectively. Cp. also op. cit. 98–114.
In some defenders of armchair philosophy, this desire is tempered by a co-operative naturalism (e.g. Goldman) or transformed by scepticism about the viability of the a priori/a posteriori distinction (e.g. Williamson).
For exceptions see e.g. Hawthorne (2002).
This is emphatically not intended as an exhaustive dichotomy.
One hence needs to beware of simplistic interpretations of the increasingly influential ‘dual process accounts of cognition’ (Evans 2008; Evans and Frankish 2010) in which Kahneman and Frederick (2002, 2005) embed earlier work on heuristics and biases and which some philosophers take up to explain philosophical intuitions (e.g. Nagel 2011; Pinillos et al. 2011), while leading proponents of the ABC programme reject these accounts (Gigerenzer and Regier 1996; Gigerenzer 2009; further criticism: Keren and Schul 2009; Osman 2004). See Evans and Stanovich (2013) for the current state of the debate which is beyond this paper’s scope. We will develop an explanation largely consistent with but not reliant upon such accounts.
When found compelling, non-perceptual judgments generated by spontaneous processes satisfy our above definition of ‘intuition’.
In these experiments subjects were not provided with information that would have allowed them to make judgments based on normative rules—which could hence only be applied to outputs of prior heuristic reasoning or processing. Where such information (e.g. base rates) is provided, heuristic and analytic processes may generate competing responses in parallel (De Neys and Glumicic 2008). The present paper is consistent with but does not rely on the purely ‘default-interventionist’ architecture (Evans 2007) endorsed by Kahneman and Frederick (2002, 2005).
Within the ABC programme, researchers seek to predict and explain different but no less surprising effects, e.g. ‘less-is-more effects’ where subjects perform better when possessing less relevant information (Goldstein and Gigerenzer 2002).
When a property or relation in the source domain (say, ‘x orbits y’) is mapped onto a property or relation in the target domain (itself, if available), their arguments or relata (be they individuals—like planets and sun—or lower-level properties or relations) have to be placed in correspondence too (‘parallel connectivity’); and each element (individual, property, relation) in one domain must be placed in correspondence with at most one element in the other domain (‘one-to-one mapping’).
In the process, both source and target may get ‘re-represented’: Where the two domains do not share the same but similar relations, these may either get subsumed under more generic concepts or analysed into simpler concepts, which apply in both domains (Falkenhainer et al. 1989; Forbus et al. 1995).
In similar studies, including the one mentioned below (Blanchette and Dunbar 2002, p. 675) experimenters explicitly used CSG to generate the test sentences.
Despite its frequently noted importance, this metaphor has not yet been reconstructed in any detail. See Fischer (2011, pp. 22–28, 41–49), for a more detailed discussion, also of its relation to other ‘mind metaphors’.
p has the metaphorical implication q* iff p\({\rightarrow }\)q* can be obtained through CSG from a truth p\({\rightarrow }\)q about the source-domain of a conceptual metaphor whose constitutive mappings license substitution of or in q yielding q*, but license no substitution of or in p. ‘\({\rightarrow }\)’ designates de- or inductive inference. (My definition).
E.g.: Just as the ‘antecedents’ of (4) and (7) above imply that of (2), so their ‘consequents’ imply the ‘consequent’ of (2). Ditto for (1) and (3), (6) and (4), etc.
ABC researchers use a heuristic’s simplicity and frugality (i.e. use of little information) to argue that it can account for performance in real-life situations. Where proposed heuristics—like ours—deploy only natural processes which are demonstrably executed in real time, this argument can be made more directly and convincingly, without detour via frugality (which we hence do not discuss here).
Gentner et al. (2002) used such a ‘naturalistic’ setting for an experiment revealing metaphor consistency effects indicative of processes of re-mapping and inference. Participants needed on average 1277 ms longer to answer a metaphorically phrased question when it employed a different conceptual metaphor than the previous question (op. cit. 555). This leaves just over one second for fresh mapping and inference.
A recent review (Genter and Forbus 2011) reviews 7 computational models of retrieval and 16 models of mapping. This provides the resources to model the natural processes the proposed heuristic draws on, rendering it precise enough to be modelled computationally.
Application to the representativeness heuristic [see Read and Grushka-Cockayne (2011) for a development within the ABC framework] illustrates that correlation of cue (prototypicality of judgment object for category) and criterion (probability that object belongs to category) need not prevent even systematic fallacies (like the conjunction fallacy) from arising from the application of the rule itself. Hence stress ‘likely’ and ‘primarily’ in the main text.
Day and Gentner (2007, exp. 2), rules out simple lexical priming but no other associative processes. While no account of how associative processes could duplicate analogical inferences has yet been spelled out in detail, e.g. Leech et al. (2008) provide an associationist model of basic analogical processing.
Careful experiment excluded alternative explanations, crucially including explanations that invoke Gricean principles of cooperation (Reder and Kusbit 1991; Park and Reder 2004), and supports the partial match hypothesis, which can also explain a wide range of further phenomena (Kamas and Reder 1995).
Also recall (from Sect. 4.1) that frequent exposure to concepts and their combinations strengthens the nodes representing them and the links connecting these. When a thinker is well-versed in faculty psychology, the nodes representing the technical concepts ‘intellect’ and ‘understanding’ will attract more activation than ‘wits’, both because of their own strength and that of their link to ‘think’ etc.
Fischer (2011, pp. 41–45), offers a fuller reconstruction of this complex spatial operation metaphor.
Such inferences are facilitated by re-representation (Fn. 10).
The verb’s use was not metaphorically extended from the visual to the intellectual domain (cp. Sweetser 1990): Deriving from the Latin ‘capere’ (to take, seize; ‘per-’ = thoroughly), it was extended from the source domain of spatial operation (what you seize is in your surrounding space) to the different target domains of intellectual achievement (where you ‘grasp’ my point) and sense-perception (where you ‘catch’ a glimpse). Parallel extension forged the generic concept ‘to apprehend [=seize] with the mind or senses’, i.e., ‘to become aware’ or cognizant of, by thinking or seeing, etc. (OED) which applies in present source- and target-domain.
Note this term’s now defunct visual senses: ‘likeness, image, representation’ (1530s—early eighteenth century, as in ‘ideas in the mirror’, cp. Locke EHU II.i.25), was extended, first, to memory images (1570s), then to pictures or notions of something formed in the mind, independently of memory (1580s), and finally given the yet more general philosophical use at issue (OED).
Quite possibly, competent speakers do not place an introspective interpretation on these phrases when they do not have, or dwell on, the intuitions explained: ‘aware of’ means ‘to know, have cognizance of’, and applies in the same sense regardless of the nature of its objects (OED): investment risks, deadlines, or sensations, own or other, etc. Similarly, the use of ‘conscious of’ in which it only takes ‘one’s sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc.’ as objects is marked as ‘philosophical and psychological’. In its ordinary use, the verb simply means ‘having knowledge or awareness’ and takes facts and information as objects. (ibid.)
Locke states that, and explains why, he feels torn between these two conceptions, in EHU IV.iii.6.
An anonymous reviewer helpfully clarified (my italics): ‘Under some circumstances, candidate inferences can be deductively valid, e.g., when the statements in the base are an instantiation of a logically quantified statement, and the match has no analogy skolems.’
With mapping 3* (Sect. 3.2) but without N.
More generally, this default move frequently restores intelligibility, sometimes truth, and makes it possible to apply expressions containing spatial terms (‘before’, ‘in’, etc.) to abstract entities, without lapse into nonsense, even where the relevant metaphor does not unfold from a basic mapping that involves a spatial relation (as with Thinking-about as Looking-at, in contrast with Thinking-of as Spatial Inclusion).
Locke does the former in the passages quoted above and the latter, e.g., in EHU II.iii.1 and II.viii.12. See Fischer (2011, pp. 103–109, 116–123) on Locke and Berkeley, respectively.
Not to be confused with the ‘no false lemma rule’ proposed in response to the Gettier problem.
For an experimental paradigm to establish such semantic similarity, see e.g. van Oostendorp and Mul (1990).
Other explanations of meaning are informed by the basic mapping of the conceptual metaphor Remembering as Spatial Inclusion. See Fischer (2011, pp. 56–57).
Thompson et al. (2011, exp. 3) found evidence that cue ambiguity is another relevant factor.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on previous drafts and closely related material I am indebted to John Collins, Hilary Kornblith, Jennifer Nagel, David Papineau, Finn Spicer, two anonymous referees for this journal, and audiences in Belfast, Bielefeld, Graz, and London.
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Fischer, E. Philosophical intuitions, heuristics, and metaphors. Synthese 191, 569–606 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0292-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0292-2