1 The Critique from Experimental Philosophy: Can Philosophical Intuitions Be Externally Corroborated?

The movement of experimental philosophy criticizes traditional philosophy’s armchair reliance on intuition. The critique is rarely spelled out precisely; rather, experimental philosophers simply point to the admittedly surprising results of intuition surveys, which are, roughly, that intuitions vary with factors presumed to be irrelevant to the subject matter in question.1 However, the question what is wrong exactly with armchair philosophy is rarely answered adequately.2 Jonathan Weinberg (2007) has offered what I take to be the most compelling answer so far: Reliance on philosophical intuition is problematic because we have no tools for detecting and correcting its errors. Weinberg introduces the technical term ‘hopefulness ’ for the property of methods to allow for the detection and correction of error. A method is hopeful if it meets all or most of the following desiderata to some sufficient degree: external corroboration, internal coherence, detectability of margins, and theoretical illumination. A method is clearly hopeless when it fails to meet any of the desiderata. According to Weinberg this is the case for the philosophers ’ practice of appealing to intuitions. He further argues for the epistemic principle that “[a]ny putative source of evidence that is hopeless ought not be trusted ” (2007, 327; emphasis omitted) and thus concludes, that the practice of appealing to intuitions ought to be abandoned (or revised)