Do Epistemic Intuitions Vary Across Actors? A Mixed-Methods Study of Philosophers’ and Non-Philosophers’ Knowledge Attributions

Intuitions play an important role in both traditional and experimental philosophy, and they could provide evidence for or against philosophical theories. In recent years, there has been frequent debate about the evidential role of intuitions in experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophers have investigated the evidential value of intuitions by determining whether they are influenced by certain factors. These experimental studies have reported that extraneous factors, such as cultural background, gender, age, and the presentation order of thought experiments can influence intuitions. This has called the reliability of intuitions into question. The use of intuitions in experimental studies divides experimental philosophy into two camps: the positive programme and the negative programme. The positive programme, as an extension of traditional philosophy, posits that philosophers should use intuitions in philosophical investigations to understand what people think about certain concepts and obtain evidence for future theorising. On the other hand, the negative programme suggests that intuitions are not reliable sources of evidence, and philosophers should be careful of using them as evidence in studies. Thus, the negative programme attempts to challenge intuition-based traditional philosophy. This has led to the development of a counterargument, the expertise defence, which claims that previous experimental studies have reported intuitional diversity because experimental philosophers recruited data from ordinary people (non-philosophers) whose intuitions are not philosophically relevant. Consequently, the discussion of the unreliability of intuitions has evolved into a discussion of expert intuitions. The proponents of the expertise defence state that non-philosophers are more easily influenced by extraneous factors than philosophers are; therefore, experiments should instead be conducted with philosophers as participants. With regard to the expertise defence, there has been great debate about whether or not philosophers’ and non-philosophers’ epistemic intuitions differ. In light of this, in this dissertation, I argue that philosophers’ epistemic intuitions might differ from those of non-philosophers due to their philosophical training. This argument requires empirical investigation, which is the essence of this dissertation. In order to examine whether philosophers and non-philosophers have different epistemic intuitions, I designed a mixed-method experimental study, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis tools. While the quantitative results revealed that there is a significant difference between philosophers’ and non-philosophers’ epistemic intuitions (p<.05), the qualitative results did not support this. This leads to three conclusions: first, epistemic intuitions vary as the negative programme argued; second, the qualitative results indicate that the difference between philosophers’ and non-philosophers’ epistemic intuitions are not entirely due to philosophical training; and third, experimental studies’ methodology should be improved by adding qualitative tools to the survey-based study design