Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

Intuitions, Heuristics, and Metaphors: Extending
Cognitive Epistemology
Eugen Fischer
Psychological explanations of philosophical intuitions can help us assess our warrant for
accepting them. To explain and assess conceptual or classificatory intuitions about specific
situations, some philosophers have suggested explanations that invoke heuristic rules
proposed by cognitive psychologists. This approach offers a promising alternative to the
standard approach of experimental philosophy. The present paper develops this alternative
in fresh directions: It motivates the proposal of a fresh heuristic, and shows that this
heuristic can explain a class of influential intuitions that have been neglected in current
debates in the epistemology of philosophy. By integrating results from two hitherto
disconnected strands of psychological research, on intuitive judgment and on analogy and
metaphor, respectively, the paper motivates the proposal of a ‘metaphor heuristic’. Second, it
shows that this heuristic can explain general factual intuitions influential in the philosophies
of mind and perception. The paper shows that the proposed heuristic satisfies the key
requirements imposed by cognitive psychologists in the relevant research traditions, and that
explanations employing this new heuristic can reveal whether particular philosophical
intuitions are due to the proper exercise of cognitive competencies or constitutive of
cognitive illusions.
This paper will develop an approach that forms part of a research program we can helpfully
dub ‘cognitive epistemology’. This is a kind of naturalised epistemology, which shares a
central ambition with experimental philosophy: It seeks to develop psychological
explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us assess philosophers’ warrant
for accepting them (cp. Knobe and Nichols 2008: 8). Cognitive epistemology pursues this aim
by drawing on experiments and theories already available from cognitive and social
psychology. Work in this nascent tradition seeks to explain – and assess – philosophically
relevant intuitions as the results of cognitive processes for which psychologists have already
provided experimental evidence (Fischer 2011, Gerken 2011, Nagel 2010, 2011, Spicer 2007).
One approach that has been tentatively tried (e.g. by Hawthorne 2004 and Williamson 2005)
is to explain some relevant intuitions by reference to heuristic rules posited by cognitive
psychologists working within the ‘heuristics and biases program’ (Tversky and Kahneman
1974, Kahneman and Frederick 2005, Kahneman 2011). This may reveal that compelling
intuitions are due to seductive fallacies and can be disregarded. The moment we pool the
conceptual resources of this research program with that of the ‘adaptive behaviour and
cognition’ program (Gigerenzer and Todd 1999, Gigerenzer 2008), also from cognitive
psychology, we can explain intuitions and assess their evidentiary value more widely, both
when they lack and when they possess such value. Crucially, we can do this without –
controversial (Cappelen 2012, Williamson 2007) – recourse to conflict, sensitivity, or
instability results from surveys of the kind experimental philosophers tend to conduct (cp.
Alexander and Weinberg 2007).
This paper will develop the approach of intuition assessment through heuristics-based
explanation, and present two extensions of it: the proposal of a new heuristic, the metaphor
heuristic, and its application in the explanation and assessment of a philosophically
important class of intuitions that has been neglected in current debates. Debates in the
epistemology of philosophy have focused on conceptual, classificatory, or modal intuitions