Rev.Phil.Psych.

(2010) 1:447–460
DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0033-0

Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental

Philosophy

Max Deutsch

Published online: 19 March 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Practitioners of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ have collected data

that appear to show that some philosophical intuitions are culturally variable. Many
experimental philosophers take this to pose a problem for a more traditional,
‘armchair’ style of philosophizing. It is argued that this is a mistake that derives from
a false assumption about the character of philosophical methods; neither philosophy
nor its methods have anything to fear from cultural variability in philosophical
intuitions.

Some of the most striking results from the new ‘experimental philosophy’ movement
are those that appear to reveal significant variability, along cultural and other
dimensions, in peoples’ philosophical intuitions. For example, the experimental
philosophers, Weinberg et al. (2001), conducted cross-cultural empirical studies on
the Gettier intuition and claim to have found that significant majorities of East Asian
and Indian subjects will intuit that an agent in a Gettier case ‘really knows’, as
opposed to ‘only believes’, the relevant proposition. A different group of
experimental philosophers, Machery et al. (2004), undertook cross-cultural experi-
ments on intuitions about reference, and claim to have discovered that East Asians’
intuitions strongly favor a descriptivist theory of reference for proper names, while
Westerners’ intuitions equally strongly support Kripke’s (1980) ‘causal-historical’
alternative.
This variability, if it really exists, is interesting in itself, and cries out for some
explanation. But what, if anything, does it tell us about philosophical method? Is
cross-cultural variability in intuitions something that Gettier and Kripke, for
example, should worry about? Some experimental philosophers say that it is. In
fact, both groups of experimental philosophers mentioned above use their
experimental results to challenge the more traditional, ‘armchair’ method of

M. Deutsch (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong, 311 Main Building, Pokfulam Road, Pokfulam,
Hong Kong, China
e-mail: medeutsc@hkucc.hku.hk
448 M. Deutsch

philosophizing practiced by Gettier and Kripke. I argue here for the opposing view:
Variability in philosophical intuitions poses no threat to philosophy.
My argument begins with the observation that it is common, even outside of
experimental philosophy circles, to misrepresent arguments in philosophy as
depending on the intuitiveness, or counterintuitiveness, of some proposition or
other. For example, many philosophers would accept (G) as an accurate
characterization of the way in which Gettier is supposed to have refuted the justified
true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge:
(G): Gettier refuted the JTB theory by presenting cases in which a subject has a
justified true belief that p, but it is intuitive (or intuitively true) that the subject
does not know that p.
And many philosophers would accept (K) as an accurate characterization of the way
in which Kripke is supposed to have refuted the descriptivist theory of reference:
(K) Kripke refuted the descriptivist theory by presenting cases in which it is intuitive
(or intuitively true) that some speaker uses a proper name, N, to refer to x even
though the definite descriptions the speaker associates with N do not denote x.
To the extent that (G) suggests that Gettier’s anti-JTB argument requires that we
find it intuitive that the agents in his cases fail to know despite justifiably and truly
believing, the characterization is a misrepresentation. Similarly, to the extent that (K)
suggests that Kripke has refuted descriptivism only if his cases are intuitive
counterexamples to descriptivism, it too is a misrepresentation. Gettier refuted the
JTB theory, if he did, and Kripke refuted descriptivism, if he did, by presenting
counterexamples, full stop. Whether these counterexamples are intuitive for anyone
is a separate, and purely psychological, matter.
Talk of theories and their alleged counterexamples allows a useful framing of the
issue, for it is precisely by failing to keep questions about whether an alleged
counterexample is genuine separate from questions about whether an alleged
counterexample is intuitive that allows experimental philosophy to gain a foothold.
The experimental philosophers have solid seeming evidence that what may be
intuitive to Westerners is not intuitive to other cultural groups. They therefore
suppose themselves to have evidence that, even by philosophy’s own standards,
Gettier’s alleged counterexamples to the JTB theory of knowledge, or Kripke’s
alleged counterexamples to the descriptivist theory of reference, are not genuine. But
this mistakes intuitiveness for genuineness.
The mistake may be an innocent one, since misleading characterizations of
philosophical arguments such as (G) and (K) abound, even within traditional
philosophy itself. And appeals to intuition, or ‘what we would say’ about
hypothetical cases and thought experiments, appear with great frequency directly
in various philosophical arguments, without an especially clear indication of the
argumentative role these appeals are meant to play. In fact, there are plenty of
cases in which it looks for all the world as though a philosopher is inferring p
(not-p), from the fact that p is intuitive (counterintuitive) or represents (fails to
represent) ‘what we would say’ about a case. How many times have we heard that
a philosophical theory must be rejected because it has ‘counterintuitive
consequences’? Too many, it seems to me; theories must be rejected if they have
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 449

false consequences, but true theories might have consequences that strike us as
false without actually being false.
So, experimental philosophers should not be blamed for supposing that many
philosophical arguments depend on empirical speculation about peoples’ intuitions.
How can they be blamed when as eminent a philosopher as Frank Jackson advocates
‘doing serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various [philosophical] cases’ in
order to confirm or disconfirm this or that ‘conceptual analysis’ (Jackson 2000, 36-7)?
Whether they are to blame for it or not, however, it is a mistake. Opinion polls won’t
settle any philosophical questions for us and, Jackson aside, it is doubtful that many
philosophers would, on carefully considering the matter, say that they could.
Earlier, I said that (G) and (K) are misrepresentations because they suggest that
the arguments they are meant to characterize depend on the intuitiveness of certain
counterexamples. I claimed that the arguments instead depend only on whether the
counterexamples are genuine, not on whether they are intuitive. These points deserve
some elaboration.
Both the JTB theory of knowledge and the descriptivist theory of reference for
proper names entail certain generalizations. The JTB theory entails the generaliza-
tion that, for every subject, S, and every proposition, p, if S justifiably and truly
believes that p, then S knows that p. The descriptivist theory of reference implies the
generalization that, for every proper name, N, N refers to the denotation of the
definite descriptions users of N associate with N. Gettier and Kripke argue against
these generalizations by describing counterexamples, by which I mean possible
cases that falsify the generalizations.1 The counterexamples are quite well known,
but since I am concerned to show that they do not depend on what is or is not
intuitive, it will be useful to rehearse a pair of them here. Here is Gettier’s
presentation of his famous 10 coins-case counterexample to the JTB theory.
10 coins-case
Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that
Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
d. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured
him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted
the coins in Jones's pocket 10 min ago. Proposition (d) entails:
e. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

1
I take it that this is a standard understanding of ‘counterexample’. However, in a recent paper defending
the JTB theory, Brian Weatherson (2003) defines ‘counterexample’ in the following way: ‘Let us say that a
counterexample to the theory that all Fs are Gs is a possible situation such that most people have an
intuition that some particular thing in the story is an F but not a G’ (Weatherson 2003, 2; Italics added).
Weatherson may use words as he pleases, of course, but his definition runs together precisely the two
things I think need separating, namely (a) the issue of whether a possible case genuinely falsifies a theory
(I call such cases ‘counterexamples,’ or ‘genuine counterexamples’.) and (b) the issue of whether ‘most
people have an intuition’ that a case falsifies a theory. Note that on Weatherson’s definition there may be
counterexamples to a theory even if the theory is true. This makes Weatherson’s initially surprising claim
that the JTB theory may be true even in the face of Gettier’s counterexamples rather less surprising.
450 M. Deutsch

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e)
on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is
clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the
job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket.
Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred
(e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true,
(ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that
(e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for
(e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does
not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on
a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man
who will get the job (Gettier 1963, 122).
And here is Kripke’s presentation of his equally famous Gödel-case counterex-
ample to descriptivism:
Gödel-case
Let’s take a simple case. In the case of Gödel that’s practically the only thing
many people have heard about him—that he discovered the incompleteness of
arithmetic. Does it follow that whoever discovered the incompleteness of
arithmetic is the referent of ‘Gödel’?
Imagine the following blatantly fictional situation. (I hope Professor Gödel is not
present.) Suppose that Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man
named ‘Schmidt’, whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circum-
stances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel
somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel. On
the view in question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name ‘Gödel’, he
really means to refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the unique person satisfying
the description, ‘the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic’. Of
course you might try changing it to ‘the man who published the discovery of the
incompleteness of arithmetic’. By changing the story a little further one can
make even this formulation false. Anyway, most people might not even know
whether the thing was published or got around by word of mouth. Let's stick to
‘the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic’. So, since the man
who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in fact Schmidt, we, when
we talk about ‘Gödel’, are in fact always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to
me that we are not. We simply are not (Kripke 1980, 83-84).

Notice that there is no mention of intuitions or the intuitiveness of any proposition

in either presentation. Gettier, on the question of whether Smith knows (e), says
that, although it is clear that Smith justifiably and truly believes (e), ‘it is equally
clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true’ (Gettier 1963, 122; Italics in
original). He does not say that it is intuitive that Smith does not know; he says
straight out, and emphatically, that Smith does not know. Likewise, Kripke insists
that, in the circumstances he imagines in his story about Gödel and Schmidt, we ‘simply
are not’ referring to Schmidt when we talk about ‘Gödel’ (Kripke 1980, 83). It is not that
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 451

it is intuitive that we are not talking about Schmidt, it is that we are not talking about
Schmidt, period.2 Of course, Gettier’s and Kripke’s counterexamples are intuitive
counterexamples for at least some readers, but this is a logically inessential feature. The
10 coins-case qualifies as a refutation of the JTB theory just in case it is true that Smith
does not know (e) despite justifiably and truly believing it. Similarly, the Gödel-case
refutes descriptivism just in case it is true that, in the imagined circumstances, the uses
of ‘Gödel’ refer to Gödel instead of Schmidt. If these things are true, the
counterexamples are genuine, regardless of whether anyone finds them intuitive.
Abstracting away from the details of Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments, the form
of each can be represented as the conclusion that a generalization is false via a
premise asserting that there is a counterexample:
The Form of the Arguments:
(1) There is an F that is not a G.
(2) Hence, not all Fs are Gs.

The experimental philosopher critics, and perhaps a number of more traditional

philosophers as well, think there is a missing premise in this representation of the
arguments’ form. According to them, (1) is supposed to follow from a premise
asserting that the counterexample is intuitive. So, according to them, the arguments
would be better represented by the following:
The Alleged Form of the Arguments:
(0) It is intuitive that there is an F that is not a G.
(1) So, there is an F that is not a G.
(2) Hence, not all Fs are Gs.

2
An anonymous referee (this journal) reminds me that, in Naming and Necessity, Kripke writes, ‘Of
course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in
favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way,
what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking’ (Kripke 1980, 42). So,
am I wrong to insist that, even by Kripke’s own lights, the Gödel-case argument against descriptivism
does not depend on treating intuitions as evidence? Firstly, even if I am wrong to insist on this, the
important issue, as I make clear later in the main text, is not whether Kripke thinks that intuitions about the
Gödel-case argument matter crucially as evidence, but instead whether they really do matter in that way.
Secondly, the surrounding context of the quote makes it clear, I think, that Kripke is not endorsing an
intuitions-as-evidence method for philosophy in general, or for evaluating counterexamples in particular.
In the surrounding text, Kripke is responding to a skeptic who doubts that the philosophical distinction
between necessary and contingent properties overlaps with any distinction possessed by non-philosophers.
Kripke maintains that it does, and then goes on, in the quote above, to respond to a different sort of
skeptic, one who doubts that that kind of overlap is evidence for, specifically, the meaningfulness of
assertions involving the philosophical notions. So, the sorts of things that have ‘intuitive content’ are not
judgments about hypothetical scenarios, they are, instead, philosophical distinctions and notions. And their
having ‘intuitive content’ is a matter of how closely these match up with non-philosophical distinctions
and notions. Lastly, closeness of match, Kripke says, is evidence only that the philosophical notions may
be used to make meaningful assertions. In fact, Kripke explicitly puts aside the question of whether ‘there
are any nontrivial necessary properties’, and asks us to focus on just ‘the meaningfulness of the notion’
(Kripke 1980, 42-43). Clearly, we cannot infer from any of this that Kripke would accept that intuitions
about hypothetical cases are essential evidence about what is true concerning them. The quote with which
I began may seem to suggest that there is at least an implicit appeal to intuitions in Kripke’s presentation
of the Gödel-case. Closer inspection of its surrounding context reveals that this is not so.
452 M. Deutsch

Representing the arguments this way makes it appear imperative that we find out
whether the counterexamples really are intuitive, and that, in turn, provides the
experimental philosophers’ empirical studies with their point. But what justifies the
view that (0) is required by the best representation of the arguments’ form? From the
way Gettier and Kripke actually express themselves, it appears that the simpler ‘(1),
therefore (2)’ representation (The Form of the Arguments, as opposed to The Alleged
Form of the Arguments) is the more accurate one.
Taking (1) to follow somehow from (0) is to treat the intuition that there is an F
that is not a G as evidence that there is an F that is not a G. Some metaphilosophies
do treat intuitions as evidence.3 However, whether or not intuitions are evidence, it is
fairly clear that the cogency of various traditional philosophical arguments does not
require them to be. Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments—paradigmatic traditional
philosophical arguments, I take it—do not implicitly assume that intuitions are
evidence. Intuitions play no evidential role in these arguments. Since a reasonable
conclusion to draw from the variability in intuitions uncovered by the experimental
philosophers is that at least some philosophical intuitions are not evidence for their
contents4, it should come as a relief to philosophers that their arguments do not take
them to be and do not need to take them to be. Gettier and Kripke may have refuted
their target philosophical theories even if, as the data collected by the experimental
philosophers perhaps shows, the 10 coins-case and the Gödel-case are not intuitive
counterexamples to, respectively, the JTB theory of knowledge and the descriptivist
theory of reference.
It is time to respond to the most obvious objection to my proposal that Gettier’s
and Kripke’s arguments don’t depend on the intuitiveness of their counterexamples,
namely that, if it is not the intuitiveness of the counterexamples that gives us reason
to accept that the counterexamples are genuine, what does gives us that reason?
The objection appears to assume that the genuineness of the counterexamples
must be inferred from something else. It is not clear that this is a fair assumption,
however. Is there something obviously wrong with the idea that one might know
directly that, for example, Smith does not know (e): that the man who will get the job
has 10 coins in his pocket? Clearly, some people, the majority of East Asians in
Weinberg et al.’s poll, for example, don’t know it directly, since they don’t even
believe it.5 It doesn’t follow, however, that those of us who do believe it fail to know
it directly.
As far as I can see, there is nothing to prevent philosophers from maintaining
that, on at least some occasions, the belief that a counterexample is genuine
qualifies as direct, noninferential knowledge that the counterexample is genuine.
The intuition that p would not be evidence for p, on this metaphilosophical picture,
but would instead be a manifestation of one’s direct knowledge that p. Implicit
allegiance to this sort of picture perhaps partly explains the frequency with which

3
See Bealer 1998, Goldman and Pust 1998, and Pust 2000.
4
I say ‘reasonable’ not ‘clearly correct,’ since it is possible for those who accept the view that intuitions
are evidence to argue that variability in intuitions of the kind uncovered by the experimental philosophers
does not pose an insurmountable difficulty. Perhaps only considered or reflective intuitions are evidence,
or perhaps it is only the intuitions of the experts (i.e. the philosophers) that matter.
5
This is somewhat inaccurate, since Weinberg et al. (2001) did not use the 10 coins-case as a test case in
their studies. (Instead, they used a variation on Lehrer’s (1965) ‘Nogot/Ford’ case.)
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 453

philosophers appeal to intuitions in their theorizing, without any attempt to

determine whether the relevant propositions are intuitive for anyone else. When a
philosopher claims that p is intuitive, we should not understand this as, ‘Most
people would pretheoretically judge that p.’ After all, if it were understood in that
way, how could anyone fail to recognize the relevance opinion polls might have to
the claim? Instead, the claim is best interpreted as, ‘I know p directly, without
inference.’
The point may be less than perfectly clear; am I trying to distinguish
‘knowing directly’ from ‘intuiting’? What could this difference consist in when
the judgment concerns a hypothetical philosophical case? But I do not mean to
be distinguishing ‘knowing directly’ from ‘intuiting.’ Knowing directly that, say,
‘Gödel’ does not refer to Schmidt in the Gödel-case is just intuiting that that it
doesn’t. Indeed, I take it as given that, if we know that ‘Gödel’ does not refer to
Schmidt in the Gödel-case, we know this via intuition and, hence, directly.
However, in asserting this, I mean to assert only that the causal source of the
judgment is intuition. Intuition may be the causal source of the judgment without
being its justificatory source, and without the fact that the judgment is intuitive
serving as a premise in an inference to the judgment’s truth. This is an important
distinction for understanding the role of intuition in philosophical methodology.
Various arguments in philosophy—presentations of counterexamples to general
philosophical theories, for example—may ‘rely’, or ‘depend,’ on intuition, but
only causally, not inferentially or evidentially.
However, drawing this distinction is not quite enough to answer a skeptic who
demands evidence for taking various counterexamples to be genuine. Compare
perceptual knowledge. Perhaps we sometimes have direct perceptual knowledge, but
against a skeptic who wants to know how we have any perceptual knowledge at all,
it seems evasive to answer that some perceptual knowledge is direct. That is not an
answer to the relevant how-question. The relevant how-question is not: How is
perceptual knowledge arrived at? Instead it is: How is it that perceptual beliefs ever
‘add up’ to perceptual knowledge? And to answer this question we must find some
set of considerations from which it follows that perceptual beliefs sometimes qualify
as knowledge, even if we do not typically arrive at this knowledge via inference
from those considerations.
Once the relevant how-question is on the table, however, it is fairly clear that
there need be no single, fully general answer to it. The relevant how-question
concerning counterexamples to philosophical theories is: How can we be sure, in any
given case, that a counterexample is genuine? The answer foisted on philosophy by
its experimental philosopher critics is that we know whether a counterexample is
genuine by checking to see whether it is intuitive. I have already argued that this
answer does not accurately reflect actual philosophical practice, since, in many cases
(Gettier’s and Kripke’s, e.g.), a counterexample is presented with no explicit or
implicit appeal to its intuitiveness. But the answer has a deeper flaw: It presupposes
that there is some one way according to which we know whether a counterexample
is genuine. There is no one way. Consider just the two examples we have looked at
here. Surely, if we know that Gettier’s counterexample is genuine, we know this on
quite different grounds from the grounds on which we know, if we do, that Kripke’s
counterexample is genuine. In the former case, the grounds concern various
454 M. Deutsch

epistemic issues, while in the latter case they concern semantic ones. And in neither
case do they concern who intuits what.
What are the differing grounds on which it has been argued that Gettier’s and
Kripke’s counterexamples are genuine? Perhaps reminding ourselves of these
differing grounds will help dispel the impression that the case for the genuineness
of the counterexamples bottoms out in an appeal to what is or is not intuitive. Here,
under the heading K-Grounds, are some of the reasons that have been offered for
taking the Gödel-case to be a genuine counterexample to the descriptivist theory of
reference. The second list, labeled G-Grounds, lists reasons that have been given for
supposing the 10 coins-case to be a genuine refutation of the JTB theory of
knowledge. The striking fact about both lists is that neither cites any claim about
what is or is not intuitive.
K-Grounds:
(a) Kripke points out that the imaginary Gödel-case has real-life analogues. All
that many of us ‘know’ about Peano is that he was the discoverer of certain
axioms concerning the natural numbers. But it turns out that Dedekind
discovered those axioms. If descriptivism is true, many of us have been
referring all along to Dedekind with our uses of ‘Peano’. But we have not
been referring to Dedekind with those uses. We have been referring instead to
Peano, misattributing to him the discovery of the axioms. This is not simply a
further putative counterexample; it strengthens the claim that the Gödel-case
is a counterexample by showing us that the way in which we ought to judge,
with respect to the imaginary Gödel-case, should line up with the way in
which we correctly judge about the real-life Peano case. (See Kripke 1980,
84-85.)
(b) Kripke argues that the view that ‘Gödel’ refers to Schmidt—the prediction
made by descriptivism concerning the Gödel-case—suggests a more general
view to the effect that one can never be mistaken in uttering a sentence of the
form ‘N is the F’, when ‘the F’ denotes, and is a definite description one
associates with ‘N’, a proper name. But one can be mistaken in uttering ‘Peano
is the discoverer of the axioms’, even if one associates ‘the discoverer of the
axioms’ with ‘Peano’. The falsity of this general view is evidence that Kripke is
right in claiming that ‘Gödel’ refers to Gödel, not Schmidt, in the Gödel-case.
(See Kripke 1980, 85n, 87.)
(c) Kripke argues for an alternative account of the way in which ‘Gödel’ refers (the
causal-historical account) which explains, Kripke thinks, why ‘Gödel’ refers to
Gödel in the Gödel-case. The existence of a satisfying general theory of reference
that predicts that ‘Gödel’ refers to Gödel in the Gödel-case counts in favor of the
view that ‘Gödel’ refers to Gödel in the case. (See Kripke 1980, 91–93.)
G-Grounds:
(a) As Gettier himself says in his original presentation of the 10 coins-case, it is clear
that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of
coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in
Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones's
pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job (1963, 122).
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 455

The thought here, shared by many later commentators on Gettier’s cases (See
especially Goldman 1967.), is the thought that S’s justified true belief that p
might fail to be knowledge if there is a disconnection between: (i) what causes S
to believe p, and (ii) what makes S’s belief that p true. In the 10 coins-case, it is
the number of coins in Jones’s pocket that is (partly) causally responsible for
Smith’s belief that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. But
that belief is true “in virtue of” the number of coins in Smith’s pocket. According
to Gettier, this disconnection between what causes Smith to believe and what
makes Smith’s belief true justifies the judgment that Smith does not know.

(b) Some epistemologists (e.g. Unger (1968), Engel (1992), Pritchard (2005))
argue for the related idea that agents in (at least some) Gettier cases are only
luckily correct in believing what they do, and that the presence of this sort of
‘epistemic luck’ explains why such agents lack knowledge. In the 10-coins
case, it is an accident (luck) that Smith is right in believing that the man who
will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket, given that this belief is based partly
on a count of the coins in the pocket of a man who, as it happens, is not the
man who will get the job. This appears to be compelling grounds for
concluding that Smith’s belief does not add up to knowledge.
(c) Other epistemologists (e.g. Lehrer and Paxson (1969)) claim that S’s justified
true belief that p may fail to qualify as knowledge if there are “epistemic
defeaters” to S’s justification. Roughly, q is defeater to S’s justification for p, if
q is compelling evidence against p about which S is unaware. The presence of
defeaters might explain Smith’s lack of knowledge in the 10 coins-case. If
Smith were apprised of the fact that it was he who would get the job, not Jones,
then Smith would no longer justifiably believe that the man who will get the
job has 10 coins in his pocket. Smith’s justification for his belief is thus
defeated and, for this reason, arguably fails to count as knowledge.

The existence of the K-Grounds and G-Grounds ought to remove the suspicion
that the case for taking Kripke’s and Gettier’s counterexamples to be genuine rests
solely on an appeal to the counterexamples’ intuitiveness. Neither list cites any
appeal to intuitions or the intuitiveness of any principle or proposition. Still, some
will say that the K-Grounds and G-Grounds don’t do much to dispel the impression
that, in building a case for the counterexamples’ genuineness, there is going to be an
appeal, at some stage, to the brute intuitiveness of something. For example, part (b)
of the K-Grounds appeals to the falsity of a general principle apparently implied by
the descriptivist theory of reference. But how do we know that this general principle
is false? Perhaps we infer its falsity from the fact that its falsity is intuitive. If so, my
attempt to show that there are grounds, which have nothing to do with the
counterexample’s intuitiveness, for taking the Gödel-case to be genuine only
succeeds in relocating the appeal to intuition. Perhaps it is not a straight out appeal
to intuition that grounds the view that the Gödel-case is a genuine counterexample,
but, ultimately, the justification for some principle or proposition cited as part of
those grounds is going to bottom out in such an appeal.
There is a whiff of something right in this reaction. It is true that the K-Grounds
and G-Grounds appeal to various principles and propositions for which we may
456 M. Deutsch

demand further grounds. This is a general point about justification, however, not one
that holds only of arguments for the genuineness of philosophical counterexamples.
In general, if one argues for p on the basis of q, it may be fairly asked why q should
be accepted. However, it is implausible to suppose that the last link of every
justificatory chain must be a premise asserting the intuitiveness of some proposition
or other. This too is a general point about justification: More often than not,
justifications come to an end with premises that assert something other than that
some proposition is intuitive for someone or some group of people. There is no
obvious reason this general point should fail to hold of arguments for the
genuineness of philosophical counterexamples. So, while the principles and
propositions cited in the K-Grounds and G-Grounds are perhaps not justificatory
rock bottom, we need not accept the idea that the rock bottom (if there is such) must
consist of claims about what is and is not intuitive.
I can imagine experimental philosophers complaining that, although there need be
no rock bottom appeal to intuitions in arguments for philosophical counterexamples,
the fact is that there often is such an appeal. I have already conceded that there is a
good deal of misleading talk about intuitions and their evidential role in philosophy.
On the other hand, I take myself to have shown that Kripke’s argument against
descriptivism and Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory do not depend at any
stage on whether anything is intuitive for any person or group—and Kripke and
Gettier do not even talk as if their arguments depended on this. Maybe there are clear
cases in which a philosophical argument does bottom out in an appeal to what is or
is not intuitive. We should ask, in such a case, whether the appeal to intuition clearly
assumes that intuitions are evidence, or whether, instead, the philosopher presenting
the argument merely means to signal that she has reached a premise she feels
requires no justification.
In any case, the important point is that philosophers need not appeal to intuitions
as evidence, regardless of whether they sometimes do. What difference would it
have made if, contrary to fact, Kripke and Gettier had argued as experimental
philosophy’s caricature of them takes them to have argued? If Gettier, for example,
had argued that the 10 coins-case is a counterexample to the JTB theory simply and
solely because it is an intuitive counterexample to that theory, then his premise
would have been open to refutation-by-opinion-poll. Those of us convinced by the
10 coins-case, however, presumably would have shrugged our shoulders at this. For,
even if Gettier had offered bad reasons for supposing his counterexample to be
genuine, this would not prevent us from casting about for better reasons, such as
those mentioned in the G-Grounds.
The methodological conclusions drawn above apply to ‘armchair’ arguments
quite generally, I think. I have been focusing on Gettier’s and Kripke’s arguments,
but, as I have said, I take these arguments to be paradigmatic examples of the type.
There is surely no obvious reason why the method of offering counterexamples to
semantic or epistemological theories should be different in some crucial respect from
the method of offering counterexamples to metaphysical or ethical theories. It would
be peculiar if, while Kripke’s counterexamples to descriptivism require no backing
via an appeal to their intuitiveness, counterexamples to, say, utilitarianism do require
it. No, if I am right, and the generalization-vs.-counterexample method we see in the
work of Kripke and Gettier does not evidentially depend at any stage on what is
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 457

intuitive, then it is safe to assume that the method, as it appears in the work of others
in different areas, does not evidentially depend on what is intuitive either.6
The role of intuitions in philosophical arguments has thus been greatly
exaggerated, by experimental philosophers, certainly, but also, and perhaps equally,
by more traditional philosophers themselves. Kripke and Gettier are innocent, I
think, but there are others who seem to accept the inaccurate and strangely
psychologistic view that, in philosophy, ‘it all comes down to intuitions.’ It almost
never comes down to intuitions, if what this means is that philosophical arguments
either do or must terminate with premises asserting that some person or group is in
(or would be in, given the right prompts) the psychological state we would describe
as intuiting that something is so. Instead, in philosophy, it all comes down to
arguments, not intuitions, and very often these arguments terminate with premises
asserting that some not-purely-psychological fact obtains. Gettier’s and Kripke’s
arguments are cases in point.7
Sometimes, experimental philosophers present their empirical studies as a
challenge not to philosophical theories of x (where x is knowledge, reference, or
etc.) but instead as a challenge to theories of the concept of x. They claim that a good
portion of philosophy involves ‘conceptual analysis,’ and that their empirical studies
provide evidence for or against a variety of received conceptual analyses.8 Is there
an important distinction here that I have overlooked? Perhaps experimental
philosophers take more traditional philosophers to take intuitions as evidence, not
for claims about the (nonconceptual) world, but instead for claims about the
application conditions of concepts. Earlier, I mentioned in passing that Jackson
advocates conducting opinion polls in order to test conceptual analyses. Is testing
conceptual analyses an importantly different sort of activity from the activity of
offering counterexamples to theories, and, if so, do experiments on philosophical
intuitions have some evidential bearing on accounts of a concept’s application
conditions?
The answer to both questions is, I think, ‘no.’ Consider the claim that Smith from
the 10 coins-case does not know (e): that the man who will get the job has 10 coins
in his pocket. This is not a claim directly about concepts and their conditions of
application. On the other hand, the claim is true if and only if the concept knowledge
fails to apply to Smith and his relation to the proposition expressed by (e). Given this

6
Two anonymous referees (this journal) urge that Rawls’s (1971, 1993) account of how to select justified
‘principles of justice’ is an account that depends on taking moral intuitions about particular cases as
evidence for moral theory. The picture is that, on the Rawlsian account, we start with our moral intuitions
about particular cases on one side and we try to bring these into ‘reflective equilibrium’ with a variety of
moral principles on the other. Though I am off my home turf here, and though Rawls himself seems to
endorse a somewhat different picture, I will say that the account just described strikes me as very strange
indeed. What we want, surely, are moral principles that don’t conflict with particular moral truths;
conflicts with intuition will matter only if what is intuited is true. And how do we know whether our moral
intuitions about particular cases are true? We know this by assessing arguments for or against their truth.
In other words, in ethics, just as in epistemology and philosophy of language, philosophers need not
appeal to intuitions as evidence, even if they, misleadingly, sometimes do.
7
Keep in mind that to deny that philosophy must treat intuitions as evidence is not to deny that intuition is
the causal source of some philosophical knowledge.
8
Joshua Knobe’s widely read papers in experimental action theory (Knobe 2003a, b) concern, Knobe
says, the concept of intentional action. Similarly, Shaun Nichols’s papers in experimental metaphysics
(Nichols 2004 and Nichols 2006) are supposed to concern the concept of free action.
458 M. Deutsch

equivalence, the evidence, whatever it may be, for thinking that Smith does not
know the proposition is going to be evidence for the claim about the concept
knowledge failing to apply, and whatever fails to count as evidence for the former
will fail to count as evidence for the latter. I have already argued that intuitions are
not, and need not be, treated as evidence for the claim that Smith does not know (e).
This argument applies equally to the view that intuitions are needed as evidence for
the claim that the concept knowledge fails to apply to the relation between Smith and
the proposition in question.
Of course, the existence of a counterexample, such as the 10 coins-case, allows us to
generalize. We can say, based on the existence of the case, that there are, possibly,
instances of justified true belief that are not instances of knowledge, and hence that the
concept knowledge does not coextend with the concept justified true belief. So
reflection on hypothetical (and sometimes real) cases can reveal the contours of
various concepts we find philosophically interesting and important. But it is a mistake
to think that there is some separate stage of conceptual analysis, different in some
significant way from theory construction and the consideration of putative counter-
examples, at which intuitions might play some crucial evidential role. It is therefore
also a mistake to think that intuition surveys and their results might pose a threat to
this or that conceptual analysis. An intuition survey will not settle the question of
whether Smith knows that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. For
identical reasons, such a survey will not settle the question of whether the concept
knowledge applies to the relation between Smith and the proposition expressed by (e).
Since intuitions need not be regarded as evidence, either for theories of
philosophically interesting phenomena, such as knowledge and reference them-
selves, or for analyses of the concepts of such phenomena, philosophers should not
fret, if it turns out that different cultural groups have differing philosophical
intuitions. However, in the circumstance in which the philosophical intuitions of two
or more cultures clash, how do we decide who is right? Is it not imperious (and
perhaps imperialistic) to assume that the intuitions of our own culture are correct?
If all we had to rely on in justifying our judgments about philosophical cases were
the fact that those judgments are intuitive, cultural variability would put us in a real
bind. We would have to admit that cultural groups with differing intuitions have just
as much right to their judgments about cases as we do to ours.9 The intuitiveness of
the judgments is not all we have to rely on, however. We can try to convince those
who disagree with us by providing justifications for our intuitions. If our

9
Some philosophers, including Ernest Sosa (2007), William Lycan (2006), and an anonymous referee
(this journal), have suggested that persistent cultural variation in philosophical intuitions may indicate
mere ‘verbal disagreement’. (Nichols and Ulatowski (2007) take a similar line on the ‘Knobe Effect’, first
reported in Knobe 2003a.) Perhaps, for example, ‘knowledge’ in an East Asian English speaker’s mouth
expresses a different, though presumably related, concept than that expressed by ‘knowledge’ in a Western
English speaker’s mouth. If so, then there may be no real conflict—no ‘substantive disagreement’—
between East Asian English speakers who judge that agents in Gettier cases ‘really know’ and Western
English speakers who judge that they don’t. I find this line implausible. It is of course possible that subtle
conceptual differences are producing the apparent disagreement. But there is no evidence at all that this is
in fact what is going on. People can and do have persistent disagreements about even putative necessary
truths without this implying that they are operating with different concepts. Philosophers have such
disagreements with one another all the time. Presumably, they are not, most of the time, ‘speaking past
each other’.
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy 459

justifications are good enough, we can say, without feeling guilty of cultural
insensitivity, that we are right and they are wrong. My own view is that the
K-Grounds and the G-Grounds provide a very strong case for thinking that the
Gödel and 10 coins cases are genuine counterexamples to the semantic and
epistemological theories they are meant to challenge. If East Asians and Indians
intuit otherwise, they ought, on reflection, and after being exposed to the K-Grounds
and G-Grounds, to capitulate.10
What explains cross-cultural variability in philosophical intuitions, even if it is a
mistake to think such variability poses a severe problem for traditional philosophizing?
That is a good question—for a social scientist.11

Acknowledgements For help thinking through the issues raised in this paper, I’d like to thank Harry
Deutsch, Patrick Hawley, Joe Lau, Don Tontiplaphol, and audiences at the University of Hong Kong and
Lingnan University. Three anonymous referees (this journal) made suggestions that led to substantial
improvements.

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10
The criticism of experimental philosophy offered in the main text differs from most other published
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Philosophers are surely not obligated to explain cultural variability in philosophical intuitions; they lack
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