Comments on Hales:<i>Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy</i>

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 I’ll just note here that Hales’s claim that if there were no way to adjudicate between, say, ‘rational intuition’ and revelation, our choice of one over the other would just be a matter of luck (and thus not yield knowledge) strikes me as debatable. First of all, the defender of revelation might claim that their decision had more to do with something like ‘grace’ than luck, and so the group that happened to choose revelation correctly would count as knowers. Not being a defender of revelation, I wouldn’t go that way myself, but even the naturalist could claim that there is a difference between being lucky that the process you use happens to yield a truth in a particular instance, and being lucky to have settled on using a process that is typically reliable. The issue is how wide one must spread one’s net when one identifies the ‘process’ by which a belief is formed. If one just looks at the immediate process used, then one is using a reliable process, while if one treats the relevant ‘process’ as being the one where the first‐level process is chosen, then the process may unreliable. I think that there are good reasons not to spread one’s net in this wider fashion, but I won’t pursue the matter here. 2 Hales, p. 129, and even here he seems sympathetic to the suggestion that the axioms of logic, like mathematical propositions, are not really philosophical propositions at all (which would allow him to hold on to global relativism for philosophical propositions proper). 3 Indeed, one might argue that even ‘epistemological propositions’ is a wider class than one is entitled to work with, and that the argument for relativism may be taken to apply only to a sub‐class of propositions even within epistemology. 4 The conception of intuition as a ‘faculty’ is attributed to Descartes (pp. 14–15), Jackson (p. 16), Bonjour and Bealer (p. 36), and endorsed by Hales himself (p. 24). 5 ‘The familiar way that most contemporary philosophers acquire beliefs about philosophical propositions is through the logical analysis of rational intuitions that must be taken as foundational, basic data’ (p. 49). 6 Hales, p. 10. 7 The terminology of ‘normative characterizations’ and ‘archetypical applications’ is, of course, taken from T. Burge’s ‘Intellectual Norms and the Foundations of Mind’, Journal of Philosophy, 83(12) (December 1986), pp. 697–720. 8 My position may thus be closer to that of Michael Lynch, who while supporting the use of intuitions in philosophy, also believes that philosophers should live by the commandment ‘thou shalt not posit mysterious faculties without necessity’ (see his ‘Trusting Intuition’, in P. Greenough and M. Lynch (eds) Truth and Realism: Current Debates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)). 9 What justifies our belief that intuitions themselves can justify beliefs? 10 Talking of rational intuitions also encourages the impression that intuitions are a separate faculty that tracks truths that are robustly independent of the intuitions themselves (Plato’s theory of forms being perhaps the most extreme instance of this aspect of the ‘Socratic’ tradition). Once the epistemology of intuition is set up in this ‘realistic’ fashion, scepticism about the reliability of intuition can be natural. I won’t go into my own views in detail here, but I think that armchair analysis is on much firmer ground when one understands its justification in a coherentist fashion, which is in turn supported by taking the inputs to such analysis as partially constitutive of the concepts being analysed. (For a slightly more extended discussion of this, see my ‘Intuitions and Semantic Theory’, Metaphilosophy, 36 (3) (April 2005), pp. 363–80.) Such construction makes use of all of our commitments and doesn’t need to appeal to any special faculty of intuition. Indeed, ‘intuition’ (like ‘meaning’ or ‘concept’) may be one of those handy and flexible words that can be very hard to avoid, but not especially useful when engaging in actual theorizing.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.