Demographic Differences in Philosophical Intuition: a Reply to Joshua Knobe - Review of Philosophy and Psychology

1. In their paper on “The Philosophical Use and Misuse of Science,” Kingsbury and Dare (2017) offer the following definition: “To cherry-pick is to appeal to just those scientific results or theories that appear to support your view and to disregard or give insufficient weight to those that conflict with it.” (450)

2. In addition to cherry-picking the studies he cites, Knobe has also cherry-picked the parts of studies he chooses to mention. He notes, correctly, that Beebe et al. (2015) “find cross-cultural robustness for … metaethical intuitions.” But that study also reports that “[d]ifferences in participants’ … age were found to significantly affect their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact” (Beebe et al. 2015, 386). Knobe does not mention that finding.

3. 40 million is a dramatic total, though it is rather misleading since there are three outliers each of which reports data from over 100,000 participants. But even if we drop these three, the total sample size of the remaining 97 studies is over 93,000 participants.

4. We have adopted a broad interpretation of what counts as a “demographic” variable that includes personality traits and cognitive styles. All of these features might be used in the sort of metaphilosophical argument that challenges the reliability of philosophical intuitions. One demographic variable that does not appear on our list is race. This is because, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies exploring racial differences in philosophical intuitions. And, as a helpful referee has pointed out, many publications in other areas (including medicine) fail to report or analyze the racial composition of the groups they have studied.

5. The studies were first reported in Starmans and Friedman (2014) and are presented in much greater detail in Starmans and Friedman (2020).

6. The exceptions are Sytsma & Machery (2010), Horvath and Wiegmann (2016), and Starmans and Friedman (2020).

7. Failed replications should also be examined carefully. For instance, Machery et al. (2020) have shown that Cova et al.’s (2021) failed replication of Grau and Pury (2014), which reported that variation in intuitions about reference and about love were systematically related, was a false negative due to an insufficient sample size.

8. For a classic overview of early work in this tradition, see Nisbett (2003).

9. One referee encourages us to speculate on what future research will find. But we are inclined to think that such speculation would be premature. What’s needed now is a lot more empirical work of the sort that Knobe’s paper may discourage.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

   Stephen P. Stich

2. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

   Edouard Machery

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Edouard Machery.

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We are grateful to Wesley Buckwalter, Nick Byrd, Florian Cova, John Doris, Vilius Dranseika, Ori Friedman, David Rose, Krzysztof Sękowski, Christina Starmans, Justin Sytsma, Kevin Tobia, John Turri, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.