On On Folk Epistemology

ABSTRACT

This commentary focuses on two main points in Gerken's remarkable book, On Folk Epistemology: his appeal to dual process theories of cognition and his alleged identification of some case judgments as normatively deficient. The first point leads to a friendly amendment of his proposal, the second to a more serious challenge.

KEYWORDS:

• experimental philosophy
• case judgment
• dual process theories

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here I should note that the discussion of the empirical literature reporting an absence of stakes effect is not satisfactory (Gerken 2017, 37). While it is true that sometimes ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ when the test is sensitive (e.g. when the test has a high power), absence of evidence is evidence of absence. And, pace Gerken, some studies have an extremely high power, including Rose 2019. Unpublished work by the Geography of Philosophy Project (www.geographyofphilosophy.com/) confirms that stakes do not matter for knowledge ascription (but see Dinger and Zakkou, 2021).

2 As I have argued in Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, the focus on the alleged intuitive nature of these judgments is misleading. Gerken agrees for reasons that partially overlap with mine (2017, 111).

3 Readers may be interested in the following introduction to some striking cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIFwIEZ_xes.

4 The distinction between these two approaches rests on some understanding of how to individuate processes. It assumes that when a stimulus is processed at different levels, it is not processed by several different processes.

5 Gerken does not appeal to the dual-process framework in Gerken and Beebe (2016), and the approach there is compatible with the level of processing framework.

6 Of course, they could still be incorrect even if they are not the outputs of normatively deficient cognitive processes. Furthermore, they could be unwarranted even if they are not such outputs. For instance, normatively appropriate processes might be used in unusual conditions (see the discussion of the idea of a proper domain of a judgment in Machery 2017, 112).

7 Gerken explains some but not all phenomena related to salient alternatives by means of the epistemic focal bias account; he appeals to other explanantia to account for the role of practical effects.