Philosophical intuitions: should we fear that the world does not exist?

Katarzyna Kuś, Bartosz Maćkiewicz

Philosophy of Science Student Society
7 May 2019
Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, room 0.06, 6 p.m.

Can the methods of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics or developmental psychology help resolve philosophical debates that have lasted for thousands of years? Perhaps strong intuitions supporting radical scepticism, the impossibility of discovering the truth about the world, or the separability of mind and body are merely the result of our brains processing information incorrectly? How is our fear of the Cartesian demon affected by what we heard in kindergarten?

In many methodological traditions in philosophy, intuitions play an important role in justifying theoretical positions. We accept some premises of philosophical arguments because they are intuitively obvious, assess thought experiments in accordance with our best intuitions, and question philosophical positions whose consequences are intuitively unacceptable. Experimental philosophers working within the so-called sources project hold that some philosophical intuitions originate in otherwise fairly well-understood psychological mechanisms. If so, by investigating the psychological sources of the intuitions behind philosophical problems, we can at least understand those problems better, even if we cannot resolve them definitively.

One such problem is sensory perception. Although it is now primarily studied by the empirical sciences, it remains a lively topic of philosophical discussion. In particular, the traditional problem raised by phenomena such as illusions and hallucinations remains relevant: if these cognitive errors are possible, how can we trust perception at all and regard it as a source of reliable knowledge about the external world?

Our talk presents contemporary experimental-philosophy research within the sources-project paradigm. We focus on perception and on philosophical arguments, dating back to antiquity, which suggest that perception provides neither genuine knowledge nor access to a world independent of us.