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Ignorance Helps Philosophy: Objections to Mizrahi

In On Appeals to Intuition: a reply to Muoz-Surez (2015, The Reasoner 9 (2):
12-13), Mizrahi purports to reject a counterargument I presented in Should we
entitle strong appeals to intuition? (2014, The Reasoner 8 (7):77-78). Mizrahi
claims: For his counterargument to succeed [...] Muoz-Surez must show that
agreement is irrelevant to the strength of [appeals to intuition] (2014, 13). Here I'll
illustrate the view that if the strength of AIs should be explained by appealing to the
agreement among experts, it should be explained by the possibility of agreement
about what they ignore rather than by appealing to the current agreement about what
they know, so I'll offer further support to my counterargument.
Undoubtedly, the social status of a philosopher matters to the evaluation of appeals
to authority (AAs) who the intuiter is determines whether the appeal to her/his
judgment is a strong AAs. The social status of an intuiter is a kind of social fact
which derives from her/his place in a community interested in her/his ideas and,
sometimes, in her/his ideals. However, I think that this isn't the kind of social fact
relevant to the evaluation of the strength of philosophical AIs. Of course, the
strength of AAs and AIs is regulated by facts about the subjects, but not by the same
kind of facts about the relevant subjects.
I think that the turbid foundation of the debate about the strength of AAs and AIs is
precisely the notion of 'strength'. It seems that we count on a clear notion of
'strength' when we describe the conditions that strong AAs must fulfill (e.g., they are
strong only if we appeal to a genuine authority), but in the case of AIs that notion
comes out to be more cloudy. This is the motivation because of in (Muoz-Surez
2014) I advanced an analysis of the notion of 'AIs' strength' on the basis of an
analysis of the notion of 'intuitiveness'. This approach seems to be more promising
than the strength-centered approach adopted by Mizrahi. In what follows, I won't
use 'strength' but 'degrees of insightfulness'.
Mr. D is a philosopher who has acquired all the currently available theoretical about
C. He has never been recognized as an authority in his community. Mrs. B knows
the same things about C that Mr. D know but, unlike him, she has been widely
recognized as a leading authority about C. Unlike Mrs. B, Mr. D is convinced that p
is the case about C. Mr. D's daughter, Jane, is a first-year novice philosophy student
who untiringly tries to convince their classmates that p is the case about C, by
claiming: Mr. D thinks that p is the case about C. Of course, Jane hasn't
succeeded because of her weak AA. Her classmates often advice her that, if she
wants to use AAs to convince them of facts about C, she should rather appeal to
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what Mrs. B thinks.

One day Mr. D conceived a hypothetical scenario for showing that p is the case
about C. The scenario showed that p is the case about C, but not because p was
directly inferred from the theoretical knowledge that he shares with Mrs. B;
otherwise, Mrs. B would have inferred it before. One day, Mr. D decided to publish
his achievement to other philosophers. Surprisingly, they, including Mrs. B, found
that Mr. D's verdict (i.e., that p is the case about C) strongly seems to be true, but
they don't know why. Most experts, including Mrs. B disagree with Mr. D. Mrs. B
sent a letter to him saying:
... Dear Mr. D,
After thinking a lot about your view that p is the case about C, I must confess
that the only support that I've found to believe that it's true is that, given the
whole currently available theoretical knowledge about C, your view looks to
be the unique plausible verdict to your scenario. The thesis: 'p is the case about
C' is highly insightful
Nowadays, despite the new fame of his father, instead of insisting with making AAs,
Jane tries to convince her classmates that p is the case about C by showing that this
is the unique plausible verdict they can conceive when considering her father's
scenario on the basis of all the currently available theoretical knowledge about C.
Mrs. B started to do the same move, i.e., she started to present the following appeal
to intuition to her academic community: 'it seems that p is the case about C,
therefore p is the case about C'. However, Mrs. B all along adverts that the
conclusion of that AI must be conditionally granted as follows: 'it seems that p is the
case about C, therefore p is the case about C until new theoretical knowledge shows
us the contrary or leads us to better reasons to justify it'.
This case illustrates my view about strong AIs. AIs can be strong in virtue of the
degree of insightfulness of their conclusions, which might be independent of the
agreement among experts. Most experts of a community can disagree with the truth
of a conclusion of an appeal to intuition without questioning its insightfulness.
Further, like Mrs. B thinks, the conclusions of strong AIs (i.e., AIs with conclusions
with a high degree of insightfulness) should be conditionally taken for granted
because their degree of intuitiveness varies in virtue of our ignorance about the
relevant subject matter.
The degree of insightfulness of a proposition (e.g. 'that there might be subjects
lacking experiences who are behaviorally indistinguishable from normal humans')
seems to co-vary with a social fact: the shared ignorance of certain expert
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community with respect to the relevant matter. This illustrates the view that subjects
should be the focus of epistemic evaluation, but not because we should be
exclusively focused in what they agree to know, but also in what they jointly ignore.
Indeed, it does matter who the expert intuiter is, not only because of her knowledge,
but also because of her ignorance. Thus, one could argue that expert intuiters are
experts in revealing the limits of the available knowledge, i.e., experts in indicating
facts about which their communities are ignorant.
If I'm right, the joint work of Agnotology (vid.: Proctor & Schiebinger (eds.) 2008.
Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press) and Epistemology will help us to reveal the magic of the
intuitiveness of some propositions or, at least, it would lead us to get more
agreement about what we don't know. The study of intuitiveness could help us to
know more about ignorance.
Carlos Muoz-Surez
University of Barcelona