The Burden of Proof upon Metaphysical Methods by Conny Rhode

Author:Conny Rhode
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783031277771
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Method of Cases

Following these basic types of evidence, I now turn to evidential methods that incorporate such evidence—beginning with the method of cases, where a ‘case’ is simply the subject of a thought experiment.8 Here, a hypothetical situation is presented, with respect to which (a) a given theory at issue implies some proposition P, and (b) we have the (strong) intuition that ¬P. This intuition is taken to constitute (strong) evidence against the theory at issue. To briefly illustrate this, simply consider one of the original Gettier cases (1963: 122). The theory at issue states that a subject s knows that P iff P is true, s believes that P, and s is justified in believing that P. So let Smith and Jones be two applicants for the same job on the day of their interviews. Smith has seen that Jones has ten coins in their pocket, and Smith has been informed by the company director that Jones will get the job. So Smith infers that J: The applicant who gets the job has ten coins in their pocket. Smith believes that J, Smith is justified in believing that J, and, as it turns out, J is true—not because Jones gets the job, but because Smith themselves gets the job and also happens to have ten coins in their pocket. Intuitively, Smith did not know that J, yet the theory at issue implies that they knew that J. The intuition that Smith does not know that J is thus employed as evidence against the theory whose implication is inconsistent with this intuition.

As this example illustrates, the method of cases is distinguished from other methods by its employment of thought experiments. It does not appear to be distinguished, however, by the employment of a type of evidence peculiar to this method. Rather, it seems to employ intuitional evidence, which I have already examined above. And yet it might perhaps be argued successfully (albeit, I suspect, with some difficulty) that the nature of intuitions must be understood very narrowly, to the effect that the method of cases does not in fact employ intuitions as evidence, and instead employs some other psychological event as evidence in support of a given proposition. However, as long as this other psychological event remains just that—a content or occurrence contained within the totality of someone’s present psychological activity (or linguistic practice), and thus an element of psycho-linguistic content—the same restriction will apply to it as has been found to apply to intuitions.

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