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The Calibration Critique of the Philosophical Method of Cases: Some Hope for the Prospect of Armchair Knowledge
To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—principally, Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg, and his colleagues, and more recently, Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions, or case judgments cannot be calibrated, that is, standardly certified as reliably tracking the phenomena of philosophical interest, means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that philosophical theories elicited through the philosophical method of cases, is just the distorted output of the bad implicit, or explicit theory of the theorist. Moreover, they take this to license a certain skepticism about the prospect of armchair knowledge. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and outlines some reasons to be optimistic about the prospect of armchair knowledge.