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Book Review
Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates
Armchair Philosophy, by Michael Strevens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 345.
Is armchair knowledge possible, and if so, how and of what? Insightful, re-
flective, and wide-ranging, Thinking off your Feet: How Empirical Psychology
Vindicates Armchair Philosophy by Michael Strevens offers a thought-provok-
ing answer. The form this answer takes is not so much an empirical exam-
ination of the psychological features of armchair inquiry, or at least, not so
directly. Instead, the answer takes the form of a speculative hypothesis, for
which empirical evidence is periodically brought to bear. The hypothesis is a
portrayal of philosophical analysis, such that if philosophical analysis and its
various components were to operate in a certain fashion, then it would be
possible, when everything is working at its best, for philosophical analysis to
generate knowledge. The result is rich rumination on the nature of concepts,
natural kinds, inductive inference, and reference as these things relate to the
business of conducting philosophical research. It is an ambitious project, and
given its scope, portrayals of these things or even of philosophical activity
itself are likely to raise interesting discussion and debate among philosophers
of both the empirical and non-empirical persuasion. The conclusion is also
sure to be provocative, that while philosophical knowledge may indeed be
possible from the armchair, it may only be so in a limited sense that falls
short of the central aim of philosophy.
According to Thinking off your Feet (hereafter TOYF), the goal of philo-
sophical activity is to generate philosophical knowledge. While this know-
ledge might potentially take many forms, the central aim is to discover
knowledge of ‘essential natures’. Essential natures are the properties that
explain why something belongs to the category that it does. One way to
acquire this knowledge, it might be thought, is by engaging in ‘philosophical
analysis’ and one aspect of philosophical analysis is the ‘method of cases’.
While philosophers utilize many different methods in their research, the
primary focus of the book is devoted to this method. When using this
method, philosophical research essentially amounts to categorization.
Philosophers create cases to elicit judgments about the category membership
of a specimen or phenomenon under investigation. Philosophers then use the
judgments that they make in response to such cases, together with what those

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cases are like, to hypothesize about what the definition of that category must

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be. After enough case judgments are made, the hypotheses generated about
the category in question result in philosophical knowledge.
To explicate the nature of concepts in philosophical analysis, TOYF begins
with a discussion of natural kind concepts. Though eschewing the label
‘theory-theory ’ of concepts often used in cognitive science, an account of
broadly this type is introduced called ‘causal minimalism’. According to
causal minimalism, natural kind concepts are characterized in terms of
core causal beliefs that link category membership to observable properties.
A core causal belief about swans, to take a central example, is the ‘mini-
theory ’, if you will, that ‘there is something about swans that causes white-
ness’. More specifically this requires the belief that ‘there is some internal
property P robustly possessed by swans that, by way of a certain causal
mechanism, causes whiteness’ (p. 98). For a specimen to ‘robustly possess’
a property is for it to be ‘entangled’ with that property. Swanhood is
entangled with certain causal properties P, for example, when ‘there is a
counterfactually robust but not necessarily exceptionless connection between
being a swan and possessing P’ (p. 99).
Causal minimalism about natural kind concepts, such as that of water or
that of a swan, is then used to motivate a broader view—‘concept inductiv-
ism’—about philosophical concepts, such as that of knowledge or that of
causation. According to concept inductivism, the cognitive significance of
philosophical concepts is derived from our ‘ordinary beliefs’ about them.
Ordinary belief are those beliefs that do not explicitly involve essential na-
tures or what directly logically follows from them. Instead, counted among
ordinary beliefs are everyday beliefs about observable properties or charac-
teristics and appearances of things, as well as theoretical beliefs, like core
causal beliefs, beliefs about explanatory relations, patterns, or correlations,
and even beliefs guided by deductive logical inference. Philosophical concepts
are said to be ‘inductive’ in the sense that they involve explanatory reasoning
from such beliefs to category membership.
Philosophical analysis of these causal inductivist concepts proceeds by
‘inductive analysis’. The basic idea is that when philosophers use the
method of cases, they rely on ordinary beliefs to make initial judgments
about the cases they ’ve created. These ‘starter beliefs’ serve as the entry
point for theorizing. Philosophers then reflect on the case judgments
they ’ve made in virtue of their ordinary beliefs to subsequently hypothesize
about and build theories concerning the categories in question. In this way,
‘[w]e philosophers are like scientific theoreticians who, when all the empirical
evidence is in, sit down to inductively infer its implications concerning the
structure of the world—except that the evidence is not derived from obser-
vation, experiment, or measurement, but from our own case judgments’
(p. 19). When these inductive inferences are made with enough care by

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those who possess enough information, knowledge of essential natures is

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acquired. Or is it?
Towards the end of the book, we’re told that it’s not. Or at least, often not.
A lot of the time, the method of cases does not result in knowledge of
essential natures. The reason is because many philosophical categories lack
essential natures. (It is unclear just how many lack them according to TOYF,
but presumedly enough to justify a book about what happens when there is a
lack.) The reason why many categories lack essential natures is because there
is no universal explainer in virtue of which individual objects of substantive
philosophical inquiry belong to the categories that they do. Categorizations
are ‘made inductively and on highly heterogenous grounds’, where no essen-
tial nature can explain category membership of every specimen of a kind (p.
224). Water is again offered as an example. A specimen counts as water when
it has a ‘property complex’, which boils down to the necessary and sufficient
conditions required for waterhood. Combining the property complexes for
each water specimen creates a long disjunction of properties shared by all
specimens of water. The worry, however, is that this is not explanatory, and
thus cannot be an essential nature, on this understanding of essential nature.
Some disjuncts might explain why some specimens are classified as water in
some situations, while other disjuncts uniquely explain this for other speci-
mens. Grasping the disjunction that classifies all specimens as water will
probably not explain why any one particular specimen was classified as
water. What is worse, in practice, we regularly will not know which particular
disjunct explains classification and thus knowledge of the disjunction is un-
likely to improve our understanding of the category.
Despite the conclusion that philosophical analysis cannot provide know-
ledge of essential natures in many cases, philosophical analysis may not be
doomed. In the remainder, TOYF argues that the method can still provide
other sorts of knowledge. While it is unlikely that there is one thing that
groups specimens together that share a single explanatory property, speci-
mens are regularly grouped together by broad clusters of related explanatory
properties (referred to in TOYF as ‘secondary explanatory organizers’). Given
this, it may still be possible to acquire knowledge of causal-explanatory struc-
tures, generalizations, patterns, and central tendencies of specimens and the
categories they belong to by appealing to these clusters. We categorize a
specimen as water, for example, because its being water is the best explan-
ation of the fact that it has the cluster of properties that it does. Similarly, we
classify a belief as knowledge because its being knowledge is the best explan-
ation for the fact that it has the cluster of properties that it does. For cate-
gories that lack essential natures, the method of cases can still yield insight
into the role—and in particular the explanatory role—that those categories
can play in the relevant domain, for example, the explanatory role of know-
ledge in the epistemic domain.

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Because judgments from cases play such a foundational role in this picture

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of philosophical activity, whether or not philosophical knowledge is ultim-
ately possible, even in this more limited sense, depends largely on the nature
and status of these judgments and the beliefs they are based on. Early in the
book, TOYF adopts three stances about these things. The first is that judg-
ments about cases are certain. Here, the claim is that psychologically speak-
ing, case judgments often elicit feelings of certainty, or at least, very strong
confidence among philosophers. When it comes to cases in metaphysics
involving backup causation, for example, ‘nothing I could learn about the
physics of causality would persuade me—so I feel—to abandon the judgment
that the presence of a backup is irrelevant to an event’s causal status’ (p. 5). A
similar sentiment is expressed for the judgment that Gettierized belief is not
knowledge: ‘[W]hat could I possibly learn that would lead me to set aside this
verdict? Not a thing’ (p. 6). The second is that judgments are reliable. More
specifically, the judgments made in response to the method of cases are re-
liable guides to the truth concerning the subject of that judgment. Perhaps
not all judgments will have this feature, but a goal of the book is to explain
how it could be the case that at least enough of them are reliable guides to
elucidate a significant number of philosophical phenomena across subfields.
The third is that the philosophical knowledge that case judgments lead to is
substantive. Of course, a judgment might be perfectly reliable, while the sub-
ject of that judgment is trivial or uninteresting. Conversely, a goal of the book
is to explain how case judgments have the ability to generate knowledge, not
just of any categories, but of substantive categories. While this criterion is a
little fuzzy, it pertains to the idea that philosophical analysis should ‘carve
nature at its joints’ or ‘reflect the fault lines of reality ’. For categorization of
substantive philosophical phenomena to occur, the rule that fixes the exten-
sion of a category should not only answer to the contours of our concept, but
also depend to some meaningful extent on the way the world actually is
structured.
Throughout the book, certainty, reliability, and substantivity are posited as
either psychological properties of case judgments that need to be explained by
accounts of philosophical analysis or presented as properties that philosoph-
ical analysis should have in order for armchair philosophy to be vindicated.
At several junctures, these things structure the presentation of the argument,
serving as either motivation or desiderata for the accounts of concepts, con-
ceptual analysis, and the reference relation given. For example, early in the
book, TOYF rejects other theories of concepts in favour of the one it will
eventually advocate on the grounds that the former do not explain feelings of
case certainty as well as the latter. If certainty is not actually a cognitive
process that legitimately underlies philosophical analysis though, then it
questions that early move. The central theory of reference advocated in the
book is motivated by the idea that if it were true, then case judgments would
be reliable enough to vindicate the method being defended. Likewise, at

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several junctures, theories are selected or rejected because this would make it

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more likely that philosophical analysis has the ability to provide substantive
knowledge. (An interesting question, although one that cannot be addressed
here, is whether a vindicated method must be ‘substantive’; many worthwhile
philosophical projects may fall short of this.)
During this presentation, however, I found myself wondering three things.
First, does case certainty accurately reflect the psychology of case judgments?
Second, beyond being just one possible way judgments and categories should
ideally be constituted if the method of cases is going to be vindicated, are
reliability and substantivity actually true of them in practice? Third, would it
follow from TOYF’s theory of philosophical analysis that judgments are re-
liable or that the categories under analysis are substantive, regardless of
whether these things were true in practice? If there are reasons to doubt
these things are true of the method in practice, then this begins to question
the structure of the argument. There are also some theoretical reasons to
doubt that philosophical judgments will be reliable or promote knowledge of
substantive categories even if the account of philosophical activity presented
in TOYF is correct. If this is so, to some extent, then it begins to question the
strength of the theoretical vindication being offered. These doubts are pre-
sented less as a denial of the possibility of armchair knowledge and more in
the spirit of identifying an opportunity to engage in further research on the
nature and efficacy of the method.
Beginning with certainty, are enough case judgments made with certainty
to justify appealing to certainty in evaluating theories of philosophical con-
cepts? Few examples of cases or case judgments are cited, somewhat odd for a
book vindicating the method of cases. A systematic scientific study of the
frequency and degree of case certainty would be decisive. Short of the sys-
tematic approach, however, my own anecdotal examination leads to suspi-
cion. I suspect that a great many case judgments are actually made with
hesitation or even ambivalence. Judgments in complex, multifaceted, and
imaginative cases in the literature on time travel and deterministic roll-
back scenarios, swampman, teletransporters, twin earth, and so on, are
prone to doubt. I confess that I would probably flip the switch in trolley
problems but that I am only slightly below chance that I shouldn’t push the
man.
There is reason to doubt case certainty even in some of the most paradig-
matic examples offered in its favour. Throughout the book, the Gettier case
tradition is often used as a touchstone for the method of cases and its success.
This is a view, I fear, that many epistemologists working in that tradition do
not share. Of course, it’s probably safe to assume that most philosophers
confidently believe that justified true belief is insufficient for knowledge. In
fact, it’s probably safe to assume philosophers thought that long before
Gettier’s cases were published (Dutant 2015). But there is a difference between
the claim that we are confident of that conclusion, on the one hand, and the

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6 Book Review

claim that the majority of Gettier cases inspire in us confident case judgments,

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on the other. Over its forty-five-year history, the literature following Gettier’s
cases has produced countless thought experiments that vary substantially in
presentation and response. (For discussion see Turri 2018.) Related observa-
tions about confidence have been noted in the literature on the metaphysics of
causation and counterfactual dependence (Collins, et al. 2004, p. 37). While
such cases might have secured confident verdicts in a small range of initial
cases, subsequent cases within the resulting literatures have done the opposite.
The complexity and ever-growing intricacy of cases have produced less cer-
tainty among practitioners than they have instability and frustration. A par-
ticularly colourful illustration of the point is made by Gendler and Hawthorne
in their indictment of the method of cases. Using fake barn-style Gettier cases
as an example, they suggest that case certainty evaporates when we consider
even only a handful of Gettier case variations. The authors famously conclude
that ‘the concept of knowledge, prior to its being fashioned and moulded by
certain philosophical traditions, never offered any stable negative verdict in the
original fake barn case’ (Gendler and Hawthorne 2005, p. 248).
On to substantivity, does philosophical analysis provide knowledge of sub-
stantive categories outside our own heads? One reason to be suspicious in-
volves our access to the underlying psychology and processing of cases and
case judgments. Arguably, substantive knowledge requires that philosophers
have this access. Philosophical analysis is unlikely to get a grasp on the fault
lines of reality if we do not even understand why we judge or categorize
things the way we do, at least in a way that will be of much use to researchers.
Without this, it increases the probability that the things our judgments are
answering to are not aspects of the world, or if they are, then they are aspects
of the world other than the one we are attempting to characterize. One
passage on psychological access from TOYF is illustrative (pp. 67-74). In it,
we are asked to consider some famous experimental stimuli used in the
developmental study of concepts:
These are animals that live on a farm. They go ‘neigh’ and people put saddles on
their backs and ride them, and these animals like to eat oats and hay and everybody
calls them horses. But some scientists went up to the farm and decided to study
them really carefully. They did blood tests and X-rays and looked way deep inside
with microscopes and found out these animals weren’t like most horses. These
animals had the inside parts of cows. They had the blood of cows, the bones of
cows; and when they looked to see where they came from, they found out their
parents were cows. And, when they had babies, their babies were cows. What do
you think these animals really are: horses or cows? (Keil 1989, p. 305)
The tentative response in TOYF is that the animals in question probably are
cows. In response to such cases, it is suggested, we can also grasp the reasons
that underlie this judgment:
With a bit of thought, however, I can recover the reasoning that went into the
judgment. Whatever these animals are, something must have gone awry in the

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development either of their insides or of their outsides. What’s outside, I know, is

for the most part caused by what’s inside. So I have a choice between unusual

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insides causing typical outsides or typical insides causing unusual outsides. The
latter kind of scenario is more plausible; environmental and other factors often
knock causal processes off course but far less often knock them back on course.
Independently, there is just a lot more complexity to insides than to outsides; the
deviation of insides from the species norm therefore seems more fantastical, far less
likely, than the deviation of outsides. And so I might continue, with the reasons I
give in retrospect supporting my initial judgment to a degree that is roughly
in accordance with the confidence with which the judgment was originally made.
(p. 69)
I also judge the animals in question cows, though I’m not sure it has anything
to do with the relative complexity of insides. If I had to guess, I suspect it has
more to do with being born to cow parents. But that’s just a guess. What
assurances do we have that either of these explanations is correct, and sub-
sequently, that internal complexity, lineage, or something else entirely should
be included in our theory of cowhood as a result of considering this case? In
short, it is unclear why we should assume that the psychology underlying my
judgments about cases, and subsequently, their philosophical significance for
understanding the categories that stem from the judgments we make, can be
reached through armchair philosophy, rather than, well, psychology. The
possibility that we cannot assume this is explicitly acknowledged—‘Is this
merely a post hoc rationalization that bears no connection to the actual
categorization process?’ (p. 69) —though the concern is ultimately set
aside. It is instead taken ‘as a working hypothesis that categorization is in-
ferential and that the logical structure of our categorizing inferences is largely,
with some effort, at least partly psychologically accessible’ (p. 69).
However, a growing body of research in experimental cognitive science and
experimental philosophy challenges this working hypothesis (Andow 2019;
Buckwalter 2019; Chituc, et al. 2016; Kneer and Machery 2019; Rose, et al.
2017; Turri 2017; Turri 2017). This research suggests that we frequently mis-
diagnose the reasons for judgment or misrepresent their causal structure
when utilizing the method of cases. The worry that this frequently happens
is compounded by the dialectical complexity that philosophical debate often
demands from verdicts of cases concerning the categories under analysis. In
many instances, the level of philosophical nuance case judgments are said to
offer, as philosophical literatures progress and become more sophisticated,
requires positing very specific causal pathways involving multiple variables
that often go well beyond well beyond what even the most astute armchair
reflection could reasonably be expected to provide.
One example of this comes from recent research on case judgments in the
literature on epistemic contextualism. Contextualism is the thesis that
‘knows’ is a context sensitive expression. For three decades and counting,
judgments have been offered up in support of the theory from pairs of cases,
such as bank cases, airport cases, or red-light cases (Cohen 1999; DeRose

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8 Book Review

2009). In bank cases, for example, a couple needs to deposit a pay check at a

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bank and is considering doing this on a Saturday. In a low stakes version, the
judgment is supposed to be that ‘Keith knows the bank will be open on
Saturday ’ is true, while in a high stakes version, that ‘Keith does not know
that the bank will be open on Saturday ’ is true. The substantivity of the
category under analysis stems from the fact that out there in the world, the
standards for ‘knowledge’ actually do fluctuate by context and that this sets
the rule for the extension of the category as we make judgments about the
cases.
Subsequent research revealed that this is probably not true, for at least two
reasons. First, researchers demonstrated that the cases include a key confound
(Turri 2017). Judgments in low and high cases are largely attributable to
deference, or the psychological tendency to agree that what people say
about their own mental states is true. Controlling for this confound reverses
the central pattern of judgments. Thus it appears that the judgments were not
so much carving ‘knowledge’ at its joints as answering to some very particular
aspects of our own psychology. This was not apparent from the armchair, and
if it happens often enough when conducting philosophical analysis, it ques-
tions the degree to which the resulting categories are substantive.
Alternatively, being able to rule this kind of thing out using methods from
beyond the armchair might increase the likelihood that the resulting cate-
gories are substantive.
Researchers also demonstrated that judgments in contextualist cases prob-
ably do not have the causal structure they were taken to have in other ways.
Specifically, it has been shown that other judgments being made about these
cases, such as judgments concerning belief, truth, and amount of evidence all
simultaneously fluctuate when evaluating case pairs in addition to the factors
predicted by contextualism, and that these things impact ‘knowledge’ judg-
ments (Buckwalter 2019; Turri 2017). Judgments about the truth of ‘know-
ledge’ sentences might be perfectly reliable in this case (cf. Rose, et al. 2017),
and we may suppose they are substantive too, in the sense that they are telling
us something about an important category in the world. But they are limited
in the sense that we don’t know what that ‘something’ is. The reason is that
there is a complex causal pathway underlying ‘knowledge’ judgments that is
not available to introspection. If we do not have any sense of what the cat-
egorization actually answers to, what good is the resulting category to a
researcher in building a research program? In this case, it led to the creation
of complex theories and long literatures that did not reflect the way the world
is organized. This is just one example, of course, but it is difficult to see how
philosophical analysis can lead to knowledge of substantive categories in a
way that promotes theorizing about such complex philosophical topics very
effectively or efficiently without understanding a little better why we categor-
ize things the way we do, whether the categorization truly reflects something

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about the world rather than ourselves, or whether the aspects of the world it

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reflects are the ones we took them to be as opposed to others.
Independently of these concerns about the way philosophy is currently
practiced, a separate question is whether the theory advocated for in TOYF
would bring it about that philosophical analysis is substantive. One well-
known challenge to substantivity in the methodological literature involves
the possibility of conceptual diversity. If there are large cultural or individual
differences in case judgments, it might be thought, then this increases the
possibility that the use of philosophical cases is a largely parochial affair. In
Chapter 10, TOYF responds to this challenge from conceptual diversity by
engaging with various experimental findings on cultural differences. (See
Machery 2017.) These findings aside, however, large scale conceptual diversity
is also likely to follow as a theoretical consequence of causal minimalism and
causal inductivism. Such views reject roles for definitions, essences, referential
intentions, and reference fixers in our concepts. Instead, the structure of
concepts ultimately answers to highly corrigible beliefs about the properties
of the things that we observe. As a result, a systemic weakness of this kind of
theory, and perhaps ‘theory theories’ in general, involves the ‘publicity re-
quirement’ of concepts. This is the requirement that concepts be shared
among and between individuals (Fodor 1998; Prinz 2002; Rey 1983). Given
that concepts answer to ordinary beliefs, and such beliefs are so sensitive to
individual experience, what ensures that we share the same concepts of know-
ledge or causation with others or even ourselves over different times?
Without this assurance, we should expect ordinary beliefs, and hence judg-
ments about cases, to differ not just as a consequence of cultural factors, or
differences in philosophical training, but in virtue of the fact that virtually
any two humans are likely to have different sets of ordinary beliefs. The
greater this variation, the greater the doubt that judgments from cases pro-
mote knowledge of substantive categories. This is not to say that conceptual
diversity is necessarily incompatible with substantivity, of course, just that
whatever challenge it was initially taken to pose continues to loom large for
the theory at hand.
Connected to this concern about publicity is a related set of worries for
inductivism involving content and individuation. It is a fundamental char-
acteristic of concepts that they have intentional content and can be individ-
uated. If inductivism is true, however, it becomes difficult to tell with much
granularity what beliefs, among all the ordinary beliefs we have, count as
those beliefs about water, specifically, as opposed to something else. Neither
is much said in TOYF about what individuates concepts. If these matters
depend in part on ordinary beliefs and ordinary beliefs are again a highly
individual affair, it may also question the degree to which the resulting
categories are substantive, as opposed to reflecting idiosyncratic features of
our own beliefs and experiences. It would be interesting to hear more about
concept individuation on this theory in particular, given that philosophers

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are often very keen to draw sharp distinctions between concepts familiar to

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ordinary social cognition that permit at least partial overlap, such as belief,
acceptance, faith, imagination, delusion, and so on.
On to reliability, are a significant number of case judgments philosophers
make reliable enough to vindicate the method? The reliability of case judg-
ments is an area of active debate in the philosophical literature (Machery
2017; Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2015). Rather than rehearse these argu-
ments, I’ll focus instead on its treatment in TOYF. Reliability of case judg-
ments is secured in virtue of the central theory of reference advocated in
Chapter 9. The theory, called the ‘dispositional theory of reference’, states
that ‘a term refers, at a given time, to a given kind just in case it is likely that,
under ideal conditions, the term’s users would apply the term to all and only
instances of that kind’ (p. 155). Here, ‘ideal conditions’ require two things,
competent reasoning and the possession of all information relevant to
making the judgment. In this case, what constitutes relevant information is
determined by the user. It involves possessing ‘total evidence’, or the amount
of evidence such that a researcher would not change their mind about a
classification even when subsequently presented with new evidence.
A challenge to reliability comes from considering not only isolated judg-
ments about a case, but also case construction, and the way in which con-
ducting inquiry in philosophy is socially organized. Throughout TOYF,
philosophical analysis is often likened to the classification of natural kinds
(though, see Chapter 13 for disanalogies). However, there are four important
differences between these things that stand out right away. The first is that
philosophers do not neutrally happen upon the objects of philosophical judg-
ments in the bush as they do water or swans. Knowledge or causation might
exist out in the world, but the things that philosophers make judgments
about when utilizing the method of cases are cases. The second is that phil-
osophers make them. The cases used to elicit judgments are entirely of their
own construction. The third is that compared to what happens in many other
fields engaging in classification, the method of cases is presided over with
little or no rules with respect to the content, presentation, or construction of
cases. The fourth is that case construction is not a disinterested intellectual
exercise. The method is utilized by researchers working within a highly insti-
tutionalized system of academic credit and reward. To a large extent, the
cases are designed for the explicit purpose of getting judgments that the
researchers intend them to generate. The goal is often to create cases that
function as counterexamples to theories. And counterexamples to theories
are among the main ways that researchers build careers in philosophy.
This combination of researcher degree of freedom and incentive is a recipe
for disaster. Researchers will have the opportunity and incentive to create
materials that promote a desired hypothesis (Fanelli 2010; Klein and
Roodman 2005). When left unchecked, this can promote experimenter effects
in the design and interpretation of materials that do not necessarily track the

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 Book Review 11

truth (Jeng 2007; Kunda 1990; Rosenthal 1976). These worries are well known
across the sciences and they have also been demonstrated to some extent with

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philosophical cases (Strickland and Suben 2012). And while they are import-
ant for all researchers to consider, these concerns may be especially pro-
nounced during the method of cases. How much worse might it be if
researchers are themselves the sole participants of the experiments they ’ve
created in defence of the theories they support and the only data generated
are their own best judgments?
It is unclear whether the dispositional theory of reference can fully address
these concerns. Generally speaking, it is unlikely that the negative effects that
incentives promote will be addressed by better reasoning and additional in-
formation, in much the same way as full knowledge of and reasoning about
many optical illusions do not eliminate the presence of those illusions.
Instead, incentives are much more likely to alter the information that re-
searchers determine relevant and decrease the likelihood researchers will
change their minds. One consequence of this is that the degree to which
dispositionalism promotes reliable judgments will vary with the degree to
which determinations of total evidence estimate the net biases operating in
a research area. With incentives, biases, and conflicts of interest more
broadly, what is often needed is not better reasoning or additional informa-
tion, but rather, a change to the methods themselves that incentivises cor-
rection against bias (Nosek, et al. 2012). Future research might explore what
changes to the method of cases, likely from beyond the armchair, could help
do this.
Despite the challenges highlighted in this review, Thinking off Your Feet is a
valuable contribution. At its core, it candidly interrogates a key question of
philosophical activity, that is, how armchair judgments could ever get beyond
those who make them. To that end, causal inductivism provides a useful
framework to begin thinking about philosophical concepts and future re-
search might profitably explore its practical application to research questions
across the field.*

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* For helpful feedback on previous drafts, I thank James Andow, David Liggins, Joel Smith,
John Turri, and Michael Strevens.

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University of Manchester WESLEY BUCKWALTER

wesleybuckwalter@gmail.com
doi:10.1093/mind/fzz072

Mind, Vol. 0 . 0 . November 2019 ß Mind Association 2019