Scholar Field Instrument — Michael Huemer and Ethical Intuitionism
Scholar Field Instrument — Michael Huemer and Ethical Intuitionism
Instrument: Scholar Field Instrument (SFI) v1.0. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling’s corpus. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Target philosopher: Michael Huemer, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Target commitment: Ethical Intuitionism — the claim that some moral truths are known through direct rational apprehension, not inferred from prior premises or derived from empirical observation.
Audience: Non-professional philosophers engaging the contemporary philosophical landscape.
CPA context: A full-record Classical Presupposition Audit has been completed on Huemer. All six classical philosophical commitments were found Aligned; the dissolution finding was No Dissolution. Noted here as context only. It does not govern this run.
Independence note: Huemer’s 2009 article “Apology of a Modest Intuitionist,” was read as part Apology of a Modest Intuitionist, Field Synthesis produced at Step 2 ranges the contemporary field as a whole, independently of Huemer’s specific arguments. The Philosopher Record Layer at Step 3 draws on his full published record, including works not previously examined.
Political Application Constraint: Confirmed. Sterling’s name is not associated with political applications in this output.
Self-Audit — Step 0: Target philosopher named. Target commitment specified and scoped to one commitment. Audience confirmed as non-professional. CPA context noted. Political Application Constraint confirmed.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 1.
Step 1 — Target Specification
Propositional form: Some moral truths are known through direct rational apprehension — not inferred from prior premises, not derived from empirical observation, but grasped non-inferentially by the rational faculty.
Primary sources for Field Synthesis: The historical foundation of the contemporary debate: G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, H.A. Prichard, Henry Sidgwick. Contemporary anti-realist positions: A.J. Ayer, Simon Blackburn, Allan Gibbard, Sharon Street, Richard Joyce, Mark Schroeder. Contemporary naturalist realism: Peter Railton, Nicholas Sturgeon, Richard Boyd. Contemporary non-naturalist and intuitionist realism: Robert Audi, David Enoch, Russ Shafer-Landau, Ralph Wedgwood, David McNaughton, Derek Parfit (late work).
Scope: The contemporary analytic debate from the early twentieth century to the present, with the fall and revival of intuitionism as the historical frame. Historical antecedents are noted where they bear directly on the contemporary debate.
Self-Audit — Step 1: Target stated in propositional form. Scope boundaries stated. Historical depth specified. Philosopher’s specific work not consulted at this step.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 2.
Step 2 — Field Synthesis
Part A — State of the Field
Ethical intuitionism is a minority position in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. The field is dominated by two large camps that agree on almost nothing except their rejection of intuitionism as typically understood. The first camp is moral anti-realism in its various forms — expressivism, non-cognitivism, and their sophisticated descendants. The second is ethical naturalism, which holds that moral facts are real but are ultimately facts about natural states of affairs: facts about what promotes welfare, satisfies desires, or advances human flourishing. Both camps reject the intuitionist’s central epistemological claim: that the rational faculty has direct, non-inferential access to irreducible moral truths.
The minority that defends something like ethical intuitionism is real and has been growing since the 1990s. Philosophers including Robert Audi, David Enoch, Russ Shafer-Landau, Ralph Wedgwood, and David McNaughton have defended non-naturalist moral realism in forms that require intuitionism at the epistemological level, even when they do not use the word. The revival is sometimes called “third wave” intuitionism to distinguish it from the classical British intuitionism of the early twentieth century. But the revival remains a minority against a large and well-resourced opposition.
Part B — Argument Inventory
The historical foundation. Ethical intuitionism entered the twentieth century as a dominant position in British moral philosophy. G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) established the core non-naturalist claim through the open question argument: for any natural property N, it remains an open question whether something that has N is actually good — which suggests that “good” cannot be defined in natural terms. H.A. Prichard argued in “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” (1912) that our knowledge of moral obligations is immediate and non-inferential — we either see that we are obligated or we do not, and no further argument can settle the matter. W.D. Ross’s The Right and the Good (1930) developed the most influential intuitionist system of the period: a set of prima facie duties (fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-maleficence, beneficence, justice, self-improvement) each of which is self-evidently obligating, with actual duty in any situation determined by the balance of prima facie duties in play.
The fall. The dominant position of intuitionism ended abruptly in the 1930s with the rise of logical positivism and emotivism. A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) applied the verificationist criterion of meaning to moral claims: a proposition is meaningful only if it is either analytically true or empirically verifiable. Moral claims are neither. Therefore, moral claims are not genuine propositions — they are expressions of attitude, not statements of fact. Intuitionism, on this account, mistakes expressions of emotion for apprehensions of non-natural fact. C.L. Stevenson developed a more sophisticated emotivism; R.M. Hare developed prescriptivism. John Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) pressed the “queerness” argument: if there were objective moral facts of the kind intuitionists describe, they would be metaphysically unprecedented — entities of a sui generis kind, attached to natural facts by no intelligible relation. And we would need a correspondingly sui generis faculty to perceive them. The combination of metaphysical and epistemological queerness, Mackie argued, makes moral realism implausible.
The contemporary opposition. Modern anti-intuitionism takes several forms. Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism and Allan Gibbard’s norm expressivism are the most philosophically sophisticated anti-realist positions: they aim to earn the right to talk as though moral claims are true or false without committing to moral facts in the realist sense. Mark Schroeder defends a Humean theory of reasons that reduces normative facts to facts about desires. Sharon Street’s evolutionary debunking argument (2006) is arguably the most significant contemporary challenge to moral realism and intuitionism in particular: natural selection shaped our evaluative attitudes to track reproductive fitness, not moral truth; if moral facts are mind-independent, there is no reason to expect the attitudes evolution produced to track them; therefore, either moral realism is false or our confidence in our moral judgments is deeply undermined. Richard Joyce presses a related argument from evolutionary psychology. These arguments do not merely challenge intuitionism’s epistemology — they challenge the entire non-naturalist realist project of which intuitionism is the epistemological arm.
Arguments for the commitment in the contemporary field. The open question argument remains a resource, though it has been contested. More influential in the contemporary revival are three arguments. First, the companions-in-guilt argument: if moral intuitions are unreliable because they are not empirically verifiable, then mathematical and logical intuitions face the same problem; but no one seriously abandons mathematics; therefore the criterion that disqualifies moral intuitions is too strong. Second, the indispensability argument: moral reasoning cannot begin without some non-inferential moral premises; even ethical naturalists rely on intuitions to select and test their naturalistic accounts; intuitionism simply makes this dependence explicit and honest. Third, the self-defeat argument pressed particularly by Huemer’s branch of the revival: every alternative epistemology of morals either relies on intuitions covertly or collapses into skepticism; therefore, the principled rejection of moral intuition is self-undermining.
Part C — Pressure Points and Open Questions
The evolutionary debunking challenge is the most sustained contemporary pressure on intuitionism. Street’s argument forces a dilemma: either our evaluative attitudes were shaped by evolution to track moral truth (requiring an explanatory connection between evolution and moral facts that looks mysterious), or they were not (in which case our confidence in moral intuitions is massively deflated). Intuitionists have responded by distinguishing between intuitions that are plausibly explained by evolutionary pressures and those that are not — the transitivity of value relations, the pro tanto goodness of conscious experience, the basic wrongness of gratuitous cruelty. Whether this distinction survives close scrutiny is a live dispute.
The selection problem is an internal pressure: if not all intuitions are reliable, which ones are? And who decides? Any procedure for selecting reliable intuitions will itself rely on intuitions, raising the question of circularity. Ross handled this by restricting strong intuitionist claims to very general principles; contemporary intuitionists have developed more nuanced accounts, but the problem has not been solved to general satisfaction.
The supervenience problem remains open: moral properties supervene on natural properties (the same natural facts cannot support different moral facts), but if moral properties are non-natural, what explains this dependence? Intuitionists have proposed various accounts, none of which has gained consensus.
The relationship between intuitionism and moral particularism (Jonathan Dancy) is unresolved: if moral reasons are context-dependent in the way particularists claim, the intuitionist’s general self-evident principles may be too crude to capture the structure of moral reality.
Part D — Historical Development
The cultural displacement of intuitionism was rapid and thorough. In the 1920s, any educated philosopher would have recognized intuitionism as the dominant metaethical position in the British tradition. By the 1950s, it was a position held mostly by those who had been trained before logical positivism arrived. The verificationist weapon was decisive not because it refuted intuitionism on its own terms — it assumed that meaningful claims must be empirically verifiable, and this assumption was itself never verified — but because it redrew the map of what counted as a philosophically serious position. Intuitionism fell from the new map not through philosophical defeat but through a change in the standards by which philosophical seriousness was measured. The verificationist criterion later collapsed under its own weight: the criterion itself is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable, and therefore, by its own standard, meaningless. But the collapse of the weapon did not automatically restore the position it had displaced. The damage was done by the cultural conditions under which the new map was drawn, not by the weight of the arguments alone.
Self-Audit — Step 2: Philosopher’s specific arguments were not the source of the Field Synthesis — the synthesis ranges the field as a whole. All claims are traceable to identifiable positions in the contemporary literature. The minority status of intuitionism has been represented accurately, not suppressed. No verdicts on whether intuitionism is correct have been issued.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 3.
Step 3 — Philosopher Record Layer
Sources consulted: Ethical Intuitionism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); “Apology of a Modest Intuitionist,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2009); “Revisionary Intuitionism,” Social Philosophy and Policy (2008); “Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2007); “Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition,” American Philosophical Quarterly (2006); Knowledge, Reality, and Value (Open Court, 2021); Fake Nous (fakenous.substack.com), selected posts.
Coverage gap: Huemer’s full Substack archive was not ranged exhaustively. Individual posts not sampled may contain positions not captured here.
Mapping:
Convergence — The historical narrative. Huemer’s account of intuitionism’s fall in the twentieth century and its recent revival matches the Field Synthesis at every point. He names Moore, Ross, Prichard, and Sidgwick as the classical foundation; identifies emotivism and logical positivism as the forces of displacement; and situates his own work within the contemporary revival. He adds the specific mechanism by which displacement occurred: cultural and personal biases operating before argument, shaping which theories received sympathetic investigation. This is a Convergence with the Field Synthesis’s Part D finding — that the displacement was not primarily a philosophical defeat.
Convergence — The distinction between reliable and unreliable intuitions. The Field Synthesis identified the selection problem as a live internal pressure: if not all intuitions are reliable, which ones are? Huemer’s documented response converges with the direction the field’s minority has taken. He distinguishes intuitions produced by rational reflection on concepts from intuitions explained by evolutionary pressures, emotional bias, or psychologically irrelevant factors. Transitivity of the better-than relation, the pro tanto goodness of conscious enjoyment, the ceteris paribus preference for benefiting over harming a conscious being — these, he argues, are products of conceptual reflection in the way mathematical intuitions are, and are not plausibly explained as evolutionary artifacts.
Convergence — The revisionary stance. Huemer explicitly positions himself as a “revisionary intuitionist,” distinguished from classical intuitionists like Ross and Prichard who aimed to defend common sense morality substantially as it stands. He takes the Sidgwickian position: intuitionism does not require defending every widely-held moral intuition. Many intuitions are wrong. The task is to build on the most reliable ones, not to vindicate the whole of received moral opinion. This is a Convergence with the field’s recognition that the selection problem is real and that an intuitionist must take it seriously.
Divergence — The epistemological ground of intuitionism. The dominant approach among contemporary intuitionists in the revival — Robert Audi most prominently — works within a roughly Rossian framework, defending self-evident moral principles on broadly Rossian grounds. Huemer’s epistemological strategy is architecturally different. He grounds intuitionism not in a theory specific to moral knowledge but in Phenomenal Conservatism (PC): the general epistemological thesis that if it seems to S that P and S has no defeaters, S has prima facie justification for believing P. Moral intuitions receive their justificatory standing as a species of appearances, not because of anything special about the moral domain. This is a Divergence from the field’s mainstream intuitionist approach, which tends to defend moral intuition on terms specific to ethics. Huemer’s move generalizes the epistemology at the cost of making the case for moral intuitions dependent on a contested general epistemological thesis.
Divergence — Engagement with the evolutionary debunking challenge. The Field Synthesis identified the evolutionary debunking argument as the most significant contemporary pressure on intuitionism. Huemer’s documented engagement with it, in the 2009 article, focuses on the unreliability of specific psychological studies rather than engaging Street’s dilemma at its root. He argues that only one of the seven studies Joyce cites (the disgust-in-dirty-room study) directly addresses moral judgment, that even that study’s effect was modest, and that we should discount intuitions subject to known biases while retaining the most rationally grounded ones. This is a partial response — it does not fully engage the stronger form of Street’s challenge, which is about the explanatory gap between evolutionary pressures and moral truth, not merely about the psychological reliability of specific intuitions.
Addition — The unity of appearances argument. The Field Synthesis did not independently map an argument of this specific form. Huemer argues that sensory experiences, intellectual intuitions, quasi-memories, and introspective representations all share a common property — being an appearance — in virtue of which they dispose us to believe their contents and in virtue of which they confer prima facie justification. He supports this with a five-case analysis showing that what matters for the disposition to believe is the presence of an appearance-state, not its specific qualia, intentional content, or causal mechanism. The epistemological equivalence of perceptual and moral intuition is established by this argument, not merely asserted. This is a genuine philosophical contribution the Field Synthesis did not anticipate.
Addition — The negative program of elimination. Huemer’s systematic argument against every non-intuitive route to moral knowledge — observation, conceptual analysis, deduction from non-moral claims, and inference to the best explanation from non-moral claims — is a specific argumentative structure the Field Synthesis did not map as a named strategy. The argument establishes intuitionism not by directly defending it but by ruling out all alternatives. This is an independent and significant argumentative contribution.
Addition — The self-defeat argument for Phenomenal Conservatism. Huemer argues that any alternative epistemology — reliabilism, coherentism, the acquaintance theory — must itself rely on appearances to get off the ground; therefore, any epistemology that rejects PC is self-defeating. This argument is specific to Huemer’s philosophical project and was not independently mapped in the Field Synthesis.
Extension — The cultural displacement thesis as an account of philosophical fashion. Huemer hypothesizes that cultural and personal biases play a larger role in determining philosophical trends than do the objective features of philosophical arguments — not because philosophers ignore argument, but because biases shape which theories receive sympathetic investigation before argument begins. This goes beyond what the Field Synthesis mapped in its historical account of intuitionism’s fall. As a sociological claim about professional philosophy, it is not directly supported by the primary sources of either side of the debate — it is Huemer’s own explanatory hypothesis about why the field looks as it does.
Self-Audit — Step 3: All philosopher record claims are traceable to his documented public record with specific sources identified. Field Subordination has not occurred — Huemer’s work is the comparison layer, not the field. Addition findings have been identified honestly including contributions the Field Synthesis did not anticipate. Scope Drift has not occurred — no verdict on Huemer’s positions has been issued.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 4.
Step 4 — Juxtaposition
Part A — What the Field Shows
The contemporary field on ethical intuitionism is a story in three acts. In the first, intuitionism was the dominant position: British moral philosophy from Moore through Ross operated on the assumption that some moral truths are directly apprehensible by the rational faculty, that these truths are self-evident to careful reflection, and that moral knowledge does not require reduction to natural facts or derivation from empirical premises. The second act was rapid and almost total displacement. Logical positivism’s verificationist criterion of meaning arrived and declared the entire intuitionist project unintelligible: moral claims are neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable, and therefore not genuine claims at all. Emotivism and its successors filled the vacancy. The professional consensus shifted with remarkable speed, and within a generation intuitionism was a position most analytic philosophers regarded as having been disposed of. The verificationist criterion eventually collapsed under its own weight — it failed to satisfy its own standard — but the collapse of the weapon did not restore the position it had defeated. The professional culture had moved on.
In the third act, now underway, a minority of contemporary philosophers has been rebuilding the intuitionist case. They work against a field in which both sophisticated anti-realism and ethical naturalism have had decades to develop complex defensive positions. The revival is philosophically serious. But it is a minority rebuilding, not a restoration. The pressure points are real: the evolutionary debunking challenge presses the question of whether intuitions track moral facts or merely fitness-enhancing responses; the selection problem presses the question of which intuitions are trustworthy and by what criterion; the supervenience problem presses the question of how non-natural properties relate to natural ones. These questions do not have settled answers. The field is a contested landscape, and the contemporary intuitionist who enters it is doing philosophy against the current.
Part B — What Huemer Shows Within the Field
Against this background, Huemer’s engagement becomes legible in a way it is not when read in isolation.
His first distinctive move is to shift the epistemological ground. Most contemporary intuitionists defend moral intuition on terms specific to ethics — self-evidence, the authority of considered judgments, the Rossian framework of prima facie duties. Huemer builds the defense on a general epistemological principle: Phenomenal Conservatism, the thesis that appearing-true generates prima facie justification for any class of beliefs. On his account, moral intuitions do not need to earn special epistemological standing. They earn the same standing that sensory experience earns, by the same mechanism: they are appearances, and appearances confer justification. This move has a distinctive advantage — it avoids the charge that intuitionism posits a mysterious moral faculty operating by special rules — but it requires defending a contested general epistemological position as the foundation. He is defending intuitionism by first defending Phenomenal Conservatism. His adversaries in the debate know this and engage him at that level.
His second distinctive move is the negative program. Rather than arguing directly for intuitionism, he systematically eliminates every alternative. Observation, conceptual analysis, deduction from non-moral claims, inference to the best explanation from non-moral claims — each route to moral knowledge is argued to fail. What remains is intuition. This is an argumentative strategy the field has engaged but Huemer has pressed with particular systematic force: the case for intuitionism is partly the case against everything else.
The Addition findings from Step 3 are the most significant part of Huemer’s record for the non-professional reader. The unity of appearances argument — showing that it is the property of being-an-appearance, and not the specific qualia or causal origin of a mental state, that is relevant to justification — is a precise philosophical result the Field Synthesis did not anticipate. The self-defeat argument for Phenomenal Conservatism — that any epistemology rejecting it must rely on it to get started — is a distinctive argumentative structure that gives Huemer’s position a kind of methodological immunity: if you try to refute PC by appealing to a competing epistemological account, you are already relying on PC’s basic principle.
His revisionary intuitionism also marks a deliberate departure from the classical tradition he is reviving. Ross and Prichard largely aimed to vindicate common sense morality. Huemer is explicitly willing to revise substantial portions of received moral opinion and to follow the reliable intuitions where they lead, even if they lead to conclusions that conflict with prevailing views. He is not defending the moral status quo. He is defending a method for moral knowledge that may overturn the status quo.
Part C — What the Juxtaposition Reveals
The juxtaposition of field and philosopher reveals something a reader of either alone would miss.
Reading the field alone, the non-professional reader sees an apparent consensus: ethical intuitionism is a minority position that most professional philosophers regard as having been superseded. The weight of sophisticated opposition — the evolutionary debunking challenge, the naturalist program, the anti-realist tradition — appears to reflect a genuine philosophical reckoning in which the intuitionists lost. The field map, read alone, can produce this impression.
Reading Huemer alone, without the field map, the non-professional reader sees a confident defense of a position whose scope and stakes are unclear. The arguments are compelling in the reading but their place in the larger conversation is invisible. Why is this even controversial? What is being resisted and by whom?
Together, the picture is different. The reader sees that the field’s apparent consensus against intuitionism was largely produced not by decisive philosophical refutation but by a weapon — verificationism — that later collapsed on its own terms. The professional consensus, once produced, has enormous inertial force: it shapes which positions receive sympathetic investigation, which arguments seem initially plausible, which theoretical programs attract talented philosophical labor. Huemer argues explicitly that this is the mechanism by which intuitionism remained marginalized after its initial displacement — not because the arguments against it are conclusive, but because the cultural conditions of professional philosophy favor theories that give philosophers more to do. Non-cognitivism and naturalism generate rich research programs; intuitionism threatens to deliver a cleaner answer faster. Philosophers, like all professionals, have interests in complexity.
What the reader gains from the juxtaposition, specifically, is this: a map of which objections to intuitionism are philosophically serious and which are historically contingent artifacts of the field’s development. The evolutionary debunking challenge is a serious objection that Huemer’s documented record addresses only partially. The verificationist heritage is not a serious objection — the criterion is gone — but its cultural effects linger. The queerness argument has been substantially addressed by contemporary non-naturalists. The selection problem is real and remains open. A non-professional reader who has only the field map cannot distinguish these. With the juxtaposition, the distinction becomes visible.
Self-Audit — Step 4: The Juxtaposition is addressed to the non-professional reader, not to Huemer. Conclusions have been made available, not imposed. No verdict on whether intuitionism is correct has been issued. The Addition findings from Step 3 appear in Part B as evidence of the human judgment layer. Reader Condescension has not occurred.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceeding to Step 5.
Step 5 — Expert Validation Gap Declaration
The following gaps are declared to the reader. Each identifies what expert philosophical judgment is needed and why the instrument cannot supply it.
Most consequential gap — Argumentative gap on Phenomenal Conservatism. Huemer’s entire defense of intuitionism rests on Phenomenal Conservatism as its epistemological foundation. Whether PC is defensible — whether the appearance of truth is really sufficient for prima facie justification without further conditions — is a contested question in contemporary epistemology. The Field Synthesis has mapped the objections to intuitionism; those objections can be redirected at PC. Whether Huemer’s responses succeed requires philosophical judgment the instrument cannot issue. A reader who finds PC implausible will find Huemer’s entire defense of intuitionism undermined at the foundation. A reader who finds PC compelling will find the case for intuitionism substantially advanced. The instrument does not adjudicate this.
Second gap — Argumentative gap on the evolutionary debunking challenge. The instrument’s assessment of Huemer’s engagement with the evolutionary debunking challenge as “partial” is itself a judgment call. Huemer may have addressed the challenge more fully in works not ranged in this run, or his targeted response to the psychological studies may constitute a more complete answer than the instrument has assessed. A philosopher with expertise in evolutionary epistemology and the contemporary debate between Street, Joyce, and their interlocutors is better positioned than the instrument to evaluate whether Huemer’s response is adequate.
Third gap — Scope gap on which intuitions survive selection. Huemer argues that certain rational intuitions — the transitivity of value relations, the pro tanto goodness of conscious experience — are products of conceptual reflection not plausibly explained by evolutionary pressures or emotional bias, and therefore survive the selection procedure. Whether his specific list of survivor intuitions is correct, and whether his criterion for identifying them is defensible, requires judgment about both the philosophy and the relevant empirical psychology. The instrument cannot supply this judgment.
Fourth gap — Coverage gap. Huemer’s full Substack archive at Fake Nous was not exhaustively sampled. His Ethical Intuitionism (2005) was ranged through secondary sources and the 2009 response article rather than directly in full. Positions developed or revised in those sources not fully sampled may not be captured in the Philosopher Record Layer.
The reader should hold the Juxtaposition produced here as a structured starting point, not a settled account. What the instrument has produced is a map of the field and a placement of Huemer’s documented positions within it. The map is the instrument’s honest contribution. The gaps declare, specifically, where the map ends and where the reader’s own engagement — or a philosopher’s expert judgment — must begin. That declaration is not a disclaimer. It is the instrument’s account of what honest AI output looks like when it names its limits structurally.
Self-Audit — Step 5: Gaps are specific rather than generic. The most consequential gap (PC as Huemer’s epistemological foundation) has been identified and declared first. The declaration is addressed to the reader. Gap Minimization has not occurred — the PC gap is genuinely the most significant and has been treated as such. Gap Inflation has not occurred — the Field Synthesis and Philosopher Record Layer are substantive independent of the gaps.
Self-Audit Complete. SFI run complete.
Scholar Field Instrument (SFI) v1.0. Subject: Michael Huemer, University of Colorado, Boulder. Target commitment: Ethical Intuitionism. Instrument architecture: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling’s corpus. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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