Why should we expect unexamined heuristics to be false?

Here are some reasons why they might be:

(1)

Given Nature's indifference between functioning heuristics, and the likelihood that the ratio of successful false heuristics to successful true ones is likely ot be high, the probability that an unexamined heuristic is false must be high.

(2)

There is a sense in which all all language users share a specific false heuristic:  that they somehow live in the same world, and that this is why their shared language makes sense.  In fact, they only think they live in the same world because their shared language makes sense.  It is only in a shared language game that this question can arise, and it is only because the shared language game works that we can sustain the illusion of some pre-linguistic shared world.

(3)

Why would we articulate a tacit heuristic?  In normal conversation, this would only happen if a difficulty had arisen:  if interlocutors discovered that just pointing to a practice did not resolve a dissonance.  In this case, the interlocutors have discovered that they are unintelligible to one another, and need to modify the game to recover.

Except in the case of a simple grammatical or computational error, this process would have to result in at least some interlocutors abandoning heuristics as they articulated them.

(4)

The work of interrogating a heuristic falls outside the discipline the heuristic underpins - settling issues of its truth or falsehood is unlikly to be relevant to the discipline.  It might shed light on whether the discipline as a whole made sense, but this is not an issue routinely raised by practitioners, who can point to their own successful (?) practices in support of their intelligibility and who can therefore relegate heuristic 'housekeeping' to philosophers.  Their (reasonable) presumption might be that practically inconsequential inconsistencies in the underlying heuristics must be addressable.

An efficient intellectual division of labour would lead to disciplinary heuristics being simplified, since more generally defensible underpinnings would incorporate complexities which were practically irrelevant.