Who Needs Intuitions?
Jun 20th, 2009 by Jonathan
Who Needs Intuitions? Version of 7 September, 2008. Under review.
“Intuitions play critical evidential roles in philosophy.” This statement has air of truism about it; it is widely assumed, and occasionally explicitly argued, to be correct. It forms the basis of an influential series of challenges to traditional philosophical methodology; among these are a reliability challenge—’how can we explain how our intuitions are reliable guides to philosophical truth?’—and the experimentalist critique—’it is illegitimate to assume from the armchair that people really have the intuitions traditional methodology says they do; in fact, survey data indicates that they often don’t’.
I argue that this widespread assumption about the evidential role of intuitions is importantly ambiguous, and, in the sense that is relied upon for many such critiques, it is false. Philosophical evidence is not primarily psychological; traditional methodology does not require introspected premises of the form ‘I have the intuition that p’. In this matter, I agree with recent work by Timothy Williamson.
I examine three attempts to recast the experimentalist critique in terms that do not rely upon this false assumption about traditional methodology: the concepts we happen to have are arbitrary in a way undermining traditional methodology; empirical research undermines our confidence in our abilities to discern philosophical truths; general worries about the epistemology of disagreement, combined with experimental results, undermine traditional methodology. I suggest that all of these reformulated challenges can be met.