More on Intuitions

Posted on August 16, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy |

I often talk about intuitions here. (Such as my discussion on intuitions and thought experiments) While I think they have their place I think it’s more a communication principle of bringing into focus issues or preconceptions that are sometimes muddled. That is I see them more in terms of pedagogy rather than being trustworthy as a source of philosophical knowledge.

Now there was an excellent paper a few months back by Jonathan Ichikawa on whether intuitions really need to be the foundation of many philosophical arguments. In “Who Needs Intuitions?” he argues that often we can move to a conceivability argument. (Which is largely what Chalmers does with Zombies) I’m not sure how much this really strengthens thought experiments like the zombie or swampman questions. It clearly is a different sort of argument though.

Over at the Garden there is a fascinating discussion of whether theories of moral responsibility must appeal to intuitions. This seems to me to be pretty much the same sort of question.

The issue of intuitions came up again over at Brian Weatherson’s blog. There he responds to Robert Cummins paper “Reflection on Reflective Equilibrium” in Rethinking Intuition. Weatherson argues that intuitions aren’t unreliable. I won’t comment too much on his argument. (Which is basically problemizing the counting of intuitions) It’s worth reading though (as well as the comments).

Weatherson (like many) makes a separation between intuition and common sense. I wonder if that is correct. I recognize that those who feel with have some intuitive capacity that is different from our other ways of knowing will want to make the separation. (i.e. if someone thinks intuitions come from God, for instance) That leaves the question of how we can in ourselves distinguish a belief we have due to common sense from a belief we have due to intuition. That is do we know enough about our belief-forming processes to really distinguish between them?

Obviously I’m pretty skeptical that we can. (I’ve mentioned that enough in the past that I’ll not belabor the point) I’d note that Weatherson moves towards this when he asks whether there is any “single such thing as intuition.” I think his point is the problem of asking whether intuition is reliable if we can’t tell what is or isn’t a particular intuition.

I want to touch on the article that Weatherson was replying to. It’s quite interesting and makes me want to nab the book (if only it weren’t quite so expensive and if only I hadn’t bought so many books the past few months). Roughly the idea is the relationship between data and theory. We use theory to determine what is bad data so we can discount it. But unusual data can always make us rethink our theory. This is basically the hermeneutic circle in action and there often is no one way to decide which to modify (theory or data). Of course in practice some theories are sufficiently strong that we throw out data that contradicts it too much and for which there is a good explanation for why the data may have arisen an other way. (Say a detector was too hot) Too much unexplainable data leads us to change theory. The Cummins paper basically applies this to intuitions. How do we react when intuitions contradict each other?

This is no small matter since intuitions of different communities do contradict. Philosophers often appear to think that since they are educated that their intuitions are better than others. Of course this avoids the question of whether their education was merely biasing their ability to distinguish intuitions. (Or, if intuitions are just habitual responses applied to new settings, whether those intuitions were created by their education)

The problem is that it’s not clear that the process of revision that occurs in science could possibly work with intuitions. Cummins concludes with a few interesting comments I’ll quote.

Philosophers of physics interested in space and time do not consult their intuitions any more, they ask how we must understand space and time if the physical theories that appeal to them are to be true and explanatory. I do not know if something analogous will replace intuition in every branch of philosophy, but something had better replace it. It cannot support any conclusion worth drawing.

Let me conclude with something about where I think the burden of proof lies. Philosophers, especially those interested in ethics and matehmatics, are included to argue as follows: “You are no skeptic about ethics and mathematics, so you have to accept the epistemological value of intuition. What else, after all, could ground moral or mathematical knowledge?” I do not know. For that matter, I do not think we have a satisfactory account of perceptual knowledge, either. But “what else” arguments just do not cut it in epistemology. I have just been at pains to show that philosophical theory cannot be grounded in intuition. If, in a given case, we cannot say what it should be grounded in, that is no reason for reinstating intution. It is rather a reason to think harder about the methodology and questions of one’s own discipline. (126)

Comments

4 Responses to “More on Intuitions”

Clark…you say that:

**Philosophers often appear to think that since they are educated that their intuitions are better than others.**

If anything, the philosphers I have studied with have thought just the opposite, viz. that philosophers tend to have lousy intuitions on thought experiments, because our reasoning has been corrupted over time by theoretical over-exsposure.

Philosophers of physics interested in space and time do not consult their intuitions any more, they ask how we must understand space and time if the physical theories that appeal to them are to be true and explanatory.

Hard answers are, of course, settled mathematically or experimentally. But to think that intuition plays no role for either physicists or mathematicians, is simply false. We might make proofs deductively, but new ideas comes inductively. Being able to look at a situation and have physical intuition is given as a necessity in physics, though things like quantum mechanics can make it sometimes unreliable.

Zen, I think his point was in terms of justification and not exploration. In philosophy the justification for a position is often in terms of intuitions. In physics intuitions is part of the abductive process of hypothesis formation. I’m certainly not saying intuitions have no role. But their role is fairly narrow if perhaps key. I need to do a post on abduction to perhaps clarify all this. Rereading the above I can see that I made my view towards intuitions too restricted to pedagogy. While that’s just not the case given the place of abduction in thought.

A. P., that certainly isn’t the impression one gets from the papers. Now that view has led to the rise of experimental philosophy. But looking through the past century of key papers the appeal to intuition with little concern for lay views suggests the opposite.

I should note that Brandon has up a post commenting on Weatherson as well. I hadn’t noticed that when I wrote the above. But I made a few comments over there over the weekend.

Interesting paper up at this year’s Philosopher’s Annual. It’s “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.” This is the paper that notes people’s intuitions about compatibilism vary depending upon the context.

I notice that they made a point similar to what I made at Brandon’s.

But although philosophers have constructed increasingly sophisticated arguments about the implications of people’s intuitions, there has been remarkably little discussion about why people have the intuitions they do. That is to say, relatively little has been said about the specific psychological processes that generate or sustain people’s intuitions. And yet, it seems clear that questions about the sources of people’s intuitions could have a major impact on debates about the compatibility of responsibility and determinism. There is an obvious sense in which it is important to figure out whether people’s intuitions are being produced by a process that is generally reliable or whether they are being distorted by a process that generally leads people astray.

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