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.

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.

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.

**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.