Objects and Arrows

Finally finished that intuition paper.  Here

How deeply do the lessons of experimental philosophy challenge contemporary philosophical methodology? At the very least, empirical results should force philosophers to clarify the evidential role of their uses of the notion of intuition. However, in terms of the skeptical consequences for intuition, I think empirical findings will have less impact than some of their proponents sometimes claim. For instance, it is worth noting that most advocates of intuition in philosophy are not in principle averse to revising their intuitions. George Bealer would be a good example… or Russell in “On insolubilia” More importantly, it may be possible to distinguish a plausible role for intuition in philosophical methodology which is independent of the truth or falsity of propositions favored by intuition.

I would argue that the possibility of arriving at a useful notion of intuition largely depends on distinguishing the faculty of intuition from propositions. Once we have made this distinction, a new, ameliorative project (for experimental philosophy) emerges. Rather than trusting blindly in our intuitive powers, the empirical study of commonsense or intuitive judgment holds the possibility of providing an informed understanding of the way that this “faculty” functions. We already know quite a bit about the pitfalls of intuitive or commonsense judgments. We know, for instance, that there are some unhelpful aspects of commonsense which we ought to flag, for example, the systematically irrational features of our gut feelings concerning probability which Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman describe. (1974) A study of our motivation for irrationally but systematically opting for falsehoods by failing to apply the basic axioms of choice theory and by ignoring the laws of probability will lead us to understand something about our tendencies to seek certain kinds of salient features over others. Herbert Gintis (2000) and others have noted that the heuristics governing our probabilistic judgments are ordinarily reliable given the demands of everyday decision making. In combination, or in more complex settings, these heuristics may lead to the kinds of systematic irrationality that we find in some of the standard cases. (Gintis 2000, 248)
While we are very likely to encounter reasons to revise our intuitions with respect to some moral, epistemic or metaphysical matters, rejection of all recourse to intuition in philosophical investigation is not warranted on the strength of current empirical criticisms. There are epistemological and methodological reasons for hesitating before accepting a full-blown skeptical attitude. As Matthew Liao (forthcoming) and Williamson (2004) note, skepticism with respect to intuition is misguided if it rests on the bad epistemic principle that we ought to always know what our evidence is. This principle, as Williamson points out, is self-defeating. (Williamson 2004, 121) Methodologically, total rejection of intuition is understood by many philosophers as equivalent to giving up on commonsense as a moderating influence in our investigations. David Lewis’ account of the role of commonsense assumptions is partly motivated by this kind of concern. (1986, 134-5) Lewis and others have argued that intuition (or something like it) plays a salutary role insofar as it contributes to methodological conservatism.
There seems to be few strong arguments in favor of giving up entirely on the kind of methodological role which commonsense or intuition serves. However, it is worth distinguishing methodological conservatism from uncritical acceptance of some proposition or set of propositions. There is at least one general feature of contemporary usage that requires clarification. Conflation of the content of favored propositions with the feelings which lead us to favor those propositions figures frequently in the literature and is responsible for unnecessary obscurity. The salutary effect of distinguishing between intuitions and propositions is that it clarifies the sources of justification in an argument. So, for instance, it would allow us to distinguish arguments which rest on the truth of propositions from those which rest on the authority of something like a faculty of commonsense or intuition.

While those propositions which are favored by commonsense are true or false independently of their relation to commonsense, a proposition’s having the property of being favored by commonsense or intuition might count as a reason to believe that it is true. However, we could only reasonably believe that this property is a guide to truth by virtue of some additional set of propositions concerning the reliability and nature of the faculty of intuition or commonsense. To say that we need reasons to heed the voice of commonsense is not equivalent to an epistemic principle to the effect that we ought to have evidence in all cases for the propositions that commonsense provides. This would be the kind of self-defeating operational principle that Williamson warns against. Instead, by focusing on our reasons for heeding the faculty of intuition, we embark on a general (largely empirical) project to give an account of the faculty and its place in the philosophical enterprise. One could imagine a range of possible accounts: An evolutionary story concerning the reliability of ingrained habits of thought, some notion of subconscious processing, some inductive account of the usefulness of commonsense in the past etc. Propositions or theories of this kind would be true or false independently of whether they are favored by intuition/commonsense and one could imagine counterintuitive explanations for the reliability of intuitive reasoning. Such accounts, rather than generalized skepticism with respect to philosophical intuition, might be the lasting payoff of the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Distinguishing between the truth value of a proposition and its relation to intuition is certainly not equivalent to denying the value of intuition in philosophical investigation or justification. Rather, the distinction is a necessary step in the search for a reasonable account of why (and when) we ought to heed intuition.