Abstract
Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important role as part of a methodologically conservative stance towards philosophical investigation. I argue that methodological conservatism should be sharply distinguished from the process of evaluating individual propositions. Nevertheless, intuition is not always a reliable guide to truth and experimental philosophy can serve a vital ameliorative role in determining the scope and limits of our intuitive competence with respect to various areas of inquiry.
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Notes
Given the obscurity of the notion of intuition and the variety of roles it plays in philosophical reasoning it is tempting to agree with Timothy Williamson’s charge that “[w]hen contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuition.” (2004, 109).
There are some connections between the use of commonsense in the analytic tradition and some of the arguments one finds in the Scottish Enlightenment or the 18th century Common Sense tradition. Thomas Reid’s view of Common Sense has striking parallels with G.E. Moore’s for instance. However, the term ‘common sense’ has a far more ancient origin. The notion of a sensus communis in medieval philosophy of mind has its roots in Aristotle’s De Anima and was considered by Aquinas to be one of the soul’s inner senses. In addition to the five outer senses Aquinas described memory, imagination, common sense and vis cogitativa and common sense as specialized cognitive faculties. Roughly speaking, for medieval philosophers, sensus communis was the faculty which coordinated the outer senses such that different sensory modalities could be thought of as providing information concerning a single external object. Interestingly, many of the contemporary roles served by intuition and commonsense that are discussed in the Twentieth Century would not have been served by sensus communis but rather by what Aquinas called vis cogitativa. Aquinas understood vis cogitativa to be the inner sense by which humans recognized relevance in sensory experience. As Anthony Kenny points out, vis cogitativa plays the role that the estimative power (vis aestimativa) plays in animals by instinct (1994, 36). Thus, vis cogitativa would seem closer than Aquinas and Aristotle’s sensus communis to our modern notion of intuition as something like intelligent seeming. It is worth remembering also that sensus communis generally referred to a power which is specifically located in one of the ventricles in the brain wherein information from the different sensory modalities is combined. In this sense, the medieval account has a far more naturalistic flavor than contemporary approaches to commonsense.
Although there are examples in early analytic philosophy where philosophers make this identification. For example, in Russell’s response to Poincaré he writes: “Poincaré clamours for the use of ‘intuition’ in reasoning, we may concede that positive errors are less likely to emerge if we only apply our rules where ‘intuition’ (i.e. common sense) suggests that we may safely do so.” (1973, 196).
Among the first paper to make an experimental case against the assumed consensus with respect to some philosophical intuition is Jonathon Weinberg et al. (2001) on normative intuitions. In a recent paper Swain, et al, (forthcoming) conduct experiments on epistemic intuitions to similar effect. See their blog at http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com.
George Bealer (2002, 74), for example, sees the revisability of intuition as central to its role in the a priori disciplines.
Hintikka (2007) makes a roughly similar point with respect to the so-called fallacies of rationality made famous by Tversky and Kahneman.
Williamson diagnoses the situation in the following way: “uncritical talk of philosophy as relying, for better of worse, on ‘intuitions’ often manifests the misconception that our evidence in philosophy consists of psychological facts about ourselves rather than facts about the philosophical topic itself.” (2005, 122).
Although as Mark Steiner (2000) points out Wittgenstein also had positive things to say about the role of intuition in mathematical practice and discovery.
Tyler Burge describes Frege’s attitude towards intuition in the following way:
“…Frege thought that mathematical and logical intuition and judgment, even in outstanding mathematicians and logicians, is thoroughly fallible. Let me codify this point in two principles. He thought (a) that the fact that a mathematical or logical proposition is found obvious by competent professionals at a given time provides no infallible guarantee that it is true, much less a basic truth. He thought (b) that there is no guarantee that true mathematical or logical principles (including basic truths) will be found to be obvious by competent professionals at a given time.” (1998, 328).
This chain of influence would connect more recent intuition talk via John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein with the influential emphasis on commonsense which we find in G.E. Moore.
Bealer says so quite directly: ‘By intuitions here, we mean seemings; for you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A’ (2002, 73).
Wittgenstein described the project this way:
When philosophers use a word—“knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “sentence”, “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (1953 §116).
Hanfling (2000) provides a useful historical survey of the standard criticisms of ordinary language philosophy.
The ordinariness of modal questions does not, by itself, provide decisive evidence against the kinds of criticism that Kripke had in mind. Quine’s well-known criticisms of modal discourse rest on the failure of substitutivity in modal contexts and are intended to encourage philosophers to reform rather than adhere to their ordinary attitudes towards possibility and necessity. On Quine’s view, theoretical investigation may leads us to use terms in ways that differ significantly from their role in their original home. See, for example his discussions of modality in ‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’ and ‘Reference and Modality’.
Kripke writes: “[…]we begin with the objects we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects.” (1980, 53) Catterson notes that this strategy commits Kripke to some form of haecceitism. This is because:
“[…] the identity relation is not only primitive with respect to possible world semantics, it is metaphysically rock bottom tout court. Our conceptual scheme must start with the individual already individuated, and then go on to theorize about what relations and qualities this individual possesses or could possess… Thus Kripke is at heart an haecceitist. Of course, if his view of the ontological primacy of the individual is true, then the relation of identity cannot be analyzed into more basic terms and the whole question of cross-identification becomes moot.” (2004 39–40).
For Moore, the truisms of common sense are thoroughly entangled with the reality of familiar objects. Figuring prominently among these are his body, his clothes, the furniture in his study, his pen, etc. It is precisely the Idealist denials of familiar objects and ordinary experience that his essay is intended to correct.
This is Allan Bloom’s 1968 translation.
Bealer claims that “The use of intuitions as evidence (reasons) is ubiquitous in our standard justificatory practices in the a priori disciplines [… ]By intuition here, we mean seemings: for you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A. Of course this kind of seeming is intellectual, not experiential—sensory, introspective, imaginative.” (2002, 73).
One example of this kind of ameliorative project in epistemology is Bishop and Trout (2005).
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Roberto Poli and two anonymous referees for this journal for their valuable criticism and careful reading. Thanks are also due to Tim Cleveland, Clifford Hill, Paul Sagal, Jules Simon, Jean-Paul Vessel and Christopher Whalin who offered a number of good suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. As always, conversations with Vincent Hendricks and Jaakko Hintikka have contributed significantly to my work.
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Symons, J. Intuition and Philosophical Methodology. Axiomathes 18, 67–89 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-007-9019-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-007-9019-7