Debate continues over the acts/omissions doctrine, and over the concepts of duty and charity. Such issues inform the debate over the moral permissibility of euthanasia. Recent papers have emphasised moral sensitivity, medical intuitions, and sub-standard palliative care as some of the factors which should persuade us to regard euthanasia as morally unacceptable. I argue that these lines of argument are conceptually misdirected and have no bearing on the bare permissibility of voluntary euthanasia. Further, some of the familiar slippery slope (...) arguments against voluntary euthanasia compromise the principle of autonomy to which both supporters and opponents of euthanasia adhere. I discuss a model for doctor/patient relationships which can be applied to cases which would be seen by all disputants as strong prima facie cases for euthanasia. I argue that in certain cases it will be ordinary medical practitioners who are duty-bound to assist death. (shrink)

Quentin Gailhac Dans cet article, l’auteur se penche sur les développements de Husserl sur la perception du tempo-objet spécifique qu’est la mélodie, à partir des lectures critiques qui les déterminent. En réfutant tout à la fois la saisie instantanée de Brentano, le temps de présence de Stern et la conscience d’après-coup de Meinong, Husserl se donne les moyens d’une résolution proprement phénoménologique du problème de l’unité mélodique dans la conscience. L’insatisfaction en regard des positions discutées conduira en effet Husserl à (...) un élargissement du champ de l’intuition, qui le mènera, notamment dans les Manuscrits de Bernau de 1917-1918, à penser l’originaire comme mouvement dynamique, comme procès. (shrink)

Elijah Chudnoff elaborates and defends a view of intuition according to which intuition purports to, and reveals, how matters stand in abstract reality by making us aware of that reality through the intellect. He explores the experience of having an intuition; justification for beliefs that derives from intuition; and contact with abstract reality.

In this paper, I argue that Dual Process Theories of cognition offer a useful framework to understand the nature and role of concepts in cognitive science and intuitions in epistemology.

‘Intuition deniers’ are those who—like Timothy Williamson, Max Deutsch, Herman Cappelen and a few others—reject the claim that philosophers centrally rely on intuitions as evidence. This ‘Centrality’ hypothesis, as Cappelen terms it, is standardly endorsed both by traditionalists and by experimental philosophers. Yet the intuition deniers claim that Centrality is false—and they generally also suggest that this undermines the significance of experimental philosophy. Three primary types of anti-Centrality argument have cross-cut the literature thus far. These arguments, I’ll claim, have (...) differing potential consequences on metaphilosophical debate. The first sort of argument centers on worries about the term ‘intuition’—for instance, worries about whether it has clear application, or whether anything actually falls under it. Call this the Argument from Unclear Application. The second argument type involves the claim that evidence in philosophy consists not of facts about intuitions, but of facts about e.g. knowledge and causation. Call this the Argument from Antipsychologism. The third type involves an attempt to demonstrate that philosophers support their claims not via bald appeal to intuition, but via argumentation. Call this the Argument from Argumentation. Although these three arguments have merit, none of them undermines the importance of experimental philosophy. Nonetheless, they do have significant consequences for the methodological debates that dominate meta-philosophy, and for experimental philosophy in particular. (shrink)

The empirical turn has created an undercurrent of scrutiny regarding the relevance of disciplines such as philosophy and theology due to assumptions about the limitations of their epistemology. This article seeks to recognize that disciplines that are lauded as most relevant due to their reliance on empiricism as their main form of epistemology often rely upon intuition for making decisions in the research process. After delineating this process using Anthropological research as an example, I draw a parallel between descriptions of (...) how intuition can be understood and used as a means of knowing in the work of Kant and several theologians with descriptions of how intuition is relied upon and necessarily emerges as a critical epistemology in the more traditionally empirically grounded discipline Anthropology. This parallel is offered as the launching place for connections between these disciplines through further examination of the use of intuition as an epistemology and hopes to equate the epistemo- logical integrity of disciplines such as philosophy and theology that admit to the use of intuition with those that are considered empiri- cal which rely upon intuition yet may not admit to its use overtly. (shrink)

Wissenschaft setzt, folgt man dem Theologen Heinrich Schmidinger, als Minimalqualifikationen rationale Nachvollziehbarkeit und Überprüfbarkeit voraus. Damit ist sie an Methoden gebunden, die jenseits des subjektiven Überzeugtseins operieren und ihre Glaubwürdigkeit darin zum Ausdruck bringen, dass sie verallgemeinerbar sind. Intuition, ein höchst persönlicher und im Grunde irrationaler Erkenntnismodus, hält diesen wissenschaftlichen Kriterien nicht stand. Und dennoch stößt man sowohl in den Geistes- als auch in den Naturwissenschaften immer wieder auf Formen intuitiven Erkennens.0Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler unterschiedlichster fachlicher Herkunft? von der Wissenschafts- und (...) Ideengeschichte sowie der Philosophie und Epistemologie über die Rechts-, Musik und Literaturwissenschaften bis zur Medizin und Naturwissenschaft? gehen im vorliegenden Band dem spannungsreichen Verhältnis von Intuition und Wissenschaft nach. Drei Fragestellungen stehen dabei im Zentrum der Beiträge:01) Welche Rolle spielt Intuition im Entwicklungsgang der einzelnen Wissenschaften, was kann aus wissenschaftshistorischer und epistemologischer, also externer Perspektive zur Intuition in den Wissenschaften gesagt werden? 02) Was positionieren sich einzelne Wissensfelder und Wissenschaftsdisziplinen zur Intuition? Welche Definitionen bieten sie an? Wie sieht die interne Perspektive aus, gibt es eine 'angewandte Intuition' in den Wissenschaften?03) Kann Intuition eine Rolle als Bindeglied zwischen wissenschaftlichen und außerwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisformen und Vorstellungswelten spielen? (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to (...) elicit the relevant stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Moral intuitions are generally understood as automatic strong responses to moral facts. In this paper, I offer a metacognitive account according to which the strength of moral intuitions denotes the level of confidence of a subject. Confidence is a metacognitive appraisal of the fluency with which a subject processes information from a morally salient stimulus. I show that this account is supported by some empirical evidence, explains the main features of moral intuition and is preferable to emotional or (...) quasi-perceptual views of moral intuition. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with (...) their theories. Finally, philosophers are more confident in rejecting theories to the extent that they have several counter examples involving diverse cases. I argue that these facts are better explained by philosophers' using intuitions as evidence than by any plausible contrary explanations. I further argue that aspects of philosophical practice that my thesis may initially seem ill-suited to explain are in fact unsurprising whether or not my thesis is true. (shrink)

The phenomenology of a priori intuition is explored at length (where a priori intuition is taken to be not a form of belief but rather a form of seeming, specifically intellectual as opposed to sensory seeming). Various reductive accounts of intuition are criticized, and Humean empiricism (which, unlike radical empiricism, does admit analyticity intuitions as evidence) is shown to be epistemically self-defeating. This paper also recapitulates the defense of the thesis of the Autonomy and Authority of Philosophy given in (...) the author’s “A Priori Knowledge and the Scope of Philosophy” (Philosophical Studies, 1996). (shrink)

This book is concerned with the role of intuitions in the justification of philosophical theory. The author begins by demonstrating how contemporary philosophers, whether engaged in case-driven analysis or seeking reflective equilibrium, rely on intuitions as evidence for their theories. The author then provides an account of the nature of philosophical intuitions and distinguishes them from other psychological states. Finally, the author defends the use of intuitions as evidence by demonstrating that arguments for skepticism about their (...) evidential value are either self-defeating or guilty of arbitrary and unjustified partiality towards non-intuitive modes of knowledge. (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic (...) class='Hi'>intuitions are produced by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert (...) and lay intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

What are intuitions? According to doxastic views, they are doxastic attitudes or dispositions, such as judgments or inclinations to make judgments. According to perceptualist views, they are—like perceptual experiences—pre-doxastic experiences that—unlike perceptual experiences—represent abstract matters as being a certain way. In this paper I argue against doxasticism and in favor of perceptualism. I describe two features that militate against doxasticist views of perception itself: perception is belief-independent and perception is presentational. Then I argue that intuitions also have both (...) features. The upshot is that intuitions are importantly similar to perceptual experiences, and so should not be identified with doxastic attitudes or dispositions. I consider a popular argument from the introspective absence of sui generis intuition experiences in favor of doxasticism. I develop a conception of intuition experiences that helps to defuse this argument. (shrink)

The use of intuition abounds in modern analytic philosophy. In particular, intuition is considered evidence that is used in the analysis of concepts, often in an attempt to find the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of the concept under consideration. Alternatively, intuition is used as evidence that one or more of the proposed necessary conditions is unacceptable, as in Gettier counterexamples to the classical analysis of knowledge. This view of intuition can be thought of as a form of rationalism. (...) However, in the middle part of the 20th century intuition cam under attack through the influence of Quine's project of naturalizing philosophy. The two very general positions on intuition are: intuition provides evidence, but only of necessary truths or intuition does not provide evidence at all. ;I critically analyze the philosophical positions on intuition of many modern philosophers. I pay particular attention to the defense of moderate rationalism presented by Bealer and Bonjour, who place intuition at the heart of rationalism. I criticize their respective views by arguing that their defenses are viciously circular because they overtly appeal to intuition in order to defend intuition as a source of evidence. I further criticize the inability of the moderate rationalists to defend their stipulation that intuition must be of apparent necessary truths. ;On the positive side, I defend that intuition is best thought of as a basic source of evidence that provides evidence for both necessary and some contingent truths. This is how I split the difference between and from above. This view has many virtues, with one if its primary virtues being its ability to account for contingent, grammatical intuitions of he sort used in modern day linguistics. Finally, I argue that my view is more amenable to modern evolutionary psychology by giving a genealogy of intuition. (shrink)

There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies, we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn (...) influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non-moral intuitive probabilities. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

"The nature of intuition and its relation to other mental faculties, particularly perception, is one of the most hotly contested debates in philosophy of mind and psychology. Do intuitions justify belief or merely dispositions to believe? Is intuition a mental state with distinctive phenomenal qualities and if so, how do these differ from normal perceptual states? Drawing on the most recent philosophical research on intuition and perception, Ole Koksvik defends the idea that intuition not only justifies belief but can (...) play a much wider role in our everyday epistemic lives than previously thought. Arguing that intuitional experience is similar to perceptual experience he develops a novel view of intuition as conscious experience. His argument involves both a close description of the kind of experience that intuition is and a defence of intuition against criticism from experimental philosophy. The picture that emerges defends intuitions not because they can be found to be true or false but because they permit us to consider the world as it is might otherwise be and are continuous with the rest of general human inquiry"--. (shrink)

Intuitions is presented as a counterpart of Rethinking Intuition ( DePaul and Ramsey 1998 ). 1 After 16 years, it revisits the topic of the place of intuitions in philosophy in light of two developments...

Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central systems” (...) responses, rather than endorsed outputs of a modularized language faculty (the “Voice of Competence”). Along the way, it is argued that linguistic intuitions may not constitute a natural kind with a common etiology; and that, for a range of cases, the process by which intuitions used in linguistics are generated amounts to little more than comprehension. (shrink)

El trabajo que se presenta constituye un análisis epistemológico del aprendizaje intuitivo como dimensión humana. Su objetivo es caracterizar el marco referencial para una epistemología de lo intuitivo, a partir de la revisión bibliográfica y con la utilización del método hermenéutico, el histórico- lógico, la inducción- deducción y el análisis - síntesis. Sus principales resultados son los fundamentos epistemológicos del aprendizaje intuitivo, la definición pedagógica del aprendizaje intuitivo y la caracterización de las experiencias intuitivas. This article constitutes an epistemological analysis (...) of the intuitive learning as a human dimension. Its objective is to characterize the referential sitting for an epistemology about the intuitive beginning myth the cheering of the bibliography and the Hermeneutical method, Historical- logical, Induction- deduction, and analysis and synthesis. Its main results are: the epistemological foundation of the intuitive learning, the pedagogical definition of the intuitive learning and the characterization of the intuitive experiences. (shrink)

We argue that many intuitions do not have conscious propositional contents. In particular, many of the intuitions had in response to philosophical thought experiments, like Gettier cases, do not have such contents. They are more like hunches, urgings, murky feelings, and twinges. Our view thus goes against the received view of intuitions in philosophy, which we call Mainstream Propositionalism. Our positive view is that many thought-experimental intuitions are conscious, spontaneous, non-theoretical, non-propositional psychological states that often motivate (...) belief revision, but they require interpretation, in light of background beliefs, before a subject can form a propositional judgment as a consequence of them. We call our view Interpretationalism. We argue (i) that Interpretationalism avoids the problems that beset Mainstream Propositionalism and (ii) that our view meshes well with empirical results in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally (...) reliable but predictably generate cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments. (shrink)

Linguists take the intuitive judgments of speakers to be good evidence for a grammar. Why? The Chomskian answer is that they are derived by a rational process from a representation of linguistic rules in the language faculty. The paper takes a different view. It argues for a naturalistic and non-Cartesian view of intuitions in general. They are empirical central-processor responses to phenomena differing from other such responses only in being immediate and fairly unreflective. Applying this to linguistic intuitions (...) yields an explanation of their evidential role without any appeal to the representation of rules. Introduction The evidence for linguistic theories A tension in the linguists' view of intuitions Intuitions in general Linguistic intuitions Comparison of the modest explanation with the standard Cartesian explanation A nonstandard Cartesian explanation of the role of intuitions? Must linguistics explain intuitions? Conclusion. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged (...) kind is largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)

In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering (...) a stranger), and (d) the difference between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings. (shrink)

Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of (...) inclinations to believe. Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments. (shrink)

Mathematicians often describe the importance of well-developed intuition to productive research and successful learning. But neither education researchers nor philosophers interested in epistemic dimensions of mathematical practice have yet given the topic the sustained attention it deserves. The trouble is partly that intuition in the relevant sense lacks a usefully clear characterization, so we begin by offering one: mature intuition, we say, is the capacity for fast, fluent, reliable and insightful inference with respect to some subject matter. We illustrate the (...) role of mature intuition in mathematical practice with an assortment of examples, including data from a sequence of clinical interviews in which a student improves upon initially misleading covariational intuitions. Finally, we show how the study of intuition can yield insights for philosophers and education theorists. First, it contributes to a longstanding debate in epistemology by undermining epistemicism, the view that an agent’s degree of objectual understanding is determined exclusively by their knowledge, beliefs and credences. We argue on the contrary that intuition can contribute directly and independently to understanding. Second, we identify potential pedagogical avenues towards the development of mature intuition, highlighting strategies including adding imagery, developing associations, establishing confidence and generalizing concepts. (shrink)

The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital Library, (...) which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In recent years, some defenders of traditional philosophical methodology have argued that certain critiques of armchair methods are mistaken in assuming that intuitions play central evidential roles in traditional philosophical methods. According to this kind of response, experimental philosophers attack a straw man; it doesn’t matter whether intuitions are reliable, because philosophers don’t use intuitions in the way assumed. Deutsch (2010), Williamson (2007), and Cappelen (2012) all defend traditional methods in something like this way. I also endorsed (...) something like this line in Ichikawa (2014a). -/- In this contribution, I will follow up on this sort of defence of traditional philosophical methods in three ways. In §1, I will rehearse and extend some of my reasons for challenging the idea that traditional methods depend on intuitions in an evidential role. (My reasons are very different from those discussed in (Cappelen, 2012).) I will also engage with some recent more sophisticated attempts to establish the idea that intuitions play evidential roles in philosophy, such as that of Chudnoff (2013). In §2, I will consider and argue against a dismissive response to such positions from experimental philosophers, who consider the question of philosophical reliance on intuitions to be irrelevant to the experimentalist critique. But in §3, I will argue that it would also be a mistake to conclude (as Herman Cappelen does) that the critique is rendered totally irrelevant by the denial of the evidential role of intuitions; I defend a more moderate view on which the bearing of experimental studies of philosophical intuitions is relevant for philosophical methodology, but only in a relatively limited way. (shrink)

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well- known biases of (...) judgment and decision-making among expert ethicists and laypeople. We found that even expert ethicists are affected by some of these biases, but also that they enjoy a slight advantage over laypeople in some cases. We discuss the implications of these results for the expertise defence, and conclude that they still do not support the defence as it is typically presented in (moral) philosophy. (shrink)

Action is not always guided by conscious deliberation; in many circumstances, we act intuitively rather than reflectively. Tamar Gendler (2014) contends that because intuitively guided action can lead us away from our reflective commitments, it limits the power of knowledge to guide action. While I agree that intuition can diverge from reflection, I argue that this divergence does not constitute a restriction on the power of knowledge. After explaining my view of the contrast between intuitive and reflective thinking, this paper (...) argues against the conclusions Gendler draws from empirical work on implicit bias. (shrink)

Confronts conflicting intuitions about the character of probabilistic causality. These intuitions were exposed with the publication of the preceding essay, and the critics’ responses to it. Using several important additional examples, this essay addresses the responses of I.J. Good to the criticisms raised in the preceding chapter. It exhibits complexities that arise when we try to accommodate sophisticated intuitions about probabilistic causality in an explicitly articulated theory.

In this article, we discuss critically some of the key themes in Max Deutsch’s excellent book, The Myth of the Intuitive. We focus in particular on the shortcomings of his historical analysis – a missed opportunity by our lights, on the claim that philosophers present arguments in support of the judgments elicited by thought experiments, and on the claim that experimental philosophy is only relevant for the methodology of philosophy if thought experiments elicit intuitions.

Testimony by disabled people concerning the relationship between their experiences and overall well-being has long been an object of social scientific and humanistic study. Often discussed in terms of “the disability paradox,” these studies contrast the intuitive horribleness of certain impaired states against the testimonial evidence suggesting that people in such states do not in fact experience their lives as horrible. Explanations for why such testimonial evidence is suspect range from claims about adaptive preferences to issues of qualitative research methodology. (...) In this paper, I argue that the problem lies not with the evidence, but the intuitions in question. Using the disability paradox as a case study, I further argue against the use of the concept of intuitive horribleness in social epistemology and beyond. I contend that testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are baked into most deployments of the concept, and even if one were to justify its use in select cases, it should be accompanied with prima facie suspicion. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of this analysis for the literature on transformative experience and also for the stakes of multi-cultural, historically informed philosophical inquiry more generally. (shrink)

Much recent work on philosophical methodology has focused on whether we should accept evidence: the claim that philosophers use intuitive judgments about cases as evidence for/against philosophical theories. This paper outlines a new way of thinking about the philosophical method of appealing to cases such that evidence is true but not as it is typically understood. The idea proposed is that, when philosophers appeal to cases, they are engaged in a project of conceptual engineering and that, within that project, (...) class='Hi'>intuitions about cases provide evidence as to the normative constraints which are relevant within that project. The paper demonstrates that this is a feasible interpretation of the way that cases are appealed to in recent journal issues, and makes the case that this would be a better way to think of what philosophers are doing when they appeal to cases. (shrink)

Kant imposa au public philosophique la distinction entre sensations, intuitions et concepts. Bolzano reprit la terminologie, mais pas la substance de cette dernière. Cet article examine la critique astucieuse et détaillée qu’adresse Bolzano à Kant et présente les grandes lignes de sa théorie. Tandis que ses célèbres propositions « en soi » lui permirent de traiter avec précision des notions de conséquence, d’équivalence, d’analyticité, etc., en évitant le psychologisme logique si commun à l’époque, les intuitions font figure d’exception. (...) Elles sont introduites en rapport direct avec l’activité mentale : les intuitions sont des pensées — les épisodes qui représentent notre conscience empirique directe — et constituent en fait la porte étroite de la philosophie de l’esprit bolzanienne.Kant impressed on the philosophical public the distinctions between sensations, intuitions and concepts. Bolzano followed him in terminology, but not in substance. This essay deals with Bolzano’s astute and detailed critique of Kant, and then outlines his own theory. His famous propositions « in themselves », allowed him to discuss, with precision, the concepts of logical consequence, equivalence, analyticity, etc., and to escape from common logical psychologism. Intuitions are an exception. They are introduced with heavy reliance on mental activity and are thought — they are episodes representing our direct empirical awareness — and they indeed constitute the narrow door of Bolzano’s philosophy of mind. (shrink)