Introduction
The idea that our philosophical intuitions provide us with important philosophical insight about the world and ourselves has not been without its critics, and much of the concern has centered on the purported evidentiary status of philosophical intuitions in debates about the truth or plausibility of philosophical theories.
Some have argued that, while philosophical intuitions count as evidence for something, they don't count as evidence for anything that ought to be of real interest to philosophers (see, e.g., Kornblith 1998, 2002, 2007). Others have argued that philosophical intuitions cannot be treated as evidence because we cannot determine antecedently whether or not they are reliable guides to the truth (see, e.g., Cummins 1998). Still others have argued that philosophical intuitions cannot be treated as evidence because they are fallible (e.g., Devitt 1994, Elgin 1996). These challenges have been instructive, but more for what they tell us about what a successful challenge must look like than for what they tell us about the standing of philosophy's interest in our philosophical intuitions. We learn from them that a successful challenge can't rest on too narrow a conception of philosophy, can't demand the epistemically impossible, and can't be so strong that it deems all putative evidence untrustworthy.In this chapter we will focus on a different kind of challenge, one advanced by experimental philosophers, and ask how well it has learned these lessons. Philosophers have been interested in pursuing philosophical questions through the lens of our philosophical intuitions, at least in part, because they've believed that these intuitions are more or less universally shared. Recent empirical work, however, finds interesting patterns of intuitional diversity. While intuitional diversity presents its own methodological challenges, forcing us to either explain away certain evidence or explain away our worries about evidential diversity, the real problem is that these patterns of intuitional diversity suggest that our philosophical intuitions might be sensitive to things that we neither expected nor perhaps wanted them to be. Since unwanted evidential sensitivity is acceptable only when it can be expected and controlled, it seems that philosophy’s intuition deploying practices face a challenge.
The exact nature of this challenge, often called the restrictionist challenge, and what general methodological conclusions should be drawn from this work, has proven difficult to determine.
The most radical version of this challenge would call for a complete methodological elimination of philosophical intuitions, but this position seems too radical, being neither warranted by the empirical results nor necessary in order to accommodate them. The most conservative version of this challenge would call for limited methodological restrictions, removing problematically sensitive philosophical intuitions from play, while leaving our intuition deploying practices otherwise intact. This position seems too conservative, failing to appreciate the risks involved in not knowing how widespread this kind of problematic intuitional sensitivity might be. The right position falls somewhere in between, combining local methodological restrictions with a global shift in how we think about and approach our intuition deploying practices. The real challenge lies not just in the fact that intuitions are not wholly reliable, but also in the fact that we know so little about them. We lack the resources needed to explain problematic intuitional sensitivity and, in return, struggle to understand its dimensions, to identify strategies for how to compensate for it, and to predict where it will appear. What is really needed, then, is a general, systematic understanding of philosophical intuitions. By coming to better understand what intuitions are, where they come from, and what factors influence them, we can better understand what role they can play in philosophical practice.2.