Philosophical Intuitions

Examples like these abound. In fact, philosophical intuitions play such a significant role in contemporary philosophical practice that George Bealer (1992, 1996a, 1998) has said that philosophical intuitions are part of “our standard justificatory procedure”.

Now at one time many people accepted the doctrine that knowledge was justified true belief. But today we have good evidence to the contrary, namely, our intuitions that situations like those described in the Gettier literature are possible and that the relevant people in those situations would not know the things at issue. This and countless other examples show that, according to our standard justificatory procedure, intuitions are used as evidence (or as reasons). (p. 122)

Bealer not only makes the descriptive, sociological claim that philosophical intuitions are in fact a standard part of our justificatory practices, he also argues for the normative claim that they must be. The normative claim is part of his famous argument for the incoherence of empiricism, whose basic idea is that empiricists cannot defend their own methodological commitments using any set of justificatory resources that don't include philosophical intuitions. Other philosophers have gone further than Bealer, claiming not only that philosophical intuitions are part of our standard justificatory procedure, but also that this fact is part of what makes philosophical methodology unique. For example, Janet Levin (2005) writes:

Is knowledge justified true belief? Is causation merely constant conjunction? Is conscious experience nothing but neural activity of a certain kind? These questions, insofar as they concern the nature of things (rather than merely the structure of our concepts), are modal theses, and thus cannot be investigated purely by empirical means.

And, Alvin Goldman (2007) writes:

One thing that distinguishes philosophical methodology from the methodology of the sciences is its extensive and avowed reliance on intuition. Especially when philosophers are engaged in philosophical “analysis”, they often get preoccupied with intuitions. To decide what is knowledge, reference, identity, or causation (or what is the concept of knowledge, reference, identity, or causation), philosophers routinely consider actual and hypothetical examples and ask whether these examples provide instances of the target category or concept. People's mental responses to these examples are often called “intuitions” and these intuitions are treated as evidence for the correct answer. At a minimum, they are evidence for the examples' being instances or non-instances of knowledge, references, causation, etc. Thus, intuitions play a particularly critical role in a certain sector of philosophical activity. (p. 2)

But, what are philosophical intuitions? Answers vary, often reflecting different attitudes about how we should go about trying to answer this question. Some philosophers encourage us to consult our intuitions about intuitions; others recommend paying special attention to what they introspectively seem to be from the first- person point of view; and still others advise looking closely at what philosophers appeal to as intuitional evidence in practice.⁷ As Jonathan Weinberg and Joshua Alexander (forthcoming) point out, these different approaches have produced a range of conceptions from thin conceptions that treat philosophical intuitions as rather generic kinds of mental states (or episodes), typically beliefs or inclinations to believe, to thick conceptions that place additional conditions on what kinds of mental states count as genuine philosophical intuitions.

The Doxastic Conception

Some philosophers think that intuitions are simply beliefs, or perhaps inclinations to believe.⁸ David Lewis (1983) adopts this view:

Our “intuitions” are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions, and a reasonable goal for a philosopher is to bring them into equilibrium. (p. x)

And Peter van Inwagen (1997) agrees:

Our “intuitions” are simply our beliefs - or perhaps, in some cases, the tendencies that make certain beliefs attractive to us, that “move” us in the direction of accepting certain propositions without taking us all the way to acceptance. (Philosophers call their philosophical beliefs intuitions because ‘intuition' sounds more authoritative than ‘belief'.) (p. 309)

And, while we might question whether van Inwagen has accurately captured our motivation for singling out some of our beliefs as philosophical intuitions, Timothy Williamson (2007) has recently argued that there are good reasons for thinking of them in this way: more restrictive conceptions don't adequately capture all of what philosophers appeal to as intuitional evidence in practice, and more inclusive conceptions help insulate philosophical intuitions from the threat of skeptical challenge by making global intuitional skepticism less and less attractive.⁹ Still, there are other reasons to worry that the doxastic conception is simply too thin: many philosophers want to say that there are important differences between philosophical intuitions and other kinds of mental states, and we might worry that the doxastic conception doesn't put us in a position to be able to mark these differences.¹⁰

The Phenomenological Conception

One way to mark the difference between philosophical intuitions and other kinds of mental states is to suggest that genuine philosophical intuitions have special phenomenological characteristics that are introspectively accessible aspects of intuitional experience.

While this conception has been tremendously influential, it has also been extremely controversial, with much of the controversy surrounding the claim that philosophical intuitions involve the appearance of necessity.¹³ As Joel Pust (2000) points out, one problem is that many propositions that might seem to us to be necessarily true when we stop to think about their modal status might nonetheless never appear to us to be necessarily true simply because we never stop to think about such things. The idea is that whether or not a proposition appears to us to be necessarily true depends not only on features of the proposition, but also on whether those features catch our attention. And this leaves open the possibility that propositions that would seem to us to be necessarily true under the right circumstance never actually appear to us in this way simply because the circumstances are never right.

The Semantic Conception

Some philosophers have attempted to do this by arguing that philosophical intuitions must have a specific kind of propositional content. Ernest Sosa (1998) provides a nice example of this approach, arguing that philosophical intuitions must have abstract name=bookmark69>propositional content. Sosa doesn't say precisely what this means, instead saying that he will rely on our working understanding of what it means for a proposition to be abstract, but he does provide some glimpse of what he means when he says that abstract propositions don't mention any concrete particulars - no particular persons, places, or things. (They can mention particular properties or relations.) The problem with this approach is that it is also too strict, again leaving out certain things that we want to count as philosophical intuitions.¹⁴ To see this, we need to be careful to distinguish between philosophical claims and the intuitions that are used to evaluate them.

The Etiological Conception

The idea behind both the semantic and phenomenological conceptions was to try to locate something in the content or appearance of philosophical intuitions that could be used to set them apart from other kinds of mental states. The problem is that too much seems to get lost in the mix. These conceptions turn out to be too discriminating, leaving too much out in their effort not to let too much in. This has led some philosophers to suggest that what makes philosophical intuitions different from other kinds of mental states has to do with where they come from rather than what they are or what it's like to have them. Kirk Ludwig (2007) advances this view, arguing that genuine philosophical intuitions are judgments made only on the basis of conceptual competence. In the same spirit, Ernest Sosa (1998) suggests that philosophical intuitions are inclinations to judge based on conceptual understanding, George Bealer (1998) claims that philosophical intuitions are the product of determinate concept possession, and Antti Kauppinen (2007) argues that they are what competent users of the relevant concepts would say in sufficiently ideal conditions where their judgments are influenced only by semantic considerations.

The common theme is that we can distinguish philosophical intuitions from other kinds of mental states by looking at the contribution that conceptual competence plays in the formation of particular intuitive judgments. It turns out, however, that this is actually quite hard to do. As we will see in later chapters, it is no easy task to determine precisely what is part of our conceptual competence and what is part of our conceptual performance (Alexander et al. 2010a, 2010b). But even if we set this worry to the side, the fact remains that we need some way of identifying which intuitions have the appropriate etiological pedigree, and the problem is that the cognitive processes involved are typically unconscious (Henderson & Horgan 2000, 2001) or otherwise introspectively opaque (Lynch 2006). We may have privileged access to the contents of our own psychological states, but rarely do we have that kind of access to their causes (Nisbett & Wilson 1977, Wilson 2002), and this is reason enough to worry that it is going to be quite difficult to separate the influences of conceptual competence from matters of conceptual performance.

The Methodological Conception

It is important to be clear that the problem with the etiological approach is that it is hard to see how it's going to work in practice. The nature of the cognitive processes involved makes it difficult to distinguish conceptual competence from conceptual performance, and their relative inaccessibility, especially to introspection, makes it difficult to see how we are going to be able to determine which mental states count as philosophical intuitions. This has led some philosophers to suggest that there is a methodological difference between philosophical intuitions and other kinds of mental states. The idea is that what makes philosophical intuitions different from other kinds of mental states isn't necessarily where they come from but rather what we do with them once they are here. Antti Kauppinen (2007) advocates this approach, arguing that philosophical intuitions are those mental states subjected to critical examination as part of reflective participation in traditional philosophical discourse; they are the mental states ratified by a process of philosophical reflection. This way of thinking about things is perfectly consistent with thinking that philosophical intuitions have some kind of special propositional content, special phenomenological characteristic, or even special etiological background. In fact, Kauppinen endorses both an etiological conception and a methodological one, arguing that philosophical intuitions are what competent users of the relevant concepts would say in sufficiently ideal conditions where their judgments are influenced only by semantic considerations, and that these just happen to be the kinds of mental states that are generated by reflective participation in traditional philosophical discourse.

The advantage that the methodological conception has over these other ways of thinking about philosophical intuitions is that it provides a practical way of deciding which mental states count as philosophical intuitions, and does so in a way that seems less likely than the phenomenological or semantic approaches to leave too much out. Still the idea that philosophical intuitions are the product of traditional philosophical reflection does raise some worries about their epistemic fitness, as we will see in later chapters. There are significant, and often overlooked, limits to the epistemic value of traditional kinds of philosophical reflection, a point made nicely by Hilary Kornblith:¹⁵

When we stop to reflect on the question of whether our prereflective beliefs are justified, a host of different biases go to work. We better remember evidence which supports the beliefs we hold than evidence we encountered which runs contrary to them. We better remember occasions on which we have been correct than those on which we have erred. We have a tendency to judge arguments which support our beliefs quite favorably, while arguments which run contrary to our beliefs are held to a very high standard. When we form judgments about the processes by which our pre-reflective beliefs were formed, we seem to employ as a minor premise the belief that we are, all things considered, quite reliable in our judgments, and we thus have a strong tendency to see our beliefs as based on evidence which we ourselves take to be highly probative, whether the beliefs were in fact formed on such a basis or not. As a result, far more often than not, the result of reflection turns out to be little more than a ratification of the beliefs held prior to reflective evaluation. Rather than serving as a source of correction... reflection tends to act in ways which further cement our pre-reflective beliefs into place within the larger web of our convictions. Many reflective processes thus act, not to correct our pre-reflective beliefs, but only to increase our confidence in them; we thus become more self-satisfied, even if no more accurate, epistemic agents. (2010, p. 5)

Reflection, it seems, sometimes has quite a negative epistemic influence on us, a point that we will want to look at more closely in coming chapters.

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