A Defense of Philosophical Intuitions

I do think intuitions are a necessary source of pushback against philosophical skepticism, and am in favor of a kind of spirit of incredulity in response to skepticism. People pretend they are Cartesian skeptics for 15 minutes in a conversation, or a classroom, but go right back on to being a person after the conversation is over.

But on the other hand, I think a lot of disasters in philosophy come from having a failure of imagination, mistaking it for an insight into necessity and calling that an "intuition."

So I don't know that one should have a transcendent attitude toward all intuitions, I think it depends. Lance Bush is interested in moral intuitions and generally (imo) a great philosopher with great instincts, but I think what intuitions we do or don't have about morality are important, and I wouldn't want to wave those away because anglosphere philosophers have a bad track record with intuitions leading them astray when it comes to Mary's Room or the Chinese Room (what is it with rooms).

I think people are rightly skeptical of intuitions for the obvious reason-- they are shortcuts that don't come with easy verification that the "intuiter" knows (and can effectively communicate) the chain of reasoning that led to the conclusion. So you can't tell from the stated intuition whether the corresponding chain of reasoning is correct (or, for any non-trivial intuition, even if there exists a corresponding chain of reasoning at all).

Edit: Well, people are rightly skeptical of intuitions which aren't merely definitional tautologies. The author put definitional tautologies in their list, which seems odd. I don't care about intuitions for which everyone minus edgelords assumes that a thing is being defined in a sentence. It's all the other, subtle intuitions that require unrolling. E.g, if someone thinks it's wrong to torture puppies for fun because everyone has Ring installed nowadays, I want to know that! So I guess we need the edgelords after all :(

Your intuitions are what give you your axioms and Bayesian priors, the starting point of deduction and analysis, as well as your values and top-level goals.

You can't justify any belief at all without axioms/priors, or make any decisions about what to do without values/goals.

Intuition is the thing that gives you those axioms and values; it's really the "only game in town" for generating them.

I don't think intuition is in the same class as "perception". I think intuition is better characterized as a byproduct of perception interacting with our preconceptions. I think fundamentally, intuitions are that part of the pattern-recognizing mind which allow us to quickly decide which tunnel is safe when fleeing a tiger. They are an antidote to indecision, but I think that perception is actually more reliable and factual than intuition in pretty much every sense, because it, in general, has some relation to the world that is thinly mediated by our minds. Intuition is the most unreliable part - it's mind all the way down.

So, to address the final two points:

> (1) if cross-cultural variance undermines the evidentiary value of rational intuition, then it also undermines the evidentiary value of perception for the exact same reasons.

No, perception in a sensory context has some relation to real or imagined phenomena. Intuition isn't predicated on that relation.

> (2) experimental philosophy depends upon perception to arrive at its conclusions (as do all experiments). Therefore, if we can’t count on perception to give us the truth, we can’t trust the results of experimental philosophy because of that very fact.

What about "I think therefore I am"? However, I'm quite frankly never sure I've landed on the truth as a philosopher, and I feel the same way about science. But that doesn't stop me trusting it.

This guy persistently misrepresents skepticism. No radical skeptic as he conceives them could live long, since apparently they don’t believe in eating or breathing…

Radical skepticism is not the rejection of belief, it is the rejection of certainty. I believe many, many things that I am not certain of. I am willing to live without absolute certainty.

In my head and heart there are things I choose to feel certain about, even though I know that such certainty is mere faith. I have no defense or argument to justify my certainty that my wife loves me. I don’t care about empirical justification for that.

People who sneer at skeptics, I am guessing, want to be honored and respected for feeling certain about things that are not, in fact, certain. Meanwhile the power of skepticism is that it encourages me (and everyone) to let the questioning continue.

If you care about philosophy at all, then you should accept that the questioning must continue. The end of doubt is also the end of philosophy.

The argument appears to be: Intuitions work like all our other mental tools, and like the others can be wrong occasionally. We would never consider not using our ability to read just because we occasionally misread something. We would never give up hearing because we misheard something. But we do sometimes consider doing away with intuition, and, according to the author, we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard.

My issue with this argument is that the baseline for things like reading and hearing is much more universal than for intuition. Also the problems that stem from illiteracy and bad hearing and predictable. The consequences of failures of intuition can be anything. My attitude has always been: develop your instincts and then trust them. But don't skip that first step.

A skeptic is just someone with a very fine tuned intuition for detecting bullshit.

An intuition is just something you believe without being able to say why you believe it.

If you have reasons for your belief, then it's a conclusion, not an intuition. If you can't give reasons for it, then you can't argue that anyone else should also believe it, by definition.

"So what is intuition supposed to be? Rational intuitions are a spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions."

Here the author changes the subject from intuition to "rational intuition", but the latter just means a conclusion you come to quickly, and all the examples given are ones that you could readily supply an argument for. That's not the kind of epistemological starting point that people usually mean when they say they have an "intuition", and it's not what people object to when they object to using intuitions as "evidence". Intuitions aren't evidence of anything except the fact that you believe them. If you have reasons for your beliefs, give the reasons, that's it.

Nietzsche, who I would argue is one of the best philosophers or at least observers of human nature, I think was largely intuition/"vibes"-based. I don't know of another modern philosopher who nailed so many predictions of societal behavior (except his nonsense about women, which, coincidentally he had no intuition for since the only woman he really knew was his sister who turned out to not be the greatest person).

So I'd say, yeah, intuition can help.