lukeprog comments on Intuitions Aren't Shared That Way - Less Wrong

31 Post author: lukeprog 29 November 2012 06:19AM

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Comment author: RichardChappell 03 December 2012 09:53:45PM 4 points [-]

The debate over intuitions is one of the hottest in philosophy today

But it -- at least the "debate over intuitions" that I'm most familiar with -- isn't about whether intuitions are reliable, but rather over whether the critics have accurately specified the role they play in traditional philosophical methodology. That is, the standard response to experimentalist critics (at least, in my corner of philosophy) is not to argue that intuitions are "reliable evidence", but rather to deny that we are using them as evidence at all. On this view, what we appeal to as evidence is not the psychological fact of my having an intuition, but rather the propositional content being judged.

The purpose of thought experiments, on this view, is to enable one to grasp new evidence (namely, the proposition in question) that they hadn't considered before. Of course, this isn't a "neutral" methodology because only those who intuit the true proposition thereby gain genuine evidence. But the foolishness of such a "neutrality" constraint (and the associated "psychological" view of evidence) is one of the major lessons of contemporary epistemology (see, esp., Williamson).

Comment author: lukeprog 04 December 2012 12:37:17AM 0 points [-]

Can you cite a specific paper on book chapter which makes the kind of argument you're suggesting here?

Comment author: RichardChappell 04 December 2012 06:48:15PM 3 points [-]

Jonathan Ichikawa, 'Who Needs Intuitions'

Elizabeth Harman, 'Is it Reasonable to “Rely on Intuitions” in Ethics?

Timothy Williamson, 'Evidence in Philosophy', chp 7 of The Philosophy of Philosophy.

Comment author: lukeprog 04 December 2012 07:52:28PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. I'm going to be extremely busy for the next few weeks but I will make sure to get back to you on this (and reply to your comment, so you get a notification) at a later time.