Monday, April 25, 2005
Probably not of interest to anyone but myself, but I was at a philosophy conference this past weekend and ran into several grad students who were concerned about the role that "intuition" plays in philosophy.
Philosophers often call upon our intuitions about particular cases to provide evidence for or against a given principle. So, for example, Peter Singer thinks that our intuition about what one ought to do if given the choice between saving a child and saving one's car from an oncoming train (intuition: one ought to save the kid and sacrifice one's car) supports his claim that we ought to be giving more to charity since we face an analogous choice with regard to many children in the third world. And so it is with many of the famous thought experiments (also sometimes called, thanks to Dennett, "intuition pumps") in philosophy -- Searle's Chinese Room, the Gettier Examples or simple appeals to intuition, like "Kant says you ought never to lie, not even to a murderer looking for your friend, and that's just too counterintuitive."
So one might get to thinking, what's the status of these intuitions that are so liberally utilized in philosophy, why should we think they're reliable indicators of truth, etc.?
I think this is a mistake, and that people are simply misled by the label, "intuition", which suggests that we're calling upon some special faculty of the mind that delivers verdicts on mysterious philosophical questions. It seems rather clear to me that consulting our intutions is nothing more than finding out what we really think about an issue -- incisive thought experiments show us that we think something about a particular situation that doesn't match our theoretical commitments, so we must revise one or the other. So it's no mystery why "intuition" is as useful as it is -- it shows us what we are committed to.
Of course, there are interesting questions to be asked about our intuitions in philosophy, but they're to be asked about the source and justification of those beliefs in the particular cases, not about intuition in general, which is just a mistake (i.e. "intuition" refers to many different kinds of belief).
¶ 11:06 PM
Philosophers often call upon our intuitions about particular cases to provide evidence for or against a given principle. So, for example, Peter Singer thinks that our intuition about what one ought to do if given the choice between saving a child and saving one's car from an oncoming train (intuition: one ought to save the kid and sacrifice one's car) supports his claim that we ought to be giving more to charity since we face an analogous choice with regard to many children in the third world. And so it is with many of the famous thought experiments (also sometimes called, thanks to Dennett, "intuition pumps") in philosophy -- Searle's Chinese Room, the Gettier Examples or simple appeals to intuition, like "Kant says you ought never to lie, not even to a murderer looking for your friend, and that's just too counterintuitive."
So one might get to thinking, what's the status of these intuitions that are so liberally utilized in philosophy, why should we think they're reliable indicators of truth, etc.?
I think this is a mistake, and that people are simply misled by the label, "intuition", which suggests that we're calling upon some special faculty of the mind that delivers verdicts on mysterious philosophical questions. It seems rather clear to me that consulting our intutions is nothing more than finding out what we really think about an issue -- incisive thought experiments show us that we think something about a particular situation that doesn't match our theoretical commitments, so we must revise one or the other. So it's no mystery why "intuition" is as useful as it is -- it shows us what we are committed to.
Of course, there are interesting questions to be asked about our intuitions in philosophy, but they're to be asked about the source and justification of those beliefs in the particular cases, not about intuition in general, which is just a mistake (i.e. "intuition" refers to many different kinds of belief).
¶ 11:06 PM
