Intuitions in philosophy: A minimal defense

Abstract

In Philosophy Without Intuitions, Herman Cappelen focuses on the metaphilosophical thesis he calls Centrality: Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for philo-sophical theories. Using linguistic and textual analysis, he argues that Centrality is false. He also suggests that because most philosophers accept Centrality, they have mistaken beliefs about their own methods. To put my own views on the table: I do not have a large theoretical stake in the status of intu-itions, but unreflectively I find it fairly obvious that many philosophers, including myself, appeal to intuitions. Cappelen’s arguments make a provocative challenge to this unreflective background conception. So it is interesting to work through the arguments to see what they might and might not show. I think we can articulate a minimal (not heavily theoretical) notion of intuition that captures something of the core everyday philosophical usage of the term, and that captures the sense in which it seems obvious that philosophers rely on intuitions. I think the claim that philoso-phers rely on intuitions in this minimal sense remains strong enough to be interesting, and remains plausible in light of Cappelen’s analysis. Much depends on what counts as an intuition. Cappelen does not give a definition of ‘intu-ition’, but in his textual analysis, he uses three main diagnostics for intuitions: (F1) they have a special phenomenology, (F2) they have a special epistemic status, in that they justify but do not need justification, and (F3) they are based solely on conceptual competence. He goes on to argue that in a number of well-known philosophical texts that are often taken to appeal to intuitions, there is little evidence that authors are appealing to judgments with any of these three features. It is not obvious that these three features capture the core notion of intuition at play in philo-sophical discussion. While the features may be attributed to intuitions by theorists such as Bealer (1992), Cappelen needs to show not just that Bealer is wrong, but that most philosophers’ self-conception is wrong. To flesh out this worry: I think that using an everyday philosophical notion * Forthcoming in a symposium in Philosophical Studies.