Related: It's apparently quite common for philosophical intuitions to divide along gender lines. Academic philosophy is a heavily male-dominated field, and there are a number of ostensibly "intuitive" propositions that are actually quite uncommon among women. See:
Interesting paper, but one thing that annoys me about it is how they don't discuss what qualifies as an intuition. The various thought-experiments about what it means to "know" something or about what's right or wrong, sure. But then they also report on questions like "is determinism and free will compatible" and "could a robot ever experience love".These are things you analyze and reason out, you don't just have an intuition about it!
Education levels are another big one (and not simply with respect to things where education should give you more accurate intuitions, whatever that would mean.) How much confidence "know" implies, for instance.
On that same blog, Massimo Pigliucci wrote a reply.
Pigliucci's reply is good, but the discussion in response to Pigliucci's piece is uncommonly good and wide-ranging. Definitely worth a look. Besides the use and misuse of intuition in philosophy, subjects covered include Searle's "Chinese Room" and how not to use Google to collect evidence.
People here may remember Pigliucci from this Blogging Heads debate against Eliezer.
Where is it written that if a reasoned argument reaches a conclusion that an individual does not like, that this proves that the reasoned argument must be flawed? People have an annoying tendency of asserting that our “moral intuitions” are so flawless that if any reasoned argument comes into conflict with a moral intuition that the moral intuition must be preserved.
I hold that moral intuitions are nothing but learned prejudices. Historic examples from slavery to the divine right of kings to tortured confessions of witchcraft or Judaism to the subjugation of women to genocide all point to the fallibility of these 'moral intuitions'. There is absolutely no sense to the claim that its conclusions are to be adopted before those of a reasoned argument.
In fact, the prejudice that we have 'moral intuitions' that are superior to any type of reasoned argument is a groundless conceit – something children should be warned against the instant they can understand the warning.
-- Alonzo Fyfe
In old mathematics texts, at the end of a proof one sometimes sees the expression "Q.E.A.", abbreviating "quod est absurdum", that is, "which is absurd". It isn't used nowadays, because in mathematics, it is now known precisely what is absurd: a contradiction. Nothing else is absurd. The only reductio ad absurdum in mathematics is proof by contradiction. While intuition may inform one's search for theorems and their proofs, an actual proof must not depend on any intuitions beyond the common acceptance of the universal language of mathematics (i.e. first-order predicate calculus).
In former times, before that universal language had been discovered, this was not so. People trying to prove Euclid's Fifth Postulate would start by supposing it to be false, derive a great many conclusions from this, and eventually either give up, or declare victory by dismissing as absurd or repugnant some conclusion they thought especially bizarre.
In science, there is a second type of absurdity: contradiction by experimental data. This is not quite as reliable a message that your theory is wrong as self-contradiction, since sometimes it is the experiment that is wrong, but still, you can get a long way with science. When establishing scientific results, intuition does not count as evidence, only consistency of the theory and agreement with observation.
19th century introspectionist psychology failed because its practitioners found themselves unable to agree on the basic data of their introspections, such as whether every colour is a psychologically primitive sensation, or some are compounds of others (link). Here's a link to the beginning of a scientific account (containing a link to a book-length account near the foot).
So in both mathematics and science, intuition plays a role in the conduct of the discipline, but always has to be cashed out when it comes to determining what is true. When it cannot be, the subject is in a confused state. Philosophy is very confused. If intuition is evidence, as Kripke would have it (quoted in the paper that Prismattic linked):
Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.
then how does one proceed when different people's intuitions are irreconcilable? The Chinese Room does/does not understand. One should/should not switch the trolley. A perfect copy is/is not me. Reality does not contradict itself, only our beliefs about reality. Therefore intuitions on these matters, however strongly held, are poor evidence.
What good is a discipline in which anyone can respond to an argument by just trotting out a contrary intuition, and have this count as a substantial response?
Ethics leans especially heavily on appeals to intuition, with a whole school of ethicists (“intuitionists”) maintaining that a person can see the truth of general ethical principles not through reason, but because he “just sees without argument that they are and must be true.”6 Intuitions are also called upon to rebut ethical theories such as utilitarianism: maximizing overall utility would require you to kill one innocent person if, in so doing, you could harvest her organs and save five people in need of transplants. Such a conclusion is taken as a reductio ad absurdum, requiring utilitarianism to be either abandoned or radically revised – not because the conclusion is logically wrong, but because it strikes nearly everyone as intuitively wrong.
[...]
One central concern for the critics is that a single question can inspire totally different, and mutually contradictory, intuitions in different people. Personally, I’ve often been amazed at how completely I disagree with what a philosopher claims is “intuitively” the case. For example, I disagree with Moore’s intuition that it would be better for a beautiful planet to exist than an ugly one even if there were no one around to see it. I can’t understand what the words “better” and “worse,” let alone “beautiful” and “ugly,” could possibly mean outside the domain of the experiences of conscious beings. I know I’m not alone in my disagreement with Moore, yet I’ve also talked to other well-respected professional philosophers who claim to share his intuition.
Link: rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/01/are-intuitions-good-evidence.html
I think the article provides some interesting insights into philosophy. It is also food for thought when it comes to metaethics, the psychological diversity of mankind and intuitively wrong versus rationally right.
via Luke Muehlhauser