Intuitions as Evidence

Joel Pust

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136777073
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is concerned with the role of intuitions in the justification of philosophical theory. The author begins by demonstrating how contemporary philosophers, whether engaged in case-driven analysis or seeking reflective equilibrium, rely on intuitions as evidence for their theories. The author then provides an account of the nature of philosophical intuitions and distinguishes them from other psychological states. Finally, the author defends the use of intuitions as evidence by demonstrating that arguments for skepticism about their evidential value are either self-defeating or guilty of arbitrary and unjustified partiality towards non-intuitive modes of knowledge.

CHAPTER 1

The Use of Intuitions as Evidence in Philosophy

1.1 Introduction

My aim in this first chapter is to demonstrate that much contemporary philosophical theorizing proceeds as though intuitions of various kinds constitute evidence for and against the truth of a philosophical theory. Making clear just how widely intuitions are treated as evidence in contemporary philosophy demonstrates the importance of my discussion, in later chapters, of the normative question of whether intuitions really ought to be so treated.

The chapter consists of an extended discussion of the methods of philosophical analysis and reflective equilibrium. Section 1.2 illustrates the fact that standard philosophical analysis is a method driven by the evidential appeal to particular case intuitions. Section 1.3 argues that those philosophers who avoid exclusive appeal to particular case intuitions instead appeal to more general intuitions and so also use intuitions as evidence. The section also distinguishes between three sorts of intuitionism. Section 1.4 shows that the various methods falling under the rubric of “reflective equilibrium” are all instances of one or another of the forms of intuitionism distinguished in Section 1.3 and so constitute no alternative to treating intuitions as evidence for philosophical theory.

Prior to beginning the main discussion, let me draw the reader's attention to an important fact. Throughout this chapter I will not distinguish between intuitions and intuitive beliefs. As my discussion in Chapter 2 will make clear, I do believe that there is a distinction between the two and that intuitions are not beliefs. Since other philosophers speak indifferently of intuitions, intuitive beliefs and judgements, my discussion in this chapter also uses their (misleading) terminology. However, I believe that the evidential appeal to intuitive beliefs or judgements really amounts, in most cases, to an evidential appeal to intuitions themselves.

1.2 Standard Philosophical Analysis

This section outlines the method of standard philosophical analysis and demonstrates, by appeal to examples of the method in action, that it involves the use of particular case intuitions as evidence for theories. The enterprise that I'm calling “philosophical analysis” can be found as far back as the Platonic dialogues. For example, in an early passage in The Republic, Socrates, searching for the nature of justice, engages Cephalus in an activity most contemporary philosophers should readily recognize as their own. After Cephalus offers Socrates a definition of justice, the following dialogue ensues:

Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it?—to speak the truth and to pay your debts—no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.

You are quite right, he replied.

But then, I said, speaking the truth and paying your debts is not the correct definition of justice.

Quite correct, Socrates. (Plato 1892, 595)¹

This kind of reasoning is repeated throughout contemporary philosophical dialogue. In fact, much of contemporary philosophy can be seen as a series of more and more sophisticated and detailed discussions of this general sort. Philosophers seek to understand the nature of justice, knowledge, justified belief, personal identity, meaning, consciousness, explanation, belief, etc. The usual manner in which philosophical analyses of these concepts or properties are proposed and defended demonstrates an essential reliance on intuitive judgements.

Typically, philosophers seek an account or a theory expressed in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. We seek an account of the nature of X in terms that tell us what all the X's have in common and what only the X's have in common. That is, we are typically seeking the correct way to fill in the right side of an “if and only if” (iff) as in the following prominent examples:

[1] S knows that p iff _____.

[2] S is justified in believing that p iff _____.

[3] Physical/functional state X has intentional content c iff _____.

[4] Action X is morally right iff _____.

[5] Action X is rational iff _____.

[6] Person 2 at time t₂ is the same person as Person 1 at time t₁ iff _____.

[7] X explains Y if _____.

I trust that schemas like [1] - [7] are familiar to all analytic philosophers and that most philosophers could readily expand this list.

Given a proposed analysis of some notion, how do philosophers argue for or against the analysis? Typically, one argues for an analysis by showing that it implies (perhaps when conjoined with other accepted propositions) the correct verdict about particular actual and hypothetical cases of the notion in question. The correct verdict on the cases, moreover, is usually taken to be indicated by the intuitive judgements most people make about the cases.

How are proposed analyses attacked? Again, as anyone who has survived the first couple of days of an introductory philosophy class knows, one argues against the correctness of an analysis by producing a particular hypothetical case (or enough such cases) about which intuition disagrees with the analysis in question. This activity is exemplified in Socrates’ reply to Cephalus when he appeals to what people would or would not say about various hypothetical actions in order to refute the crude analysis of justice offered by Cephalus. A robust intuition that the analysandum term applies to a particular case but that the case lacks one of the features specified in the analysans is usually taken to show that the features the analysis holds to be necessary are not in fact necessary. A robust intuition that the analysandum term does not apply to a case even though the case has all of the features specified in the analysans is usually taken to show that the analysis fails to provide sufficient conditions. In both cases, the data or evidence to which analyses are answerable are intuitions regarding whether or not particular actual and hypothetical cases are instances of the analysandum.

For the remainder of this section, I'm going to attempt to support what I hope are the fairly uncontroversial claims I've just made about the goals and methods of standard philosophical analysis. I'll do this by presenting examples of the method at work. Again, my aim in what follows is only to support the descriptive claims I have just made about philosophical methodology. I will not here be trying to argue that the method either possesses or lacks any normative virtue or that any particular philosophical theory I discuss is actually supported or refuted by the intuitions I discuss.

Let us begin with schemas [1] and [2], those central to contemporary epistemology. As anyone minimally familiar with analytic epistemology over the last 30 years or so will be quite aware, much contemporary epistemology consists of attempts to find satisfactory definitions or accounts of knowledge and justified belief. The paradigm example of how this enterprise works is surely Edmund Gettier's (1963) paper which demonstrated that the analysis of knowledge generally accepted at that time was wrong. That analysis (the JTB analysis) held that S knows that p iff S has a justified true belief that p. Gettier demonstrated that this analysis was incorrect because satisfaction of the analysans was insufficient for knowledge in certain cases. What Gettier did was present two hypothetical cases which almost all philosophers agreed satisfied the JTB analysis but which almost everyone agreed were not “intuitively” cases of knowledge. Gettier's paper launched a continuing philosophical search for the right analysis of knowledge, a search involving ever more baroque analyses and counterexamples.²

Here is a case (derived from Lehrer 1965) from that massive literature:

[i] Nogot's Ford. Suppose your friend Nogot comes over to your house to show you the new Ford automobile he has just purchased. He shows you a deed of sale and takes you around the neighborhood for a spin. You believe, on this good evidence, that a friend of yours owns a Ford. Suppose, in addition, that Nogot is bent on deceiving you and has merely borrowed the Ford and forged the accompanying documents. Suppose further that, unbeknownst to you or Nogot, Havit, another friend of yours, actually does own a new Ford, having just been willed one by his dying aunt. Do you know that a friend of yours owns a Ford?

Most philosophers take the fact that they have the intuition that S does not know that p in this case to show that S does not know that p. An adequate theory of knowledge should, they seem to think, treat this fact as a datum. Other contributions to this enterprise also display this pattern of proposed analysis and intuitive counterexamples (Harman 1973; Lehrer 1990; and many, many others).³

The analysis of justified belief proceeds in exactly the same fashion. A theory is proposed, some condition or conjunction of conditions designed to fit the right side of [2], and it is tested by its ability to account for intuitive judgements regarding the justifiedness or unjustifiedness of particular actual and hypothetical beliefs.⁴ That this is so is recognized by many philosophers who reflect on their practice. For example, the epistemologist John Pollock claims that in epistemological analysis:

[O]ur basic data concerns what inferences we would or would not be permitted to make under various circumstances, real or imaginary. This data concerns individual cases and our task as epistemologists is to construct a general theory that accommodates it. (Pollock 1986, 172)⁵

Consider, for illustration, the proposal of Goldman (1979). Suppressing details and refinements, Goldman proposed that the right side of [2] was properly completed with “S's belief that p is produced by a reliable process.” Counterexamples were quickly proposed. The sufficiency of the account was attacked by Bonjour (1985) and Lehrer (1990) who appealed to intuitive judgements about whether people with peculiar reliable faculties such as clairvoyance would be justified in believing on the basis of those faculties if they had reason to think no such faculty existed. Here is one such case:

[ii] Norman the Clairvoyant. Norman is a perfectly reliable clairvoyant. He has, however, no evidence whatsoever for his marvelous power. Suppose that Norman suddenly finds himself with a belief that the president is in New York city. Is Norman justified in believing that the president is in New York?

Since many philosophers (including, apparently, Goldman (1986, 109), but see Goldman (1979, 120-121)) agreed that Norman would not be justified in believing as he does, and since the case is one in which the belief in question is produced by a reliable process, straightforward reliabilism was prima facie refuted. That this was so is indicated by the fact that the defenders of reliabilism felt a need to amend or reinterpret the analysis (e.g. Goldman (1986)). Failure of an analysis to capture a robust intuition is, evidently, deemed evidence against it.

The task of completing [3] is shouldered by many theorists in the philosophy of mind. Though [3] does not require it, the goal in much of contemporary philosophy of mind has been to complete [3] using a set of naturalistically acceptable conditions (or, at least, to offer a set of naturalistically acceptable sufficient conditions (Fodor 1990)).⁶ That the analyses in this field are often constrained by shared intuitive judgements about cases can be demonstrated by attention to the fact that many theories of mental content are tested by their ability to capture the robust intuition elicited by Hilary Putnam's (1975) Twin-Earth case:

[iii] Twin-Earth. Suppose that you have a physical doppelganger in another possible world, a creature physically identical to you. Suppose that in this other possible world that instead of H20 in the streams, rivers and oceans, there is a different stuff, XYZ, which seems to the unaided senses exactly like water. When you and your doppelganger think “water is wet”, do your thoughts mean the same thing?

Here, many philosophers profess, at least when the story is told in sufficient detail, to have the intuition that “water” in the mind and mouth of a physical twin on Twin Earth would mean something different than it means in my mind and mouth. Many of them, moreover, seem to require that any acceptable account of mental meaning capture this intuitive difference.

It may be less common for moral theories to be put in a form acceptable as the right side of [4], but nonetheless (as the discussion of reflective equilibrium in Section 1.4 will demonstrate) much philosophical theorizing about morality can be understood as an attempt to justify general principles or rules in virtue of the fact that they make the same distinctions made by our intuitive judgements about cases. Explaining why a moral theorist must attend to her own moral beliefs about examples and cases, one master of this case-driven method, Judith Jarvis Thomson, claims that

it is precisely those beliefs [about cases] which supply the data for moral theorizing, and which go a long way—if not all the way—to setting the constraints on what constitutes an acceptable moral principle and thus on what constitutes an acceptable way of understanding what we ourselves take morality to require of us. (1986, 260, emphasis added)

To take a simple but revealing example, consider the way in which philosophers sometimes argue against crude utilitarianism. Typically, they demonstrate that the theory (at least in its crude hedonic act utilitarianism form) implies that certain actual or hypothetical actions are permissible (or even obligatory) which intuition deems either impermissible or not obligatory. Here is a simple example:

[iv] The Punishment of the Innocent. Suppose that a certain sort of crime became very common and that none of the perpetrators could be caught. Suppose that if an innocent man could be framed and thought guilty by most everyone, then this would have a significant deterrent effect on other potential perpetrators and thereby produce a better total outcome than simply admitting that no perpetrator could be found. Would this act be right?

Again, most everyone feels, simply upon reflecting on this case, that such an act would be grossly immoral. Thus it is that straightforward act utilitarianism is rejected for implying, contrary to intuition, that certain acts violative of rights are moral and that certain acts based on personal concerns and attachments are quite immoral.

Many debates about decision theory are profitably interpreted as disagreements about how the right side of [5] is ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 The Use of Intuitions as Evidence in Philosophy
• CHAPTER 2 The Nature of Philosophical Intuitions
• CHAPTER 3 Empiricist Explanationist Skepticism About Intuitions
• CHAPTER 4 Problems with the Empiricist Skeptical Argument
• CHAPTER 5 Reliability, Epistemic Circularity, and the Undue Partiality of Empiricist Skepticism About Intuitions
• References
• Index