Intuition as Conscious Experience

Ole Koksvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351809962
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Is torturing the innocent OK?

Just now something happened: it seemed to you that torturing the innocent is wrong. What kind of mental state were you in? What is its nature? Perhaps you now believe that torturing the innocent is wrong because it just seemed to you that it is. If so, that seems appropriate. But is it really, and if so, what could explain this?

In this book, Koksvik argues these mental states form a psychological kind called 'intuition', and that having an intuition indeed justifies you in believing what it says. What explains this, he argues, is how similar intuition is to perception. Through a detailed examination he shows that intuition, just like perception, is a conscious experience, and that the two experience types have important properties in common, in virtue of which they can both justify belief.

In sharp contrast to traditional thought, Koksvik argues that intuition is completely unrestricted in content: we have intuitions about morality and metaphysics, but also about all sorts of everyday things, like danger or trustworthiness, and in all cases they can justify. The use of intuition is thus not only a legitimate part of philosophical and scientific practice, it also plays a pervasive, important and legitimate role in all of our everyday rational lives.

1
Introduction

SOCRATES: Being able to cut things up again, class by class, according to their natural joints, rather than trying to break them up as an incompetent butcher might.

PLATO Phaedrus

1.1 First steps

Is torturing an innocent person OK?

Just now something happened: it seemed to you (I shall assume) that torturing an innocent person is wrong. This went on for a period of time, then it stopped. What kind of thing happened?

You believe many things: that Paris is the capital of France, that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, and that the currency in France is the Euro, for example. You also have hopes and fears, desires and preferences; you reason and ruminate; and you feel, taste, see, and hear various things. These are all mental states (or events, hereafter simply ‘mental states’). What happened is broadly speaking the same kind of thing as any of these: for a few seconds, you were in a mental state.

But what kind of mental state were you in? What is its nature? These questions are interesting in their own right. We want to know what the world is like, what the nature of reality is. Minds occupy a particularly interesting corner of reality. We inquire into the nature of beliefs, preferences, hopes, and fears. In the same spirit, and for the same reason, we should also seek to discover the nature of the mental state you were just in.

It is also interesting to ask what, if anything, mental states like this one can do. Perhaps you now believe that torturing the innocent is wrong because it just seemed to you that it is. If you do believe that, that is on the face of things appropriate. A good question is whether it really is appropriate, and if so, why and in what way.

Furthermore, ‘seemings’ like this one appear to play various roles, both in everyday life and in various scientific and academic disciplines, including physics, maths, linguistics, law, and philosophy. It is interesting to ask whether they really do play the roles they appear to play, and if they do, whether that is appropriate.

Quite a bit of philosophical attention has been paid to questions like these last ones. Not nearly as much attention has been paid to discovering the nature of mental states like the one you were just in. But this creature of the mind is an interesting one, well worth our attention. Moreover, understanding the nature of these states will help us to answer other questions about them, including in particular whether believing something because that’s how it seems to you really is appropriate.

Let’s consider some further examples. To many people – and maybe to you, now that you think about it – it seems that if something is red, it is coloured. To many it seems that a rational person can’t believe both that things are and that things are not a certain way: both that there is and that there is not another person in the elevator with them, for example. To many it seems that this sentence: “The boy the man the girl saw chased fled” is ungrammatical. To many it seems that if Anne is taller than Bob, and Bob is taller than Cliff, then Anne is taller than Cliff. To many it seems that people generally prefer less pain to more. To many it seems permissible to kill an aggressor if that is the only way to save one’s own life. And to many it seems that if events A and B happened at the same time, and B and C did too, then A and C must also have.

All these mental states have certain things in common. Most obviously, each of them ‘says’ something, something that is either true or false. It is true that if something is red it is coloured, that people generally prefer less pain to more, that if Anne is taller than Bob, who’s taller than Cliff, then Anne is taller than Cliff, and that killing in self-defence is morally permissible. It is false that the sentence is ungrammatical, and that simultaneity is transitive.

A second commonality is that people sometimes come to believe that things are a certain way because that is how things seem to them to be. We can easily imagine this happening for each of our examples; indeed, it has probably happened many times. All sorts of things might happen after that: the person might forget that things seemed that way to them, they might reject the way it seemed on reflection (as you might, when you manage to parse the sentence), or either lose or fail to form the belief for any number of other reasons. But it is still clearly true that people often come to believe that things are a certain way because that is how things seem to them to be.

A third commonality, already noted, is that if a person comes to believe that the sentence is ungrammatical, or that it’s not OK to torture the innocent, because that is how things seem to him, then that is on the face of things appropriate. In fact, we can say something stronger: it is apparently appropriate not just in any old way but in a particular way. Perhaps a sprinter should believe that she will win the race, regardless of how likely that is, if that encourages peak performance. By contrast, if you now believe that torturing the innocent is not OK, that belief is not appropriate because it serves some further end: it is simply appropriate for you to so believe, in and of itself.

Finally, the examples we have mentioned are similar in that being in the mental state feels a certain particular way. Exactly what it feels like is tricky to describe at first, and I will try hard to get this right later on. One thing that immediately stands out, however, is that the mental states are not neutral with respect to what they ‘say’. When it seems to you that if something is red it is coloured, for example, that is no longer something you can easily remain neutral about: you are pushed to believe that that is how things really are. (You are not actually moved around, of course; think of this as a roundabout way of doing something quite difficult, namely to describe an aspect of what it feels like to be in that mental state.)

These apparent commonalities appear to bind these cases, and others, together. Here, as elsewhere, appearances could be deceptive. But unless we find good reason to think that they actually are deceptive, it will remain reasonable to think that there is a class of mental states worth caring about here.

So these are our first steps: a list of examples, the recognition that they all appear to have certain things in common, and a preliminary description of these apparent commonalities.

1.2 More rigour

Most of the examples of seemings just discussed would be accepted by most philosophers as ‘intuitions’. I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, I will simply adopt this usage.

So far, I have tried to keep things simple and non-technical. But no terminology is innocent or pure, and we won’t get far by trying to stay clear of commitment and controversy. I will therefore now say some of the same things again, in more detail, and using language that is a bit more technical and that commits me a bit more. This is useful because it makes the starting point clearer, because it shows what I mean by some key terms and because it brings to light some key assumptions that will play important roles in what follows.

Before that, a brief methodological point. Throughout this book I will make unashamed use of intuition itself to characterise and discuss intuition. I can see no way around this, but also, and more importantly, no reason not to. So I shall (continue to) feel free to say things like: ‘It seeming to an agent as if things are a particular way seems to support her belief that things really are that way’. As we shall see, the conclusions I reach in later chapters vindicate this practice.

1.2.1 Representational content

I said that each intuition ‘says’ something that is either true or false. Let’s get a bit clearer on what that means.

My belief that there is a person behind me is either true or false. For it to be true, the way things are must meet certain conditions, which they may or may not meet. In this case, these conditions are, roughly, that a living human being (that is not disqualified from personhood, if that’s possible) must be located quite close to my back, if I am standing up or sitting, or behind my head, if I am lying down. These are that belief’s truth conditions. My belief represents that the way things are is one of the ways that satisfies these conditions. That is the representational content of my belief, or just its content, for short.

‘One of the ways’, because there are many aspects of the way things are on which my belief places no conditions, and therefore a lot of room for variation consistent with my belief. My belief doesn’t specify what the weather is like, for instance, or what the person behind me is wearing. For my belief to be true, things must be one of the many, many ways they might be that are compatible with what the belief does specify: Tom is behind me wearing jeans in the sun, Dick is behind me wearing a trench coat in the fog, Harry is behind me in a Batman outfit in the rain, and so on.

My belief has truth-conditions, but what I believe is not truth-conditions. What I believe is that the truth-conditions are satisfied: that way things actually are is one of the many ways things might be while meeting these conditions. It is tricky to state this without leaving any room for an interpretation on which the belief represents both its own truth conditions and that these conditions are met, but to be clear, that is not the picture.

This notion of representational content straightforwardly applies to other types of mental states as well. Your intuition that torturing the innocent is not okay has truth-conditions. For it to be true, things have to be a certain way, namely such that torturing the innocent is morally impermissible. Just as with my belief just discussed, there are many things on which the intuition places no conditions. What the intuition represents is that the ways things are is one of the many ways things might be that is compatible with the constraints that it does place. That is the representational content of the intuition, or just its content, for short.

This notion of representational content applies to perception too, although a small adjustment is required. Suppose I have a perceptual experience in which, among other things, I seem to see that a person is walking down the street.¹ My perceptual experience represents a great many further things besides this: the colour of the person’s clothing and of the houses in the background, that the sun shines on her head and torso but not on her legs, and so on.

Because some of the things my perceptual experience represents might be true while others are false, a binary notion like truth-conditions is too blunt an instrument to describe its content. Instead we say that perceptual experience has accuracy-conditions: it is wholly accurate if those conditions are completely satisfied; and otherwise, it is accurate to various different degrees, all the way down to being wholly in accurate. However, even though perceptual experience represents many things, and therefore places many constraints on the way things are, it resembles intuition and belief in that there are many things on which it places no restrictions at all. What it represents is that things are one of the many ways they might be such that those conditions are (wholly) met. That is the representational content of perceptual experience, or just its content, for short.

This is a natural way to understand representational content and a useful one for present purposes.² Other notions may be more useful for other purposes and may also deserve the label, but in this book, the content of intuitions, beliefs, perceptual experiences, and other mental states is understood as just outlined.

*

I can have a belief with the simple content that there is a cup on the table in front of me, but it is not clear that I can see just that. If I see that there is a cup on the table in front of me, I usually see many other things as well: that it has a certain colour, size, and shape; that it is a certain distance from the edge; that it is partly in shadow and partly lit; and so on. Compared to belief and intuition, the content of perceptual experience is usually very rich. (This point will become important later on, because it helps us to explain why some people mistakenly take intuition to be more different from perception than it actually is.)

Some argue that perceptual experience differs from belief and intuition not only in the richness of its content but also in its kind: whereas belief has ‘conceptual’ content, perceptual experience has content of a different, ‘non-conceptual’ variety.³ In my view, the similarities between perception and intuition are significant, so I need to say something about this potential difference between the two states.

If the content of perception is sufficiently different from that of belief, it may be that we never literally believe what we see. However, we clearly do believe things on the basis of what we see, and properly so. Within the things we properly believe on the basis of perception, we can distinguish beliefs that involve some measure of ‘jumping to conclusions’ from those that do not. For example, when I look down the corridor and see that nowhere is light shining out from under a door, in some sense I see that I am the only one still working. But there is another sense in which that is not what I see: it is a conclusion I jump to based on what I do see.

Because everyone needs a way to account for this difference; everyone needs a notion that plays much the same role as representational content does here.⁴ I think that perception has the same kind of content as intuition and belief do, but I also think that even if this turns out to be wrong, my claims can be restated in whatever terms ultimately turn out to be correct. The similar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reduction?
• 3 The shape of the view
• 4 Perceptual and intuitional experiences
• 5 Phenomenalism
• 6 The FIFO objection
• 7 Too much justification?
• 8 Final thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index