I recently addressed Rian Lobato’s absurd accusation that I am lying when I say that there is no good evidence that moral realism is a common view among nonphilosophers. I shouldn’t have to do this. And I probably don’t. Most people probably don’t care or would dismiss this accusation as obviously unjustified. But I’m nothing if not thorough when the mood strikes, and I opted to engage in the hope that Rian would retract the accusation and apologize. That hasn’t happened yet.
Part of the reason I chose to do so is because of my broader hostility towards reflexive, baseless accusations that others are lying. Psychological research shows that we are generally very bad at detecting whether other people are lying without access to contextual cues (Masip, 2017). Sure, if you know a person’s claims are inconsistent with independently verifiable facts, or you learn someone’s distinctive quirks, or you otherwise have specialized inside information or insight, then your assessment may be more accurate, or even virtually certain (e.g., if you have a recorded confession that they lied). Yet none of these standard cues were available to Rian. Nevertheless, Rian is one among many people on the internet that hurl accusations of dishonesty, lying, grifting, disingenuity, pretending, bad faith, and so on with reckless abandon.
This is as unethical as it is unjustified, and they should stop doing so. It is destructive to productive and friendly exchanges to be so quick to question people’s integrity. Such accusations should be made publicly only when we have good publicly available reasons to support the accusation. If Rian wants to insist I’m self-deceived or such nonsense and isn’t attacking my integrity, that’s fine, but (a) none of Rian’s original remarks made that clear, so Rian was at best irresponsible with his accusations and (b) claims of self-deception are even harder to support with evidence, since a self-deceived person could act in a way indistinguishable from an honest person…so what would be the basis for the claim? Either way, once a person has been accused of any of these things, anything they say can be dismissed out of hand. Serious and productive philosophical exchanges become pointless; their critics can always fall back on the “you’re lying” claim, and the victim of the accusation has little recourse or defense against these claims in many cases.
Rian isn’t the first person to accuse me of lying. Rian appears to be associated with David Ribeiro, who has made similar claims over the past few years. Today, I want to put those accusations to rest as well. You can find David’s account of what happened and why he thinks I’m lying here:
David has continued to reiterate accusations that I am dishonest as recently as a few weeks ago. Over the past few years he’d also show up in livestreams and comment sections telling others how he “caught” me lying and has screenshots proving it.
So let’s have a look at what David thinks is evidence I’m lying. The conversation in question took place on Facebook in May 2024. I decided to make it public so you can see it here. Here’s what I initially said:
I still can’t get a clear and consistent response as to what a philosophical intuition is supposed to be. I’m told we all need them and that nothing can get done without them, but I’m not quite sure what they are. When philosophers talk about having an intuition, are they making an empirical claim about human psychology? Just what are “intuitions”?
For comparison, if people went around saying they “had a perception” or “had a memory,” one would expect at least some aspects of these claims to be amenable to empirical inquiry. But when philosophers say they have “intuitions,” well, what are these? Are they a distinctive type of mental state? do they have a specific phenomenology? Do they employ specific regions of the brain? What are the processes involved in “intuitions” and why does it seem like philosophers often don’t care about the answers to these questions?
One of the most common, recent responses I’ve received is that they are “intellectual seemings.” This isn’t very helpful.
You can find the thread David took screenshots of in my response to Tom Wellborn. Tom said:
Philosophical intuitions are considered to be immediate, non-inferential beliefs or judgments that arise spontaneously without conscious reasoning. When philosophers refer to intuitions, they are generally not making empirical claims about human psychology, but rather describing a type of mental state that seems self-evident or self-justifying.
Key aspects would be something like Mental State, Phenomenology, Empirical Inquiry, Intellectual Seemings, and Philosophical Use
Tom provides no evidence that this is what intuitions “are considered.” Are considered by who? Some people, perhaps, but not others. But we’re given no references, no textual support, no survey data, no examples, and no indication that this is anything other than what Tom personally surmises.
Tom’s account likely does capture one of the ways some philosophers use the term “intuition” some of the time. But this is just one among many other proposed accounts of what an intuition is. It’s not the definition, it’s not canonical, there’s no consensus or agreement on it, and if you canvass the literature you won’t be able to ratchet this use of the term into every use of the term. For instance, some philosophers are quite explicit that intuitions are not beliefs or judgments.
Tom’s latter remark also doesn’t make much sense:
When philosophers refer to intuitions, they are generally not making empirical claims about human psychology, but rather describing a type of mental state that seems self-evident or self-justifying.
If you wanted to describe a possible mental state without attributing it to anyone, that might not be an empirical claim. But accounts of intuitions are intended to refer to mental states people actually supposedly have. It makes no sense, then, to suggest that philosophers who report having intuitions and presume people generally have them are “describing a type of mental state” but are somehow not making an empirical claim; to describe a type of mental state people have is to make an empirical claim.
Tom’s account also conflicts with many common conceptions of intuition. Some philosophers, e.g., Huemer, would deny that intuitions are beliefs (and he’d probably deny they’re judgments, too). So are they or are they not beliefs? Or can they include both beliefs and non-beliefs? Who knows! In any case, according to Tom, intuitions are “immediate” and “non-inferential” and they “arise spontaneously without conscious reasoning.” There are many problems with this. How quick is “immediate”? If a person pauses before responding to a trolley problem, is it no longer immediate and thus no longer an intuition? Must they be non-inferential? Inferential processes may not be available on introspection. So you could have two cases that are phenomenologically and functionally identical, where one involved unconscious inference and the other didn’t. How would a philosopher know which process was employed in a given instance? They certainly couldn’t know via introspection alone, since the inferential processes are unavailable to introspection by definition.
However, the main problem I took issue with in the discussion is that his account is too broad. If intuitions referred to any immediate, non-inferential judgment that arises without conscious reasoning it would include countless decisions we make on a constant basis. It would include, for instance, a snap decision to hit the brakes on my car, decisions about what to wear, the impulse to grab a cookie, and all kinds of judgments formed on the basis of beliefs or perception. Practically any mundane decision we make is a form of judgment. Mindlessly opening the refrigerator to consider what to eat? Intuition. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee? Intuition.
I am willing to bet that philosophers would not consider every one of these judgments to be an intuition. Perhaps some would. But many wouldn’t, and it’s an empirical question whether they would or not, and a further empirical question whether they’d use the term to refer to all of these judgments. I’m guessing they wouldn’t. I doubt you’ll find many instances of philosophers referring to their decision to turn left at an intersection as an “intuition.” Intuition doesn’t capture the right connotation in these cases. It’s just not typically used in so expansive a way as Tom’s account would suggest.
Given this, I don’t grant that what Tom has provided is an acceptable account of intuition. That was the whole point of me responding by saying that while I do have “immediate, non-inferential beliefs or judgments that arise spontaneously without conscious reasoning,” I don’t consider these to be intuitions. And I am right not to do so. David is wrong in thinking he caught me “admitting” I had something close enough to what philosophers consider intuitions that I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have intuitions. What Tom described is just an ordinary part of human cognition. This is because the description Tom gave doesn’t refer to the sorts of things adequate for sustaining the kind of rationalistic philosophy that Huemer and other philosophers engage in. So the thing I’m questioning, and denying, isn’t the mere capacity for the sorts of spontaneous judgments Tom described. In response to Tom, I said this:
I have immediate, non-inferential beliefs or judgments about what I’d like for breakfast, but I don’t take those to be philosophical intuitions.
//When philosophers refer to intuitions, they are generally not making empirical claims about human psychology, but rather describing a type of mental state that seems self-evident or self-justifying.//
I don’t grant that anyone is in a position to make claims about mental states that are self-evident or self-justifying. So if they don’t take themselves to be making empirical claims, that is going to be a very serious problem for me.
Notice my first remark; I’m making it clear I wouldn’t consider those intuitions. That is, I don’t question whether we have immediate, non-inferential beliefs or judgments.
Does this mean I’ve conceded that I have intuitions? It depends what you mean by “intuition.” Under some descriptions I think I and most other people have them and under other descriptions I think we don’t or that it’s unclear. What I deny is a cluster of phenomena potentially picked out by the term “intuition.” I don’t deny that one can use the word “intuition” to refer to something I think exists. That would be trivial. I can point to my socks and call them “God.” Would this prove theism? Not in any meaningful sense.
Now, someone could insist those just are what they mean by intuitions. Well then, I obviously have those! Does this mean I’ve been caught “admitting” I have intuitions and thus know what the term means? No. Peter David Jones had been hounding me about this topic for some time, and stepped in to say the following (the sections in double slashes are quotes from me):
//I have immediate, non-inferential beliefs or judgments about what I’d like for breakfast, but I don’t take those to be philosophical intuitions.
Why not? Because they are mundane? Because they are subjective? Because they are fallible?
And what happened to having *no* idea what “intuition” means?
//I don’t grant that anyone is in a position to make claims about mental states that are self-evident or self-justifying.
You constantly grant these at a mundane level, because everyone does. If your guest tells you that they would prefer tea to coffee, you just go with it, instead of screaming “how do you know that!!!” or putting them in a FMRI machine.
I addressed the first question above. Regarding the remark about having no idea what intuition means, I don’t know if I said that or where, but this is a very silly question. I’m a psychologist and a philosopher. The term “intuition” is used by psychologists in reference to dual process models of cognition. These hold that cognition employs roughly two systems, one which is slower, conscious, controlled, and deliberative, while the other is faster, automatic, unconscious, and intuitive.
Do Peter or David suppose I’m baffled if a psychologist says “an intuitive process” in the context of the model? I sure hope not. A charitable reading of what I’d mean if I said I had “no idea” what the term meant would be that in certain philosophical contexts the meaning of the term “intuition” is ambiguous and underspecified, and likely a defective concept. This is especially charitable given that I’ve said something like this repeatedly. This isn’t some esoteric inference about what I mean; I’ve stated what my issue is repeatedly.
I have no idea why Peter or David think they have some kind of gotcha here. What you can see is that someone simply asserted a definition of “intuition” without any references, in a casual discussion on Facebook, with no evidence and no references supporting the notion that this was a generally accepted or widely used conception of what an intuition was. I responded by critiquing that account as overly broad. How would that imply that I’m somehow being inconsistent if I said I had no idea what philosophers meant by intuition? It wouldn’t. Obviously I’ve been given various definitions before; the problem isn’t that people don’t give definitions…it’s that people don’t give consistent definitions, and thus, as a result, it’s hard to pin down what anyone means when they invoke the term unless they offer a local, stipulative definition. And even when someone does that, that doesn’t mean I’ve now been furnished with an adequate account of “intuition” I can go out and use. Knowing so-and-so uses a word a particular way doesn’t help me interpret a literature if I haven’t been given any good reasons to think that the way that person uses the term captures most of the uses in that literature. Notice the very first sentence I wrote in the post:
I still can't get a clear and consistent response as to what a philosophical intuition is supposed to be.
Note the qualities clear and consistent. Accounts of intuition tend to be unclear in that they are missing features or have features they shouldn’t have relative to the way others use the term. At the same time, the inclusion or exclusion of the features attributed to intuitions offered by one or another account are often explicitly in conflict with the features attributed to them by another account. For comparison, imagine you wanted to know what a bambador was.
You go out and ask experts who purportedly use bambadors. These are the definitions you get:
Bambadors are a kind of hat.
Bambadors are any piece of clothing.
Bambadors are something you use to cover your head, but they are definitely not hats.
Bambadors are a special kind of hat that has intrinsic magical properties.
Bambadors are hats or masks, but not scarves.
Bambadors are scarves but definitely not masks.
Bambadors are a special kind of hat only some people have.
Bambadors are definitely not special hats. Everyone has them.
…and so on.
If these were the answers you received, would it be reasonable to say you have “no idea” what “bambador” means? Yes. “No idea” does not typically mean that you literally couldn’t say anything intelligible at all about what the thing in question is. It can be meant literally, but it frequently (if not typically) isn’t used this way. Instead, it’s a colloquial phrase for conveying one’s profound lack of understanding about something. For instance, I don’t know how computers work. It would be reasonable, if an engineer asked me, to say “I have no idea how a computer works.” Now, is it true that I have no idea in the strictly literal sense that I could say nothing at all about how computers work? No. They have electricity and have various parts like processors and motherboards and little fans that keep them cool because they heat up and there’s transistors and something to do with binary code and there’s RAM and I think that means Random Access Memory. I can say a few things. But it’s so far from an adequate understanding that “no idea” is an entirely conventional and ordinary way to express one’s profound ignorance.
Now, I say all this on the off chance I did, in fact, say that I have no idea what intuitions are supposed to be. I searched the comments in that thread and another on intuitions from around the same time and couldn’t find it. So it’s not clear I even did say that. But it would be entirely defensible if I did.
Either way, the above situation with the notion of a bambador is similar to the situation we’re in with philosophical use of intuition. The problem is not that someone can’t locally specify some stipulative use of the term; the problem is that usage of the term is extremely underspecified or inconsistent across different instances of its application; that one doesn’t know what people mean by the term is thus a holistic assessment of a body of discourse. What I am definitely not saying is that I can’t understand someone who offers a specific, stipulative definition. Of course I can (unless it’s nonsense). David and Peter didn’t appear to even understand what I took the issue to be, and doggedly sought to snipe at me and try to take shots at me that simply didn’t land because they were confused.
To head off one bad objection to this problem, someone might argue that all terms are like this. All terms are used in ways that vary from one speaker or context to another. This is true. But it is a matter of degree. How much? Who knows! I don’t know how to quantify exactly how much use of a term needs to be variable, inconsistent, and contradictory across uses to qualify as a problem, but I won’t be intimidated by the same kind of vagueness and paradoxical Sorites problem that plagues so much of the rest of classification in the world. There are semi-arbitrary thresholds and cutoff points we all have to make. What distinguishes a mountain from a hill? I don’t know. But there are mountains and there are hills. So too are there terms that are used in ways too inconsistent for it to be reasonable to suppose they pick out a genuine thing, while others are consistent enough to do so.
Now let’s look at the next part of Peter’s post:
//I don’t grant that anyone is in a position to make claims about mental states that are self-evident or self-justifying.
You constantly grant these at a mundane level, because everyone does. If your guest tells you that they would prefer tea to coffee, you just go with it, instead of screaming “how do you know that!!!” or putting them in a FMRI machine.
This is completely confused. Here is the initial remark I was responding to:
//When philosophers refer to intuitions, they are generally not making empirical claims about human psychology, but rather describing a type of mental state that seems self-evident or self-justifying.//
What I am alluding to is, very roughly, a rejection of the notion that we have a capacity to discern self-evident or self-justifying truths, which are typically a priori. This would include judgments like that knowledge cannot be justified true belief due to Gettier cases, or that torture is stance-independently wrong, or that physicalism must be false because one has the intuition that Mary would learn something new when she saw red.
Another problem with Tom’s definition is the use of the term “seems.” If it’s playing the mundane epistemic hedging role it plays in much of ordinary language, that part, at least, would be fine. But philosophers often treat “seems” as a way to link philosophical intuitions to other forms of cognition that do exist, e.g., perceptions or memories. It seems to me that my name is Lance and it seems to me I’m typing at a computer right now. Memory and perception, respectively. So, too, are we told that it “seems” that Mary learns something new, which provides some defeasible justification for concluding that physicalism is false. This is supposed to be an “intellectual seeming,” which is like perception and memory in certain regards, but is its own thing. This is the kind of thing I am denying. So how did Tom mean “seems”? I don’t know, but it matters. If it was the innocuous kind, this part of the remark wouldn’t be an issue. If it was the objectionable kind, then the very response Tom offered recapitulated an undischarged use of a questionable concept, the very content of which is part of what I am skeptical about. And, furthermore, the existence of which is an empirical claim subject to skepticism, contrary to what Tom’s remarks suggest.
Conversely, a judgment about whether to have tea or coffee isn’t something I think is a plausible candidate for being the same kind of mental state as the alleged philosophical intuition that e.g., Jones doesn’t have knowledge in a Gettier case. Why should I grant that these are the same kind of psychological state, result from the same processes, etc.? I don’t grant this, and don’t see any good reason to.
So I don’t agree with Peter that I do grant what Tom was referring to in some mundane sense. I am drawing a distinction between using an intuition to determine that e.g., something is an instance of knowledge or is good, and deciding I’d prefer coffee over tea. People clearly can do the latter. But it would be ridiculous to insist that, because they can do the latter, and that’s an “intuition,” therefore they can do the former, and the former is simply the same kind of thing. I’m under no obligation to grant this. It does not follow that if someone thinks we have the psychological capacity to decide what to drink then we must grant a capacity to discern a priori truths. This type of dialectical piggybacking is a standard hallmark of the way proponents of intuitions try to establish their existence. They insist that intuitions are simply a part of human cognition, and because we have cognitive processes A, B, and C, therefore we have intuitions, even though they’re supposed to be distinct, and form their own category, D. This simply isn’t how you establish the existence of things. The fact that horses exist doesn’t entail that there are unicorns, even if unicorns are arguably a “type of horse.”
David quoted Peter and added this remark:
- Yes, where is the thing about “I have NO IDEA of what intuition CAN mean by philosophers and I suspect that they FABRICATED it”... I mean, what the hell?
I can’t tell if this is intended to be a literal quote or not. I couldn’t locate any reference to me saying this anywhere. If I did say this, I’d like to see the context. Outside of a context it sounds pretty confused and probably is something I’d not endorse. So maybe I made some kind of mistake. I certainly have some ideas on what philosophers can mean by “intuition.” They could, like Williamson, simply be referring to our ordinary methods of judgment. Or they could refer to dispositions to believe propositions. Or they could refer to hunches. Or they could refer to the processes associated with dual process models of cognition put forward by psychologists. There’s lots of things they can mean that do pick out real phenomena. So I’m puzzled as to why I’d say I have no idea what philosophers can mean.
Either way, if I said this about philosophers, and a random person showed up and gave a stipulative definition, which I then rejected (which is what happened in the thread) would that somehow mean I’ve conceded something and David has somehow exposed a problem with my initial claims? If so, what problem? This is all very obscure and unclear. Maybe it made more sense back then, but this was a few years ago. Looking at this now, it’s not clear to me what David is talking about. I did say this at the time:
I have beliefs and judgments. Nothing is gained by calling any of them “intuitions.”
//And what happened to having *no* idea what “intuition” means?”//
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. The word has lots of uses. I’m familiar with various uses to varying degrees.
That was the end of that particular thread. It remains unclear to me what David was on about there, but there were other skirmishes over this matter to review. Apparently at the time I explicitly stated that I was familiar with various uses of the term. And again, it’s worth emphasizing that they’re attributing claims to me that I was unable to locate in the thread, and in some cases are using quotations even though I can’t find the quotes. I’m not sure I even said the things they’re attributing to me. Maybe I did say them. If I did, is David going to accuse me of lying? Here we have a situation where claims are being attributed to me I don’t remember making. I’m not even denying I made them, but I can’t find them. Maybe you can. If so, I’m happy to claim them as my words.
In any case, this brings us to David’s accusations about me lying. David has repeatedly charged me with lying or dishonesty. Apparently David seems to think he “caught” me “admitting” to something that I am then denying. Here’s what he initially said:
O filósofo anti-realista moral e que trabalha com Filosofia Experimental Lance Bush meteu o Block em mim depois de uma discussão onde ele admitiu que possui algo similar ao que filósofos acadêmicos contemporâneos chamam de "intuições" e que ele vive dizendo que são "meaningless"
This is Twitter’s automatic translation:
The anti-realist moral philosopher who works with Experimental Philosophy, Lance Bush, blocked me after a discussion in which he admitted that he possesses something similar to what contemporary academic philosophers call “intuitions,” and which he keeps saying are “meaningless.”
David also elaborates in one of the screenshots he provides:
Look how it was an exchange that he had with Tom L. Wellborn, Peter David Jones and me, he admits that he does in fact possess something similar to what intuitive and/or intuitionist-friendly philosophers refer to as “intuitions,” how can he say that what philosophers mean by “intuitions” is COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS and that he have NO IDEA of what they COULD MEAN? Pretty weird.
No, David, I have not “admitted” that I possess something similar to what contemporary academic philosophers call intuitions. This makes it seem like he forced some kind of confession out of me, or that I slipped and revealed I “really” had something I’ve denied all along. This never happened.
As I pointed out above, I acknowledged that I have the state in question but that I didn’t consider the state to be an intuition, nor do I grant that it is what philosophers generally have in mind by “intuition.” Is it similar? Sure. Horses are similar to unicorns. If I agreed that I believe horses exist, but was expressing skepticism about the existence of unicorns, would getting me to acknowledge the existence of horses mean I “admit” that something like unicorns exist, and am therefore lying about my unicorn skepticism? No. Similar isn’t good enough. Yet this is similar to what David is doing. It’s silly.
Even if I’m wrong about Tom’s definition and it is an appropriate way to capture how philosophers use the term “intuition,” that’s irrelevant. The point is that I don’t believe this and so I don’t grant that what I “admitted” I have is what philosophers generally consider intuitions. And I said that in that very thread.
So it makes no sense to suggest I’m lying. And the whole point of the examples I gave wasn’t to “admit” I had what philosophers consider intuitions, it was to present a reductio that shows that philosophers probably don’t mean what Tom offered as an account by the term “intuition.” Again, even if I’m wrong about that, and that is how they use the term, that would at best mean that I have what philosophers consider intuitions but don’t realize it. That wouldn’t mean I’m lying. David seems to have a serious problem distinguishing disagreement from lying. At best, all David would be able to say is that I am mistaken (and perhaps stupid or ignorant). But being stupid, ignorant, and wrong doesn’t make you a liar.
My position was the same then as it is now. I don’t claim to have or not have intuitions, and I don’t claim that the notion of an intuition either is or isn’t meaningless. Whether I have intuitions depends on what you mean by “intuition.”
The term “intuition” is also used in an ordinary sense to refer to hunches. I have hunches. It’s used in psychology to refer to automatic, non-inferential psychological processes. I have those, too. Philosophers sometimes use the term in an utterly mundane sense to refer to dispositions to believe propositions. I have these, too. So yes, of course I “have intuitions” in some of the respects philosophers use the term. But the fact that some uses of a term are clear and meaningful and appropriate doesn’t vindicate all the other uses of a given term.
When I say that intuition talk is confused, defective, or meaningless, I am talking about the overall pattern of usage within a given discourse. What I object to is a distinct bandwidth of usages of the term: (1) those that occur in academic contexts where their meaning is underspecified such that it’s unclear given the context how they’re being used and (2) those that are explicitly used in accord with questionable conceptions of intuitions, e.g., ones that treat them as sui generis. The existence of instances of (2) creates a smokescreen of ambiguity for (1), and renders the whole discourse a problem as a result.
Imagine, for instance, that a community used the term “shoe” to either refer to its ordinary meaning of footwear, and also to some Lovecraftian mind-destroying nonsense: shaggalaothmathamolaogomech! Then they went around referencing shoes in contexts where it was entirely unclear which of these uses they were employing. Would it be appropriate to object? Yes. It would. And it wouldn’t be appropriate to insist that because I acknowledge that the term is sometimes used to refer to footwear I must therefore accept the Lovecraftian uses, too.
What David and others don’t seem to appreciate is that there is a whole population of usages of terms that exist in given discourses and that the legitimacy of localized instances doesn’t transfer to all other instances, and if one is raising an objection to those other instances one needs to be able to distinguish those problematic uses from the unproblematic ones. And this is not easy to do given that they’re all picked out using the same term and because the people in question are extremely unclear about what they mean. Unfortunately this results in David and others being extremely pushy and demanding for me to be crystal clear about everything, while they don’t notice the problem I’ve noticed: that there’s an entire field in which people aren’t being clear. Ironic, given how demanding David is in these threads for me to be clear. Apparently I’m held to a standard he isn’t interested in holding others to. Now, maybe David doesn’t think there’s an issue with the way the term “intuition” is being used. That’s his prerogative, but I’m entitled to think there is, and I do. That doesn’t make me dishonest.
Returning to the quote above, David frames things as if there is some distinctive notion of “intuition” among academic philosophers and that I claim to have something close enough to it that my claim that intuition-talk is confused and meaningless is somehow inconsistent with it. This is false, and David is simply confused. Philosophers use “intuition” in all sorts of ways. Roughly, you can plot these uses along a spectrum of mundane to distinct. At the far end of the mundane side of the spectrum intuitions are not distinct from any other psychological processes; instead, the term is simply another way of referring to preexisting and ordinary features of human psychology. This is the account of intuition Williamson (2004) favors:
What are called ‘intuitions’ in philosophy are just applications of our ordinary capacities for judgement. (p. 109)
At the other end, intuitions are a sui generis capacity that is distinct from all other psychological processes. Pust (2024) summarizes this account in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on intuition:
A final family of accounts holds that an intuition is a sui generis occurrent propositional attitude, variously characterized as one in which a proposition occurrently seems true (Bealer 1998, 2002; Pust 2000; Huemer 2001, 2005), in which a proposition is presented to the subject as true (Chudnoff 2011a; Bengson 2015), or which pushes the subject to believe a proposition (Koksvik 2011). Such views are united in denying that belief that p is necessary or sufficient for an intuition that p and in rejecting dispositional analyses of intuition. The close connection between intuition that p and disposition to believe p is explained by claiming that an intuition that p typically serves as a ground of the disposition to believe p.
According to proponents of accounts of this sort, when one has an intuition that p, one does not merely represent or believe or consider p. Rather, p is the content of a distinctive occurrent conscious non-belief propositional attitude. (Pust, 2024)
This is what I deny having and that I deny exists. What I don’t deny is that I have all the mundane psychological processes associated with judgment Williamson refers to. I address this in exhaustive detail in this post. There, another person (in this case, a very confused professional philosopher) accuses me of not having intuitions. Once again, my critics suffer from an astounding lack of understanding. There, I say much the same thing:
My remark is also orthogonal to whether I’d agree with the statement “I have intuitions.” The only way to answer this question is to know what a person has in mind by “intuition.” And I do think we have some of the things that philosophers describe as “intuitions.” It’s just that, even if we had sui generis faculties, dispositions to believe, and so on, we’re not obligated to refer to any of these in particular (or all of them, collectively) as “intuitions.” At least part of my objection to how we use the term is that it is used in too many inconsistent and underspecified ways, making it unclear what anyone is even saying they have when they report having an intuition. For comparison, if people used the term “papple” to refer to apples and pears, and people were constantly mixing them up, you could object to use of the term “papple” without thereby denying that apples or pears exist.
I’ve been very consistent on this over the past few years. It shouldn’t be that complicated for David to appreciate that I think I and others have intuitions under some descriptions but not others. Give me the specific description, and I’ll tell you whether I think I have that or whether others do. But David seems to think that if I say I have a psychological state someone has decided to call an intuition, and it has some of the features associated with some of the uses philosophers use the term “intuition” for, that I’ve been “caught” admitting I have intuitions. This is completely confused, because it equivocates between whether I “admit” to having what David considers an intuition and what I consider an intuition. The only way for me to be lying is for me to knowingly have what I consider to be an intuition, but then knowingly claiming to not have intuitions. But that never happened. At best, I have what David considers an intuition and what I’ve explicitly said I don’t consider to be one. So the accusation of lying makes no sense.
There are then a host of proposed psychological processes between Williamson on the one end and Bealer on the other where intuitions are distinguished in various sorts of ways: unconscious, non-inferential, possessing distinctive phenomenology, operating over a distinctive subset of propositions, and so on. There is no canonical account of “intuition” as it is used by philosophers. Think of it like this. Imagine there’s a whole set of properties for any prospective account of intuitions:
{A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K …}
Suppose A = belief, B = judgment, C = disposition, D = non-inferential, E = spontaneous, F = sui generis mental state, G = quasi-perceptual faculty, H = possesses a distinctive phenomenology, and so on. Philosophers don’t agree on what’s in the set. As a result, any given use of the term “intuition” by a philosopher leaves unspecified what cluster of properties they have in mind by use of the term. For some, it’s {A, B, C}, for others, it’s {D, E, F, ~A, ~B}, and so on (here ~A denotes that intuition must lack the property in question). These accounts don’t simply pick out distinct prospective phenomena; they explicitly and by stipulation exclude rival concepts. Some accounts of intuitions treat them as dispositions, while some not only don’t treat them as dispositions, but maintain that they definitely aren’t dispositions.
When you canvass the literature, then, you’ll see thousands of uses of “intuition.” And what do the philosophers in question mean? There’s usually no way to know because they don’t specify and nobody agrees. So they could mean by “intuition” any coherent (or perhaps even incoherent) combination of properties from the set above. The same philosopher might not even use the term “intuition” consistently across their work or in the same paper. The term is utterly amorphous.
Now, my position is that I question the existence of certain property clusters often picked out by use of the term “intuition.” Here are some candidate uses of the term:
A judgment that is either non-inferential or the inferential features of the judgment are unavailable to introspection
A disposition to believe propositions
A disposition to believe propositions that has a distinct phenomenology
A non-inferential belief in the truth of a subset of non-empirical propositions
The output of a sui generis quasi-perceptual faculty that grants distinctive epistemic access to the truth of a priori propositions
I have no problem endorsing the reality of (1) and (2). I’m skeptical of (3) and (4) but they’re not that outrageous, while I outright deny (5).
Now, David seems to think he’s caught me admitting to something inconsistent with my position on the matter. He hasn’t. David was, and apparently still is, simply confused.
I am tired of this. I have been and always will be aggressively sincere about what I think about these topics to the point that it sometimes gets me in trouble. So it’s incredibly annoying to have someone show up who thinks they’re clever and “caught” me lying.
Finally, suppose I was lying. So what? That doesn’t change anything about the merits of any points I make. Arguments aren’t somehow undermined by the author of the argument not endorsing them. Theories aren’t falsified by their proponents not really believing in them. There are exceptions. If, for instance, I took my personal lack of intuitions as strong evidence that they don’t exist, but I was knowingly lying about not having them when I did, that would undermine such arguments, since the lie was relevant to the truth of the premises of the argument. But the premises of arguments typically don’t require the honesty of their presenters. My claims about the problems with the field’s use of intuitions stand or fall regardless of whether I’m lying or not. That’s one reason why accusations of lying are so dialectically pointless. Not only are they false, and not only are they absolute poison to any effort to have a friendly and productive exchange. They’re also, for the most part, irrelevant.
I want to end by directing my remarks to David: your confusion and misunderstanding is not a justification for you concluding that I’m doing anything nefarious or deceptive. And it’s irresponsible, reckless, and shameful of you to have spent years going around in the comment sections and livestreams claiming to have caught me lying. You haven’t. I can be confused, or inconsistent, or wrong. And I have few qualms about you or anyone else suggesting I am any of those things (I won’t say no qualms, though; such claims can be similarly misguided and annoying). But I’m not dishonest.
What you’ve done is obnoxious and unethical. Your accusations are based on a confused misreading of my claims. You owe me an apology for putting me through this nonsense. I take my views seriously and at the risk of inviting more accusations from unscrupulous assholes who recognize that it’s effective, your accusations bother me. Your private thoughts are yours, but you’ve been repeatedly and publicly making accusations about me for a few years now that you’re unable to actually support. It’s time to stop. It’s time to acknowledge that the specific accusation that I’m dishonest or lying is unwarranted and that you made a mistake.
References
Masip, J. (2017). Deception detection: State of the art and future prospects. Psicothema, 29(2), 149-159.
Pust, J. (2024). Intuition. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuition/#IntuSuiGeneStat
Williamson, T. (2004). Philosophical ‘intuitions’ and scepticism about judgement. dialectica, 58(1), 109-153.