Do philosophers need intuitions?

1.0 Maybe we we don’t have intuitions

Over on The Journal of Absolute Truth, Patrick Flynn asks whether it’s reasonable for people to trust their intuitions. I quite like how he frames the issue. (As an aside my very first blog post was a response to Flynn). He begins with the following:

People often speak about intuitions, which I take to be various non-inferential “seemings”—that is, things that just seem to be the case. Or, to put it polemically, a sort of warm inner tingle that something is true. (A philosophical Spidey sense?)

As I said in a note, before opting to write a short blog post about this:

I think this is a great way to describe intuitions. But I also think it flags something suspicious about them: It’s not so clear there is such a thing. While people may report having a kind of “philosophical Spidey sense,” I’d put money on this being a learned behavior people pick up from studying philosophy, and not a genuine reflection of some type of cognitive process we typically all possess. I think it’s a learned habit more akin to the mistaken belief that one can see auras.

In short: I think these kinds of intuitions aren’t real. They’re a bit of pseudopsychology, and people are tricked by their own introspective errors and the philosophical subculture into sustaining confidence in the reality of this phenomenon.

Speaking for myself, as far as I can tell I don’t have any philosophical “seemings” at all. I have judgments, beliefs, attitudes, varying levels of confidence, and so on. But absolutely nothing about my experience of any intellectual matter, philosophical or otherwise, involves anything that seems to match what philosophers are talking about when they speak of “seemings.”

This isn’t to say that I don’t think something is going on when philosophers report having intuitions. But something is going on when people claim to see auras—whatever it is though, it’s probably not literally seeing auras. Those who claim to see auras may be misinterpreting their experiences, or if we want to get wildly speculative, they may have acquired a kind of learned synesthesia. I don’t actually think this second possibility is going on; my point is simply that there are lots of other possibilities other than them actually learning to see auras. Compare, too, to pareidolia, which occurs whenever we impose meaning on ambiguous or meaningless stimuli. The takeaway I want to stress is that people can believe on introspection that certain psychological events are occurring, and, while it’d probably be quite a stretch to say that they’re mistaken that something is going on, they can be mistaken about their account of what is going on. If we want to designate as “intuitions,” whatever it is that’s going on when philosophers report having intuitions, then, obviously, and without any reasonable controversy, philosophers have intuitions. I’m not so insane that I think nothing is going on.

2.0 The nature of intuitions

However, I do think philosophers don’t appreciate the possibility that their self-reports may be a wildly inaccurate account of what’s going on with them, and that it’s entirely possible what they take themselves to be doing doesn’t draw on any distinctive or reliable cognitive processes. It may be closer to thinking one sees patterns in tea leaves. And we’re just not going to know unless we do adequate empirical research. Here’s my prediction: the notion of an intellectual seeming or philosophical intuition will not figure in future models of human cognition, because such states will either be redundant with existing psychological processes or excluded because they add nothing relevant to the models. In other words, whatever intuitions are, I don’t think they’re a distinct kind of psychological process. If you’re not already a bit familiar with intuition talk in philosophy, here’s my rough impression: nobody is clear on what intuitions are, people use the term in all sorts of different ways, very few of those ways map onto colloquial use of the term, and thus we’re left with a host of messy, disparate, and ambiguous usages of the term that are rarely clarified. You can start to get a picture for this in the SEP entry on intuition. Some philosophers do regard intuitions as sui generis states:

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 goes on to quote Bealer, who says:

When you have an intuition that A, it seems to you that A. Here ‘seems’ is understood, not in its use as a cautionary or “hedging” term, but in its use as a term for a genuine kind of conscious episode. For example, when you first consider one of de Morgan’s laws, often it neither seems true nor seems false; after a moment’s reflection, however, something happens: it now just seems true. (Bealer, 1998, p. 207, as quoted in Pust)

Let me be clear: I do not believe I have experiences of this kind at all. When I consider logical axioms, or solve math equations, or consider thought experiments, there is never any point where anything “seems” true. I don’t have any phenomenology of this kind at all. I may judge that something is true, or have some inclination to think something might be true, but I see no reason to think any special kind of “seeming” event has occurred. For comparison, if I hear sounds coming up from upstairs, I may think that there might be a person walking upstairs, but I wouldn’t say it “seems true” that there is.

I also think Bealer’s remarks are woefully underdescribed. What does it mean for something to “seem true”? At least in this quote, there is no further explanation, and no further accommodation of this remark within contemporary cognitive science. I simply don’t know what exactly Bealer is talking about. I think there are good grounds for doubting whether there actually is any “genuine kind of conscious episode” of this kind. And I do not grant that philosophers merely reporting that they have them is sufficient. If it were, then what are we to make of people reporting that they can see auras?

Note, too, what Pust goes on to say:

Some philosophers who endorse such views also hold that perceptual (and other) experiences have propositional contents and seek to provide an account of the distinctive features of intuition, perception and other seemings or experiences.

These kinds of claims are not without controversy. I don’t accept them, and I don’t think we’re required to accept them at face value. If philosophers want to establish the existence of sui generis psychological states that involve “genuine” conscious episodes of a particular kind, they’re welcome to do the work to show that there are such states. But I don’t think any of the rest of us should feel compelled to just take philosophers at their word. As such, at present, I think it’d be more appropriate to be a skeptic or agnostic about certain conceptions of philosophical intuitions. Unless, of course, you think you have philosophical “seemings.”

Unfortunately, I think Flynn and other philosophers are far too quick to just grant that there are intuitions. I don’t know if Flynn or others think they are distinct or sui generis or anything; I’d have to ask (and perhaps I should explicitly), but for now I’ll focus on what Flynn does say. Flynn goes on to say:

Quite obviously, we base many of our beliefs on the sorts of intuitions we have, and—equally obviously—we feel quite warranted in doing so.

I don’t think this is obvious. First, it’s unclear who “we” refers to, and I’m still not sure what Flynn takes an intuition to be. Depending on what Flynn means by an “intuition,” I may deny that anyone forms beliefs on the basis of intuitions. Alternatively, it may be that while philosophers form beliefs on the basis of intuitions, they do so in a way similar to people forming beliefs on the basis of what they believe are auras (e.g., Someone may think that Sara has a “red aura” and is “therefore aggressive”). If so, I don’t think I have intuitions of this kind and don’t think I form beliefs on the basis of them.

At the very least, I wouldn’t want to describe my philosophical endeavors as involving any appeals to intuitions. So, I don’t think I have intuitions and don’t feel I am warranted in doing so (since I don’t think I am). Flynn gives several examples of things we allegedly have intuitions about:

After all, we have intuitions about lots of things that seem (seem!) super-duper obvious: the external world (that we’re not brains in vats), that other people have minds (that my wife isn’t just a cleverly programmed android), about identity through time (that I am substantially the same self-person today that I was ten years ago), about contingency (that certain things could have been otherwise—or not at all), about possibility and impossibility (that I could possibly work at Jersey Mike’s, but could not have been an ostrich), about causality, logic—and, of course, various moral matters as well (that murder is wrong and ought not be done).

Again, who is “we”? I don’t think I have intuitions about any of these things. I have beliefs about them, and perhaps dispositions to hold certain beliefs, and perhaps various other mundane psychological states relevant to these considerations. But I have nothing I’d distinctively call an intuition. At this point, one response might be: maybe you’re weird or defective, Lance. Maybe you don’t have intuitions, but the rest of us do.

Sure. Maybe. In that case, I’d like to see some empirical evidence that anyone else “has intuitions.” This would require operationalizing intuitions such that they are subject to empirical investigation, and then providing empirical evidence that other people have them, and, perhaps, either that I don’t or that I do but don’t realize it. There simply isn’t at present, any compelling evidence of this kind that I’m aware of. Perhaps it is out there. Send it my way if you have it. Conversely, suppose a philosopher insisted that intuitions aren’t subject to empirical investigation in this way. Well, that’s even more of a problem. I’m an empiricist, and I don’t think facts about the kinds of psychological processes humans have fall outside the scope of empirical investigation. So I’d outright disagree with this on philosophical grounds from the very outset…and I’m certainly not obligated to grant anti-empiricist positions at the outset of inquiry.

3.0 The reliability of intuitions

Flynn goes on to discuss whether intuitions are reliable or not. I don’t have as much to say about that. I’m not questioning their reliability. I am questioning what intuitions are supposed to be and whether, conditional on an account, whether they even exist. Even so, I’ll say a few things. First, Flynn makes claims like this:

After all, to suggest that they’re [intuitions] unreliable across the board would itself rely on beliefs that are, at some point or other, delivered via intuitions.

This worries me. It’s one thing to claim that people have intuitions and use them to form beliefs. It’s quite another to suggest that it’d be impossible to reject the reliability of intuitions without relying somewhere on intuitions. This is a far stronger claim: That we must and in fact do use intuitions (at least some of the time). I don’t think this is true, and I’d be curious to see what an argument for this would look like. Has it been shown that rejecting the reliability of intuitions would rely at some point or other on intuitions?

It would be like saying our senses aren’t reliable because people sometimes sense things that aren’t there (like a wavy-looking road on a hot day). But of course, the only reason we know our senses sometimes fail is because we use our senses to detect and discern the error. That is, to make reasonable judgments about when our senses go wrong assumes a background of their general reliability. And something similar must—and should—be said about intuitions, of course. Even when our intuitions are off, that’s rationally decidable only because they aren’t generally off.

This may be part of why we judge perceptions to be reliable, but another critical feature of judgments about the reliability of our perception is that their reliability can be mutually corroborated by our other senses and, more importantly, because judgments about our perceptions have practical implications. If I don’t think the stove is hot and touch it, I get burned. If I don’t think there’s a tiger in the bushes, I get ambushed. If I don’t think the cliff edge is a few feet away, I can fall to my death.

When it comes to sense perception, we get feedback. Yet when it comes to our philosophical intuitions, there is no external corroboration of our intuitions at all. There is never any feedback. There aren’t any consequences to being mistaken about some philosophical matter or other. If you think dualism is true, rather than monism, but this leads to no differences in your expectations about future experiences that have practical relevance and that are mediated by your sense perception, you will never get any direct, external feedback from the world.

Any philosophical issue cut off from this kind of sensory feedback will be forever barred from this kind of sensory corroboration. This is part of why I’m an empiricist and a pragmatist in the first place. Much of what concerns philosophers has, I believe, absolutely no direct practical relevance whatsoever (I say direct, because one’s beliefs about philosophical issue can impact one’s psychology, e.g., believing there’s no objective moral truth could make someone sad; I’m not talking about this, and this doesn’t threaten the empiricist/pragmatist approach I’m taking since it isn’t the content of the facts themselves but one’s contingent attitudes and reactions to them that are doing all the practical work). And since my conception of truth is tied to practical concerns of this sort, the kinds of metaphysical and conceptual disputes that occupy philosophers often strike me as misguided and disposed towards drawing false (and practically irrelevant) distinctions and conclusions).

4.0 “Our” strongest intuitions

Flynn then brings up theism:

This brings me back to one of my more basic cases for classical theism, which is that—to my mind—it seems the worldview best suited to make sense of our strongest intuitions.

Note the use of the term “our.” I just wrote a post a few days ago criticizing this kind of language. Philosophers often make references to what “we” think or what “our” intuitions are, without clarifying or qualifying what they mean, which you can find here. I think this is not a good way to frame things and that philosophers should stop doing this. If you think other people share your intuitions, I think it’s better to be clear about who you think shares them in a more specific way. Flynn goes on to describe his own perspective on the matter:

What I mean is that, all along the chain of my classically theistic commitments, I detect no obvious weak link that would compel me to cast serious doubt on any of my more phenomenologically forceful seemings—or on the general posture of assuming that what seems to be delivered via such intuitions is probably correct. (And that just isn’t the case when I try to think through other competing theories—especially naturalistic ones, though plenty of theistic ones, too—which would absolutely cause me to question the reliability of a good number of my strongest intuitions, if I ascribed myself to those positions.)

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But Flynn’s ability to detect weak links is a thoroughly private matter. I don’t doubt that Flynn doesn’t detect any weak links, and that this is a genuine expression of Flynn’s epistemic status, whether I am comfortable characterizing that in terms of intuitions or not. However, my judgments on almost all of these matters would almost certainly differ, and not by a little. Yet note what Flynn says. First, he says classical theism is “best suited to make sense of our strongest intuitions,” (emphasis mine) then goes on to say “What I mean is that, all along the chain of my classically theistic commitments [...].” Flynn’s intuitions are not necessarily the same as anyone else’s. Simply put: my intuitions ≠ our intuitions.

In other words, the problem is that we don’t all have the same intuitions. It may be intuitive to Flynn that P, but intuitive to someone else that not-P. The strength of those intuitions can vary as well. Flynn may assign a 10/10 to the strength of an intuition, while someone else assigns only a 1/10. Even if I framed what I think in terms of intuitions, I would never report having the sorts of intuitions Flynn has. For instance, I find moral realism to be totally absurd; my reaction to every thought experiment and scenario I’ve ever encountered has only reinforced this.

Setting aside the issue of whether intuitions are real, there’d be a further question about whether people all have the same intuitions. I see no good reason to think that they do. Questions about the kinds of inclinations, beliefs, or “intuitions” people have are empirical questions about human psychology. And findings from experimental philosophy show that there is considerable variation both within and between populations in the kinds of responses people give to questions about traditionally philosophical topics. If there are intuitions, they’re probably wildly variable. If, for instance, Flynn’s intuitions provide knowledge that certain actions are stance-independently wrong, presumably my intuitions also provide me with knowledge that nothing is stance-independently wrong. Unless, of course, there are “good reasons” for one or the other of us to think otherwise. There’s a problem here, though: on intuition-based accounts, how good a reason is may itself be rooted in intuitions, and our intuitions about those cases could vary as well. The strength of our intuitions could also vary. What if I have a super duper mega ultra-to-the-max intuition that moral realism is false? Then I won’t be moved!

5.0 Epistemic blank checks

I think there is something seriously flawed with intuition-based approaches to philosophical problems. They leave open the door to the mutual incorrigibility of people with conflicting philosophical positions, with no available means for resolving which of the two people is correct. And I think this is a serious problem. Flynn’s own remarks allude to phenomenal conservatism, but the position is underdescribed. In principle, it appears to be a modest epistemic notion: That one is justified in believing things are how they seem unless one has compelling reasons to think otherwise.

The problem is that, in practice, this licenses everyone to put their thumb on the epistemic scales in a way that is totally private and inaccessible to anyone else. Someone could present me with a thousand good arguments against my view, only for me to respond that, while these are all very powerful arguments that strengthen their case, they’re just not enough to overcome just how strongly it seems otherwise to me. This is why I have argued that while phenomenal conservatism, were it to be used as a modest starting point, may be a fairly innocuous principle, in practice it is easy to exploit. The result is what I describe as writing oneself epistemic blank checks: in any dispute over any matter, if the amount of justification one’s seemings provide isn’t curtailed in some principled way, someone could, in principle, report, or genuinely believe, that their “seemings” can override any arbitrary amount of arguments or evidence to the contrary. I think many philosophers do operate this way in practice, and that this often manifests in somewhat formalized ways, such as Moorean shifts. One can always insist “Here is one hand…” and simply refuse to accept some argument. I actually endorse this, and think this is a fine thing to do. I just think this illustrates that philosophy is far more bound up in our psychology than philosophers appreciate, and that much of what we’re doing in philosophical disputes is navigating social conflicts, not deep intellectual divides.

References

Bealer, G, (1998). Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy. In Michael Raymond DePaul & William M. Ramsey (Eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry (pp. 201-240). Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.