Challenge philosophers who say things are "intuitive" without qualification

A call to stop letting philosophers get away with a bad habit

Many people know that resolving questions in psychology is incredibly difficult. One must traverse a host of obstacles: proper operationalization, devising valid and reliable measures, acquiring data with sufficient generalizability, and so on. It’s challenging to figure out how any particular sample of people think. It’s even more challenging to figure out how a local population thinks. And it’s extremely challenging to figure out how people in general think.

Yet for some strange reason, analytic philosophers go around saying such-and-such “is intuitive” or that this or that is “obvious” or “self-evident” or “seems to be the case.” They don’t qualify. They don’t say “to us.” They treat obviousness or intuitiveness as a property of the claims, and not a property of their own psychology.

Keep in mind that analytic philosophy is an extremely recent, distinctively Anglophone development within the already culturally parochial Western philosophical tradition. What we’re dealing with is a nearly monolingual, highly culturally and historically narrow bandwidth of human thought. And we’re entirely fine with people all steeped in this tradition making proclamations about how everyone, everywhere thinks without conducting a single empirical study?

…What in the world? What is wrong with everyone? Why is this hardly ever being challenged? And why is everyone fine with philosophers being super dismissive towards experimental philosophy and those who put actual effort into figuring out how people think about the issues in question?

Stop accepting it at face value when a philosopher says something “is obvious” or “is intuitive.” If they aren’t clarifying who something is obvious or intuitive to, or otherwise qualifying their claims with the appropriate degree of support or epistemic caution, they’re not just doing bad philosophy, they’re doing very bad psychology. And it is time for people to stop accepting this.

Philosophers should change the way they speak. It simply isn’t acceptable to go around saying that this or that position “is intuitive.” Whether something is intuitive or not cannot be a feature of a claim. How intuitive something is is a matter of psychology. If this is supposed to be shorthand for “to most people” or something else, too bad. It’s misleading and seems to have duped people into uncritically accepting what philosophers say. Nobody should want this, least of all philosophers. Do they want people to accept their claims for the wrong reasons? I sure hope not.

I already make a point of saying “intuitive to who?” “Seems that way to who?” when philosophers make these claims. I encourage others to do the same. If enough people challenge philosophers often enough when they make unqualified claims, this may put pressure on philosophers to be more careful, more critical, and more clear. And that is something philosophers themselves should welcome.

This is a call to stop letting philosophers get away with a bad habit. It is time for the constant, often careless tendency to say that this or that position “is intuitive” or that things “seem to us” a certain way or that “we” think without specification or qualification to be challenged. Philosophers who want to make these such claims are making psychological claims (or, if they’re not, they should clarify that). They are not entitled to just presume to know the answers to psychological questions.