Philosophical intuitions aren't hunches: A response to Disagreeable Me

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Disagreeable Me (DM) has provided some commentary on my critical response to Bookbinder here. I respond to DM here.

1.0 The Mundane/Distinctive Spectrum

In my critique, I argue that the conceptions of intuition philosophers use tend to fall on a spectrum: on one end they refer to mundane psychological states that can’t serve the more ambitious roles philosophers often put them to while on the other they refer to robust and distinct psychological states that can serve the ambitious roles philosophers put them to. These two ends of the spectrum tend to exhibit the following clusters of traits:

Mundane

1. Refer to existing psychological processes (beliefs, dispositions, etc.)

2. Have no distinctive phenomenology

3. Tend to include a heterogeneous array of different cognitive processes

4. Usually supported by current empirical evidence

5. Can’t serve the epistemic roles many philosophers believe intuitions can serve

Distinctive

1. Refer to sui generis or distinct psychological processes

2. Have a distinctive phenomenology

3. May refer to a more homogeneous set of processes or even a single faculty

4. Are not strongly supported by current empirical evidence

5. Can serve the epistemic roles many philosophers believe intuitions can serve

Even a spectrum is a bit of an oversimplification, as something more like family resemblance may bind (even if loosely) different conceptions of intuitions. Given this messiness, it’d be a mistake to say that intuitions don’t exist without qualification. Instead, my position is that conceptions of intuitions more roughly associated with the mundane end of the spectrum often exist, while intuitions on the other end of the spectrum probably don’t. I believe Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions falls well within the distinctive end of the spectrum and is thus at best very unlikely to exist.

2.0 DM’s critique

For the sake of simplifying the narrative (which I don’t object to), DM opts for a sharp dichotomy between mundane and outlandish conceptions of intuition. Outlandish intuitions roughly correspond to the distinctive category above, though DM describes them as involving “a distinct faculty of directly perceiving truth somehow, with associated distinct phenomenology.” DM agrees that outlandish intuitions don’t exist, but argues that Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions falls within the mundane category:

The remaining substantive content of Bookbinder’s post seems reasonable enough to me. This is because he can be read as writing about mundane intuitions, and not as arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for. Indeed, the core disagreement comes across to me as arising out of mutual misinterpretation.

1. Lance says (outlandish) intuitions don’t exist.

2. Bookbinder interprets him as saying that (mundane) intuitions don’t exist.

3. Bookbinder says Lance must be cognitively impaired if he doesn’t have (mundane) intuitions, and defends the philosophical use of (mundane) intuitions.

4. Lance responds with a post arguing against what he perceives as a defence of (outlandish) intuitions.

I don’t agree. I think Bookbinder endorses distinctive intuitions, though whether they’d qualify as “outlandish” on DM’s account isn’t clear to me. Part of the reason for this is that DM opts to characterize outlandish intuitions in terms of intuitions as a form of truth perception with distinct phenomenology. But Bookbinder doesn’t mention either of these qualities in his account, and I’m explicitly arguing against Bookbinder’s conception of intuition, as it was presented in his article. Specifically, this is the description Bookbinder gives:

Rational intuitions are a spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions.

There is no mention of intuition as a form of perception or any reference to distinct phenomenology. I even explicitly comment on the absence of the latter feature, noting that it is a bit idiosyncratic because of this. Given this, I find it a bit strange that DM would include these features in his characterization of outlandish intuitions, then claim that my position is that outlandish intuitions don’t exist. I didn’t interpret Bookbinder to be defending the characterization DM labels “outlandish,” I explicitly argued against Bookbinder’s specific account, breaking it down word-by-word.

I argue that this characterization of intuitions: “[…] spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions” …falls well within the realm of unsubstantiated and very likely pseudoscientific. Furthermore, I think there’s enough context aside from this specific characterization to be confident Bookbinder’s characterization of an “intuition” doesn’t comport with colloquial notions of “hunch.”

Another reason DM’s characterization doesn’t stand up well is that much of my objection focuses on how Bookbinder’s specific account is underspecified such that it would be hard to operationalize and test it. I then argue that to the extent that it does have enough content to evaluate, I don’t think such a faculty exists, and, at the very least, there’s no good evidence that it exists. DM seems to have created two extraneous categories, mundane and outlandish, then claimed that I took Bookbinder’s account, B, and misclassified it as an instance of outlandish rather than mundane. This framing is in considerable tension with how I argued for my view. I argued directly against B, and then classified it as outlandish in virtue of its own internal features. In other words, what I didn’t do was say that there was a category of outlandish intuitions with a certain set of features (e.g., quasi-perceptual, involving distinct phenomenology), then interpret Bookbinder’s account as exhibiting those features. I directly targeted the features of Bookbinder’s account itself.

3.0 Single faculty accounts

Bookbinder also uses language that suggests a single faculty account, while at other times suggesting that certain faculties (such as moral intuitions) are the product of particular selective pressures, which suggests a more pluralistic conception of intuition, which points to lack of clarity or internal tensions in Bookbinder’s account. If the single faculty account is true, this would favor the distinctive account, while if the multiple faculties account were correct, this would push it closer to the mundane end of the spectrum. The problem with Bookbinder’s account is that it’s unclear which of these interpretations is accurate.

However, DM offers some puzzling suggestions for my concerns about how many “faculties” are involved in intuition:

Perhaps an issue for Lance is that “faculty” is something of a success-term. If you have the faculty to do X, then X is implicitly appropriate or apt or good in some way.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. This sounds like an analytic concern. Perhaps I didn’t articulate what my concerns are explicitly enough in my post, but I am treating “faculty” in a psychological sense, not in terms of the sorts of concerns that motivate analytic philosophers. See for instance a standard dictionary definition:

cognitive faculty
“a specific aspect or domain of mental function, such as language, object recognition, or face perception. See faculty psychology.”

“Faculties” in psychology refer to distinct psychological systems that are specialized for operating within a particular domain, e.g., visual perception, memory, language, and so on. The brain isn’t just an undifferentiated mass. We have distinct subsystems specialized for specific tasks. What I’m claiming is that we don’t have a specialized system that yields “intuitions” as an output in the way we have specialized systems that involve memories or visual percepts. Reliability or success isn’t relevant to my critique, and I don’t believe I ever mentioned it.

I also think associating Bookbinder’s account with hunches is misguided. “Hunch” is a folk term that captures a certain kind of feeling that something is true, will happen, has happened, and so on. Hunches can be based on prior experience, emotional reactions, training, sensitivity to unconscious cues in one’s environment and so on. You could, for instance, have a hunch that someone is watching you. This would be a hunch about an empirical matter. Critically, hunches also frequently (if not usually) concern empirical matters. Hunches about people’s personalities or what’s going to happen if you make a left turn are empirical. But Bookbinder’s account explicitly refers to rational intuitions that concern a priori matters exclusively. This already puts considerable strain on any attempt to associate his conception of intuition with hunches.

Furthermore, given the way hunch-talk is used, it is very unlikely to be the output of a single faculty in the sense outlined above. We don’t have a specialized “hunch faculty” analogous to our faculties of memory or visual perception.

To support the idea that Bookbinder means a monolithic faculty, Lance quotes Bookbinder as saying “Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty”, and points to the fact that “faculty” is singular.

His use of the term “mental faculty” is singular, which suggests a single dedicated faculty.

I don’t think it does suggest that.

It does suggest a single faculty reading. It’s just not decisive. Think of this in simple Bayesian terms. If someone thought of something in singular terms rather than pluralistic terms, using the definite article “the” as in “the faculty” is more in line with what we’d expect, and would be considerably undermined if they used the plural, e.g., “faculties of intuition.” Bookbinder is mostly consistent in referring to intuition as the product of a faculty, not a set of faculties:

Intuitions are another kind of mental faculty.

Language like this also suggests a singular reading:

Bush is a man, blind from birth, angrily denying that others have a power he lacks and cannot imagine.

Note the use of the singular “a power”.

There are also two other lines of evidence that suggest a single faculty reading. First, there is the analogy to a host of other “mental faculties” that do roughly meet the conditions for being singular faculties (I say roughly because some are clusters of functionally related faculties, e.g., various forms of memory). For example, sensations such as seeing, hearing, and tasting are all faculties in the relevant sense, as are nociception, proprioception, and so on. These are all specialized subsystems that operate within a circumscribed domain.

Second, Bookbinder also makes a point of describing various deficits in these faculties. Such deficits are specific impairments in distinctive functions, not generalized cognitive deficits, e.g., blindness is an impairment in visual perception, aphantasia is the inability to form mental images, and so on. Localized impairments like these only make sense if the faculties in question are distinct from others; otherwise localized lesions or impairments wouldn’t result in the distinct impairments in question.

Given this, Bookbinder’s suggestion that I suffer from a congenital cognitive impairment such that I lack intuitions would make little sense if intuitions were the output of a broad and heterogeneous array of psychological processes. As DM says:

if hunches are other psychological phenomena, and hunches are a grab bag of disparate psychological phenomena including instinct, learned expertise, cognitive illusion and so on, then they’re not a single monolithic faculty distinct from everything else.

I also treated hunches as heterogeneous earlier in this article:

Hunches can be based on prior experience, emotional reactions, training, sensitivity to unconscious cues in one’s environment and so on.

If Bookbinder’s conception of “intuition” maps onto these notions of “hunch,” then in order for me to have a congenital cognitive deficit that barred me from having intuitions at all, I’d have to suffer from a broad, diffuse, and ultimately catastrophic array of cognitive abnormalities that would require impairments in pattern recognition, memory, emotion, learning, sensitivity to environmental cues, and every other psychological process associated with intuition. This isn’t a reasonable psychological hypothesis. It would lead to the prediction that I should have severe general cognitive and emotional deficits, which I clearly don’t have. And if these other systems are supposed to be intact but all somehow only are impaired in their capacity for producing intuitions, this wouldn’t make sense because it would require all these separate systems to operate mostly normally except, for some reason, that they’re all uniquely impaired in their capacity for producing intuitions. Given that these systems are neurophysiologically and cognitively distinct, this would be a remarkable and bizarre coincidence.

Finally, Bookbinder was clearly building up to something like the suggestion of a particular, identifiable deficit (which I’ve dubbed anoesia, an inability to perceive philosophical truths) by specifically mentioning all the other faculties and their associated deficits, e.g., blindness, aphantasia, anendophasia, and so on. All of these deficits consist of impairments to specific, specialized cognitive systems, and are good candidates for natural kinds. It’d be a bit strange to lean so heavily on analogies to what are distinctive and largely single faculty systems with associated deficits, only for intuition to not be a single faculty and to instead be heterogeneous and not fundamentally connected to distinct, specialized cognitive subsystems or clusters of interrelated systems in the way every other faculty on his list is. And note that he refers to all of these as faculties.

Given the structure of Bookbinder’s article, the intention appears to be to present the faculty of intuition as being a faculty of the same kind as the other faculties on his list, which are all good candidates for natural kinds. This casts doubt on DM’s suggestion that Bookbinder’s conception of intuition wouldn’t be a natural kind:

What if he had said “Dairy animals are another kind of livestock”? That seems like a natural kind of thing to say, but it doesn’t commit one to thinking that either “dairy animals” (plural) or “livestock” (singular) is a distinct category or natural kind.

I agree in this specific case, but all else being equal use of singular language is still suggestive of a single faculty reading; in this case our background knowledge about what “livestock” is would weigh against a natural kind reading. As always, context matters, and my basis for interpreting Bookbinder as appearing to defend a single faculty reading is based on a more holistic reading of his article that considers the context in which the remarks are made. In short:

1. The use of singular terminology

2. The analogy to single-faculty systems

3. The suggestion that I lack intuition due to a congenital deficit

…are all more consistent with a single faculty reading. Yet when DM continues, he says:

So I don’t think Bookbinder’s post commits him to a distinct, singular, monolithic faculty of intuition.

Lance acknowledges that this isn’t clear...

“But Bookbinder simply isn’t clear about this, since later speculation about the evolution of moral intuitions points to two different mechanisms,”

… so I think that just reinforces the idea that Bookbinder probably isn’t arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for.

This is an odd way of framing and responding to my position. DM’s way of describing my position makes it seem like I favor the single faculty interpretation, but then note that it isn’t clear. Yet this isn’t quite right. Here’s what I say later in those sections:

The single-capacity account has very little going for it, and Bookbinder’s other article talking about the evolution of moral intuitions suggests a heterogeneous conception of intuition, so it’s likely that language suggesting a single faculty is just an imprecise and misleading way of speaking about intuition.

What I do in the article is present a conditional set of objections: Bookbinder would face one set of problems on the single faculty account, and a different set of objections on the heterogeneous account. I take both to suffer serious problems. Given this, it doesn’t make much sense for DM to claim that

Bookbinder probably isn’t arguing for what Lance takes him to be arguing for.

DM’s remarks here seem to imply that my objections to Bookbinder center on the single faculty reading, but that because Bookbinder isn’t in fact defending a single faculty account, he isn’t in fact arguing for what I’m objecting to. This reading doesn’t make much sense, since I favor the heterogeneous interpretation and argue against it, too, which DM then immediately addresses:

In that case, Lance says:

“If, instead, “intuition” captures a range of processes, this exposes it to being a superfluous and unhelpful term that doesn’t pick out anything in particular.”

In response to this, DM says:

I don’t see how it makes it any more unhelpful than the term “hunch”. I see the two as being synonymous in most cases. The reason to use the term “intuition” is primarily because “hunch” is too informal for philosophy journals.

That’s fine, but note that this is a matter of DM and me disagreeing about whether my objection is correct or not. It’s not a matter of misinterpreting Bookbinder. Let me try to clarify, at this point, what I take the mistake on DM’s part to be.

DM seems to think my objection to Bookbinder’s conception of intuitions turns on interpreting it in a specific way. But that interpretation is wrong, so my critique is misguided. I’m right about the notion of intuitions I am objecting to, it’s just that this notion isn’t the one Bookbinder is defending.

Where DM has gone wrong here is in thinking that I am only rejecting that specific conception (maybe specifically single faculty accounts). But I’m rejecting Bookbinder’s account based on its specific content, which doesn’t clearly specify whether it’s a single faculty account or a heterogeneous one. I suspect it’s heterogeneous, but I find it objectionable either way.

So I don’t think the proper framing of the disagreement between DM and me is that I have misinterpreted Bookbinder but DM hasn’t. I think we share roughly the same interpretation, but disagree about how defensible that account is on its own terms. So I’ll directly address DM’s objection to my claim that:

If, instead, “intuition” captures a range of processes, this exposes it to being a superfluous and unhelpful term that doesn’t pick out anything in particular.

Which, to repeat, was this:

I don’t see how it makes it any more unhelpful than the term “hunch”. I see the two as being synonymous in most cases. The reason to use the term “intuition” is primarily because “hunch” is too informal for philosophy journals.

I’ll address both points here: whether the term would be helpful or not, and DM interpreting intuitions as hunches.

First, maybe I wasn’t as clear as I thought about why I think it wouldn’t be helpful. Philosophers want to make general claims about the epistemic status of intuitions. But if “intuitions” are the output of, say, twenty different systems, then it’s unlikely such generalizations would be true. This is because the epistemic status of any given intuition would be contingent on which one of these twenty systems delivered that intuition as an output. Furthermore, if intuitions are defined in terms of their output features (such as their phenomenology) and not the processes that give rise to them, but those processes are epistemically relevant, then we encounter a serious problem: which process was involved in a given intuition won’t be introspectively accessible. Let me illustrate with an analogy.

Suppose there are twenty programs on a computer. All of these systems operate very differently. One system is always reliable. One is never reliable. The others are reliable in some cases but not others, but it depends on the context. You submit an inquiry, and you get an answer. You have no idea which one of the twenty systems processed the inquiry. Is your answer reliable? You will have no idea. Whether it’s reliable or not depends on the specific process. Since you don’t know the process, you won’t know if it’s reliable or not.

In order for philosophers to make generalizations about the epistemic role of “intuition,” if intuitions are the product of a heterogeneous set of psychological processes, they’d first have to catalogue what those processes are and independently evaluate their reliability. Otherwise, any declarations that intuitions are “reliable” is a bizarre claim that the outputs of a mysterious array of blackboxes are uniformly “reliable” even though we don’t even know which systems are involved in general or which are involved in any given instance in which a person has an intuition.

Compare to hunches. Some people believe they have the power of premonition. They may describe premonitions as “hunches.” Supposing premonition isn’t real, these people are probably engaged in a kind of self-imposed cognitive error (or delusion, if we want to use less flattering language), much as people who think they can read minds or see auras may be sincere but are mistaken about what’s really going on. These judgments won’t be reliable. Conversely, an experienced detective may have a hunch that a witness was lying, and opt to investigate further, eventually discovering that they were. In this case, the detective may be picking up on subtle body language or microexpressions without realizing it. Or a soldier may have a hunch that they’ve been spotted, and take cover, only for bullets to whiz past where they were moments later. In these cases, the “hunches” in question may be unconscious visual or auditory processing that warned them of danger. The point then is that whether a “hunch” is reliable or not depends on what cognitive processes caused the hunch. Since “hunches” aren’t a natural kind and aren’t produced by a single faculty, generalizations about the reliability of hunches won’t be appropriate. Some hunches are outright delusions. Others are highly specialized reactions to years of training and experience.

Just so, if philosophical intuitions are the output of a whole array of disparate processes, or pseudoprocesses (comparable to a person believing they have premonition), then assessing their epistemological role will require assessing which process is involved, and doing that will require doing empirical psychology, which is exactly what Bookbinder and so many others seem to want to avoid, and is exactly what I am calling for.

4.0 Intuitions as hunches or dispositions to believe

Next, DM also wants to treat intuition as a fancy, formal term that is synonymous with “hunches” in most cases. DM goes on to say:

In any case, I would take it to be a family resemblance term, roughly picking out dispositions to believe which are spontanaeous in the sense that we may not have direct introspective access to where they come from. For the most part, people can use the term to communicate successfully without a very precise specification. It would only become an issue if somebody were to drastically misinterpret what is intended, which I suspect does not happen all that often, but would seem to be happening here, either because Lance or I am misinterpreting Bookbinder.

I do not believe Bookbinder is defending intuitions as the mere disposition to believe. Dispositions to believe have no special connection to the truth and thus couldn’t play the epistemic role Bookbinder attributes to intuitions. They’re also too broad, since they’d include empirical considerations. It’s also a bit of a stretch to suppose that dispositions to believe could be reasonably described as a faculty. I also don’t think dispositions to believe are synonymous with “hunches.” DM continues:

In philosophy in particular, it tends to serve the purpose of a claim I take to be true, cannot justify, but need not justify, because I expect most of my readers to also take it to be true. The precise psychological or neurological origins of the intuition are not particularly important if this is the role it is playing, as long as it is taken to be true.

Note how anemic this conception of intuitions is. DM treats intuitions as claims that we ourselves take to be true, but can’t justify, yet this isn’t an issue because most readers will take them to be true. Yet this is not how Bookbinder describes intuitions. Earlier in Bookbinder’s article, he states that the other mental states he described (memory, perception, and so on):

[…] are used as reasons, as evidence, to believe things. They are all sources of knowledge.

Bookbinder’s whole article turns fundamentally on maintaining that intuitions have the same status:

My response to the debunking argument is this: it leads directly to radical skepticism. Replace “intuition” with “perception” in the preceding paragraph and you’ll see what I mean. If we’re going to dismiss intuition on evolutionary grounds we’ll need to dismiss perception on exactly the same grounds. Well, so much for empirical knowledge. Adios. If you like that option, you might as well stop reading here. I don’t think you’ll get many followers, though.

Note the close analogy to perception: they’re epistemically interchangeable. Perception furnishes us with knowledge of the physical world. We detect it. Likewise, by analogy, intuition furnishes us with knowledge of a priori reality. So…do we detect it? Or dare I say … perceive it? I think these would be reasonable suspicions to have about Bookbinder’s analogy, but Bookbinder isn’t explicit about how far the analogy goes. It doesn’t have to, though. Bookbinder doesn’t need to explicitly treat intuition as quasi-perceptual for it to play an epistemic role that DM’s interpretation of intuitions as “hunches” can’t play.

Are hunches sources of knowledge in a way analogous to perception? Are dispositions to believe interchangeable with perception in their epistemic role? I don’t think so, but maybe Bookbinder is using these terms in ways that differ from how I’ve typically seen them used by philosophers. Philosophers, at least, frequently go out of their way to explicitly insist that intuitions are not hunches (more on this below).

DM also takes issue with my concerns about “intellectual seemings” or “appearances.” This barely comes up in my critique of Bookbinder, but I will address one point:

And for those philosophers who do talk of phenomenology, I suspect that what they have in mind is more mundane and less outlandish than Lance has in mind.

I’m not quite sure what DM is referring to here. I don’t think I specifically maintained that there’s anything outlandish about the phenomenology people associate with intuition. My suspicion about intuition phenomenology isn’t that it’s outlandish, or even that it’s not real. I’m entirely on board with granting that people who report distinct phenomenology with intuitions are, in fact, having distinct phenomenology.

My specific claim here is about what’s causing intuitions. Whereas philosophers may think they’re employing an innate or learned capacity to detect a priori truths in some quasi-perceptual way, I believe what is going on instead is that they have been induced to have experiences they misinterpret as being a genuine type of epistemically legitimate quasi-perceptual capacity to detect truth.

I don’t think people possess or learn to develop a genuine truth-detection ability. Instead, my working hypothesis is that studying philosophy and interacting with people who study philosophy leads to a process of philosophical induction in which novice philosophers are socialized into specific ways of thinking, speaking, and reacting to philosophical work, and that part of this process is being inducted into reporting and in some cases genuinely experiencing certain experiential states they systematically misinterpret as a genuine experience that has some special epistemic connection to the truth. What I think is going on is instead a bit like what happens with people who are convinced by a guru that they can see auras (the paranormal ability to detect energy fields around people that can be differentiated by their distinct colors). Such people may very well be having genuine experiences. It’s just that those experiences aren’t actual instances of seeing auras. Maybe they’re misreporting mundane experiences as instances of seeing auras. Maybe they’ve been able to literally perceive colors around people as a result of some kind of self-induced hallucination. Whatever’s going on, I don’t think they’re actually seeing auras. Likewise, whatever is going on with philosophers who report a “seeming” that some philosophical claim is true, I don’t think they’re really “detecting” truth with a special power.

I don’t find any of this especially outlandish. It’s just a hypothesis about what’s actually causing the phenomenology in question. My proposal may seem far-fetched. But something like this would have to be true if my broader worldview is correct. For comparison, some people believe they literally speak to God. If you’re an atheist, you can’t consistently just accept that they have this ability. So if they sincerely believe they’re able to talk to God, and report hearing God’s voice, what alternative do you have other than to hypothesize that they’re doing something like (a) misinterpreting their own inner monologue as God or (b) hallucinating or (c) some other mundane-but-definitely-not-God-talking account? A consistent atheist would have no choice but to suppose something like this is going on.

I think something like this is going on with many philosophers. I think they are committed to construing their intuitions in theoretical terms that are inconsistent with the actual nature of what’s happening. Something is happening: some affective reaction, or feeling, or hunch, but what they explicitly report and are committed to is something far more than this: some quasi-perceptual apprehension of a transempirical reality. It is on par with claiming to see auras. I don’t think there’s anything mundane about this. To continue to push the comparison, suppose that what’s going on with people who report seeing auras is that they pick up on body language, appearance, facial expression, and so on, and get certain emotional responses. They then associate their emotions with colors, and describe the person as having a “green aura.”

• (1A) In reality, something mundane is going on: they’re associating emotional responses to visual cues with colors.

• (1B) But the person construes themselves as having the paranormal ability to detect energy fields.

Now compare to philosophers. A philosopher is presented with a thought experiment and reports their intuition about it.

• (2A) In reality, they’re having some affective reaction, recollection, unconscious inferential processing, or other mundane psychological event.

• (2B) But that person construes themselves as having a special capacity for perceiving a priori using their mind, but in a way that transcends all empirical considerations and is utterly divorced from and not responsive to physical stimuli in the world.

I don’t think there’s anything mundane about (2B). It sounds pretty similar to claiming to have magic powers to me.

5.0 Did I misinterpret Bookbinder?

DM’s last section continues to claim that I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder somehow:

Much of Lance’s post seems to me to be concerned with arguments which are predicated on what I take to be a misreading of Bookbinder.

I still haven’t seen a single clear instance of a way in which I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder, but I’ll consider what DM says in this section, which addresses a few issues:

“How, for any given judgement, do we know when it is the output of the mental faculty of intuition instead of the output of some other faculty, such as memory”

(predicated on the monolithic (mis)interpretation)

No, this isn’t based on a monolithic interpretation. Even if a phenomenon is supposed to be pluralistic and thus the product of multiple distinct processes, this doesn’t mean it can be the output of any process. Memories and hunches are not the same thing. I don’t have a hunch that 2+2=4. On that note, think about how poor a fit the term “hunch” is for Bookbinder’s examples of intuitions:

• 5+7=12

• It is wrong to torture puppies for fun.

• If you know something, then you believe it.

• Nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same way.

• Cycling implies cyclists.

• Everything obligatory is also permissible.

• Impossible things never happen.

None of these are the sorts of things people would describe as hunches. These are all examples of things people would be pretty damn sure of, whereas “hunches” are typically a lot more tentative. This is quite a strong point against DM’s hunch interpretation. Far from supporting the contention that I’ve misinterpreted Bookbinder, I think this flips the table on DM and more strongly favors the conclusion that DM is guilty of misinterpretation.

At the same time, my general point in these sections is that one’s reaction to these cases can often be explained by mundane processes like memory. Thus, I am not drawing a distinction between reacting to these scenarios on the basis of a single faculty account of intuitions as something distinctive or instead viewing one’s reaction as based on some process that could be plausibly associated with a heterogeneous conception of intuition. Rather, I draw attention to processes that wouldn’t fit either account. Thus, I think DM has both misinterpreted Bookbinder and misinterpreted me.

· Interesting empirical questions to explore but not necessary for successful communication

“How did it evolve?”

I’m not sure all the questions I posed are strictly necessary, but I don’t believe I claimed they were. There are a few reasons for bringing up evolution, though. First, it’s a critical part of the explanation of any faculty or faculties. Second, the evolutionary history of psychological processes is relevant to their function, which is in turn relevant to functional differences, which is in turn relevant to how many faculties there are, and is thus relevant to the question of homogeneity or heterogeneity of process. Third, Bookbinder himself brings up evolutionary considerations, so it seemed worth mentioning since Bookbinder appears to acknowledge the relevance of evolutionary considerations. Also, I address evolution in part because it’s relevant to drawing a distinction between proximal and ultimate explanations. I note that the latter doesn’t resolve questions about the former and shouldn’t be mistaken as an adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question because it doesn’t directly assess the cognitive processes involved.

· Interesting semantic questions that may be worth exploring in particular contexts, but probably not always and everywhere

“Must intuitions be rapid?”

I don’t think DM appreciates why this is a problem. First, consider my general strategy against Bookbinder. What I did was take each one of the features Bookbinder attributes to intuition then show that it’s questionable how defensible this feature is, given how philosophers use intuitions or engage in intuition talk. If I can show that each of the traits Bookbinder attributes to intuitions are ones that we’d either want to abandon or that raise questions about how adequately they capture intuition-talk among philosophers, Bookbinder would either have to give up one more feature of his account or commit to an account that would be in tension with philosophical practice and with other conceptions of intuitions. And if enough features are given up, this strips Bookbinder’s account of intuition of most of its content, leaving it a conceptually empty husk.

In other words, if intuitions must be rapid, then we run into a host of problems with actual philosophical practice. Many things philosophers may want to call intuitions wouldn’t be. This may serve as a reductio. Conversely, if they don’t have to be rapid, then Bookbinder made a mistake and would have to give up some of the content of his account. If enough of these mistakes accumulated, it’d be death by a thousand (or in this case, a half a dozen) cuts.

· Somewhat, I’m sorry to say, pedantic point-scoring

“Do intuitions have to be judgements about whether something is true?”

This might be a little pedantic, but it was a two sentences out of a ~30,000 word post. I think DM’s depiction of my concerns would give readers who haven’t read those concerns the impression that my objections are petty, when I think DM is just drawing attention to this particular one being an especially weak one (which it admittedly is).

However, I didn’t exclude it for a reason. Again, recall the strategy outlined above: what I am trying to show is that once you look at each component of Bookbinder’s account of intuition, if you can poke holes in each, the whole account ends up being empty. Consider Bookbinder’s account:

Rational intuitions are a spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions.

Now suppose we show that:

• An acceptable account wouldn’t be restricted to a priori propositions, and if this is what “rational” means, then they don’t have to be “rational” either

• They don’t have to be spontaneous

• They don’t have to be rapid

• “Psychological” appears superfluous here, so we can drop that

• It’s not clear what it means for them to be “prompting to judgment”

If it also turns out that they’re not even necessarily about assessments of truth, then what, exactly, would we be left with? Maybe something like:

Intuitions are an assessment about propositions.

…if that’s all Bookbinder is left with, I’d consider that a victory for me. Removing “truth” from the list would be part of that.

In short, the reason I even included “truth” in my critique was to continue the general pattern of showing that every or nearly every word Bookbinder associated with intuitions was questionable. Unfortunately, when I gave examples of alternatives to judgments about truth, I did a poor job of elaborating. I simply said:

Do intuitions have to be judgments about whether something is true or not? Must they in all cases be direct assessments of the truth of propositions or can intuitions be direct judgments of whether something is e.g., good, more likely, different, and so on?

DM responds to this question by saying:

(because a judgement that X is Y is, to me, more or less equivalent to a judgement that “It is true that X is Y” — I don’t see why this question matters.)

This is true enough. One could readily construe all the examples I gave as truth claims. This shows that the examples I give don’t really plausibly allow alternative construals of the content of intuitions to escape being about truth. So perhaps the answer to this particular question is a simple “yes, they’re about truth.” I’m fine with that. Not all of my questions are going to be devastating. I do want to raise a concern, though.

Do hunches invariably involve assessments of the truth of propositions? I suspect not. On the contrary, I suspect hunches often take the form of, say, a feeling of unease or some other affective or nonpropositional state. If so, while I may have failed to provide a good example initially, Bookbinder’s identification of intuitions with hunches may now provide one: it may be that Bookbinder’s emphasis on truth assessment is in some tension with hunches, insofar as the latter aren’t restricted to being associated with assessing truths. DM could perhaps suggest that feelings of unease or other affective hunches can be construed in propositional terms, but I’m not so sure this is defensible.

Suppose I walk into a room, and feel a deep sense of unease. I then conclude I should get out of there, because it might be dangerous. Is the judgment “I should leave” or “it might be dangerous” the hunch, or is the feeling that prompted these judgments the hunch? I think a reasonable case could be made that the feeling is the hunch, and the feeling caused the judgment, but that the judgment isn’t always constitutive of the hunch itself.

In other words, Bookbinder’s account of intuition may be committed to a cognitivist construal of intuitions, whereas the notion of a hunch may include (even if it isn’t limited to) noncognitive states. If so, this would put further strain on DM’s claim of near-synonymy.

DM continues:

If I’m right that Bookbinder doesn’t have anything particularly outlandish in mind, then I think that undercuts a lot of Lance’s demands and criticisms. For example, Bookbinder need not establish that the distinctive phenomenon of intuition exist if he is not talking about a distinctive phenomenon.

As already noted, my criticism is conditional. If intuitions aren’t a distinctive phenomenon this exposes Bookbinder to a different set of problems than if it is. I will stress though that there are weird internal tensions in Bookbinder’s account. Every one of the examples of mental faculties he draws on is a distinctive phenomenon (or cluster of related distinctive phenomena), so it’d be quite strange to say that intuition is one of them, but somehow isn’t a distinct phenomenon. I also don’t take heterogeneity to mean something isn’t a “distinct phenomenon” since heterogeneity of process doesn’t entail heterogeneity of function or epistemic role. So perhaps DM and I have different things in mind here we’d need to resolve through discussion.

6.0 Do I misinterpret other philosophers?

Lastly, we get to this:

Furthermore, if I’m right that Lance has misinterpreted Bookbinder, then Lance may be misinterpreting other philosophers, and the prevalence of outlandish conceptions of intuition may not be the problem Lance takes it to be.

I’m still not clear on what the misinterpretation is supposed to be. As I said, my critique focuses on the features Bookbinder explicitly attributes to intuitions. I didn’t try to take Bookbinder’s discussion of intuitions and interpret it to fit some other account, and then critique that other account.

On my view, Bookbinder falls within a broader camp who hold pseudopsychological views about intuition. I don’t think Disagreeable Me has done much to show otherwise, but much of this is based on the specific mundane/outlandish dichotomy. Disagreeable Me associates Bookbinder with the mundane category, and closely associates this with intuitions as hunches. So my impression is that DM interprets Bookbinder’s account to roughly be that intuitions are like hunches.

I think this is mistaken. One reason is that Bookbinder’s use of “rational intuition” seems to cleave closely to Bealer’s terminology and characterization, and I’m familiar with Bealer and a handful of other philosophers generally treating intuitions as a fairly distinct phenomenon often explicitly distinguished from hunches. In fact, Bookbinder explicitly contrasts his view with mine by associating it with these philosophers:

At the other end of the spectrum is the testimony of Saul Kripke: “Some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.” Plenty of other prominent philosophers agree, like Ernest Sosa, George Bealer, Robert Audi, etc. I’m not appealing to their authority here, just pointing out that using intuition as evidential is a mainstream (albeit not universal) view.

Bookbinder is only comparing his account to these in terms of them treating intuitions as evidential, and is not explicitly claiming to endorse the same view of intuitions as any of them. Nevertheless, the epistemic role Bookbinder assigns to intuition is more closely associated with these conceptions than the more mundane end of the spectrum; indeed, it is often the point of those who maintain that a proper conception of intuition places them on the mundane end of the spectrum is that, as a result, they can’t play the ambitious epistemic roles Bealer, Sosa, Audi, and so on attribute to them. As such, Bookbinder’s association with these accounts does hint at the overlap likely being greater than the mere overlap in the evidential role of intuitions.

DM wants to associate Bookbinder’s account with the mundane end of the spectrum, which DM treats as closely identifying intuitions with hunches. What do those who fall into the “intuitions as evidence” camp generally think of this association? I couldn’t find any specific reference in Sosa, Audi, or Kripke stating that intuitions are not hunches, but Bealer explicitly says that they aren’t:

Intuitions are also quite distinct from judgments, guesses, and hunches. As just indicated, there are significant restrictions on the propositions concerning which one can have intuitions; by contrast, there are virtually no restrictions on the propositions concerning which one can make a judgment or a guess or have a hunch. Judgments are a kind of occurrent belief; as such, they are not seemings. Guesses are phenomenologically rather more like choices; they are plainly not seemings. And hunches are akin to merely caused, ungrounded convictions or noninferential beliefs; they too are not seemings. (p. Bealer & Strawson, 1992, p. 103)

Phenomenologically, this kind of episode is quite distinct from a mere hunch. (Bealer, 1998)

The way Sosa, Audi, and Kripke talk about intuitions, however, doesn’t comport very well with treating them as hunches. Kripke (1980) claims that he can’t think of what more conclusive evidence one could have about anything (p. 42). Is it reasonable to think Kripke thought hunches were the most conclusive evidence one could have? Audi (2004) says explicitly that:

A mere inclination to believe is not an intuition; an intuition tends to be a “conviction” (a term Ross apparently sometimes used for an intuition) and tends to be relinquished only through such weighty considerations as a felt conflict with a firmly held theory or with another intuition (p. 34)

This is explicitly and obviously inconsistent with DM’s characterization of intuitions as:

[…] a family resemblance term, roughly picking out dispositions to believe

Sosa’s (1996) account of intuition is most congenial to DM’s, and likely falls closer to (or within) the mundane end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, in his earlier writings, Sosa does say that:

The intuitions of interest are a priori intellectual seemings, which present themselves as necessary (p. 151)

While sympathetic to Bealer’s account, Sosa was at the time also open to less restrictive conceptions of intuition, and suggests that they:

[…] might be viewed as inclinations to believe on the basis of direct experience (sensory) or understanding (intellectual) regardless of any collateral reasoning, memory, or introspection – where the objects of intellectual seeming also present themselves as necessary. (p. 154)

Some years later, Sosa appears to have been less tentative in construing intuitions in terms of dispositions:

On my proposal, to intuit that p is to be attracted to assent simply through entertaining that representational content. The intuition is rational if and only if it derives from a competence, and the content is explicitly or implicitly modal (i.e. attributes necessity or possibility). (Sosa, 2007, p. 101)

Sosa thus appears to endorse a competence-based account of intuition that may fit reasonably well with DM’s construal of intuitions as dispositions to believe. However, intuitions are still restrictive in that they concern a priori matters, and at least on the earlier account are characterized as “seemings” which “present themselves as necessary,” indicating that they have both a distinctive phenomenology and content that isn’t consistent with construing them as hunches. Thus, Sosa may favor a “disposition to believe” account, but the account still includes features that are inconsistent with hunches, insofar as hunches are presumed not to require distinctive phenomenology or to exclusively concern matters of necessity. Without diving into the details of precisely how this competence is supposed to work, it’s hard to say whether I’d consider Sosa’s specific account to refer to phenomena that don’t exist; I may just question whether philosophers actually have the relevant kind of competence.

As an aside, note the title of the first Sosa reference: “Rational intuition: Bealer on Its Nature and Epistemic Status”. This and other places, “rational intuition” is used to designate a subset of intuitions and is associated with Bealer’s and other, similar conceptions. In the influential “Intuition and the autonomy of philosophy,” Bealer (1998) says:

When we speak here of intuition, we mean “rational intuition.”

This is why I pegged Bookbinder as alluding to a similar conception of intuition, even if his articulation of it in his blog post was somewhat different. Such notions of intuitions other than Bookbinder’s are usually (but not always) on the far end of the distinctive spectrum, and do tend to fall within what DM would already agree are “outlandish” conceptions of intuition.

Bealer and Audi are not the only philosophers who explicitly distinguish intuitions from hunches or dispositions to believe, either. Let’s have a look at what other authors have said:

It should be clear that intuitions of this kind have nothing to do with hunches, knee-jerk reactions, or pretheoretical, commonsense judgments. (Hopp, 2015, p. 6)

The term ‘intuition’, as used in everyday conversation, appears to differ substantially from the usage relevant to philosophy. In particular, the colloquial use of ‘intuition’ covers hunches, guesses, and the like. In this paper, use of the term ‘intuition’ is meant to reflect philosophical use. (Nado, 2014, p. 15)

Similarly, we can also distinguish intuitions from hunches, guesses, blind impulses, vague sentiments, preferences for action, or current familiar opinion (Bedke, 2018)

It is argued, first, that intuitions and perceptual experiences are at a certain level of abstraction the same type of mental state, presentations, which are distinct from beliefs, hunches, inclinations, attractions, and seemings. (Bengson, 2015, p. 707)

In any case, it can be accepted that intuition has some evidential weight. For example, if one accepts that the stronger an inclination to believe, the more likely to be true is its content, then firmly held intuitions are more likely to be true than mere hunches or guesses. (Pailos, 2012, p. 297)

Philosophers regularly appeal to intuitions as evidence. This use of intuitions seems to presuppose that intuitions are characterized by propositional contents that can serve as premises for the conclusions advanced. The intuition itself, however, is not the result of any reasoning process or direct observation. Nor is the intuition a mere guess or hunch. Unlike guesses and hunches, which do not have for us the force of truth, intuitions do, at least apparently, have the force of truth despite the fact that we have no prior reasons or observations testifying to that truth. (Drummond, 2015, pp. 19-20)

There can be grounds to discount intuitions, or even not to take them into consideration; and there can be other mental states – hunches, premonitions, gut feelings, guesses – that may appear at first to be intuitions but are not. (Bruder & Tanyi, 2014, p. 157)

What should already be clear is that, in the history of philosophy, intuition is not typically a hunch, a broadly held commonsense belief. Rather, it is a primitive grasp or apprehension of ‘what is’. (Antognazza & Segala, 2023, p. 578)

Using intuitions to answer trans-empirical questions goes beyond what is accepted in linguistic philosophy, and must be distinguished from another meaning of intuition that Feigl (1958, 6) calls, for lack of a better word, ‘hunch’:

“We can define the ‘hunch’, then, as ‘a product of learning from past experience, which learning is not made explicit at the moment of the use of judgment’.”

If one has a hunch, one follows an empirical rule of which one is not aware. Hunches are therefore unproblematic, but must not be confused with transempirical intuitions, because unlike the target of a hunch, the target of a trans-empirical intuition cannot be tested empirically. (Lutz, 2009, p. 121)

Intuition as an experience of a ‘‘hunch’’, that is as unjustified belief, has never been a subject of serious philosophical interest. (Osbeck, 1999, p. 233)

Granting all that, then what sorts of propositional declarative representations are not “intuitions” in any sense that is relevant to contemporary philosophers, whether intellectual seemings, armchair judgments, or (authoritative) rational intuitions? I take it that we can all agree that all of the following mental acts or states are not properly considered “intuitions” from a contemporary philosophical point of view:

conclusions from inferences,
inferences themselves,
dogmas,
faith,
fantasies,
guesses,
hallucinations,
hunches (as Bealer notes),
mere assertions,
non-cognitive declarative affects and emotions,
reflexes,
seizures,
stipulations,
suppositions,
wishes,
and so-on.
(Ellis, 2013, p. 49)

For example, philosophers theorising about what intuitions are dismiss that intuitions are hunches or guesses. (Kuntz & Kuntz, 2011, p. 656)

Bengson (2013) argues that it is plausible that many survey responses are often not indicative of subjects’ intuitions but are instead the product of guesses, hunches, or inferences. (Pust, 2024)

McGahhey and Van Leeuwen (2018) argue that, contrary to the majority view, in the process of intuiting something, there is no conscious propositional content involved. According to them, intuitions (in a state sense) are more akin to hunches or urgings, but are not formulated by any determined proposition. (Cekiera, 2024, p. 18)

Bengson and Descartes agree that there are mental states answering to all of the other categories above. Further, as they respectively treat intuitus as a kind of perceptio and intuition as quasi-perceptual, both approaches are set apart from competing views which classify intuitions as other kinds of states such as guesses or hunches (Parsons, “Platonism”, 59), beliefs (Lewis, Philosophical Papers, x), or dispositions to believe (Van Inwagen, “Materialism”, 309). (Paul, 2023, p. 26)

If we can’t unify rational intuitions in terms of their contents, perhaps they can be unified in terms of their phenomenology. Perhaps a common phenomenology unites intuitions concerning logic, mathematics, and conceptual relationships. What might this common phenomenology be? A phenomenological feature they share is the feeling that they come from “I know not where”. Their origins are introspectively opaque. This isn’t helpful, however, to rationalists of the type under discussion. All intuitions have this opaqueness-of-origin phenomenology, including garden-variety intuitions like baseless hunches and conjectures, which are rightly disparaged as unreliable and lacking in evidential worth. Grouping application intuitions with this larger, “trashy” set of intuitions is likely to contaminate them, not demonstrate their evidential respectability. (Goldman, 2007, p. 11)

Because of their sui generis nature, intuitions cannot be reduced to other kinds of propositional attitudes such as beliefs (cf. Bealer 1992, 102; 1998, 208; 2000, 3–4; 2004, 13), judgments, guesses, hunches, etc. (cf. Bealer 1992, 103; 1998, 210). (Zouhar, 2015, p. 39)

Although adopting the doxastic account of intuition has different advantages, I believe, the seeming account is superior. The seeming account of moral intuition can help us to distinguish intuition from certain similar mental states, such as guesses, gut reactions, hunches and common-sense beliefs. (Dabbagh, 2018, p. 127)

Before explaining the etiological-diversity problem, it will help to consider a couple of ways in which diversity regarding intuitions is not the worry I’m concerned about. One sort of diversity was mentioned in Section II – that a very broad range of different sorts of psychological states get referred to as ‘intuition’, including the seeming truthfulness of logical claims, semi-informed hunches, the puzzling nature of a paradox, and so on. But this diversity can be made far less problematic by simply stipulating that we restrict our analysis to one specific type of intuition, as I proposed in Section II. Thus, we can limit our focus to the sort of intuition that has played such an important role in theory development in philosophy – the immediate, spontaneous reaction to a philosophical thought experiment, what I’ve been calling TEIJs. (Ramsey, 2018, pp. 92-93)

I think evidence for the appropriateness of these distinctions can be found in the intuitive peculiarity of calling one’s Gettier intuition or logical intuition “a guess” or “a hunch.” (Pust, 1997, p. 74)

Recall at the beginning of this section that DM suggested that if I’m misinterpreting Bookbinder, perhaps I’m misinterpreting other philosophers as well. I don’t think I’m generally misinterpreting these philosophers insofar as I don’t think their account of intuitions is nearly synonymous with “hunches” for the simple reason that most of the remarks above are some version of them explicitly saying “intuitions aren’t hunches.” Alternatively, some instead say that doing so is an uncommon or problematic approach, or that even if hunches are intuitions, the philosophical intuitions of interest to them aren’t hunches.

One of the main reasons I don’t think it’s very likely I’m misinterpreting these and other philosophers when it comes to what they think intuitions are is that interpretation isn’t really a significant factor here. At least on the topic of intuition, philosophers are often quite straightforward about what they are referring to. It doesn’t take subtle exegesis or a deep well of knowledge to interpret convoluted prose or byzantine jargon. If a philosopher says that it’s clear intuitions have nothing to do with hunches, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t think that intuitions are hunches. I could be misinterpreting them anyway, but I think the straightforwardness of the quotes above puts the onus squarely back on DM to show that this is likely.

Collectively, these quotes present a consistent tendency for philosophers to explicitly distinguish intuitions from hunches or, where they include hunches within the scope of intuition, to draw further distinctions, narrowing the scope of the intuitions of interest to “rational intuition.” Of course, there are likely several different conceptions of what “hunches” are at play here, some of which may differ from DM, so any given quote could turn out to be consistent with DM’s views due to terminological differences. But I hope what I’ve shown here provides a reasonably compelling basis for the notion that there is a non-negligible subset of philosophers who construe intuitions in ways that wouldn’t reasonably fit with DM’s suggested conception of intuitions. Some of the comments here even indicate that viewing intuitions as hunches is a minority view, though without explicit data it would be difficult to confirm if this was the case.

7.0 Conclusion

Given all these quotes, we can distinguish between at least three theses:

1. Whether a given construal of intuitions is pseudopsychological, false, or “outlandish”

2. What proportion of conceptions of intuitions fit these descriptions

3. Whether Bookbinder’s account fits these descriptions.

I think there are construals that fit (1), that many (though I don’t know how many) accounts fit this description, and that Bookbinder’s account is one of them. I don’t think DM’s suggestion of intuitions as hunches or dispositions would hold much sway among philosophers who endorse intuitions; such accounts of intuition are often favored by those who believe intuitions play little or no role, or at least little substantive evidential role, in philosophical methodology. So while such accounts do exist, they typically curtail the ambitions of philosophers who seek to place intuitions at the center of philosophical methods. This isn’t to say no such accounts would construe intuitions in this way and consider them central; competence accounts may do so. But I see little indication from Bookbinder’s characterization that he’s opted for such accounts. And as I’ve noted from the outset, the main problem with DM’s claims that I’ve “misinterpreted” Bookbinder is that my primary objections engage directly with Bookbinder’s characterization, rather than some interpretation of Bookbinder’s views that infers Bookbinder endorses some third-party account. Given this, I think the accusation of misinterpretation isn’t just mistaken but is itself like a misinterpretation of the approach I took in my critique.

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