You said that things like emotions and memory and stuff are empirically established phenomena, but to me they seem pretty suspect too. I apologize for talking about a topic I am not very familiar with but as far as I know, it is very hard to properly map these concepts into the brain. I've recently read a couple of studies and stuff that said that the whole idea of the "cognitive brain" and the "emotional brain" is just misleading or wrong and that their "interaction" is much more complex. It may also be that for us to judge something as a belief or an emotion we have to reference some rather arbitrary social conventions. Anyways I don't have too much to say because I am pretty clueless about this, but I wonder what you (or others) think.
I thought this was very interesting but MUCH too long. I hadn’t seen you be so clear about what you are objecting too previously (not saying you hadn’t been, just that I hadn’t seen it) so it was quite helpful in that respect. I think a concise statement would be very useful (again, perhaps you have one I haven’t seen).
In my experience philosophers defend intuitions most usually through a kind of argument from despair: ‘well, if intuitions aren’t good evidence, we can’t know _anything_.’ Which is a TERRIBLE argument.
This is definitely not an exact parallel, but the epistemological situation of intuition-dependent areas of analytic philosophy reminds me a bit of the situation some areas of psychology were in with respect to p-values not that long ago. The problems with relying on NHST and p-values are both significant and not that difficult to explain, but in order to actually fix them, it was/is necessary to revamp many things about how the fields worked, down to the way that labs operated day to day. Some people just kind of explained those problems away for a long time and just crossed their fingers that they didn't corrupt the field, but eventually it was just too much.
I think the difference is that there will not be a reckoning about intuitions in analytic phil. Everyone has such a vested interest in keeping it going this way, and there's no outside check about what philosophical methods "should" be, or anything like that.
Sadly, I think you are right. I don't know if any significant body of philosophers is going to take my objections seriously at all, much less do anything about it. Even experimental philosophy has largely tacitly accepted that intuitions are a thing.
I think it's one of the ways in which philosophers don't actually take philosophy very seriously in the same way that scientists take science seriously (at least some scientists). A lot of doing analytic philosophy is tutoring yourself to think that certain questions are important and that certain methods are appropriate to answering them. But without any of the external checks that at least some scientific fields have, there's just always a serious danger of spending your time discovering higher-order truths about chmess. A lot of the history of philosophy is like this.
Sadly that's what I think is going on. Convincing people who are wasting their time that they're wasting their time is not easy. I think it makes more sense to convince others who haven't already gotten too invested.
I'll agree that our moral intuitions evolved, provided that by "moral intuitions" we mean no more than the practical, frequently unconscious, understanding of what we need to do to get along with others and form functioning communities.
You said that things like emotions and memory and stuff are empirically established phenomena, but to me they seem pretty suspect too. I apologize for talking about a topic I am not very familiar with but as far as I know, it is very hard to properly map these concepts into the brain. I've recently read a couple of studies and stuff that said that the whole idea of the "cognitive brain" and the "emotional brain" is just misleading or wrong and that their "interaction" is much more complex. It may also be that for us to judge something as a belief or an emotion we have to reference some rather arbitrary social conventions. Anyways I don't have too much to say because I am pretty clueless about this, but I wonder what you (or others) think.
I think similar things have also been said about memory
Wow. I’ll need to dive into this more deeply sometime.
I thought this was very interesting but MUCH too long. I hadn’t seen you be so clear about what you are objecting too previously (not saying you hadn’t been, just that I hadn’t seen it) so it was quite helpful in that respect. I think a concise statement would be very useful (again, perhaps you have one I haven’t seen).
In my experience philosophers defend intuitions most usually through a kind of argument from despair: ‘well, if intuitions aren’t good evidence, we can’t know _anything_.’ Which is a TERRIBLE argument.
I wanted to put all my thoughts out there. I don't have a shorter version of this, but I plan to:
(1) Do at least one video on this
(2) Have guests on my channel to discuss intuitions
(3) Possibly do some bite-sized summaries of some of the key points here.
This is definitely not an exact parallel, but the epistemological situation of intuition-dependent areas of analytic philosophy reminds me a bit of the situation some areas of psychology were in with respect to p-values not that long ago. The problems with relying on NHST and p-values are both significant and not that difficult to explain, but in order to actually fix them, it was/is necessary to revamp many things about how the fields worked, down to the way that labs operated day to day. Some people just kind of explained those problems away for a long time and just crossed their fingers that they didn't corrupt the field, but eventually it was just too much.
I think the difference is that there will not be a reckoning about intuitions in analytic phil. Everyone has such a vested interest in keeping it going this way, and there's no outside check about what philosophical methods "should" be, or anything like that.
Sadly, I think you are right. I don't know if any significant body of philosophers is going to take my objections seriously at all, much less do anything about it. Even experimental philosophy has largely tacitly accepted that intuitions are a thing.
I think it's one of the ways in which philosophers don't actually take philosophy very seriously in the same way that scientists take science seriously (at least some scientists). A lot of doing analytic philosophy is tutoring yourself to think that certain questions are important and that certain methods are appropriate to answering them. But without any of the external checks that at least some scientific fields have, there's just always a serious danger of spending your time discovering higher-order truths about chmess. A lot of the history of philosophy is like this.
Sadly that's what I think is going on. Convincing people who are wasting their time that they're wasting their time is not easy. I think it makes more sense to convince others who haven't already gotten too invested.
I'll agree that our moral intuitions evolved, provided that by "moral intuitions" we mean no more than the practical, frequently unconscious, understanding of what we need to do to get along with others and form functioning communities.
Instead of "intuition" how about "prajna," "gnosis" or "vijnana buddhi"?