Sure, those are all different, but establishing the reliability of...what? If you don't know the mechanism, then this is often important in knowing whether you're even talking about the same thing.
If a philosopher has a moral intuition and a linguistic intuition, are these the result of the same cognitive processes? What if they aren't? And what if one is reliable and the other isn't? Often mechanism will be relevant to the reliability of a process. But the deeper issue is that I don't grant that there is any particular, and distinctive notion, "intuition," for us to judge them to be reliable or not reliable. Instead, the word is used in a variety of different ways.
Personally, I don't think intuitions are a genuine psychological phenomenon, I don't think we're forced to rely on them, and whether an "intuition" is reliable or not will depend on what we're talking about. But philosophers are typically extremely unclear about what they're talking about, so it would be premature to say the intuition in question isn't reliable: it's not even clear what they're talking about.
Philosophers can insist we have to have intuitions all they want. I'm not satisfied that they've even made a good case that we have intuitions.
"If a philosopher has a moral intuition and a linguistic intuition, are these the result of the same cognitive processes? What if they aren't? And what if one is reliable and the other isn't?"
You can establish that sort of thing with a statistical cluster analysis.
"But the deeper issue is that I don't grant that there is any particular, and distinctive notion, "intuition," for us to judge them to be reliable or not reliable."
There are probably different kinds of intuition, but there is also the common factor of being a black box process.
", I don't think we're forced to rely on them,"
It's easy to say that off the cuff, but demonstrating an epistemology that floats free of unjustified assumptions is much harder. I've never seen it done, so I think we are forced to rely on intuitions in the sense of unfounded foundations...type iii) here
Intuition" has the basic meaning off feeling that you know something without knowing how, but beyond that means more than several things:-
ia) Aunt Nelly's intuition that it's going to rain tomorrow. Something that "feels right". Mere phenomenology.
ib) habits of thought.
ii). Fast, but approximate, system 1 heuristic.
iii) Basic assumptions that you can't do without, since you need them to prove things, but can't prove, because they're basic.
Iv) novel epistemic technique, different from induction, deduction, etc
v). Infallible insight of mysterious, possibly supernatural origin. Like Platos forms , or Descartes clear and certain ideas.
"I'm not satisfied that they've even made a good case that we have intuitions"
Are you saying you can fully explicate every idea you have ever had? Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?
//You can establish that sort of thing with a statistical cluster analysis.//
My point isn't that you can't figure out what cognitive processes are involved but that nobody has bothered to do so.
//There are probably different kinds of intuition, but there is also the common factor of being a black box process.//
Different how? What makes them intuitions? Why are we using this term? What's it refer to? I don't think there are good or consistent answers to these questions from philosophers. It may turn out that the term is superfluous and doesn't pick out anything we couldn't already account for without positing them.
//It's easy to say that off the cuff, but demonstrating an epistemology that floats free of unjustified assumptions is much harder. I've never seen it done, so I think we are forced to rely on intuitions in the sense of unfounded foundations...type iii) here//
What makes an assumption an intuition?
//Are you saying you can fully explicate every idea you have ever had? Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?//
No, but I don't have to be able to fully explicate every idea I've ever had to think that if a certain notion is central to philosophy, that they should have a pretty good account of what it is and how it works. But they don't. I'm not an entire field of super smart people that have had decades to address the matter, and it's one thing, not dozens of them. There probably *are* specific ideas I can fully explicate. I want a full explication of this one.
For comparison, if car mechanics couldn't explain a specific process or feature in cars, I'd be very concerned. It'd be a bit weird to ask me if I can explain everything ever, as if that were relevant to expecting experts that work on a particular topic to be able to offer a decent, consistent account of the primary tools they use. If mechanics couldn't explain what a wrench was, I'd very concerned.
// Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?///
No, I don't have experiences like that, and I am skeptical that anyone else does.
I am much more partial to intuitions than you are, but I am also puzzled by what they are. What exactly do you think the significance
of knowing what intuitions are is? And is this significance shared with other purported modes of justification? For instance, if I live in a time where no one knows what proprioception is or how it works, would you consider that to be a big problem for epistemologies which cite a special sense which tells you where your limbs are but which have an inadequate account of this sense?
If we know the causal origins of any given intuition or category of intuitions, this will provide insight into whether or not and to what extent we would on reflection (given our own epistemic values) accord evidential weight to them.
For instance, suppose we discover that when moral realists report that it "seems" that certain actions are stance-independently wrong, this is typically the result of psychological processes associated with emotional responses distinctive to each individual, and that these "seemings" are in fact a reflection of partially unconscious emotional attitudes that, if one changes one's emotional reaction, this changes which things that person considers right and wrong. And suppose we also discover that one's emotional responses are highly attuned by cultural and environmental inputs.
I would think if this were the case, that antirealists would have a good case to argue that these "intuitions" are actually just something like emotional projection: the sense that there's something "out there" that's "wrong" is misguided: a kind of misapprehension about one's own psychological states.
We'd need to handle intuitions like this on a case-by-case basis to form a better picture of the cognition of intuition. As far as I know, virtually nobody is even attempting to do this. So philosophers have all these "intuitions" but they don't even know what they are or how they work.
> For instance, if I live in a time where no one knows what proprioception is or how it works, would you consider that to be a big problem for epistemologies which cite a special sense which tells you where your limbs are but which have an inadequate account of this sense?
No, I probably wouldn't think there's much of a problem there, but there are important and illustrative differences.
First, proprioception only relates to physical interactions with the world and thus deals with descriptive facts. It is not positing extra metaphysical theses or anything nonphysical. Second, it'd be fairly straightforward to find evidence that one's capacities are influenced by physiological changes. Third, if, after an extended period of time, we failed to identify features of human physiology and cognition that could account for these effects, I would become skeptical. However, that hasn't happened. Instead, we find evidence that proprioception is another thing human bodies and brains can do. We have no analogous body of empirical evidence for "philosophical fact detection" systems in the brain.
John Bengson's paper "The Intellectual Given" (2015) is what you're looking for--exceedingly thorough, careful, systematic, widely-cited treatment of what an intuition is (not), its phenomenology, its epistemic significance, etc. In this paper he's doing rationalist epistemology. In his other paper, "Grasping the Third Realm," he does a bit more metaphysics, attempting to explain the relation a thinker bears to some abstract fact--what's the non-accidental connection?--that's sufficient to yield knowledge of abstract reality.
Note that the claim that we are forced to rely on intuitions is different to the claim that intuitions are particularly reliable.
Note also that reliability can be established without knowing the mechanism
Sure, those are all different, but establishing the reliability of...what? If you don't know the mechanism, then this is often important in knowing whether you're even talking about the same thing.
If a philosopher has a moral intuition and a linguistic intuition, are these the result of the same cognitive processes? What if they aren't? And what if one is reliable and the other isn't? Often mechanism will be relevant to the reliability of a process. But the deeper issue is that I don't grant that there is any particular, and distinctive notion, "intuition," for us to judge them to be reliable or not reliable. Instead, the word is used in a variety of different ways.
Personally, I don't think intuitions are a genuine psychological phenomenon, I don't think we're forced to rely on them, and whether an "intuition" is reliable or not will depend on what we're talking about. But philosophers are typically extremely unclear about what they're talking about, so it would be premature to say the intuition in question isn't reliable: it's not even clear what they're talking about.
Philosophers can insist we have to have intuitions all they want. I'm not satisfied that they've even made a good case that we have intuitions.
"If a philosopher has a moral intuition and a linguistic intuition, are these the result of the same cognitive processes? What if they aren't? And what if one is reliable and the other isn't?"
You can establish that sort of thing with a statistical cluster analysis.
"But the deeper issue is that I don't grant that there is any particular, and distinctive notion, "intuition," for us to judge them to be reliable or not reliable."
There are probably different kinds of intuition, but there is also the common factor of being a black box process.
", I don't think we're forced to rely on them,"
It's easy to say that off the cuff, but demonstrating an epistemology that floats free of unjustified assumptions is much harder. I've never seen it done, so I think we are forced to rely on intuitions in the sense of unfounded foundations...type iii) here
Intuition" has the basic meaning off feeling that you know something without knowing how, but beyond that means more than several things:-
ia) Aunt Nelly's intuition that it's going to rain tomorrow. Something that "feels right". Mere phenomenology.
ib) habits of thought.
ii). Fast, but approximate, system 1 heuristic.
iii) Basic assumptions that you can't do without, since you need them to prove things, but can't prove, because they're basic.
Iv) novel epistemic technique, different from induction, deduction, etc
v). Infallible insight of mysterious, possibly supernatural origin. Like Platos forms , or Descartes clear and certain ideas.
"I'm not satisfied that they've even made a good case that we have intuitions"
Are you saying you can fully explicate every idea you have ever had? Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?
//You can establish that sort of thing with a statistical cluster analysis.//
My point isn't that you can't figure out what cognitive processes are involved but that nobody has bothered to do so.
//There are probably different kinds of intuition, but there is also the common factor of being a black box process.//
Different how? What makes them intuitions? Why are we using this term? What's it refer to? I don't think there are good or consistent answers to these questions from philosophers. It may turn out that the term is superfluous and doesn't pick out anything we couldn't already account for without positing them.
//It's easy to say that off the cuff, but demonstrating an epistemology that floats free of unjustified assumptions is much harder. I've never seen it done, so I think we are forced to rely on intuitions in the sense of unfounded foundations...type iii) here//
What makes an assumption an intuition?
//Are you saying you can fully explicate every idea you have ever had? Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?//
No, but I don't have to be able to fully explicate every idea I've ever had to think that if a certain notion is central to philosophy, that they should have a pretty good account of what it is and how it works. But they don't. I'm not an entire field of super smart people that have had decades to address the matter, and it's one thing, not dozens of them. There probably *are* specific ideas I can fully explicate. I want a full explication of this one.
For comparison, if car mechanics couldn't explain a specific process or feature in cars, I'd be very concerned. It'd be a bit weird to ask me if I can explain everything ever, as if that were relevant to expecting experts that work on a particular topic to be able to offer a decent, consistent account of the primary tools they use. If mechanics couldn't explain what a wrench was, I'd very concerned.
// Or that you dont experience the psychological phenomenon of seeming-to-be-true, apart from any consideration of reliability?///
No, I don't have experiences like that, and I am skeptical that anyone else does.
I am much more partial to intuitions than you are, but I am also puzzled by what they are. What exactly do you think the significance
of knowing what intuitions are is? And is this significance shared with other purported modes of justification? For instance, if I live in a time where no one knows what proprioception is or how it works, would you consider that to be a big problem for epistemologies which cite a special sense which tells you where your limbs are but which have an inadequate account of this sense?
If we know the causal origins of any given intuition or category of intuitions, this will provide insight into whether or not and to what extent we would on reflection (given our own epistemic values) accord evidential weight to them.
For instance, suppose we discover that when moral realists report that it "seems" that certain actions are stance-independently wrong, this is typically the result of psychological processes associated with emotional responses distinctive to each individual, and that these "seemings" are in fact a reflection of partially unconscious emotional attitudes that, if one changes one's emotional reaction, this changes which things that person considers right and wrong. And suppose we also discover that one's emotional responses are highly attuned by cultural and environmental inputs.
I would think if this were the case, that antirealists would have a good case to argue that these "intuitions" are actually just something like emotional projection: the sense that there's something "out there" that's "wrong" is misguided: a kind of misapprehension about one's own psychological states.
We'd need to handle intuitions like this on a case-by-case basis to form a better picture of the cognition of intuition. As far as I know, virtually nobody is even attempting to do this. So philosophers have all these "intuitions" but they don't even know what they are or how they work.
> For instance, if I live in a time where no one knows what proprioception is or how it works, would you consider that to be a big problem for epistemologies which cite a special sense which tells you where your limbs are but which have an inadequate account of this sense?
No, I probably wouldn't think there's much of a problem there, but there are important and illustrative differences.
First, proprioception only relates to physical interactions with the world and thus deals with descriptive facts. It is not positing extra metaphysical theses or anything nonphysical. Second, it'd be fairly straightforward to find evidence that one's capacities are influenced by physiological changes. Third, if, after an extended period of time, we failed to identify features of human physiology and cognition that could account for these effects, I would become skeptical. However, that hasn't happened. Instead, we find evidence that proprioception is another thing human bodies and brains can do. We have no analogous body of empirical evidence for "philosophical fact detection" systems in the brain.
John Bengson's paper "The Intellectual Given" (2015) is what you're looking for--exceedingly thorough, careful, systematic, widely-cited treatment of what an intuition is (not), its phenomenology, its epistemic significance, etc. In this paper he's doing rationalist epistemology. In his other paper, "Grasping the Third Realm," he does a bit more metaphysics, attempting to explain the relation a thinker bears to some abstract fact--what's the non-accidental connection?--that's sufficient to yield knowledge of abstract reality.
Thanks!