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Abstract

This paper addresses the definition and the operational use of intuitions in philosophical methods in the form of a research study encompassing several regions of the globe, involving 282 philosophers from a wide array of academic backgrounds and areas of specialisation. The authors tested whether philosophers agree on the conceptual definition and the operational use of intuitions, and investigated whether specific demographic variables and philosophical specialisation influence how philosophers define and use intuitions. The results obtained point to a number of significant findings, including that philosophers distinguish between intuitions used to formulate (discovery) and to test (justification) philosophical theory. The survey results suggest that strategies implemented to characterise philosophical intuition are not well motivated since, even though philosophers do not agree on a single account of intuition, they fail to capture a preferred usage of intuitions as aspects of discovery. The quantitative summary of survey findings informs the debate on this topic, and advances more defined routes for subsequent approaches to the study of intuitions.

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Notes

  1. Some easily recognisable examples are Gettier’s argument that justified-true-belief is insufficient for knowledge, i.e., that one does not have knowledge in cases where one has only justified-true-belief (Gettier 1963); Hillary Putnam’s Twin-Earth Argument for the truth of externalism, i.e., XYZ is not water (Putnam 1985); David Chalmers’ argument against physicalism, i.e., zombies are possible (Chalmers 1996); and John Rawls’ arguments for the concept of justice, i.e., that various cases instantiate fairness (Rawls 1971).

  2. The veracity of intuition arguments depend on only one premise that requires intuitive support, while other premises garner support irrespective of intuitions.

  3. The experimental data covers a variety of philosophically salient issues, including theory of reference (Machery et al. 2004), moral responsibility (Haidt et al. 1993; Nahmias et al. 2005), attribution of moral rightness/wrongness (Blair 1995; Greene et al. 1998; Nichols 2002), the nature of knowledge (Swain et al. 2008; Weinberg et al. 2001), intentional action (Nichols and Ulatowski 2007) free will and responsibility (Woolfolk et al. 2006).

  4. For example, self-evidential and seemings accounts of intuition differ from the kind of account offered by John Rawls (1951):

    [I]t is required that the judgment be intuitive with respect to ethical principles, that is, that it should not be determined by a conscious application of principles so far as this may be evidenced by introspection. […] An intuitive judgment may be consequent to a thorough inquiry into the facts of the case, and it may follow a series of reflections on the possible effects of different decisions, and even the application of a common sense rule. (Rawls 1951, 183).

  5. Weinberg (2007) presents the problem this way:

    A gloss of “intuition” that comports at all with both specialist and folk usage will take them to be a sort of intellectual seeming, phenomenologically distinct from perception (including proprioception and the like), explicit inference, and apparent memory traces. But this construal includes a rather large and motley class of cognitions. And the opponent [of philosophers reliance on intuition] would be unwise to keep the conversation focused on so broad a class, since it will include a great deal of cognition that the opponent presumably does not want to reject, such as the ordinary application of concepts to particulars (Bealer), or the claim that no object can be red all over and green all over (BonJour), or elementary mathematics (Sosa). The defenders can thus get away with—indeed, can benefit from—a vagueness in the target, as that vagueness lumps together the intuitions that the opponents really want to attack with many others that they really don’t, like criminals trying to hide themselves in a crowd of innocent bystanders. (320)

  6. “Explicitly normative claims include regulative claims about how we ought to go about the business of belief formation, claims about the relative merits of various strategies for belief formation, and evaluative claims about the merits of various epistemic situations. Implicitly normative claims include claims to the effect that one or another process of belief formation leads to justified beliefs or to real knowledge or that a doxastic structure of a certain kind amounts to real knowledge.” (Weinberg et al. 2001, 432)

  7. It is not our aim here to elaborate the theoretical implications for justificatory intuitions and intuitions of discovery. A systematic disentanglement of the uses of intuitions of discovery and of justification, and how intuitions of discovery and of justification are and can be cooperatively put to task is deserving of greater attention than can be met here. We need here to only draw out the creditability of the distinction and report the salience of the distinction to ways that intuitions are ubiquitously characterised. Since the authors make no claim to a particular conception of intuition, we will only suggest how one could make the distinction between intuitions of justification and intuitions of discovery. We suggest the following: Justificatory intuitions are the sort put to work as epistemic support; they provide justification. Were the intuition undermined or defeated, (ceteris paribus) so too would the proposition it supports be epistemically diminished. Intuitions of discovery are not epistemically efficacious. They are causally related to theory construction in ways that relate propositions of salience to the theory context. These may be ill-motivated, faulty, plainly false or similarly incorrigible without (epistemic) effect on related propositions or theory context.

    Examples of justificatory intuition are prevalent in philosophical methods. For example, Pust (2000) offers a thoroughgoing defense of intuitions as evidence, and Williamson (2004) defends the position that intuitions are a species of judgment. Both views present intuition in its justificatory role. Examples of intuitions of discovery are less obvious. Consider the role of intuition in dialectical argument. When engaged with argument, as one is presented with a move in chess, there are a number of moves one might make. Like in chess, one must see the alternatives and the relevant moves the opponent/interlocutor might make in response. The tactical solution is often intuited, a creative solution to the problem in the dynamic context of the debate. Experienced philosophers will often intuitively grasp the solution and the course of the dialectic in a couple of turns of the debate. For arguments to this point in the context of chess, see De Groot (1986) and Gobet and Chassy (2009).

  8. For reference, see Bourget and Chalmers (2009), who conducted a survey using a much larger sample size of philosophers.

  9. The interest here is to examine whether differences emerge along the demographics surveyed by experimental philosophers—ones that reportedly impugn the practice of using intuition, e.g., group affiliation (Weinberg et al. 2001)—and whether these differences emerge along demographic variables within the discipline. These variables include years of professional practice and academic affiliation. An observation made by G.A. Cohen (2000), one he makes from his armchair, motivates asking the respondents’ academic affiliation. He writes,

    [P]eople of my generation who studied philosophy at Harvard rather than at Oxford for the most part reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. And I can’t believe that this is an accident. That is, I can’t believe that Harvard just happened to be the place where both its leading thinker [Quine] and its graduate students, for independent reasons—merely, for example, in the independent light of reason itself- also came to reject it. And vice-versa, of course, for Oxford. […] So, in some sense of “because,” and in some sense of “Oxford,” I think I can say that I believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction because I studied at Oxford. And that is disturbing. For the fact that I studied at Oxford is no reason for thinking that the distinction is sound. (Cohen 2000, 18)

    If conceptual differences occur in regard to the analytic/synthetic distinction, the authors posit that differences could be present in regard to conceptions of intuition as well.

  10. Because the four importance statements were presented on the same survey page, the authors ran a within-subjects analysis of variance to assess whether study participants rated these statements similarly. Results showed that there were significant differences across ratings of importance.

  11. No explicit definition of “discovery” and “justification” was offered to participants since the aim of the survey was to test philosophers’ own concepts of intuition and its uses. The authors worried that explicit definition or description of key terms would bias the results.

  12. The theoretical implications of this are mitigated once one considers that other sources of justification can be foundational or play foundational roles (e.g., visual perception or some form of basic reliability).

  13. The authors are aware that the ambiguity of the evaluative context of the statements of essential and useful to justification and of discovery leaves a number of gaps between the survey findings and what might be claimed that the findings support. For example, the authors infer that the actual practices of philosophers are indicative of their reflections on, and conceptions of, intuition and intuitional methodologies. One can question the strength of that inference by pointing to a number of gaps between the survey findings and the actual practices of philosophers, including a gap between philosophers’ conception of intuition-use and actual practices of intuition-use in philosophical methodology, and a gap between philosophers’ conception of their own use of intuitions and conception of intuitions being essential to philosophical methodology. Future survey research should aim to eliminate these gaps. The current survey findings are offered with acknowledgement of these infelicitous artifacts of the original survey design.

  14. Moreover, 70% of participants indicated that intuitions were not essential to justification, where one would expect ratings to go in the opposite direction given well-know worries about epistemic circularity and regress.

  15. For example, George Bealer (2000) writes, “phenomenological considerations make it clear that intuitions are likewise distinct from judgments, guesses, hunches, and common sense. My view is simply that, like sensory seeming, intellectual seeming (intuition) is just one more primitive propositional attitude”. Pust (2001) holds the same kind of position. Pust argues that merely on the basis of one’s first-person experience of intuiting one eliminates that intuitions are not hunches or guesses, citing “the intuitive peculiarity of calling one’s Gettier intuition or logical intuition ‘a guess’ or ‘a hunch’” (Pust 2001, p. 34. Emphasis added).

  16. The authors thank Glenn Ewan for drawing our attention to this point.

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Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the faculty and post-graduate students at the University of Edinburgh who kindly took time to participate in and comment on a pilot version of the survey, their helpful audience at the Australasian Association of Philosophy, New Zealand Division 2009 Annual Conference, and the helpful and insightful comments of reviewers to an earlier version of this paper.

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Correspondence to J. R. Kuntz.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 1 Frequencies for demographic variables
Table 2 Rank order response frequencies for accounts of intuition
Table 3 Spearman rho intercorrelations

Appendix 2

2.1 Survey

Introductory Page:

There are recent criticisms of intuition’s use in philosophical methods. Layers of this debate range from the necessity of intuition in philosophical methods to the rejoinders to the responses to objections that intuitions are not reliable indicators of truth. In this debate are various—perhaps competing—accounts of intuition: some preceding above-mentioned criticisms, some a product thereof. On the one hand, philosophers advocating intuition’s role in philosophical methods might view the various accounts of intuition and the debate itself as a discursive attempt to get clear on the single correct account of intuition. On the other hand, philosophers argue that intuition is unreliable tout court. I think there is a middle ground: there are various kinds of intuition at work in philosophical methodology. This is ground that is subject to empirical testability. The aim of this survey is to help provide evidence for this hypothesis by asking professional philosophers with different theoretical orientations how they conceive of intuitions in the scope of philosophical methods.

Thank you for participating in what stands to be an exciting study. You will be asked for demographic data, a few short questions, and then to complete a short exercise. The entire survey should take about 20 min. Please take the survey only once and through to completion. Answers to this survey are anonymous.

Informed Consent Information: (Omitted from sample)

Survey Items

Demographic Information:

1. Years of professional practice in philosophy. [Years beginning with your first year of graduate (post-graduate) study.]

2. Academic institution where you obtained, or are currently pursuing, your highest-level degree in philosophy. (Academic institution and country)

3. Current academic institution, if for longer for 10 years. (Academic institution and country)

4. Gender (Female, Male)

5. To which group do you consider yourself to belong?

White, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, No answer, Other [write-in]

6. Area of specialisation

Presented in randomised order: Aesthetics; Africana; American Philosophy; Applied Ethics; Philosophy of Education; Epistemology; Ethics; Feminism; History of Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Law; Philosophy of Literature; Logic; Philosophy of Mathematics; Metaphysics; Philosophy of Mind; Non-Western Philosophy; Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Hermeneutics; Postmodernism, Philosophy of Culture and Critical Theory; Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy of Science; and Social and Political Philosophy.

Survey:

Please indicate the level to which you agree with the following statements.

1 - Disagree to a Very Large Extent; 2 - Disagree to a Large Extent; 3 - Somewhat Disagree; 4 - Neither Agree nor Disagree; 5 - Somewhat Agree; 6 - Agree to a Large Extent; 7 - Agree to a Very Large Extent)

1. Intuitions are useful to justification in philosophical methods.

2. Intuitions are useful to discovery in philosophical methods.

3. Intuitions are essential to justification in philosophical methods.

4. Intuitions are essential to discovery in philosophical methods.

Rank the following accounts of intuition according to how each fits with your notion of intuition used in philosophical methods. [“1” = lowest/worst; “7” = highest/best. Please, DO NOT rank any accounts equally.]

{The accounts were presented in randomised order}

  • ▪ Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

  • ▪ An intellectual happening whereby it seems that something is the case without arising from reasoning, or sensorial perceiving, or remembering.

  • ▪ A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.

  • ▪ An intellectual act whereby one is thinking occurrently of the abstract proposition that p and, merely on the basis of understanding it, believes that p.

  • ▪ An intellectual state made up of (1) the consideration whether p, and (2) positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p; together constituting prima facie reason to believe that p.

  • ▪ The formation of a belief by unclouded mental attention to its contents, in a way that is so easy and yielding a belief that is so definite as to leave no room for doubt regarding its veracity.

  • ▪ An intellectual happening that serves as evidence for the situation at hand’s instantiation of some concept.

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Kuntz, J.R., Kuntz, J.R.C. Surveying Philosophers About Philosophical Intuition. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 643–665 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0047-2

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