As far as I'm concerned, intuition is subconscious recognition of certain patterns.
I have Asperger's Syndrome; I was born without human social instincts. Over the last few years, I've been studying neurotypical humans, and I've rediscovered just how animal those instincts are.
Above the level of animal pack instincts is a cultural intuition. "Oh, I don't go into that neighborhood." "Do you know the actual crime statistics?" "No, but I get a bad feeling about it."
The philosophy I'm studying, Triessentialism, posits that there are three main ontological categories into which everything fits: Physical (what), Logical (how), Emotional (why). From there, the same categories are analogized into each other recursively.
I'm willing to bet intuition can be broken down into similar categories: intuiting the nature of something (what), the function thereof (how), or its causes and effects (why). I'm also willing to guess it's wrong about half the time.
While I'm not to sure of Weatherson's categories I'm not sure of yours either. One problem is that even if there are different kinds of intuitions it seems unlikely we can tell them apart with the kinds of evidence we have available. Perhaps some future experimental philosophy working with advanced neurological imaging could. But in that case are we still talking intuitions?
However if we take more general areas of human experience and recognize vagueness of result I think it would more fruitful.
I find it odd, Clark, that you seem to assume that intuitions will be a strictly psychological category, rather than a functional one, where the function has to do with its role in the argument. Given what appeal to intuitions is supposed to do, I would say that it would have to be the latter, not the former; thus X-phi + neuroscience might help clarify certain things, but couldn't actually tell us much.
I think Brandon is on the right track here - both in this post and in the linked one. "Intuition" is a frustratingly opaque term in current philosophical discourse because it is used univocally to describe a variety of different types of judgment. We ought be concerned about certain kinds of intuitions when we have reason to doubt their reliability - and type of reasons relevant for such doubt will vary across types of intuition.
That said, I do think that the reliability of certain types of intuition will turn out to be domain specific. Consider what we might call intuitions of causal inference (to take one of Beattie's categories). These kinds of intuitions will likely turn out to be moderately reliable concerning the everyday, macro-physical domain which humans normally occupy. Such intuitions will become suspect, however, when some kind of specialized scientific knowledge is required for understanding phenomena - e.g. as in astrophysics, advanced engineering, etc.
Similar with moral intuitions. Whatever type of intuitive reasoning is relevant, there will likely be domains in which it is trustworthy and those in which it is not. (E.g. moral intuitions about fairness in contract enforcement may be trustworthy, but untrustworthy when they concern the defensibility of aggressive foreign policy. The former we can trust in a rather direct way, while the latter require evaluation in terms of moral theory.)
Here's the view: there will be types of intuition (or judgment) and each type of intuition will be reliable across certain domains (though it is possible that there is a class of intuition wholly unreliable).
Brandon, I'm just not sure how a functional role would work unless we know what is going on underneath. But maybe this is just an apparent difference due to the vagueness of what we mean by function?
In any case my point is more that even if two processes fit the same functional role one may be trustworthy while the other isn't. Consider the idea that we have some capacity for pure intuition that is reasonably trustworthy but then we have biological instinct and then linguistic/cultural habit. Now from our first person view can we tell these apart? I don't see how. Yet one might be trustworthy while the others aren't.
I'd go further, a I did in my post, and suggest that we ought check for accuracy in different topic areas. (Maybe that's what you mean by function) So we know, for instance, that untrained people have horrible intuitions about physics. So we know that intuitions are unreliable about physics. Ditto for many other areas of thought. But they appear fairly robust in the area of common (but vague) experiences.
My point about neurology was more that if we found an intuitive process that worked well in one area, and knew it was the same process in an other area, that'd give us prima facie reason to trust it. Of course it's not a guarantee. But for areas of investigation where there is no empirical way of investigating (say ethics or free will) then at least we'd have slightly less reason to be skeptical about appeals to intuition.
I think there definitely is some difference in the way 'function' is being used here: I still read you as taking 'intuition' to indicate a special sort of psychological act, rather than to indicate a contributing factor in reasoning. Or you may be treating them both as the same; that's a common conflation since Descartes, but, I think, leads us into dubious territory. Take your neurology example again; I would hold that this provides no prima facie reason for thinking the second instance in which we find the intuitive process operative reliable; reliability is not a magical feature of the brain process itself, so merely recognizing the same brain process is in play doesn't tell us anything about whether they are reliable here as well.
By function do you mean a functional role (i.e. place in argument) in thinking about some topic? I confess I'm just not sure what you mean by function.
Yes -- if you look at my first comment in response to you, you'll find that this is how I glossed the term; and then, again, in the previous comment I glossed it as a "contributing factor in reasoning". My suggestion is that it is a mistake to think of 'intuition', in the sense to which philosophers appeal to it, as a special sort of veridical brain activity or cognitive process, rather than as simply a basic source of information against which reasoning can be checked and on the basis of which conclusions can be supported, at least under the right circumstances; if it is not the latter, it can't do what philosophers want it to do in any case and so should be completely dropped; and if it is the latter, it doesn't have to be the former (and we have reason to think that the former is a Cartesian error, anyway). But we can't get our account of 'intuition' from x-phi + neuroscience if 'intuition', however understood, is not the former. (Although, as I said before, they may provide invaluable and indispensable help with clarifying certain aspects of such an account.)
But even if it were the former, we won't draw the right conclusions from the relevant neuroscientific studies unless we've already made preliminary progress on the question. For instance, above you talked about folk intuitions about physics; but part of my point in the post is that this is a category we cannot assume to be unified, and so we have to ask, "Which types of intuitions about physics?" If 'intuition' is equivocal, and we try to answer a question like, "Are folk intuitions of physics reliable?" without recognizing that, we'll make a hash of it, because we will generalize beyond the limits of legitimate generalization.
The problem, Brandon, is that I just can't see how one could conceivably determine that intuition is reliable in that sense of function. After all to confirm it you'd have to provide an alternative method of deriving the argument at which point the intuition would be redundant and would give us no clue about other intuitions.
In other words if we take what you say seriously we can't really say intuitions are general processes at all. They are simply premises for an argument. But in such a case it seems there is strong prima facie reason to reject all intuitions entirely.
(Sorry posted too soon)
It seems what we need for intuitions to be useful is a process more general than simply a place in a certain argument but more narrow than all intuitions being treated equally.
Clark,
You keep talking about 'intuitions' as if we knew what they are; but my point in the post is that we don't without an account of what we're talking about. At the most, at present, we can say that they are things that, if they are to do what people who appeal to them want them to, serve certain types of roles or functions in certain types of arguments. There is no sense whatsoever in the question, "Are intuitions reliable?" any more than there is in the questions "Is thinking reliable?" or "Are experiences reliable?" This is certainly true if we have no account whatsoever of what intuitions are supposed to be; it is even more true if it turns out, as I suggested in the post, that 'intuition' is an equivocal term. And it is pointless to speculate about what would be required to determine the reliability of things for which we have no account on the basis of which we can even ask a researchable question about whether they have any kind of reliable functioning.
However, when you say,
After all to confirm it you'd have to provide an alternative method of deriving the argument at which point the intuition would be redundant and would give us no clue about other intuitions.
this does not appear to be based on any principles that are generally true. The fact that you can prove something two ways does not make either way redundant; and whether it told you anything about other intuitions would depend entirely on what is involved in a correct account of intuitions.
It makes it redundant in that right now intuitions are all philosophers offer. If there was empirical based premises why on earth would anyone appeal to intuitions? To see this look at say philosophy of science - especially physics - where appeals to intuition are pretty rare.
I think though we're saying much the same thing but merely coming at it from different approaches. I feel that the only way to treat intuitions as reliable one must find an underlying process than generates them. Absent that it's kind of pointless to treat them as much beyond commonly held beliefs with no grounding.
Whoops. That first sentence should read.
"...right now in many topics intuitions are all philosophers offer."
Clearly as my later example shows there are disciplines where appeals to intuition are much rarer. (I don't want to say, like Cummins does, that they are non-existent since they do pop up in some discussions)
Clark,
We do seem largely in agreement, but I think again you seem to be arguing as if we have a good account of what is being appealed to in talk about 'intuitions', which we don't. Clearly this is a problematic state to be in, but without an account of what is being appealed to in talk about 'intuitions', there is no sense to be made of the claim that philosophy of physics uses fewer appeals to intuitions; it certainly uses the word 'intuition' less, and it certainly tries to avoid some things that get the label 'intuition', but that doesn't tell us much. Likewise, if 'intuition' is an equivocal word, which it appears to be, then there's no way to say that a claim like "Intuitions are not much beyond commonly held beliefs with no grounding" is even well-formed, much less true or false, because it is using equivocal words, and we have no means in hand to disambiguate it.
Intuition is when someone understands something (or thinks he does) with little exposure or without aid from a teacher.
Let's give the Triessentialist approach a go.
Triessentialism posits three primary ontological categories (Physical, Logical, Emotional), three secondary (Scientific, Philosophical, Animal), and one tertiary (Moral).
So if we're talking about intuition regarding philosophy, which is a combination of logic and emotion, both epistomology and aesthetics are brought into play.
On the other hand, someone may have intuition regarding something purely physical, such as being able to throw a small object accurately within moments of picking it up for the first time. Thus we think about the biological, about the ever-present mental simulation of the world.
The type of thing being intuited tells us which one (or more) of the various intuitive faculties of the human mind is being used. This is like how every question carries implicitly the form of its answer. "Who do you work for?" The expected answer is a person, or possibly an organization, never "Sometimes, but I hardly notice it." That's an answer, but to a different question.
Of course Triessentialism is an intuitive approach to philosophy, so I am relying on philosophical intuition in this response.
Is the opposite of intuition "rote" or "rigor"?
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