Rethinking Intuition

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgements. This volume brings together a group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these issues. It contains a collection of essays discussing intuition from two different perspectives. They also cover how psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical enquiry.

Intuitions may seem to play a fundamental role in philosophy: but their role and their value have been challenged recently. What are intuitions? Should we ever trust them? And if so, when? Do they have an indispensable role in science—in thought experiments, for instance—as well as in philosophy? Or should appeal to intuitions be abandoned altogether? This collection brings together leading philosophers, from early to late career, to tackle such questions. It presents the state of the art thinking on the topic.

The title of this book refers to the tension between formal and informal elements in the ways analytical philosophy is practiced. The authors examine questions of the scopes and limits of both kinds of research methods.

This book focuses on the role of intuition in querying Socratic problems, the very nature of intuition itself, and whether it can be legitimately used to support or reject philosophical theses. The reader is introduced to questions connected to the use of intuition in philosophy through an analysis of two methods where the appeal to intuition is explicit: thought experiments and reflective equilibrium. In addition, the debate on the legitimacy of such an appeal is presented as connected to the discussion on the nature of the aims and results of philosophical inquiries. Finally, the main tenets and results of experimental philosophers are discussed, highlighting the methodological limits of such studies. Readers interested in the nature of intuition in philosophy will find this an invaluable and revealing resource.

We know about our immediate environment—about the people, animals, and things around us—by having sensory perceptions. According to a tradition that traces back to Plato, we know about abstract reality—about mathematics, morality, and metaphysics—by having intuitions, which can be thought of as intellectual perceptions. The rough idea behind the analogy is this: while sensory perceptions are experiences that purport to, and sometimes do, reveal how matters stand in concrete reality by making us aware of that reality through the senses, intuitions are experiences that purport to, and sometimes do, reveal how matters stand in abstract reality by making us aware of that reality through the intellect. In this book, Elijah Chudnoff elaborates and defends such a view of intuition. He focuses on the experience of having an intuition, on the justification for beliefs that derives from intuition, and on the contact with abstract reality via intuition. In the course of developing a systematic account of the phenomenology, epistemology, and metaphysics of intuition on which it counts as a form of intellectual perception Chudnoff also takes up related issues such as the a priori, perceptual justification and knowledge, concepts and understanding, inference, mental action, and skeptical challenges to intuition.

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Is torturing the innocent OK? Just now something happened: it seemed to you that torturing the innocent is wrong. What kind of mental state were you in? What is its nature? Perhaps you now believe that torturing the innocent is wrong because it just seemed to you that it is. If so, that seems appropriate. But is it really, and if so, what could explain this? In this book, Koksvik argues these mental states form a psychological kind called ‘intuition’, and that having an intuition indeed justifies you in believing what it says. What explains this, he argues, is how similar intuition is to perception. Through a detailed examination he shows that intuition, just like perception, is a conscious experience, and that the two experience types have important properties in common, in virtue of which they can both justify belief. In sharp contrast to traditional thought, Koksvik argues that intuition is completely unrestricted in content: we have intuitions about morality and metaphysics, but also about all sorts of everyday things, like danger or trustworthiness, and in all cases they can justify. The use of intuition is thus not only a legitimate part of philosophical and scientific practice, it also plays a pervasive, important and legitimate role in all of our everyday rational lives.

Experimental philosophy is one of the most recent and controversial developments in philosophy. Its basic idea is rather simple: to test philosophical thought experiments and philosophers’ intuitions about them with scientific methods, mostly taken from psychology and the social sciences. The ensuing experimental results, such as the cultural relativity of certain philosophical intuitions, has engaged – and at times infuriated – many more traditionally minded "armchair" philosophers since then. In this volume, the metaphilosophical reflection on experimental philosophy is brought yet another step forward by engaging some of its most renowned proponents and critics in a lively and controversial debate. In addition to that, the volume also contains original experimental research on personal identity and philosophical temperament, as well as state-of-the-art essays on central metaphilosophical issues, like thought experiments, the nature of intuitions, or the status of philosophical expertise. This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Psychology.