Josh Alexander and I, in our recent "Analytic Epistemology & Experimental Philosophy", consider a typology of different ways in which philosophers might understand their own appeals to intuition:
First, it might be supposed that when a philosopher relies on intuitions as evidence, she is relying only on her own personal intuitions as evidence. Let’s call this view, intuition solipsism. Second, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of the class of professional philosophers. Let’s call this view, intuition elitism. Third, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of a broader class that includes non-philosophers – commonly referred to as “the folk.” Let’s call this view, intuition populism.
But of course there are sub-varieties of these main types, and one type of intuition elitism has recently manifested in a blogging dispute (which Jen linked to) over at "Close Range". (There are also some interesting issues raised there about experimental design, but they turn out to be less substantial than originally advertised; basically, there are some ways in which some of the early experimental philosophy work could be done better, but none of it adds up to a reason to reject that work.)
The metaphilosophical view on offer there is that philosophers' reports count in ways that our subjects' reports don't -- not necessarily because philosophers are better than ordinary folk per se, but because the standards for what counts as having an intuition at all is pretty high. Let us (tongue-in-cheekily) call this particular version of elitism, intuition snobbism. It is in some ways more democratic than elitism, since in principle anyone could have a proper intuition. But one expects that philosophers will generally have more of them, because of the training and demands of their profession.
Now, here is the main problem for snobbism: if we crank up the dial on what counts as an intuition, then we accordingly will have to dial down our confidence that anyone is actually having a gin-u-wine intuition at any given time. First, we have to lower our confidence that other philosophers' reports of their intuitions -- their alleged intuitions -- in the journals and talks are, in fact, really reporting intuitions, and not some other form of intellectual seeming. More broadly, we have to surrender our sense that folks at large concur with us on many of our favorite intuitions. So, for example, this infamous bit of Jackson -- which I think reflects a kind of reasoning very common among IDR practitioners -- would have to be sacrificed:
...I am sometimes asked – in a tone that suggests that the question is a major objection – why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what governs our classificatory practice, don’t I advocate doing serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various cases? My answer is that I do – when it is necessary... Everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class of students is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answer they get in the vast majority of cases. But it is also true that often we know that our own case is typical and so can generalize from it to others." (pp. 36-37 of From Metaphysics to Ethics)
We also see this kind of thinking involved in the line that provoked this discussion, Marc Moffet's comment on this post over at the Leiter blog:
After all, while I know plenty of smart linguists who reject [Jason Stanley's] particular theory of the syntactic structure of know-how attributions, it is very rare to find someone who understands the Gettier cases but who doesn't have the Gettier intuitions (i.e., that they are not cases of knowledge).
But merely comprehending the cases isn't enough, on an intuition snob approach. They need to have, say, the force of necessity; or a strong modal tie to the truth; or to be experienced as internally justifying.
The intuition snobs also have to give up one of their favorite rhetorical moves against the experimental restrictionists: the tu quoque. Here's an example from Marc, in our recent exchange: "Moreover, I can't even begin to count the number of people that profess not to trust intuitions as part of their philosphical theorizing, but then turn around and rely on them evidentially in the next breath." Well... how do you know that that is what they were doing? Why do you have any confidence at all that it was an intuition that they were relying on? Maybe it was just a judgment of some other sort, such as a tacit sense of the weight of the empirical evidence. Indeed, speaking for my own case, I'm pretty sure that unless you saw me using DeMorgan's Law or something rudimentarylike that, it wasn't a snob-worthy intuition that I was using.
Even from a Cartesian standpoint, snobbery would require us to become rather less certain that our own reactions to thought-experiments are proper intuitions. There are just too many cases in history of various theorists being utterly certain that they had grasped, via the lumen naturale, some inmost metaphysical truth, which most of us now find unintuitive to begin with. (The Principle of Sufficient Reason is an excellent example, as is most of the arguments for God's existence in the Meditations. Most folks seem unpersuaded by BonJour's appeal to an intuition of a schematic form of an inductive inference at the end of In Defense of Pure Reason, at least in part because what he puts out as intuitive just doesn't strike everyone as such.) And there is too much scientific psychology about the ways in which the human mind is all too happy to play tricks on itself, convincing itself where it ought not be convinced, which is why there is all too many scientific norms that are in place precisely to keep us from being able to pull such autochicanery.
So, given the significant costs that snobbery would incur, we might well ask: why be a snob? There's no descriptive methodological reason to go snobbish -- it's not already built into philosophical practice, and a great many philosophers think that their intuitions can be relied upon because they're already manifested in our quotidian folk practices. (Those are the "intuition populists" that Josh and I consider.) For example, a Jacksonian is committed to intuitions being little more than the expression of our shared folk theories underlying our conceptual competences, for example. See also, say, DeRose on the ordinary language basis for his form of contextualism. Marc notes, rightly, that everyone is at least appealing to some-sort-of-intuitive-state-or-other, but snobbery is a non-starter as an account of anything that all or even most analtyic philosophers are appealing to.
This gives us a sense in which intuition snobs and restrictionists are similar: they are both advocating a radical change in philosophical methods. The restrictionists are motivated here by the idea, inter alia, that philosophy would do better to take a few methodology lessons from the sciences. (I think that's what naturalism should really be about, by the way -- not a physicalist ontology, but adding some as-scientific-as-we-can-manage methods to our tool kit.) And of course we're motivated by our particular findings, even as preliminary as they are. But where does snobbery get its motivation? I think it derives mostly from concerns about having a certifiably anti-skeptical epistemology, one in which intuitions can play an important role as a basic (though not infallible or incorrigible) source of evidence. And, actually, I'm perfectly happy to be on board with something like that, as a matter of fundamental epistemology.
But here's the thing: we're not doing fundamental epistemology here. We're doing methodology. And basicness isn't a meaningful category from a methodological standpoint -- we now have oodles & scads & tons of evidence of all sorts that speak to the range & scope of when perception, memory, testimony, & various & sundry forms of intellectual seemings are more, less, or not at all trustworthy. Maybe only a very special sub-class of those intellectual seemings are capable of getting things off the ground in the first place, and need to have conditions like the aforementioned internally-justifying nature in order to qualify as properly basic. But none of that matters after we get off the ground, and indeed we've been flying high for a long time now. Basicness is a starter-motor for the engine of inquiry; once we're in motion, it's finished with its job.
So, where does that leave things? In the context of the debate over philosophical methodology, intuition snobbery comes at a great price: the general loss of being able to determine, in our own practices, in our collaborators, and in our interlocutors, just when we do or don't have a proper intuition on our hands. I suspect that this would be a methodologically disastrous price, but it's clearly something that could be argued about (and argued about empirically). But it's not at all clear that snobbery really buys you very much for that price. All we get is a bit of epistemological machinery that doesn't do us any methodological good. Not, on the whole, a good bargain for philosophy. But isn't it just like snobs to accept only what they take to be the best, regardless of the price?
;-)
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