Philosophical Intuitions Don't Exist

[00:00:00][music] [music] [music] >> All right. All right. It's been a couple weeks. Glad to be back.

[00:00:27]Uh, been a busy couple of weeks. Uh, how y'all doing? Uh, all right. So, today I wanted to talk about a blog post I wrote recently and it's a response to an article from months and months ago. I don't get to that in a moment, but let me see who is here and then we'll get into it. All right. So, we got Jonah.

[00:00:45]You're here for a thousand lens loot.

[00:00:47]So, congrats and Jermoe gets 500 and Eric Wells gets 250.

[00:00:52]Uh, so there we go. We're We're not going to We're not going to contribute to the lens loot inflation. So, I do have a link uh, to the blog post in the description and I'll also post it here in the chat and pin it.

[00:01:08]And if you haven't consider subscribing to the blog. So, you know, I do this stuff on YouTube. I do this stuff over on Substack, which is where my blog is at and it's interesting how little interaction there is between people on the one and people on the other. There's some overlap, but a lot of people that show up here don't show up there and vice versa.

[00:01:23]So, do consider subscribing.

[00:01:25]Um, you know, you might you might like it. It might Maybe you'll find it boring.

[00:01:29]Now, if you go check out that post, you will see that it is a Titanic ridiculous It's like a monograph. Uh, so I think it's something like 30,000 words. So, I don't expect people to read all of that blog post. Although, if you do, congrats to you. Uh, so it was It was a bit of work.

[00:01:46]Uh, surprisingly, it despite its length, uh, it I didn't It didn't find it took me that long to put it together. So, I kind of just uh, vomited this thing out. Now, it's a response to a post from some months ago, which I'll talk about, but what I wanted to do is kind of just go through the key points. Now, the first thing to get out of the way, because the title of this video and the title of that blog post is philosophical intuitions don't exist. Now, uh the first thing to get out of the way, uh as I said, is uh people might not have a great reaction to that. They're going to see it as like maybe edge lordy or intentionally uh controversial or something like that. Uh I'm not trying to be like I I'm a some self-aware enough to realize that people are going to go, "Whoa, that's a that's a bold claim." People might be dismissive towards it. Uh people might think that it's it's you know, overly provocative or super plausible. Uh but what I'm not doing is intentionally overstating what my position is in a way that I think is wildly inaccurate. Uh there's certainly the case that there are certain conceptions of intuitions that I think are real. That's something I very much address in the article, and certain conceptions that I think are not real.

[00:02:56]Uh and for any case where you say something is real or not real, that sort of thing, it's always a tough call. Uh if you hold if you think some instances are real and some are not real, whether you want to say I think it's real or I think it's not real. Cuz take take the case of morality. I'm an anti-realist about morality. Does that mean I think morality is not real? Well, of course not. I think morality is real, and I think that the conception of value and normativity and all that that an anti-realist has available to them is not just robust enough, but I like I find it to be far more satisfactory than what realists have to offer. So, I think morality is is very much real.

[00:03:32]In the case of philosophical intuitions, uh part of the reason I've opted it strategically to go with the it's not real framing is because I think that this is the more productive and valuable framing of the overall discourse. I think that we should move past intuition talk and abandon the discourse of talk of intuitions. And what are we left with? Well, the word intuition, like every other word, is polysemous. Words have multiple meanings. When you use a word, you could use it to refer to concept A, concept B, concept C. Now, some polysemous terms can refer to things that are very different. Take the word bank. So, the word bank could refer to like a place you go to get money, or it could refer to like a river bank.

[00:04:14]Very different things. But in other cases, a word can shade into meanings or the meanings overlap a lot. There are people recently posting on Substack about atheism. Now, one way of just using the term atheism means the positive disbelief in the existence of God. It's also sometimes used to refer to a lack of belief in God. If you look up some people don't like that definition. If you look up something like the Merriam-Webster dictionary.com and you put in atheism, the lack of belief in God is one of the definitions you'll get as a definition of atheism. Now, you can see how those two terms are slightly different in meaning, but they overlap. And in fact, one of them is inclusive with the other.

[00:04:47]A person that actively believe disbelieves in God also lacks a belief in God. Um so, everybody that is a you could say a positive atheist, um I guess you couldn't say that they're a negative atheist, but they're an atheist in the general sense, if we're inclusive of disbelief in God. So, it's not even just that one of the one of the meanings is partially nested within the other. Also partially not if you if you say, "No, no, I lack belief in God, but it's not the case that I disbelieve in God." Um Oh, but I guess a person that says that they disbelieve in God, yeah, they would say that they lack a belief in God. But they they might not say that they only lack a belief in God, which is what someone else might insist is their position. Um so, one of them is inclusive, the other's not. Anyway, I'm I'm belaboring the point. The point here is that sometimes terms have multiple meanings and they're they're pretty closely uh bound up in one another. And sometimes it just happens to be for like the weird etymological roots of a language that a word will mean lots of different things. Um now, take the case of intuition. The word intuition is an ordinary language term, and it's used in a variety of ways in ordinary language. And some of those ways it's very clear it's they're not what philosophers are talking about. So some people talk about being intuitive in the sense of having a sort of inarticulable sense of like you could predict things very well or you are good at reading people. Like I'm very intuitive. I just something like you this feels like the wrong thing to do. Like you you kind of have this spider sense for the the world as a whole and you're reactive to the world around you and the people around you.

[00:06:16]Maybe your intuitions are driven by empathy and they're very interpersonal and you're you're good at you're you're intuitive about people. Or you could be intuitive about oh, I don't think we should make this we shouldn't take this step in the project. We should take a different step. Oh, why? Do you have Can you articulate your I don't know. It's just a gut feeling I have. So intuition is used in that colloquial sense to be this kind of like sixth sense vibey kind of thing about all sorts of stuff.

[00:06:43]That's not what philosophers are talking about. Now, does that does that ability exist? Well, people report it.

[00:06:50]I don't see any reason to think that that's not picking up some things that exist and some people probably have sort of paranormal or supernatural construals of what's going on there. I wouldn't believe in those. And if they say I'm baking that into the concept like it's the paranormal ability to anticipate future events like a kind of precognition. Certainly I don't think that exists. It could exist. I just don't think it does.

[00:07:11]If it's something like uh you know, a really good a a good sense of empathy that you can't like articulate it but you're good at reading people like a detective that's very intuitive. Like ooh, I think I think that person did the crime. Yeah, I think some people through internalizing certain sorts of pattern recognition and and developing a certain skill set or whatever can be intuitive in that sense.

[00:07:33]So the problem with the term like intuition is that it has these colloquial uses. Some of them are paranormal, they don't exist. Some of them or at least I don't think they do.

[00:07:41]Some of them are are natural and maybe have a good psychological explanation. I think those exist. But then we have the philosophical conceptions. Now, arguably, some of those philosophical conceptions could discriminate or pick out particular uses that are also present in ordinary language. So, it doesn't have to be that you have ordinary language over here and technical language over here, and the content of these definitions is just non-overlapping with the content of these definitions.

[00:08:05]Bengson has an article on this where he talks about how he thinks that the conception of intuition, or at least the central ones that he wants to talk about, of use among philosophers is discriminative in its use rather than technical in a distinct way. So, you can say, "Okay. So, in ordinary language, you have this like list, right? So, imagine there's a big pile of ways of using a term. And then there's these technical ways of using a term that don't match any of those, right? But another thing you could do is in a technical discourse, is you could say, 'Okay.

[00:08:34]We are going to discriminate, in other words, to select from among this list, meaning number four, and that's the technical sense. We're going to pluck that out. We're going to go put that in the technical pile. That's what I mean.'

[00:08:43]And if that's the case, you are using the term in a narrower uh sense than it would be used in ordinary language where its meaning would vary in depending on the context. You might say, "No, no, no. We're using it in a context-invariant way." Uh or you could just say, "Within this context, like the philosophical context, we're going to use the term in this particular way and only this particular way." So, that's one way you could use terminology. So, notice you got ordinary language over here, technical language over here, and some technical language might borrow some stuff from ordinary language.

[00:09:11]And, of course, there's cross-pollination in both directions.

[00:09:13]Sometimes uh technical terms come out of of their technical contexts in which they were originally proposed and diffused within that that context, and they they enter into ordinary use, or they leapfrog into other technical domains, and sometimes the meaning is slightly different when they do. So, there's this whole sort of like uh linguistic or like history and sociological and institutional factors that are all at play in how terms are used. And this makes it very, very difficult. And often people don't like the idea of saying this thing doesn't exist, right? Because they'll say, "But I can point to instances or conceptions of the thing that do exist. So, you're just being edgy when you say it doesn't exist." Um in this case, I don't think so.

[00:10:00]First of all, I would recommend uh this paper by James Andow uh that looks at I forget the exact title, but it's called like uh how intuition exploded, something like that. Where what Andow does is he looks at how use of the term intuition uh picked up and gained prominence both within philosophy and outside of philosophy and academia as a whole, and possibly even outside of academia. And it looks like there were kind of two strains of its rise. It had this sort of low-level usage that was increasing. And then it really exploded around the 1950s, and it's disproportionately prevalent among philosophers. And so, intuition talk definitely has increased in the Anglophone world. There's a lot more discussion and use of the term intuition in philosophical writing and philosophical work.

[00:10:44]The question is whether that corresponds to a change in method. Did philosophers start using a new method based on intuition?

[00:10:52]Andow I think doesn't believe so.

[00:10:54]And I also suspect maybe not really. I don't think that it's been there's been some methodological revolution within philosophy. And so, instead, it looks like perhaps the methodology has remained relatively stable, at least for the early half of the 20th century, you know, because keep in mind this is also the period in which analytic philosophy was emerging um as a as a distinct, you know, as distinct from continental philosophy and as a unique outgrowth, an Anglophone outgrowth, of Western philosophy as a whole.

[00:11:20]>> [snorts] >> Uh but I don't think that the particular rise post-1950 corresponds to a distinct methodological revolution post-1950. I think whatever methods were in place have been I wouldn't say exactly the same, like conceptual analysis is no longer in its heyday um in the way that it was throughout the 20th century.

[00:11:40]And so, there have been methodological shifts.

[00:11:42]Uh but uh I don't think that they perfectly map on to the rise of the use of the term intuition. In other words, if there was a methodological revolution, it predated the distinctive tendency for everybody to start speaking in terms of intuition, at least to some extent. So, something something funny was happening with language at the time.

[00:12:02]And I think traces this to others who suggest that Chomsky was a big factor in the rise of intuition talk. Uh although I don't I doubt he's the only factor.

[00:12:15]And And I towards the end of the article speculates on some other potential causal mechanisms.

[00:12:19]Uh about, you know, sociological, institutional, and other sorts of of changes that may have have led to the rise of intuition talk. Now, so you have the term intuition, and it's very important to keep the term intuition distinct from whatever sorts of things it refers to. So, you have the word intuition, and then you have all the possible things it can refer to. So, when I say philosophical intuitions don't exist, what I want to do really is draw a distinction between uses of the term intuition that I would consider superfluous, redundant, or what I I prefer the the term mundane. So, you could use intuition to refer to beliefs, to dispositions to believe, to inclinations of some kind, maybe that's the same thing as dispositions.

[00:13:03]Uh to certain kinds of judgments, like a non-inferential judgment or a judgment uh whose inferential processes are introspectively inaccessible, that sort of thing.

[00:13:12]Um you could use it in a variety of ways where it doesn't pick out a distinctive type of psychological state. It's just you're using the word intuition to refer to a psychological process or state that could be described in other ordinary terms that we already have. And in those cases, intuition, it might be useful in certain contexts to say, "Look, look, look, I'm not just talking about any judgment. I'm talking about judgments in this particular dialectical context, and I'm going to call those intuitions." So, it's not that the term is completely superfluous or useless. It might be practically useful to signify that you're talking about judgments in a particular context, but the underlying process and its epistemic status aren't meaningfully different from if you were talking about judgments in say some other domain or some other context.

[00:13:55]Um or at least they wouldn't have to be different.

[00:13:58]And so, the term intuition there isn't doing that much work. Those are the mundane uses.

[00:14:03]The other uses are the uses that I'm really concerned with. So, uh I had a list here. Let me see if I can pull it up.

[00:14:09]>> [snorts] >> Where is that list?

[00:14:12]Yeah, here.

[00:14:13]So, here I wrote, um someone had mentioned something about intuitions, and then I responded, "It's also used to refer to judgments, beliefs, dispositions to believe, a perceptual truth-detecting capacity, non-inferential judgments, judgments that may have non-inferential features, but these aren't introspectively Sorry, they have inferential features. I should fix that.

[00:14:32]Whoop.

[00:14:33]And then I'll start over cuz there's a mistake there.

[00:14:38]Boo boo boo. Okay. So, I say, uh "Intuition is also used to refer to judgments, beliefs, dispositions to believe, a perceptual truth-detecting capacity, non-inferential judgments, judgments that may have inferential features, but these aren't introspectively accessible, an invitation to agree as a special kind of experience, as a output of a distinct faculty of intuition, a kind of special competence acquired by studying philosophy." I don't mention it here, but I I also have a paper which proposes that intuitions are a particular kind of affective state, and so it's a kind of sort of affective or emotional conception of intuition. And those are just some that I I can think of off the top of my head. Now, notice that there those are quite different from one another in some cases. There's some overlap, there's some non-overlap. And they run the gamut from completely mundane types of psychological processes. Okay, well, intuitions are just a certain kind of belief, or intuitions are a disposition to believe something without necessarily believing it.

[00:15:36]To up to and including people that claim that intuitions are involved in a quasi-perceptual capacity for detecting a priori truths. Like we have a faculty that allows us to perceive non-empirical truths.

[00:15:51]So, we have vision, you have hearing, and then you have this faculty, and it lets you, quote-unquote, see or perceive non-empirical truths.

[00:16:00]That's one of the conceptions of intuitions that I want to deny. And so, what you see is that if you look at the spectrum, and you have the mundane uses, and you have these the more ambitious uses, I think the ambitious uses generally don't exist or are not well supported by empirical evidence. Well, the mundane uses, they exist, but you're using the term in a way that it usually, or I think in most cases, can't sustain the the methodological work that it's supposed to be used for. This isn't to say people don't think, "Okay, look, when I'm invoking intuitions, I'm just inviting intersubjective agreement." So, I'm saying, "Look, I find the premise of this argument intuitive. Do you share that intuition? You do? Great, we can proceed and consider the conclusion. You don't? Okay, well, then we can have a further discussion."

[00:16:42]That's using intuitions as an invitation to agree. Um that's a mundane use of intuitions. It's not using them as evidence, it's not using them as some sort of special insight to detect truths that supersedes what's available to us through the natural sciences. It doesn't have those roles.

[00:16:59]And the problem is that I think it would be misleading for me to say intuitions exist, it's just that they're this mundane thing. Let me give an analogy.

[00:17:08]Um imagine if it turned out that use of the term unicorn was used by about half of people to refer to a mystical uh horse that they're typically white and maybe they have glowing skin and they have a horn and they live in secluded glades and they like protect them and they have magic powers and like they could heal you if they touch your horn they could like cure disease cure you of a disease or poison or something like that.

[00:17:33]>> [snorts] >> And they have magic powers maybe they could teleport or something. So, uh that's what like a magic unicorn. And then it could also refer to like a rhino, like a rhinoceros. Uh Okay, well, rhinos exist. So, would it be reasonable to say therefore unicorns exist? I think not. I think it's important in this case when to say when you say unicorns don't exist, to say look, I'm denying that the mythical magical beast of the the one-horned thing that heals people and is magical, that doesn't exist. And it's important to be able to say unicorns don't exist, magical unicorns don't exist, without someone saying ah ah ah, that's edgy because rhinos exist.

[00:18:11]And look, here's a group of people that use the term to refer to rhinos. It's not edgy. It's just that the term unfortunately is used to refer to both some mundane thing we already agree exists and to magical things.

[00:18:22]>> [snorts] >> And so, that's why I titled the video philosophical intuitions don't exist.

[00:18:27]And that's why I titled the article that way.

[00:18:29]Intuitions understood as a distinct faculty or quasi-perceptual capacity for detecting truth, those don't exist.

[00:18:36]Intuitions serving the important epistemic or evidentiary roles that some philosophers put them to, uh where they're they're used as a sort of direct source of evidence, I think those don't exist. Uh so, it's specific conceptions that don't exist and it's very difficult to to draw like an exact line. So, like you take all these the big pile of uses of the term and I want to I want to like say, "Okay, I'm going to draw a line like this. Oh, well, all around these ones here. Oh, and this one over here, put a circle around that. Oh, that one over there, put a circle around that.

[00:19:04]Those don't exist. But this one over here, this one here, this one here, and this big pile right here, these exist."

[00:19:09]Uh because the term is used in such an indiscriminate sloppy way, I don't have a clean way of saying these are the ones that exist and these are the ones I think don't exist. And even there, it's not that I just think these exist and these definitely don't exist.

[00:19:23]It's that I think that they may not exist or the sense in which they exist isn't the isn't what people think that it is. So, um you know, here would be an issue.

[00:19:32]Let's say a philosopher says, I have the intuition that X, right? Whatever that would be.

[00:19:37]And they think that intuition is this perceptual capacity for detecting a priori truths uh and but they're misdescribing the process they're evoking. So, they have a certain experience, a certain psychological process is being employed.

[00:19:50]It's a real psychological process and they're really having an experience, but they're misdescribing. They have a theory about what they're doing and the theory is wrong. Well, now we have to have some sort of error theory where we're saying their conception of what intuitions are is wrong, but they actually are having a distinctive type of psychological state, that's real. Um so, I certainly think that's a possibility. And I certainly think that the experiences philosophers report, I don't think that they're uniformly lying. I don't think that they're all completely delusional. Uh in some cases, I think that their theories about what's going on when they describe the experiences or mental states that they're having are wrong, but that they are having a certain kind of describable mental state or experience. There could be certain certain phenomenology, there could be certain psychological processes. And we need to do empirical work to figure out what actual processes what's actually happening when people report having intuitions when they're doing philosophy. Um my guess is what we'll find is a number of different things happen.

[00:20:44]And so, because of this messiness with the lack of of terminological consistency, uh because of the messiness with both the colloquial uses, the technical uses, the potential for discriminatory uses to pick up some colloquial uses, it's very hard to pin down a particular target. And one of the things I worry about is the the risk of a motte and bailey. So, someone could go around Motte and Bailey-ing on unicorns existing. So, that ah unicorns exist, unicorns exist. And you say, "Ah no, they don't. There's no magical uh oh no, I didn't say magical. I'm talking about these." And they show a picture of a rhino. And you're like, "Fine, those exist." And they go, "Great. So, you agree that there's magical creatures with one horn that look like horses and they they live in secluded glades and they heal people." You're like, "No, no, no. I agree that that exists, that rhino in the picture." Um and they're like, "Okay, but that's a unicorn. So, you agree unicorns exist." Yes, they do. So, the magical thing exists. So, people will vacillate. Of course, no one's actually going to do that with a unicorn rhino thing. But, people uh over the stretch of both a a long-term dialectic, one person to another person to another person, over years or even just months or generations, or even the same individual in the middle of a conversation or over the course of time in different conversations to different people, can shift between the mundane uses of intuition and these more ambitious uses of of intuition without consciously realizing it, without intending to deceive. People can just because it's it's use is so varied and so sloppy, they can inadvertently Motte and Bailey their way towards defending the more ambitious and less plausible conceptions of intuition by sliding back to the more mundane uses when they're available. And so, one thing I suggest is that if if we could press people to be more clear, like even if we just had a dichotomous distinction between mundane and ambitious states, and someone had to be clear about which one they were referring to, I think that this would be like the light a sanitizing light on all of this practice, and I think you would start seeing a lot of changes in the way that people spoke about the methods that they're using when they're doing philosophy.

[00:22:47]Because let's say a person just said, "Look, um I have the disposition to believe premise one."

[00:22:54]Like would you go, "Oh no, well I guess I better accept your argument cuz you have the disposition to believe it. What am I going to do?" Uh no, you would you might go, "Okay.

[00:23:02]I I agree that you're disposed to believe the first premise of your argument."

[00:23:07]Does that provide me with any evidence that I should believe the first premise of the argument? I mean, maybe a little Bayesian evidence, right? If you're a smart person and you believe the first premise, that's a little bit evidence that I should believe the first premise, but that's very different from someone saying premise one is intuitive in the more robust sense where they're saying, "Look, this is an intuition where like a rational, competent person aware of the relevant concepts and considerations ought to accept the first premise on the grounds that it is intuitive." And philosophers speak this way all the time. That they what they're frequently like in that case, imagine if this someone said it that way, right? It sounds like they're making a much stronger claim. And if you press them and it turned out all they're reporting is a personal disposition to believe the first premise, it's going to lose all the dialectical teeth that it previously had, right? It's not going to serve the same role as saying, "Premise one is intuitive, all rational and competent people ought to agree with it." There's no particular reason why rational, competent people ought to agree with the fact that you have like the fact that you are disposed to believe something, that isn't the same thing as like this more robust normative claim, which is that rational people ought to believe this claim. Not just you, right? And so uh if philosophers are licensed to motte and bailey between these different conceptions of intuition, they can get away with using the term in these more ambitious but potentially less defensible ways that I reject uh by being able to slide back towards the more mundane uses. So, if you say, "I don't think intuitions are real," people might scoff at you, they might go, "So, how would you even believe anything? You got to start somewhere, you know, you you have to think certain things are going to seem to you to be the case."

[00:24:39]Yeah, things seem to me to be the case.

[00:24:41]I would say that. It seems to me I have a cup here, right? Seems to me. Uh now, uh do I exercise a special faculty for detecting a priori truths? No, cuz my belief that that's there's a cup there, that it seems there's a cup, isn't even an a priori matter, it's an empirical matter. And philosophical intuitions are the kind that Bengson uh endorses uh or Hilary Bokbinder, the poster responded to, uh or or Bealer, George Bealer.

[00:25:06]Um maybe uh Audi Sosa, some of these other people uh that defend these sorts of accounts. Um Their conception is restrictive to a priori issues. And so it wouldn't include the judgment there's a cup there. So, uh because it's an empirical matter. So, you you have these these uses that would not comport with just talking in terms of appearances or seeming. So, they have to talk about a special kind of appearance or seeming.

[00:25:28]And some of them might not use the phenomenological language, and some of them will. So, what you have is not just that if you set aside all the colloquial uses, and then you set aside all these these um more mundane uses, even within the more ambitious uses, people don't even agree on the the content of what an an intuition is there. Um let me show you this.

[00:25:50]Well, I'll look at chat in a moment to see what people are saying there.

[00:25:56]I wanted to find this quote. Yeah. So, when I was reading Andow's article, Andow sites a I think it's a master's thesis from 1946 from somebody named Belton.

[00:26:06]Um yeah, a uh it says master's dissertation. Okay.

[00:26:11]I'm looking at the reference for it. An examination of the meaning and use of the term intuition. Now, keep in mind, 1946, so 80 years ago.

[00:26:18]This is this is what the person says.

[00:26:19]And this this quote I found in the Andow paper.

[00:26:22]No word in common use among philosophers is in more urgent need of an accepted definition than the term intuition. And no word bears such diversity of meaning.

[00:26:35]80 years ago. Let me read that again.

[00:26:38]No word in common use among philosophers is in more urgent need of an accepted definition than the term intuition. And no word bears such diversity of meaning.

[00:26:48]So, notice the tension there. It's a great great great quote.

[00:26:52]Of all the terms that it would be important for philosophers to settle on the meaning of, intuition is the term.

[00:26:58]Why? Because they themselves, at least many of them, claim intuition is foundational to everything else they do.

[00:27:03]They say it's necessary, you can't even reject it or it's self-defeating.

[00:27:06]There's all these this support for intuition. Now, whatever you do downstream of the use of this term, fine. People argue about the word atheism, or they'll argue what free will is, or they'll argue about the nature of consciousness. But all of that that discourse, all of those philosophical conversations, are happening against the background of a presumptively coherent shared set of methods that all these philosophers are using.

[00:27:30]Now, those methods, if they rely on the notion of intuition, but we're not clear on what those are, what the hell is going on in all those those conversations downstream?

[00:27:41]So, this person's appealing to intuition, that person's appealing to intuition. What is this person appealing to and this person appealing to? I don't know. Is it the same thing? Do they know what they're appealing to? No, apparently not. Um, are they appealing to the same thing as one another? Maybe not. So, uh, you know, this would be a bit like, you know, it's one thing if two engineers disagree on what kind of bridge to build, right? There's a river there, we got to build a bridge. I think it should be bridge a bridge type A, you think, I don't know bridge types. I think it should be a suspension bridge or some of that kind of bridge, you know, whatever. Um, they disagree on what kind of bridge.

[00:28:10]And now imagine them trying to do that work, but they don't agree on what a centimeter is. And I don't mean abstractly, like the nature of centimeters. Do you believe it's extension through space, or do you believe it's whatever. Um, no, they don't agree on like how long a centimeter is.

[00:28:25]Right? They don't agree on how long a meter is. They don't agree on how how much mass a gram is, right? Uh, if they can't agree on that, they're not going to be able to work effectively together to build a bridge, unless they have some sort of bridge principles. Oh, that's a unintended pun.

[00:28:39]That they're like, okay, well, when you use a centimeter, it's exactly 1.6 cm when I use a centimeter. If they have some bridge measurement like that, they could render their disparate measurements commensurable with one another or something.

[00:28:50]Uh so one of them's like, "Oh, it's it's 2 cm." The other's like, "You mean 3.2?"

[00:28:53]"Yeah, yeah, yeah, 3.2 cm." Right? So, but if they don't have that, they can't work together effectively. And so, you have the same issue here. If intuitions are fundamental, if they're central, essential, ineliminable, and it's self-defeating to not have them to philosophical practice, it's the most important thing for us to get clear on, and yet it's the thing one of the things philosophers are the least clear on.

[00:29:15]What?

[00:29:16]Like, shouldn't we sit down and know what our actual practices and methods are? Like, someone knows how telescopes work, someone knows how microscopes work, someone knows how to calibrate all the tools in a physics lab, someone knows how to calibrate all the tools in in medical facilities.

[00:29:30]Why aren't philosophers sitting down and figuring out how their tools work? They don't even agree on what the tools are.

[00:29:36]They don't agree on what they're for, they don't agree on what they are, they don't agree on what processes are involved, they don't agree on how many processes are involved, they don't agree on their philosophical status or their role, they don't agree on what the terms mean, they don't agree on how important they are to people's usage, they don't agree on which things are used for, are they used as evidence, which specific ones are used as evidence, when are they used as evidence? They No one agrees on anything.

[00:29:57]But they all agree There is one thing they agree on. Sorry, I take it back.

[00:30:01]Nobody agrees on what intuitions are, how they work, what causes them, or any of that, but they do agree, a lot of them agree, that we definitely have them and that they're absolutely essential.

[00:30:13]What?

[00:30:14]What the hell is happening here? I mean, this is this is bananas. This is a cuckoo bananas situation.

[00:30:21]Um I don't see a lot of people talking about it, and I I think this is a pretty serious issue. And another thing that frustrates me, wow, okay, I've been going at this 30 minutes. Um another thing that frustrates me is that critics of intuition, and I love a lot of this work. This is the work, you know, I I want to say I grew up like as I was a little like I'm like a little toddler like reading philosophy books, you know, I I I I as I worked my way through my philosophical training and education, this is the stuff I was reading inside because I wasn't taking courses on it.

[00:30:46]Um as you know, I'm reading Edouard Machery and Stephen Stich and the the um the negative uh position in experimental philosophy, which largely consists of studies showing that intuitions appear to be associated with or caused by uh biasing factors that undermine their reliability and that philosophers are similarly subject to these as not untrained people.

[00:31:08]Uh or what they show is variation in intuitions. And this is supposed to show that intuitions are not a reliable guide to the truth because people have inconsistent intuitions and those intuitions appear to be driven by identifiable biasing factors. Um okay, but they're all agreeing intuitions exist. Uh what are these intuitions that exist?

[00:31:26]Now, for any given study, they may operationalize it, but often it's just people reporting into it just taken for granted. There's very little discussion about what exactly intuitions are. Don't get me wrong, there are papers on this topic, but it's not a titanic literature and it's not like everybody first goes to that literature and we've all settled on what intuitions are and now they're doing the work. The work is going on without having settled those questions.

[00:31:48]But those questions proceed and strike me intuitively, maybe in certain senses, uh as essential for doing the later work, right? It's it's scaffolded on top of that work. Uh so if that original work isn't like are people going to be figuring out what prime numbers are if they don't know what numbers are?

[00:32:04]Uh how?

[00:32:06]Or [snorts] if they don't know what factors are, if they don't know what division is, if they don't know what multiplication is, right? Um you got to you got to have your tools in order in order to get the job done. Uh you know, carpenters can't it can't build a shed if they don't agree on what a saw is and what a hammer is and what a nail is and what a screw is. Uh and so there's something there's something very, very off about this. And another thing I'm finding is that I'm almost getting like hysterical about this. And the reaction that I'm getting from so a few people are like, yeah, I I share your worries.

[00:32:35]Reaction I'm getting is mostly, eh, I don't I don't see the problem. We could just proceed. We don't have to solve every We don't have to fully answer this question before proceeding." Uh well, for certain questions, I don't think you do. I certainly think I can do philosophy without appealing to intuitions cuz I don't think that I do, at least the ambitious kinds cuz I don't I don't think they're real. So, obviously, I don't think I'm using them.

[00:32:55]Um so, I certainly think philosophy can and does get by without super duper relying on intuitions. Uh you know, someone can use ordinary methods of interpretation to figure out like what Aristotle's position is if they're doing history of philosophy or maybe in logic. Someone could say, "Look, I'm not invoking intuitions. I'm just saying, 'Look, according to rules of classical logic, this is what follows. This is invalid. This is valid.

[00:33:14]This is why, right?'" And so, they may not invoke intuitions in all sorts of contexts and domains.

[00:33:19]But, a lot of people take themselves to invoke intuitions. They take them to be essential. And that's the sort of thing that I'm worried about. So, okay, let me slow down there and check the chat.

[00:33:29]Looks like quite a few people here.

[00:33:31]>> [snorts] >> All right.

[00:33:36]Uh Modern Moralist was 1 second away back to the bit of Emerson Emeralds. Has Emerson been streaming? I haven't seen him in a while.

[00:33:45]Andrew Wy says, "I don't have Substack because I've lost the ability to read."

[00:33:51]Uh Modern Moralist, do you have videos on the debate between Olson and conservationists and fictionalists? I do not. What What discussion is that? Can you send me a link?

[00:34:04]Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is funny. Rob goes slow says, "In before the philosophical intuition that philosophical intuitions don't exist."

[00:34:14]These are really boring, lazy, and tired objections that you're invoking the concept to reject it.

[00:34:20]No, I'm not. Uh or you'd have to present an argument that I am. I'm not invoking the conceptions of intuitions. Like you know, of course, it's possible that I have them and don't realize it. Um but that's something you'd have to demonstrate. It's not something someone could just assert. And yet people would.

[00:34:39]All right.

[00:34:42]People are talking about lifting. Nitty says lurking while I work out. And then Devo says just finished up my lift. Great.

[00:34:50]All right. So, yeah, this isn't So, Sensei SMK says, "What's your definition of intuition?" I don't have a definition.

[00:34:58]Uh it's a term that has lots of different uses, and it would make sense for me to offer like a like what would If I gave a definition of intuition, what would that be?

[00:35:07]Like a proposal to use it in a certain way? I don't think there's some like essence of intuition that we need to go figure it out. It there it intuition as a word refers to a bunch of different concepts.

[00:35:18]So, I might could list some of them, but you know, I don't I don't know what it would what work would be achieved by proposing one. I don't know what I'd be picking out or referring to.

[00:35:32]Uh Sensei says, "In the world of mean, what type of intuitions do you think are mainly at play?" I think it's pretty much the same way it's used in epistemology and metaphysics.

[00:35:39]Um it's it's the same grab bag of beliefs, dispositions to believe, non-inferential judgments, judgments that may have inferential content, but it's not introspectively accessible. Uh it's used in ways where people refer to seemings or appearances. It's used in a variety of mundane ways where it may be an invitation to agree with something.

[00:35:55]Uh it may be used as a hedge term uh for reporting epistemic uncertainty.

[00:36:00]Um so, it's I think it's going to be used in all the ways it's standardly used.

[00:36:07]Uh Vinicius asks a great question. What do you mean by a faculty of intuition?

[00:36:11]So, I addressed this question directly in a response, and I'll put a link to that here.

[00:36:23]All right.

[00:36:25]So, Vinicius Rodriguez, here is a post where I talk about that.

[00:36:31]And I'll read off my response there.

[00:36:39]Where is it?

[00:36:41]Here it is. Okay.

[00:36:45]So, I'll just read from the beginning of this section. This section is 3.0 single faculty accounts. So, here's what I say there. And Bookbinder is the person that originally wrote an article defending the that we have like a faculty of intuition. Although some other language he uses makes it sound like there's multiple faculties or that intuitions have different adaptive sources. He talks about moral intuitions related to kin selection and reciprocal altruism that even produce conflicting intuitions. So, that's at least two processes or two different faculties or systems. Maybe he means faculty in the sense that includes is inclusive of those and all other intuitions and it's one faculty or maybe he means there's multiple faculties.

[00:37:18]It's not very clear.

[00:37:19]Anyway, Bookbinder also uses language that suggests a single faculty account while at other times suggesting that certain faculties such as moral intuitions are the product of particular selective pressures, which suggests a more pluralistic conception of intuition, which points to a lack of clarity or internal tension in Bookbinder's account.

[00:37:38]If the single faculty account is true, this would favor the distinctive account. Well, if multiple faculties uh accounts were Sorry, if the multiple faculties account were correct, this would push it closer to the mundane end of the spectrum.

[00:37:49]The problem with Bookbinder's account is that it's unclear which interpretation is accurate. However, uh Disagreeable Me offers some puzzling suggestions for my concerns about how many faculties are involved.

[00:37:59]>> [snorts] >> And uh he says uh Disagreeable Me says uh sorry.

[00:38:04]One second.

[00:38:11]Uh Disagreeable Me suggested um perhaps an issue for Lance is that quote faculty is something of a success term. If you have the faculty to do X, then X is implicitly appropriate or apt or good in some way. And that's not That's not what I had in mind. That's a perfectly viable use of the term faculty. Notice how that term faculty can be used to refer to a bunch of different things.

[00:38:31]>> [snorts] >> But what I said is unfortunately this is not the case. This sounds like an analytic concern. Um perhaps I didn't articulate what my concerns explicit were explicitly enough in my post, but I'm treating faculty in a psychological sense, not in terms of the sort of concerns that motivate analytic philosophers.

[00:38:45]And then I give a definition of faculty from like some website. Um cognitive faculty is specific aspect or domain of mental function such as language, object recognition, or face perception. See faculty psychology. Faculty psychology is a whole thing which has a historical basis.

[00:39:01]So sorry. [snorts] Yeah, I'm having a bit of an issue here.

[00:39:06]Um faculties in psychology refer to distinct psychological systems that are specialized for operating within a particular domain such as visual perception, memory, language, and so on.

[00:39:15]The brain isn't just an undifferentiated mass. We have distinct subsystems specialized for specific tasks. What I'm claiming is that we don't have a specialized system that yields intuitions as an output in the way we have specialized systems that involve memory or visual percepts.

[00:39:29]Reliability or success isn't relevant to my critique and I don't believe I ever mentioned it. So I'm using it in the sort of cognitive sense of like a system that operates within a particular domain. Like it functions for a specific purpose. Vision would be one.

[00:39:42]Um you know, hearing would be another. So the point here is that well those are mediated by a well-understood set of biological like including sense organs and the nervous system. There's the optic nerve, the occipital lobe, all a bunch of stuff involved in visual processing. Um I the notion of a faculty I don't take to require you to be able to pinpoint a specific region of the brain. It could be distributed across the brain that that there's some system of interacting par- uh types of brain activation um that work together in a consistent reliable way to produce a particular output. Totally fine. Um but the idea here would be that there's like a system dedicated to and you could you could look at like Fodorian notions of modularity. You could have increasingly um, distinctive conceptions of a system operating in a way that's like informationally encapsulated. There's other sorts of features it might have, but you don't have to be that strict about it. So, I'm invoking a notion of sort of um, cognitive cognitive narrowness or cognitive specialization of particular capacities. That's roughly what I'm talking about. I hope that answers the question.

[00:40:49]>> [snorts] >> All right.

[00:40:57]Alan says, "Intuition is either a skill-derived ability or messy language.

[00:41:00]In In no case is it epistemic closing of a question."

[00:41:05]Yeah, so the skill-derived I If I get a chance, I'll I'll talk about that, but I think a skill a skill-based conception and there are competence-based accounts of intuition in the philosophical literature.

[00:41:15]Uh, and those I think are closer to a legitimate ability people could have.

[00:41:19]And probably do have.

[00:41:24]All right.

[00:41:30]Pa pa pa pa pa, I'm just going through the chat.

[00:41:36]Anisha says, "Seems to me there's a cup is a perceptual seeming, not an intellectual seeming." Yeah, so I don't have perceptual seemings either. I don't believe seemings are real. Like, I perceive a cup, but it and I would say it seems to me that there's a cup, but I I use that language. Like, someone could say, "See, like, are you sure that they're going?" I It seems like they are, right? So, the term seems is already used in ordinary language to to as a sort of epistemic hedge. So, when I say it seems to me that there's a cup there, what I'm reporting is that my visual system provides information which indicates that there's a cup there. Um, and so I have a certain kind of information. That information could in principle be negated by contrary information like that there's an optical illusion or something like that. And so it's it's a way of of hedging the difference between what information is available to me and what I take to be true. That's how I use the term seems.

[00:42:28]This isn't ordinary use of it. I'm sure if you look I haven't but I'm sure if you look up in a dictionary that's an ordinary usage. What I'm not evoking is a special type of mental state. That's that there would be an analog to for intellectual seeming. So there's a perceptual seeming and an intellectual seeming. I don't think seemings are a real type of psychological state. I think that this is stuff that philosophers made up. I don't think it's real.

[00:42:48]And that this is part of this is inclusive of the conceptions of intuitions that I'm saying I don't think exist.

[00:42:56]So Venecia says intellectual seeming is what's being called intuition in the relevant literature.

[00:43:00]It's not though.

[00:43:01]Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. So some of the people that that characterize intuition characterize it in terms of what you may call an intellectual seeming. Mike Huemer does this. There's a handful of rationalist philosophers that speak in these terms but there are other philosophers that do not characterize intuitions in this way and would explicitly say that's not what I think an intuition is. At least Williamson would would hold this view.

[00:43:26]Timothy Williamson.

[00:43:28]And I could give you a whole bunch of quotes from people that that say these sorts of things. So some of them use it that way and some of them don't. They don't all construe them as intellectual seemings.

[00:43:39]>> [snorts] >> Mark W. O'Brien says I'm not convinced there's much of a practical difference between an invitation to agree and claim that rational people will agree. Either your interlocutor agrees or not. There's a sense in which I I think there's some truth to that but notice it a different situate like these two conversations.

[00:43:59]Okay, so a person presents a syllogism and they go right what do you think of this argument? The person goes I don't really accept premise two. And they go okay well I'm inviting you to consider.

[00:44:08]I think premise two is very plausible.

[00:44:10]Do you share my intuition?" They go, "No." Okay, conversation over.

[00:44:13]But, in the second conversation, a person could say, "Okay, well, you're not being rational. Like, because rational people would agree and accept premise two. There must be something going wrong with your reasoning. Let's explore that." And then the dialectic can proceed. In the first case, the disagreement may be regarded as faultless. The invitation to agree doesn't necessarily coincide with a normative judgment about a person disagreeing that they're making some kind of error. Whereas, in the second case, that would be a presumption that the person that disagrees is in fact making some kind of error.

[00:44:40]Um so, that strikes me as as a relevant difference.

[00:44:52]Uh good old Tom says, "I thought Audi nurses a disastic account of intuition, at least I think he did back then, but he still thought it can somehow provide epistemic justification." I'm not super familiar exactly with what with what Audi said.

[00:45:06]I'd have to I'd have to double-check and cross-reference.

[00:45:15]All right. Venetia says, "Don't you think if this is the same thing with knowledge, value, mind, life, God?" No, that's not what I'm talking about. Um so, the issue here is that one of my primary issues is that I I mean, one is that this is more fundamental. So, all these other disputes are disputes that are downstream of a shared set of methods.

[00:45:33]Whereas, the issue with intuition are the is the methods itself. So, all of those other issues rely on the presumption that we have some shared methods that can allow us to resolve these issues. So, if we're disputing the nature of knowledge or value or mind or life or God, provided we have tools to that would render those dis those debates fruitful, we can make progress on them. But, if the tool itself is a problem, that's a relevantly different type of issue.

[00:45:59]Because, uh now you're going to have to resolve that before you can resolve anything downstream of it. So, that's that's one factor here. Uh, the other factor here is that in the case of knowledge, value, mind, life, God, um, in a lot of cases, uh, people are arguing about the nature of the thing, and that's what the dialectic is. But in the case of intuition, people rarely do argue about the nature of it.

[00:46:21]They're just operating in all these different accounts, and when they are presented, they're presented almost as an afterthought. Yeah, yeah, intuitions are this. Yeah, yeah, intuitions are that. People do a rather perfunctory way of characterizing it. They're just this, and then they just proceed. Well, what if your interlocutor is not invoking the same conception of intuition as you?

[00:46:37]And you think you would think on reflection your conception does have evidential value, but theirs doesn't. If it turns out they're not using the same as you, they don't have evidence for their claims, and you do, right? As at least relative to your view, that's what you think. Um, seems like it's important to know, right? So, if you and another person are arguing, and you think you have a measuring tape that's accurate at measuring, and you think it turns out they're not using measuring tape, um, they're using something I don't they're using like a string with no numbers marked on it or something. They're not measuring accurately. So, isn't it important to know whether they're using the same kind of tool as you? So, uh, I don't think this is something people could just skip over because it's it's at least like on the on the conception people that think intuitions are being used and are really super important, um, it's at least necessary from that point of view for them to be clear on whether the other person is using the same notion or not. Whereas, it's not the case that people are arguing about knowledge or value or mind within a dialectical context with a presumptively, like they're we're operating on the assumption that we have a shared framework. So, I I do think that there's a big difference here.

[00:47:42]There there are other differences, too, as well. Um, one of them being that if intuition is treated as like basically output only, and you're not concerned with the process, uh, okay, so let's say all that matters for intuitions, we're not going to care about which psychological process produces the intuitions. It's just, look, I get intuitions in this case, I get intuitions in that case, I get intuitions in the third case. They're all intuitions. I don't care what the underlying psychological processes are.

[00:48:06]Uh okay. And then they say, "And intuitions are generally reliable."

[00:48:10]Well, hold up a moment. They're making a generalization about the outputs of possibly different psychological systems. What if one of those systems is reliable and one of them isn't reliable?

[00:48:19]Which one is being used in any particular case of an intuition?

[00:48:22]They won't know. Let me give an example that I give in in the paper.

[00:48:27]Let's say I have a calculator app and you ask me to do some calculations and if the calculator app you do some simple stuff to make sure it's working and I keep giving you the right answer. You might trust it for if I get get you give me something bigger, 1,318 / 14 and I I whatever the answer to that is. And I give it to you and you go, "Okay, fine.

[00:48:44]I'll just write it down." You're not going to do out the long division and figure out if it's right. You'll just trust it. Okay, fine. And let's say you you check it three or four times and it works. You might trust it in the future.

[00:48:53]Okay, but what if I told you, "Okay, well, whenever you ask me to do a calculation, um I actually have 10 apps on my phone.

[00:49:01]Two of them are reliable calculators and the other eight just do other stuff.

[00:49:04]Like they give you random numbers or they always add three or they do something goofy, right? Um whatever they are, they're not giving you an accurate answer. And you I'm going to pick one of them at random cuz you don't know which one I'm using, right? So, you ask me, "Hey, can you do this calculation?" I pick one of the 10 at random and I give you an output. Are you going to trust it?

[00:49:21]I would hope not because two of the 10 are reliable, the other eight aren't.

[00:49:25]So, if if your intuitions are the output of some inscrutable set of black boxes, some of which may be reliable and some of which are not reliable, and you don't know which one is being used, how can you know whether your intuition is reliable or not?

[00:49:38]The answer is you can't. Um and so, it you have an issue here which is that in if the process involved in an intuition matters to its epistemic status, and we don't have introspective access to what process is involved, and multiple processes may be involved. We We're not in a good position to know whether intuitions are reliable or not.

[00:50:00]We would need information about what processes are involved. And so, this process issue is something that I don't see typically come up in discussions about intuition.

[00:50:08]The The process involved matters. It matters what's causing the intuition.

[00:50:13]Right? What if most of your philosophical intuitions are this truth-detecting ability, and then 10% of them are caused by affective biases of some kind?

[00:50:22]The whole point about intuitions is that if there is inferential stuff going on, it's not introspectively accessible, the psychological processes are not introspectively accessible. So, which one of the two is causing any given intuition?

[00:50:33]You don't know. So, you don't know if it's reliable or not. Maybe there's a 90% chance it's reliable. Uh So, but you would have to do empirical work to find that out in the first place, that it's it's like 90 nine out of 10 of them. And you'd have to do empirical work, not just at nine out of 10 systems, but that those systems are uh used at nine 90% of the time. And then, probably they wouldn't be used just randomly 90% of the time. They'd be They'd be context-driven which one is being used in which case. Again, the only way to figure any of those questions out would all be empirical work, empirical work, empirical work. Uh researchers are not doing this empirical work.

[00:51:03]They're not working to discriminate to which processes are involved in the outputs of intuition. The work just isn't being done. And so, one of my biggest issues here is even if there's some salvageable conception of intuitions in philosophical work, um it's it's got to be rooted in in psychology because intuitions are psychological states. So, but if the philosophers aren't really doing much psychological work to They're not even just like doing They're not even just failing to do the theoretical work to get clear on what intuitions are.

[00:51:33]There's virtually no work on how they work, what processes are involved, when are they reliable, when are they unreliable. Like, doesn't it matter if certain regions of the brain associated with like emotion are or are not involved? I'm not saying if emotions are involved, a judgment is >> Mhm.

[00:57:34]>> Mhm.

[00:57:50]>> Mhm.