Philosophical intuitions, a response to Julia

by Massimo Pigliucci

Julia, ah, I love it that you started your essay with “some of my best friends are philosophers...” ;-)

Seriously, though, when you claim that most philosophical discussions get off the ground on the basis of intuitions I think you are widely off the mark. That is a skewed reading of the literature, based on a few prominent but certainly not representative examples (like the infamous zombies concocted by Chalmers). More importantly, I think the entire premise of this discussion is off base. Intuitions — in philosophy like in science, and in fact as in everyday life — are not and cannot be “evidence.” They are better thought of as embryonic hypotheses to be further tested (in the case of science) or analyzed (in the case of philosophy).

Moreover, some instances of so-called intuitions — like those underlying the trolley dilemmas, for instance — are not really intuitions at all. They are thought experiments, meant to bring out explicitly certain implicit assumptions about, for instance, ethics, or philosophy of mind, so that such assumptions are clearly out there for everyone to see and discuss (and accept or reject).

Searle’s Chinese room, for instance, is really a thought experiment, not an appeal to intuition. Searle is correct in putting the question: if the Chinese room cannot in any sense be said to “know” Chinese (and it really would be difficult to argue that it does), then there is something missing from a straightforward computational theory of mind. The thought experiment is meant to highlight this point and to pose a challenge. We are not meant simply to believe Searle’s intuition and be done with it, but to try to figure out where the analogy between a computing mind and a computing Chinese room went wrong — if anywhere.

Back to ethics, you are confusing two different approaches when you go from intuitionism (which really is a doctrine based on the significance of ethical intuitions, and which I don't buy) to the criticisms of utilitarianism based on hypothetical situations. The latter are perfectly legitimate, rational (i.e., non intuitive) critiques. As you know, I actually think that ethics is pretty much all about “what if ... then ... why” sort of issues: IF you are a utilitarian, and IF you face a situation in which you can kill one person in order to save five, what would you THEN do, and WHY? And the utilitarian has to meet the challenge, again not by appealing to inscrutable intuitions, but on the basis of reasons. And of course many sophisticated utilitarians, like Peter Singer, have.

Of course, there are examples that do make your case. I think G.E. Moore was simply wrong about his reasoning concerning a beautiful vs. ugly — but inaccessible — world, where the beautiful would in any meaningful sense be “better.” But I know of very few philosophers who have been moved by Moore’s so-called reasoning. So, your rejection of Moore puts you in excellent company! Indeed, your objections to Moore (please define what you mean by better, worse, beautiful and ugly) are standard, and show how easily one can reject a too cavalier use of intuition in philosophy.

Your point that different philosophers have different intuitions, and that somehow this should make us feel uncomfortable seems a bit strange to me. Do you feel uncomfortable because different scientists have different hunches about, say, the value of string theory? And while it is possible (though entirely unsubstantiated) that “having the ‘right’ intuitions is the entry ticket to various subareas of philosophy” this is certainly the case in science. According to Lee Smolin, for a long time it was next to impossible to find a job in fundamental physics, or get a grant funded, unless you shared the community’s intuition that string theory is the only game in town when it comes to unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. I’ve had for years the same experience in certain domains of evolutionary biology, when I was a practicing scientist.

You then proceed to make the valid point that we know of all sorts of other intuitions that seem reasonable to most people but are in fact wrong. Your example is the intuition that there must be more rational numbers than positive integers. But that’s an intuition shared by laypeople, not mathematicians. Mathematicians, however, feel comfortable with their intuition (because there is no proof yet) that Goldbach's conjecture is true. At the moment, that’s all it is, an intuition. But since it is an intuition shared by a group of people with a lot of expertise in math in general and with Goldbach’s conjecture in particular, I think it’s a good bet that they are probably right, or that there is at least good reason to consider the notion seriously. The same argument applies to your (again, valid) criticism of folk understanding of physics. But you are probably not going to argue that professional physicists share that sort of naive intuition. Indeed, that particular intuition was initially put in doubt by a thought experiment concocted by Galileo (who, contrary to popular lore, never actually conducted the physical experiment to test his intuition).

Your quote of Harman is a non sequitur: “Considering the inadequacies of ordinary physical intuitions, it is natural to wonder whether ordinary moral intuitions might be similarly inadequate.” Right, the problem is that moral philosophers are people who constantly think about ethics, so their intuitions in that regard are anything but the equivalent of “ordinary physical intuitions,” just like Galileo did not rely on ordinary intuitions about physics.

I’m not sure why you then bring up our Pleistocene ancestry. Certainly whatever “intuitive” thinking may have evolved in us about quantum mechanics shouldn’t be trusted, but this isn’t the sort of intuition we are talking about. Intuition in the sense discussed here is not the same as instinctive behavior. Indeed, there is a large literature on the cognitive science of intuitions (I've been reading about it in preparation for a chapter of my new book), which basically suggests that: a) intuition is the result of sub-conscious processing of information by the brain; b) that it is domain-specific (so, for instance, chess masters have excellent intuitions about chess, but not about anything else); and c) that it can be effectively used either heuristically (when one doesn't have time to further analyze things), or as a preliminary hypothesis on the basis of which to conduct further inquiries.

I am a bit baffled by your citing of Jonathan Haidt and his argument about incest. Yes, a large number of people have a “yuck” reaction to incest precisely for the evolutionary reasons you mention, and it certainly is interesting to study the neural underpinning of such reactions, like Haidt does. But what does that have to do with the ethical issues posed by incest in a modern context? Do you really think that most ethicists would support a “yuck” type of reaction and therefore agree with the lay person that incest is wrong under all circumstances? In the same paragraph you also mix categories of explanation inappropriately. Let’s say that a particular lay intuition (about probability, instead of ethics) can be shown to be the result of evolution. Would you then ask, as you do in the case of ethics, “since that [evolutionary] fact alone suffices to explain the (widespread) presence of the X intuition, why should we take that intuition as evidence that X is true?” The answer is because something that evolution favored may or may not be true, but we could take it’s (alleged) evolutionary origin as provisional evidence that it may be true, or at least useful, and go from there. Again, the idea is to treat intuitions as preliminary hypotheses to be further investigated.

Finally, the question with which you conclude your post seems to me a bit too grandiose: “Can analytic philosophy survive without intuition?” Of course it can, since a lot of analytic philosophy simply does not depend on intuition, and nowhere in analytic philosophy is intuition considered the final arbiter of truth. And of course, it is somewhat ironic that you quote several papers by analytic philosophers, discussing — analytically — the role of intuitions in philosophy. Analysis, not intuition, is what analytic philosophy is all about.


UPDATE: Spurred by a lively discussion on Julia's Facebook page about this, I actually finally got raw quantitative data (as opposed to "my reading of the literature is..." or "I talked to a philosopher who told me that...") pertinent to the issue at hand.


According to the Philosopher's Index, the most comprehensive database of philosophical entries (covering 1940-2010), 2052 articles published in English over the past 70 years include the word "intuition" in the abstract. This, arguably, is an overestimate as far as this discussion is concerned, since not all these papers actually deploy philosophical intuitions as a major part of their arguments.


Still, this is out of a total of 234,018 papers, which means 0.88%. I think that any claim to the effect that intuition plays a "major" role in the philosophical literature runs into trouble, given these statistics.


Out of further curiosity, I inquired about the possible differential frequency of the use of the term intuition in abstracts taken from different sub-fields of philosophy. Here is the breakdown (the total doesn't add up to 2052 because there is a fairly significant "miscellaneous" category):

461 in ethics
417 in epistemology
385 in metaphysics
276 in logic
190 in philosophy of science
100 in semantics
46 in political philosophy