Does “intuition” have a specific, carefully-guarded meaning in moral philosophy? Intuition as I understand it is vague. The term “intuition” captures examples of lots of opinions and preferences and conclusions that share the attribute of having a feeling or partial representation to the person holding them. For example, some moral intuitions could develop through or depend on personal experience but have this property of having a vague representation. For someone using my definition of “intuition”, a discussion of whether all moral intuitions are evolutionarily-driven seems clearly wrong.
’Does “intuition” have a specific, carefully-guarded meaning in moral philosophy? ‘
Quite possibly not: a bit over 15 years ago Timothy Williamson famously argued (in effect, that’s not quite how he frames it) that “intuition” as philosophers use it just isn’t very well-defined: http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0008/1313/intuit3.pdf Rather, philosopher say “intuitively, P” when they can’t be bothered arguing for “P” or “that’s just an intuition, why would they be reliable” when someone says “P” and they disagree, but something about the terminology convinces people that we know what “intuitions” are in some substantive theoretical sense, when at most it just means something like a judgment that people in the current conversational context think feels “natural”’, which, as Tim points out, actually covers pretty much any time a human being quickly and easily applies a word to something on the basis of pretty much any kind of evidence.
David—that makes sense to me; thanks for sharing the link to the Williamson paper.
I guess apart from ‘evolutionary debunking’ of intuitions, it’s often possible to run some ‘cultural/historical debunking’ of philosophical intuitions, e.g. pointing out that our ‘deepest intuitions’ about particular issues have often changed—often quite quickly—over historical time periods, as culture changes.
I would expect evo-debunking arguments to be most relevant to ‘moral intuitions’ that are relatively universal across humans and cultures and historical epochs—and there are many such intuitions studied by moral psychologists, evolutionary anthropologists, evo psych people, etc.
Whereas, ‘moral intuitions’ that are more culture-limited or idiosyncratic probably aren’t as open to evo-debunking—although they might be subject to other kinds of debunking (e.g. cultural/historical analysis of where the cultural ‘intuition’ originated; psychological analysis of how an individual’s traumatic experiences shaped their moral judgments, etc.)
Well, I’ve been noodling that human physiology defines our senses, our senses limit our ability to represent information to ourselves, and correction for differences of sensory representation of different sets of information from the same class allows for better comparisons and other reasoning about each (for example, interpreting) . A classic example is television pharmaceutical drug ads. The ads present verbal information about the dangers of a medication in tandem with visual information showing happy people benefiting from the same medication. Typically.
Does “intuition” have a specific, carefully-guarded meaning in moral philosophy? Intuition as I understand it is vague. The term “intuition” captures examples of lots of opinions and preferences and conclusions that share the attribute of having a feeling or partial representation to the person holding them. For example, some moral intuitions could develop through or depend on personal experience but have this property of having a vague representation. For someone using my definition of “intuition”, a discussion of whether all moral intuitions are evolutionarily-driven seems clearly wrong.
’Does “intuition” have a specific, carefully-guarded meaning in moral philosophy? ‘
Quite possibly not: a bit over 15 years ago Timothy Williamson famously argued (in effect, that’s not quite how he frames it) that “intuition” as philosophers use it just isn’t very well-defined: http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0008/1313/intuit3.pdf Rather, philosopher say “intuitively, P” when they can’t be bothered arguing for “P” or “that’s just an intuition, why would they be reliable” when someone says “P” and they disagree, but something about the terminology convinces people that we know what “intuitions” are in some substantive theoretical sense, when at most it just means something like a judgment that people in the current conversational context think feels “natural”’, which, as Tim points out, actually covers pretty much any time a human being quickly and easily applies a word to something on the basis of pretty much any kind of evidence.
David—that makes sense to me; thanks for sharing the link to the Williamson paper.
I guess apart from ‘evolutionary debunking’ of intuitions, it’s often possible to run some ‘cultural/historical debunking’ of philosophical intuitions, e.g. pointing out that our ‘deepest intuitions’ about particular issues have often changed—often quite quickly—over historical time periods, as culture changes.
Noah - ‘intuition’ does seem pretty vague.
I would expect evo-debunking arguments to be most relevant to ‘moral intuitions’ that are relatively universal across humans and cultures and historical epochs—and there are many such intuitions studied by moral psychologists, evolutionary anthropologists, evo psych people, etc.
Whereas, ‘moral intuitions’ that are more culture-limited or idiosyncratic probably aren’t as open to evo-debunking—although they might be subject to other kinds of debunking (e.g. cultural/historical analysis of where the cultural ‘intuition’ originated; psychological analysis of how an individual’s traumatic experiences shaped their moral judgments, etc.)
Well, I’ve been noodling that human physiology defines our senses, our senses limit our ability to represent information to ourselves, and correction for differences of sensory representation of different sets of information from the same class allows for better comparisons and other reasoning about each (for example, interpreting) . A classic example is television pharmaceutical drug ads. The ads present verbal information about the dangers of a medication in tandem with visual information showing happy people benefiting from the same medication. Typically.