I'm having a hard time understanding footnote 13. It's not clear whether you're saying that others' contrary intuitions (intuiting that Q where Q and P are contraries) counts as a defeater for the intuition that P, or that they do not. Why would it be "not"? And if it's not "not", then why is it being passed over so lightly in a footnote rather than being acknowledged as an important consideration in the text?
Just felt appropriate to have it as a footnote at the time of writing. Though I realised I had to fix up some of the wording! It was just another explanatory story to offer that also gave me some other ideas.
The idea it explores is that cases of perceptual disagreement seem to be more likely to undermine how trustworthy our perceptions are (e.g. I see a red apple, you don't see anything, and another guy sees a yellow banana). The worry would be that there is also disagreement in intuitions, and thus there may be a problem to some extent (or maybe not). But, part of the reason why we may think disagreement in the perceptual case undercuts justification for forming beliefs is because, presumably, if there is some physical phenomena out there in the world, our perceptions will pick up on it and there will be hardly be disagreement about it due to this causal thing. For instance, why do we both have the perceptual experience that there is a table? Because there really is a table there causing us to have the experience.
However, if one rejects a direct causal role between things intuited and the relevant phenomena (e.g. we're Platonists and believe in abstract objects) then this absence of a direct causal story makes it less clear how disagreement in intuitions would undermine justification. This doesn't determine that disagreement in therefore no issue for intuitionists (I wasn't very clear on that in the footnote), but it does seem to me that disagreements in perceptual experiences are more worrisome in comparison due to this causal story.
OK, I've read the revised footnote, and your explanation above. How do you feel about the following description of your point?
== Our bodies (normally) process the information we receive thru our senses from the physical world in very similar ways, and thus we get the same perceptual presentations -- of a table, for example. Given that, a perceptual disagreement suggests that something has gone wrong with the perceptual process in one or the other of the observers. Each observer thus has a defeater for their perception, and so should hold off on believing their perceptions until they can figure out what's up.
== Intuitions, on the other hand, may not be caused by the physical world. Thus a difference of intuition may not provide a defeater at all -- or only a weaker defeater. ==
If that's an accurate representation of your position, I must object that there is still the problem that your claim is that an intuition presents the world as satisfying a proposition P. If the world does satisfy that proposition, then it doesn't satisfy Q for any Q contrary to P. Thus someone with a contrary intuition is holding the world to be different than you hold it to be. Making P and Q be about non-physical parts of the world (if indeed there are any such parts) makes no difference to the disagreement. Propositions don't care about their subject matter.
Insofar as the intuitions that P and Q are actually contrary, I see no reason why they do not provide defeaters for each other -- a reason for each intuiter to hold off on believing their intuition.
It seems to me that there is only one way to make the defeater go away, and that is to hold that the intuitions provide not propositions, but "subjectivitions" -- ways that the world seems-to-me. If I read a sentence that seems ungrammatical to me, then I intuit the subjectivition [[that it is ungrammatical]]. Some other English-speaker may intuit it to be grammatical -- they are presented with the subjectivition [[that it is grammatical]]. We may express our views using declarative sentences like "This sentence is ungrammatical" and "No, it's fine", and we do have a disagreement, but it's not a propositional disagreement; our idiolects are subtly different, even tho' they are both dialects of English.
I think your summation adequately captures my view. Though I want to clarify that one can still be justified in holding some belief even if there is a weak defeater for it. Juxtapose this with an "adequate" defeater which would determine that we should (at least on epistemic grounds) abandon the belief if we can.
I must apologise that I'm not exactly seeing the weight of your objection. I was simply saying that a problem that exists for disagreement in the cases of perception needn't apply to intuitions. In addition, I think this causal story is one of the stronger reasons (if not the only main reason) why we think perceptual disagreement is so epistemically worrying. Which of course wouldn't apply to intuitions, provided there is no causal story.
You also mention that you can't see a reason why the disagreement wouldn't provide an adequate defeater–but I wanna know why it would be such an adequate defeater. There is a presentation that you might like given by Russ Shafer-Landau (an intuitionist and a colleague of John Bengson) where he talks about intuitions and disagreement. One of the ideas he brings to the table is that of an epistemic peer. Namely, if someone is not your epistemic peer, then they're not as likely to get at the truth as you are, and thus disagreements with them needn't be so worrying.
Regarding your proposed solution–that the content of intuitions are not propositions but subjectivitions–it's not clear that it doesn't suffer from the same pitfalls (if we are to call them pitfalls). Subjectivitions just look like propositions, e.g. [[sentence X is ungrammatical]].
If subjectivitions are just the way the world seems to us, then they're gonna be propositional.
> Though I want to clarify that one can still be justified in holding some belief even if there is a weak defeater for it. Juxtapose this with an "adequate" defeater which would determine that we should (at least on epistemic grounds) abandon the belief if we can. <
That's fine. I can make the same clarification regarding what I said -- a weak reason to back off on belief and an adequate reason to back off on belief.
I did not mean to claim that the mere existence of someone else's contrary intuition provides an adequate reason to hold off on belief. Like Shafer-Landau, I allow that these are situations in which it would not:
1) You don't know about the person having that contrary intuition.
2) The person claiming to have that contrary intuition is lying about having it.
3) The person with the contrary intuition is defective in some epistemic way.
(**) NOTE: I disagree with one situation where S-L denied that the contrary intuition is a defeater -- that was where the content of your intuition is true. Truth alone does not and cannot justify belief.
Unfortunately, S-L seems to think that there are plenty of grounds for (3) --judging that someone is epistemically defective. In fact, the **only** case in which he agrees that a contrary intuition counts as a defeater is when you hear it and you think that it might be the case, and estimate about a 50% chance that it is the case. In every other case it comes out to <<Well I'm perfectly justified in holding that he's not **really** my intellectual peer.>> His intuition that P is now justifying not only his belief that P, but also his belief that so-and-so here is his intellectual inferior. That is definitely not a reliable way of moving from intuitions to beliefs!
Per his argument: Pro-choice? Anti-abortion? Both may have beliefs that are justified by their intuitions about the moral status of a fetus. Each is fully justified in dismissing the other as intellectually inferior.
Well they can't both be less likely than the other to come up with "the right answer" (his preferred caching-out of "epistemic peer"). And I refuse to accept that each of them is justified in holding on to their belief because they are justified in holding that the other is so. They are not justified in holding that the other is so **absent some non-intuition-based evidence** that the other is actually so. Else justification is merely a form of masturbation.
And to be clear, I am not saying that intuitions cannot justify beliefs. I am saying that the existence of intuitive disagreements between people who are each others' epistemic peers (regardless of what **they** think) are reasons for both to withhold belief in the content of their intuitions. Only non-intuitive considerations can break the tie.
> Well they can't both be less likely than the other to come up with "the right answer"
Yes you're right, but it seems justification is seperate from truth. It can be the case that one is truly more likely to get the right answer, but that both are justified in thinking they're more likely to get the right answer.
> I am saying that the existence of intuitive disagreements between people who are each others' epistemic peers (regardless of what **they** think) are reasons for both to withhold belief in the content of their intuitions.
I think I more or less agree. The question is whether someone truly is an epistemic peer or not. That will determine how many beliefs we'll have to give up.
> Subjectivitions just look like propositions, e.g. [[sentence X is ungrammatical]]. <
Nonsense! Propositions are in single brackets! :-)
> If subjectivitions are just the way the world seems to us, then they're gonna be propositional. <
The propositional content of the subjectivition [[that sentence X is ungrammatical]] is [that sentence X is ungrammatical for me]. Note that the propositional content is not equal to the subjectivitional content. Indeed, it depends on who is holds the subjectivition. Similarly [[that this pie is delicious]] has a propositional content, but it's not [that this pie is delicious], because [that this pie is delicious] is not a proposition. Sure, it looks like one (with the single brackets and the "that" at the beginning), but it's something that two people can disagree about and neither of them be wrong.
Subjectivitions are essentially maps from person to proposition. [[That this pie is delicious]] maps A to [that this pies is delicious for A]. The presentation of the pie is more like the subjectivition than the proposition (at least to me). My attention is on the pie and the feelings it's generating inside me, and not on my beliefs about how others would react to the pie. Being in the moment means that neither I nor other people are active parts of my experience.
> Nonsense! Propositions are in single brackets! :-)
Touché!
This still looks like they're propositions, just of an indexical sort. But I have my own tentative worries about that sort of view. Namely that it's hard to see how intuitions with such content (if they can have such content) could be plausible. It would be like intuiting that you have some sort of perspective before you even have such a perspective. Recall that intuitions are the sorts of things that incline beliefs. I have an intuition with the content [[P is true as I see things]] and I then come to form the belief that [P is true as I see things]. But this looks starkly strange.
Another concern is simply that the content is provably false if you currently don't have that perspective. Thus we couldn't utilise intuitions to know anything beyond what we already take to be the case.
On the other hand, it seems tonnes of important intuitions are non-indexical, like the intuition that identity is transitive.
> This still looks like they're propositions, just of an indexical sort. <
I'm using the word "proposition" in its technical sense of an object that has exactly one value in the set {true, false}. That's exactly one value over all space and time, and for all people.
An indexical utterance uses a term like "I", "here", or "now" to specify a particular person, time or location, and that person/time/location are included in the proposition: "It's raining here" --> [that it is raining at time t in location l], where t and l are the time and location of the utterance.
If I can overload my bracket notation, [[it is raining]] would be a map from time and location to proposition. (I have heard these things called "fluents".) If you were on the phone with someone across the country and they said "It's raining", you wouldn't tell them they were wrong based on whether it's raining where you are. You perceive [[it's not raining]], but that doesn't justify the belief [that it's not raining where they are].
> I have an intuition with the content [[P is true as I see things]] <
That's not how I'd describe it. The perception and intuition are presentations of the world to us. Every presentation is at/by/for/(whatevs) a particular person, and the belief it justifies depends on how we conceptualize the contents. The perception [[it's raining]] would justify the belief [that it is raining at time t in location l], where t and l are when and where the perception occurred. The perception [[that's a table]] justifies the belief [that's a table], while the perception [[that's delicious]] justifies the belief [that's delicious to me]. The difference is that we conceptualize raininess as varying over time and place, tableness as objective(*), and deliciousness as subjective.
(*) I'm going to assume this for argument. If you don't also accept it, please substitute some objective-for-you property and a perception thereof.
As for identity being transitive? That's not something I intuit; it's something I learned. 2 + 2 = 4? Learned. And the way I conceptualize them -- the way I learned to conceptualize them -- is that they are logically necessary.
Another thing I learned is a range of application for them. Two apples plus two apples is four apples, but two litres of water plus two litres(**) of dirt is not four litres of mud. In the Star Trek universe, personal identity is not an identity relationship. (Yes, that's fictional, but that's the way we conceive the fiction; we don't say that identity relations are non-transitive in the Star Trek universe.)
(**) One litre is one cubic decimetre, so it's weird to say two litres of dirt, but it's not mistaken.
Now maybe you want to insist that you just intuit that identity is transitive, or that 2 + 2 equals 4. But if you do, I'm just going to say that you **learned** to intuit those things, and a range of situations under which those intuitions are suitable.
So I will grant you that many intuitions are propositional -- that the content of the intuition is a proposition rather than a fluent or a subjectivition. The point of the subjectivition was to provide a way for two contrary intuitions(+) not to be defeaters for each other -- while still justifying the separate intuiters' justified beliefs. But for contrary propositional intuitions by epistemic peers? I'd still say that they still give reason to doubt.
(+) Fluents and subjectivitions are contrary when there is no domain element that they both map to true. For example, [[this is delicious]] and [[this is disgusting]] or [[it's raining]] and [[it's not raining]].
Perhaps. But that would no longer be an intuition as understood. It would be that what is perceived as an Intuition is merely some sort of bias, or what have you.
Great article. However, an “intuition” can only ever been a justification provided that such intuition can be converted into an objective (univerilizable) explanation (provides clarity on a truth) as discussed in the link below. If an “intuition” can’t be converted into an objective explanation, it cannot be a justification.
Hard to say (I wouldn’t say I have a list on stand by). But, generally, and perhaps trivially, it’s gotta seem reasonable upon contemplation (or just seem reasonable right out of the gates). And/or there are compelling arguments for it too.
From the intuition haver’s perspective they may very well confer prima facie justification to form a belief about the supernatural. But that will also depend on possible defeaters for this intuition-of which there may be numerous, e.g. Occam’s razor.
Religion is one of the most ubiquitous human experiences. I don’t see the rational argument for why moral intuitions point to the truth but religious ones don’t.
In this article I’m referring to intuitions simpliciter-not just moral ones. And I mentioned my thoughts about religious intuitions above. There can be more to say of course, (eg. Problems of evil, divine hiddenness, etc) but that is just one example.
The question is whether they have an adequate defeater for the intuition. But it seems unreasonable to criticise them for forming beliefs based on how the world presents itself to them (when they have no adequate defeaters for their beliefs). Much like how I form beliefs based on my perceptual experiences.
Damn, I didn’t even see that. I do plan on writing more about intuitions in the future, but I have mixed feelings about doing philosophy with Lance and co. If you’re willing to do your own research, I’d have a look and see if any of John Bengson’s papers address the issues you’re concerned with. (Link to his website in my intuition article)
Ah this article is close. Digs pretty deep. Doesn’t start out with enough radical skepticism however.
lmao. Doesn’t start with enough radical skepticism.
I'm having a hard time understanding footnote 13. It's not clear whether you're saying that others' contrary intuitions (intuiting that Q where Q and P are contraries) counts as a defeater for the intuition that P, or that they do not. Why would it be "not"? And if it's not "not", then why is it being passed over so lightly in a footnote rather than being acknowledged as an important consideration in the text?
Thanks for the comment.
Just felt appropriate to have it as a footnote at the time of writing. Though I realised I had to fix up some of the wording! It was just another explanatory story to offer that also gave me some other ideas.
The idea it explores is that cases of perceptual disagreement seem to be more likely to undermine how trustworthy our perceptions are (e.g. I see a red apple, you don't see anything, and another guy sees a yellow banana). The worry would be that there is also disagreement in intuitions, and thus there may be a problem to some extent (or maybe not). But, part of the reason why we may think disagreement in the perceptual case undercuts justification for forming beliefs is because, presumably, if there is some physical phenomena out there in the world, our perceptions will pick up on it and there will be hardly be disagreement about it due to this causal thing. For instance, why do we both have the perceptual experience that there is a table? Because there really is a table there causing us to have the experience.
However, if one rejects a direct causal role between things intuited and the relevant phenomena (e.g. we're Platonists and believe in abstract objects) then this absence of a direct causal story makes it less clear how disagreement in intuitions would undermine justification. This doesn't determine that disagreement in therefore no issue for intuitionists (I wasn't very clear on that in the footnote), but it does seem to me that disagreements in perceptual experiences are more worrisome in comparison due to this causal story.
OK, I've read the revised footnote, and your explanation above. How do you feel about the following description of your point?
== Our bodies (normally) process the information we receive thru our senses from the physical world in very similar ways, and thus we get the same perceptual presentations -- of a table, for example. Given that, a perceptual disagreement suggests that something has gone wrong with the perceptual process in one or the other of the observers. Each observer thus has a defeater for their perception, and so should hold off on believing their perceptions until they can figure out what's up.
== Intuitions, on the other hand, may not be caused by the physical world. Thus a difference of intuition may not provide a defeater at all -- or only a weaker defeater. ==
If that's an accurate representation of your position, I must object that there is still the problem that your claim is that an intuition presents the world as satisfying a proposition P. If the world does satisfy that proposition, then it doesn't satisfy Q for any Q contrary to P. Thus someone with a contrary intuition is holding the world to be different than you hold it to be. Making P and Q be about non-physical parts of the world (if indeed there are any such parts) makes no difference to the disagreement. Propositions don't care about their subject matter.
Insofar as the intuitions that P and Q are actually contrary, I see no reason why they do not provide defeaters for each other -- a reason for each intuiter to hold off on believing their intuition.
It seems to me that there is only one way to make the defeater go away, and that is to hold that the intuitions provide not propositions, but "subjectivitions" -- ways that the world seems-to-me. If I read a sentence that seems ungrammatical to me, then I intuit the subjectivition [[that it is ungrammatical]]. Some other English-speaker may intuit it to be grammatical -- they are presented with the subjectivition [[that it is grammatical]]. We may express our views using declarative sentences like "This sentence is ungrammatical" and "No, it's fine", and we do have a disagreement, but it's not a propositional disagreement; our idiolects are subtly different, even tho' they are both dialects of English.
I think your summation adequately captures my view. Though I want to clarify that one can still be justified in holding some belief even if there is a weak defeater for it. Juxtapose this with an "adequate" defeater which would determine that we should (at least on epistemic grounds) abandon the belief if we can.
I must apologise that I'm not exactly seeing the weight of your objection. I was simply saying that a problem that exists for disagreement in the cases of perception needn't apply to intuitions. In addition, I think this causal story is one of the stronger reasons (if not the only main reason) why we think perceptual disagreement is so epistemically worrying. Which of course wouldn't apply to intuitions, provided there is no causal story.
You also mention that you can't see a reason why the disagreement wouldn't provide an adequate defeater–but I wanna know why it would be such an adequate defeater. There is a presentation that you might like given by Russ Shafer-Landau (an intuitionist and a colleague of John Bengson) where he talks about intuitions and disagreement. One of the ideas he brings to the table is that of an epistemic peer. Namely, if someone is not your epistemic peer, then they're not as likely to get at the truth as you are, and thus disagreements with them needn't be so worrying.
https://youtu.be/_M57lZ2Q5jg
Regarding your proposed solution–that the content of intuitions are not propositions but subjectivitions–it's not clear that it doesn't suffer from the same pitfalls (if we are to call them pitfalls). Subjectivitions just look like propositions, e.g. [[sentence X is ungrammatical]].
If subjectivitions are just the way the world seems to us, then they're gonna be propositional.
> Though I want to clarify that one can still be justified in holding some belief even if there is a weak defeater for it. Juxtapose this with an "adequate" defeater which would determine that we should (at least on epistemic grounds) abandon the belief if we can. <
That's fine. I can make the same clarification regarding what I said -- a weak reason to back off on belief and an adequate reason to back off on belief.
I did not mean to claim that the mere existence of someone else's contrary intuition provides an adequate reason to hold off on belief. Like Shafer-Landau, I allow that these are situations in which it would not:
1) You don't know about the person having that contrary intuition.
2) The person claiming to have that contrary intuition is lying about having it.
3) The person with the contrary intuition is defective in some epistemic way.
(**) NOTE: I disagree with one situation where S-L denied that the contrary intuition is a defeater -- that was where the content of your intuition is true. Truth alone does not and cannot justify belief.
Unfortunately, S-L seems to think that there are plenty of grounds for (3) --judging that someone is epistemically defective. In fact, the **only** case in which he agrees that a contrary intuition counts as a defeater is when you hear it and you think that it might be the case, and estimate about a 50% chance that it is the case. In every other case it comes out to <<Well I'm perfectly justified in holding that he's not **really** my intellectual peer.>> His intuition that P is now justifying not only his belief that P, but also his belief that so-and-so here is his intellectual inferior. That is definitely not a reliable way of moving from intuitions to beliefs!
Per his argument: Pro-choice? Anti-abortion? Both may have beliefs that are justified by their intuitions about the moral status of a fetus. Each is fully justified in dismissing the other as intellectually inferior.
Well they can't both be less likely than the other to come up with "the right answer" (his preferred caching-out of "epistemic peer"). And I refuse to accept that each of them is justified in holding on to their belief because they are justified in holding that the other is so. They are not justified in holding that the other is so **absent some non-intuition-based evidence** that the other is actually so. Else justification is merely a form of masturbation.
And to be clear, I am not saying that intuitions cannot justify beliefs. I am saying that the existence of intuitive disagreements between people who are each others' epistemic peers (regardless of what **they** think) are reasons for both to withhold belief in the content of their intuitions. Only non-intuitive considerations can break the tie.
Awesome to see that you checked out the lecture!
> Well they can't both be less likely than the other to come up with "the right answer"
Yes you're right, but it seems justification is seperate from truth. It can be the case that one is truly more likely to get the right answer, but that both are justified in thinking they're more likely to get the right answer.
> I am saying that the existence of intuitive disagreements between people who are each others' epistemic peers (regardless of what **they** think) are reasons for both to withhold belief in the content of their intuitions.
I think I more or less agree. The question is whether someone truly is an epistemic peer or not. That will determine how many beliefs we'll have to give up.
> Subjectivitions just look like propositions, e.g. [[sentence X is ungrammatical]]. <
Nonsense! Propositions are in single brackets! :-)
> If subjectivitions are just the way the world seems to us, then they're gonna be propositional. <
The propositional content of the subjectivition [[that sentence X is ungrammatical]] is [that sentence X is ungrammatical for me]. Note that the propositional content is not equal to the subjectivitional content. Indeed, it depends on who is holds the subjectivition. Similarly [[that this pie is delicious]] has a propositional content, but it's not [that this pie is delicious], because [that this pie is delicious] is not a proposition. Sure, it looks like one (with the single brackets and the "that" at the beginning), but it's something that two people can disagree about and neither of them be wrong.
Subjectivitions are essentially maps from person to proposition. [[That this pie is delicious]] maps A to [that this pies is delicious for A]. The presentation of the pie is more like the subjectivition than the proposition (at least to me). My attention is on the pie and the feelings it's generating inside me, and not on my beliefs about how others would react to the pie. Being in the moment means that neither I nor other people are active parts of my experience.
> Nonsense! Propositions are in single brackets! :-)
Touché!
This still looks like they're propositions, just of an indexical sort. But I have my own tentative worries about that sort of view. Namely that it's hard to see how intuitions with such content (if they can have such content) could be plausible. It would be like intuiting that you have some sort of perspective before you even have such a perspective. Recall that intuitions are the sorts of things that incline beliefs. I have an intuition with the content [[P is true as I see things]] and I then come to form the belief that [P is true as I see things]. But this looks starkly strange.
Another concern is simply that the content is provably false if you currently don't have that perspective. Thus we couldn't utilise intuitions to know anything beyond what we already take to be the case.
On the other hand, it seems tonnes of important intuitions are non-indexical, like the intuition that identity is transitive.
> This still looks like they're propositions, just of an indexical sort. <
I'm using the word "proposition" in its technical sense of an object that has exactly one value in the set {true, false}. That's exactly one value over all space and time, and for all people.
An indexical utterance uses a term like "I", "here", or "now" to specify a particular person, time or location, and that person/time/location are included in the proposition: "It's raining here" --> [that it is raining at time t in location l], where t and l are the time and location of the utterance.
If I can overload my bracket notation, [[it is raining]] would be a map from time and location to proposition. (I have heard these things called "fluents".) If you were on the phone with someone across the country and they said "It's raining", you wouldn't tell them they were wrong based on whether it's raining where you are. You perceive [[it's not raining]], but that doesn't justify the belief [that it's not raining where they are].
> I have an intuition with the content [[P is true as I see things]] <
That's not how I'd describe it. The perception and intuition are presentations of the world to us. Every presentation is at/by/for/(whatevs) a particular person, and the belief it justifies depends on how we conceptualize the contents. The perception [[it's raining]] would justify the belief [that it is raining at time t in location l], where t and l are when and where the perception occurred. The perception [[that's a table]] justifies the belief [that's a table], while the perception [[that's delicious]] justifies the belief [that's delicious to me]. The difference is that we conceptualize raininess as varying over time and place, tableness as objective(*), and deliciousness as subjective.
(*) I'm going to assume this for argument. If you don't also accept it, please substitute some objective-for-you property and a perception thereof.
As for identity being transitive? That's not something I intuit; it's something I learned. 2 + 2 = 4? Learned. And the way I conceptualize them -- the way I learned to conceptualize them -- is that they are logically necessary.
Another thing I learned is a range of application for them. Two apples plus two apples is four apples, but two litres of water plus two litres(**) of dirt is not four litres of mud. In the Star Trek universe, personal identity is not an identity relationship. (Yes, that's fictional, but that's the way we conceive the fiction; we don't say that identity relations are non-transitive in the Star Trek universe.)
(**) One litre is one cubic decimetre, so it's weird to say two litres of dirt, but it's not mistaken.
Now maybe you want to insist that you just intuit that identity is transitive, or that 2 + 2 equals 4. But if you do, I'm just going to say that you **learned** to intuit those things, and a range of situations under which those intuitions are suitable.
So I will grant you that many intuitions are propositional -- that the content of the intuition is a proposition rather than a fluent or a subjectivition. The point of the subjectivition was to provide a way for two contrary intuitions(+) not to be defeaters for each other -- while still justifying the separate intuiters' justified beliefs. But for contrary propositional intuitions by epistemic peers? I'd still say that they still give reason to doubt.
(+) Fluents and subjectivitions are contrary when there is no domain element that they both map to true. For example, [[this is delicious]] and [[this is disgusting]] or [[it's raining]] and [[it's not raining]].
Maybe what we call intuition is only the surface of something deeper,
a background alignment that decides which intuitions feel true.
Perhaps. But that would no longer be an intuition as understood. It would be that what is perceived as an Intuition is merely some sort of bias, or what have you.
Great article. However, an “intuition” can only ever been a justification provided that such intuition can be converted into an objective (univerilizable) explanation (provides clarity on a truth) as discussed in the link below. If an “intuition” can’t be converted into an objective explanation, it cannot be a justification.
https://neonomos.substack.com/p/what-is-a-reason?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks for the comment.
I’m not sure if I’d just reject this criteria.
Much appreciated for the response. What’s your justification for rejecting the criteria?
I’m just telling you that I’m not sure if I’d accept them in the first place.
What are your requirements for what you’d be willing to accept?
Hard to say (I wouldn’t say I have a list on stand by). But, generally, and perhaps trivially, it’s gotta seem reasonable upon contemplation (or just seem reasonable right out of the gates). And/or there are compelling arguments for it too.
And if it’s seems right on appearance but not on contemplation, does it *stop* becoming a justification, or was it never a justification
Putting witches aside, do you think religious intuitions point towards the truth of the supernatural?
From the intuition haver’s perspective they may very well confer prima facie justification to form a belief about the supernatural. But that will also depend on possible defeaters for this intuition-of which there may be numerous, e.g. Occam’s razor.
Religion is one of the most ubiquitous human experiences. I don’t see the rational argument for why moral intuitions point to the truth but religious ones don’t.
In this article I’m referring to intuitions simpliciter-not just moral ones. And I mentioned my thoughts about religious intuitions above. There can be more to say of course, (eg. Problems of evil, divine hiddenness, etc) but that is just one example.
The question is whether they have an adequate defeater for the intuition. But it seems unreasonable to criticise them for forming beliefs based on how the world presents itself to them (when they have no adequate defeaters for their beliefs). Much like how I form beliefs based on my perceptual experiences.
Damn, I didn’t even see that. I do plan on writing more about intuitions in the future, but I have mixed feelings about doing philosophy with Lance and co. If you’re willing to do your own research, I’d have a look and see if any of John Bengson’s papers address the issues you’re concerned with. (Link to his website in my intuition article)