A Defense of Philosophical Intuitions

I think people are rightly skeptical of intuitions for the obvious reason-- they are shortcuts that don't come with easy verification that the "intuiter" knows (and can effectively communicate) the chain of reasoning that led to the conclusion. So you can't tell from the stated intuition whether the corresponding chain of reasoning is correct (or, for any non-trivial intuition, even if there exists a corresponding chain of reasoning at all).

Edit: Well, people are rightly skeptical of intuitions which aren't merely definitional tautologies. The author put definitional tautologies in their list, which seems odd. I don't care about intuitions for which everyone minus edgelords assumes that a thing is being defined in a sentence. It's all the other, subtle intuitions that require unrolling. E.g, if someone thinks it's wrong to torture puppies for fun because everyone has Ring installed nowadays, I want to know that! So I guess we need the edgelords after all :(

Your intuitions are what give you your axioms and Bayesian priors, the starting point of deduction and analysis, as well as your values and top-level goals.

You can't justify any belief at all without axioms/priors, or make any decisions about what to do without values/goals.

Intuition is the thing that gives you those axioms and values; it's really the "only game in town" for generating them.

I do think intuitions are a necessary source of pushback against philosophical skepticism, and am in favor of a kind of spirit of incredulity in response to skepticism. People pretend they are Cartesian skeptics for 15 minutes in a conversation, or a classroom, but go right back on to being a person after the conversation is over.

But on the other hand, I think a lot of disasters in philosophy come from having a failure of imagination, mistaking it for an insight into necessity and calling that an "intuition."

So I don't know that one should have a transcendent attitude toward all intuitions, I think it depends. Lance Bush is interested in moral intuitions and generally (imo) a great philosopher with great instincts, but I think what intuitions we do or don't have about morality are important, and I wouldn't want to wave those away because anglosphere philosophers have a bad track record with intuitions leading them astray when it comes to Mary's Room or the Chinese Room (what is it with rooms).

I don't think intuition is in the same class as "perception". I think intuition is better characterized as a byproduct of perception interacting with our preconceptions. I think fundamentally, intuitions are that part of the pattern-recognizing mind which allow us to quickly decide which tunnel is safe when fleeing a tiger. They are an antidote to indecision, but I think that perception is actually more reliable and factual than intuition in pretty much every sense, because it, in general, has some relation to the world that is thinly mediated by our minds. Intuition is the most unreliable part - it's mind all the way down.

So, to address the final two points:

> (1) if cross-cultural variance undermines the evidentiary value of rational intuition, then it also undermines the evidentiary value of perception for the exact same reasons.

No, perception in a sensory context has some relation to real or imagined phenomena. Intuition isn't predicated on that relation.

> (2) experimental philosophy depends upon perception to arrive at its conclusions (as do all experiments). Therefore, if we can’t count on perception to give us the truth, we can’t trust the results of experimental philosophy because of that very fact.

What about "I think therefore I am"? However, I'm quite frankly never sure I've landed on the truth as a philosopher, and I feel the same way about science. But that doesn't stop me trusting it.