A Defense of Philosophical Intuitions | Hacker News Reader

A Defense of Philosophical Intuitions

hilariusbookbinder.substack.com

26 pointsCaiero26 comments

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 :(

I think we heavily overestimate our ability to reason morally though - our thinking just becomes an ad hoc justification for our own intuitions.

This guy persistently misrepresents skepticism. No radical skeptic as he conceives them could live long, since apparently they don’t believe in eating or breathing…

Radical skepticism is not the rejection of belief, it is the rejection of certainty. I believe many, many things that I am not certain of. I am willing to live without absolute certainty.

In my head and heart there are things I choose to feel certain about, even though I know that such certainty is mere faith. I have no defense or argument to justify my certainty that my wife loves me. I don’t care about empirical justification for that.

People who sneer at skeptics, I am guessing, want to be honored and respected for feeling certain about things that are not, in fact, certain. Meanwhile the power of skepticism is that it encourages me (and everyone) to let the questioning continue.

If you care about philosophy at all, then you should accept that the questioning must continue. The end of doubt is also the end of philosophy.

>Radical skepticism is not the rejection of belief, it is the rejection of certainty.

Are you sure that's true of radical skepticism? The classic example is Decartes, who doubted the reality of his own senses, of the world, and even entertained doubt of his own existence. Radical as the modifier does seem to be about extreme form.

Rejection of certainty seems much closer to a restatement of an already present status quo with respect to folk belief.

If radical means root, or pure, then I am referring to the original skepticism of Pyhrro and Sextus Empiricus.

If radical means crazy and ridiculous, then I don’t think there are any of those kind of skeptics. Not really. Because you can’t live without beliefs.

You CAN live without a commitment to certainty.

Sure and if skeptic is understood according to its Greek root skepsis aka "inquirer" then it's basically all of Greek philosophy. What matters is which combination of context and colloquial usage seems most pertinent in this context. The notion introduced in the post goes like this:

>Skepticus: Do you have a full psychological analysis of each of these concepts along with the truth conditions for their correct application? No? Well, I guess they are just made-up armchair fantasies invented by empirically-resistant philosophers.

I get that you think there's a more reasonable notion of skeptic that trades on a notion of true scotsman.. sorry, true skeptic, according to your preferred choice of emphasis, but I think the notion of "radical" skepticism as meaning the variety that emerged in what we call modern philosophy, from Descartes and Berkely counts as a fair characterization of a mainstream version of the idea.

An intuition is just something you believe without being able to say why you believe it.

If you have reasons for your belief, then it's a conclusion, not an intuition. If you can't give reasons for it, then you can't argue that anyone else should also believe it, by definition.

"So what is intuition supposed to be? Rational intuitions are a spontaneous, rapid psychological assessment of truth and prompting to judgment about a priori propositions."

Here the author changes the subject from intuition to "rational intuition", but the latter just means a conclusion you come to quickly, and all the examples given are ones that you could readily supply an argument for. That's not the kind of epistemological starting point that people usually mean when they say they have an "intuition", and it's not what people object to when they object to using intuitions as "evidence". Intuitions aren't evidence of anything except the fact that you believe them. If you have reasons for your beliefs, give the reasons, that's it.

The argument appears to be: Intuitions work like all our other mental tools, and like the others can be wrong occasionally. We would never consider not using our ability to read just because we occasionally misread something. We would never give up hearing because we misheard something. But we do sometimes consider doing away with intuition, and, according to the author, we shouldn't hold it to a higher standard.

My issue with this argument is that the baseline for things like reading and hearing is much more universal than for intuition. Also the problems that stem from illiteracy and bad hearing and predictable. The consequences of failures of intuition can be anything. My attitude has always been: develop your instincts and then trust them. But don't skip that first step.

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.

Perceptions can be misleading because unless you perceive the totality of all facts relevant to something, the next fact you discover could overturn what you thought you knew. All swans are white, until you see a black swan.

Intuitions are more integrated across your personal accumulation of perceptions and preconceptions: strict reason or perception makes me doubt that this black thing is a swan, but it looks and floats around like a swan, even if I can't quantify how, so I guess it's a swan. Good enough for now until I encounter something that comes up against the boundary of my blurry intuition of what a swan is; at that point I'll think about it some more.

In a way, I perceive the black swan as a swan because of what my established intuitions about swan-ness are.

It intuitively appears that the sun is moving around the earth.

A good Wittgenstein response: "How would it have looked if it had looked as though the Earth was going round the sun?"

Answer: the same. It's just that our default frame of reference is the surface of the Earth. Relative to that frame of reference, the sun is in fact moving

Yeah I was in fact making a cheeky reference to Wittgenstein ;)

We were talking about the reliability of intuition versus sense perception.

Ah ok, I thought after I posted that maybe I missed the intent of your somewhat cryptic remark;

I'm not sure, though, that the intuitive appearance of the sun moving is the same sense of intuition as some philosophers use. We don't perceive the Earth to be in motion, and from a frame of reference based on the surface of the Earth, the sun actually is in motion. The mistake was thinking that this was an absolute reference frame. I would say that was more a misinterpretation of our perceptions than an intuition. People could give reasons for why they thought the Earth was motionless: wouldn't buildings fall down, and birds find it harder to fly in one direction rather than another? etc. It wasn't just an intuition in the sense that it's something that people believed without being able to say why. They could say why they believed it, and they could relate it to perceptions to justify those beliefs. I think there's a distinction there.

I think it'd kind of defeat the argument of the article to say that those two types of intuition about the sun, and of philosophers, are separate. And besides, before experiment the motion of the sun was pondered by philosophers - and there's some arguments that say the boundaries of philosophy are set by what slips out of theory into experiment!

> I think it'd kind of defeat the argument of the article to say that those two types of intuition about the sun, and of philosophers, are separate.

That's ok, I don't think it's a good argument. It's based on redefining the word "intuition" to mean something else, e.g. "5+7=12" is an intuition according to the article's definition.

Nietzsche, who I would argue is one of the best philosophers or at least observers of human nature, I think was largely intuition/"vibes"-based. I don't know of another modern philosopher who nailed so many predictions of societal behavior (except his nonsense about women, which, coincidentally he had no intuition for since the only woman he really knew was his sister who turned out to not be the greatest person).

So I'd say, yeah, intuition can help.

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).

> having a failure of imagination, mistaking it for an insight into necessity

At least credit Dennett if you're quoting him

If, through a series of unlikely butterfly effects, this nearly empty comment section turns out to be a landmark moment in the history of philosophy that shifts credit for Dennet's thought to me, an anonymous internet commenter, I'll do everything I can to correct the misunderstanding.

It's not about that. It's just intellectually honest not to present other people's ideas as your own

Except no originality was claimed, so that's out the window too. These kinds of extreme charges seem to fundamentally misunderstand the conversational norms appropriate in internet comment sections.

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.

There really isn't any Bayesian "prior" for us. We exist as agents interacting with an environment qua data stream. Every single moment brings new flows of "data" and as such there isnt a sense of having a prior and posterior since this milliseconds prior is last milliseconds posterior.

> Your intuitions are what give you your axioms and Bayesian priors

No, I would say it's your perceptions and memories (of past perceptions).

A skeptic is just someone with a very fine tuned intuition for detecting bullshit.

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