Comment by tomlockwood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomlockwood | Hacker News Reader

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.

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