Late Night Generalizations About Philosophers' Intuitions

With all the talk of intuitions in philosophy (here's the latest installment), and particularly the fear that the intuitions of western academic philosophers may not be shared by members of other cultures, or even nonphilosopher members of the same culture, it's easy to begin to wonder about the validity of many philosophical positions, or at least how to save them from the problem of unshared intuitions. I myself think we should be skeptical about intuitions regardless of whether they're shared across members of different cultures. The reason is that no matter how hard philosophers try, and no matter how clean their intuitions are rendered through the process of making them explicit and filtering them through the sieve of social and academic review, so much of what goes into the production of those intuitions is unconscious and unavailable to introspection. The very idea that through this filtering is possible reminds me of the hubris Nietzsche remarks in his essay "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers," where he writes:

Collectively they take up a position as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cool, pure, god-like disinterested dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of all ranks, who are more honestly stupid with their talk of "inspiration"—), while basically they defend with reasons sought out after the fact an assumed principle, an idea, an "inspiration," for the most part some heart-felt wish which has been abstracted and sifted.

Perhaps Nietzsche is a bit harsh, but I can't escape the impression that philosophers' intuitions, like those Kripke and the philosophers who have followed him seem to share about things like reference (as discussed in Fodor's much-blogged about review) are, when they are made explicit, nothing more than post hoc rationalizations of the positions in which our largely unconscious and unexamined conceptual schemes place us in relation to the problems the philosophers are raising. If this is the case, then it's not surprising that members of cultures with conceptual schemes that vary in significant and relevant ways would have different "intuitions" when confronted with those problems. However, these cultural differences only hint at the real problem with intuitions, a problem which is made even more clear by the possibility of members of the same culture failing to share those of philosophers. What this implies is that philosophers' intuitions are a product of their specialized knowledge structures gained through training and reading related to the philosophical issues in question.

There's an upshot to all of this. When I changed disciplines from philosophy to psychology long ago, I used to get into heated discussions about the value of analytic philosophy with my graduate advisor. One of his most frequent remarks was that the biggest difference between philosophers and experimental psychologists is that psychologists are beholding to data. There's something naive about philosophers believing that their intuitions are somehow getting to the heart of the issues, that their intuitions are somehow direct, immediate, or otherwise unreasoned (but not unreasonable) impressions of or responses to the (often counterfactual) scenarios they explore. Regardless of how sophisticated the logical and conceptual tools they may have at their disposal, philosophers are subject to the personal and social limitations idiosyncracies that come with human cognition. And since all that philosophers are beholding to, in most cases, is their own intuitions and those of other philosophers (members of a community that shares at least some relevant knowledge structures) there's no real way to independently test the validity of philosophical positions. If you want to know how something like reference works, you go out and you look at how people use language to refer. That doesn't entail exploring one's own intuitions. Psychologists realized the ineffectiveness of this sort of introspection 100 years ago. Instead, in entails going out and systematically gathering data. It's true that scientists, too, are shackled by their cognitive makeup, but that's the beauty of data - it constrains the range of possible intuitions that one can accept, and the more data one gathers, the fewer intuitions on can reasonable accept.

Obviously there are areas of philosophy where this method won't work. For example, you can't develop a meta-ethical theory, particularly one that's meant to be normative rather than purely descriptive, by going out and looking at peoples' moral reactions to situations. In this case, your goal isn't to understand how people behave, but to come up with theories about how they should behave regardless of how they actually do. However, there are intuitions that go into any moral theory that could benefit from some good data. For instance, any descriptive or moral theory of ethics will have to take into account facts about the human mind, and how it acts in the types of situations (particularly in social situations) that ethical theorists are interested in.Thus in some cases, like theories of reference, philosophy can best be used as a sort of hypothesis-generator, which then passes its hypotheses along for empirical investigation. In other cases, like the case of moral theorizing, philosophy produces the ultimate theories, but it should use knowledge from empirical investigations to gain insight into the potential structures of moral theories. Any philosophy that relies exclusively on intuitions, however, is doomed to be little more than parlor games. As Fodor says in his review, "Is that a way for grown-ups to spend their time?"