Intuition: An Analysis
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ค. 2024
- What are intuitions, and what role do they play in philosophy? Do they justify beliefs? And what are some skeptical challenges to intuition? I discuss these questions and more.
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OUTLINE
0:00 Intro and outline
2:11 The nature of intuition
3:30 Intuitions as beliefs
7:52 Intuitions as dispositions to believe
11:48 Intuitions as sui generis states
17:02 Clarity is king
20:52 Epistemological role of intuition
21:10 Method of cases
25:24 General intuitions
27:29 Intuitions, evidence, and defeasibility
37:01 Criticisms and defenses of intuition
37:16 Constraints on skeptical challenges
46:48 Lack of independent calibration
52:00 Unreliability and disagreement
1:15:42 Explanation
1:22:58 Experimental philosophy and intuition
1:34:06 Conclusion
1:36:12 Bonus soccer
NOTES
(1) Here are some other (potential) examples of intuition-independent conflict that I didn't mention (at around 1:04:40): (a) quantum mechanical phenomena, like wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, quantum superposition, and whatnot; (b) Curry's paradox and naive applications of Tarski's T-schema [this one might not be intuition-independent; presumably we reject certain applications of T-schema because of the unintuitive contradictions they engender]; (c) the Twin Paradox and length contraction in relativity theory; (d) various cases of the equinumerosity of cardinally infinite sets (including the Banach-Tarski paradox) [though, again, this might not be intuition-independent, since transfinite mathematics is also undergirded by certain intuitions]; and more.
LINKS
(1) Pust's SEP entry on intuition: plato.stanford.edu/entries/in...
(2) "The phenomenology of intuition", Philosophy Compass: compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
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I finally got to the part where you mention my work in metaethics. Thanks for the shout-out, much appreciated!
an ode to intuitions:
Long live intuitions,
first came the positivists,
they called you nonsense and mysterious,
But you make sense and they are delirious,
then came the Quineans demanding no a priori or foundations,
But this didn't take and we defied their expectations,
then came x-phi who started testing undergraduate guesses and called them intuitions,
But intuitions aren't guesses so they failed in their ambitions.
Long live Intuitions.
Great stuff Joe, thanks for the stuff you do to communicate these ideas to the public and help us learn!
❤️❤️❤️
Just the video I needed. Looking forward to watching this
Wow, this was amazingly thorough!
My Intuition, or at least what I hold as a concept of it until now, tells me you are fucking awesome dude, thank you for what you do 👌
Much love❤
You helped me through my sleepless night
The definition A6 seem to include to also include the psychological state when you are convens by an argument.
Every belief also satisfy A6.
bruh i was here to learn about philosophy and probably get help for a paper but the suiiiiiiii part got me laughing in the middle of the night. appreciate ur humor buddy
There has been a very interesting paper that indicates that people do not have often have intuitions that particular cases of suffering (e.g. Rowe's fawn) are gratuitous. So experimental philosophy may undermine the empirical problem of evil that utilises such alleged intuitions.
I don't think so. Check out my long comment on TAC's channel :)
th-cam.com/video/kTGbGtQutFM/w-d-xo.html
@@MajestyofReason Thanks for your detailed comments!
I think point (2) you made is strong.
Q: If survey responses are an insufficient test of people's intuitions, what methods would be preferable? A decent amount depends (or ought to depend) on experimental philosophy, so locating an alternative would be valuable.
Also, surely survey responses can still be useful insights into other psychological states, something like "prima facie seemings", even if you would disqualify them as intuitions? If intuitions are a psychological state, what would elevate state x over state y in terms of evidential utility?
WOOOO
@1:30:00 Another worry is given how most of these x-phi papers cite often-known thought experiments, eg trolley problems. They are testing (if they are testing anything) people's *judgments* and not *intuitions*. Additionally, given that these are meant to be testing **reliability**, we shouldn't be using thought experiments that we don't know the correct answer to. But this is precisely what many of these papers do.
Hey Majesty. I found your channel from Rationality Rules when you collaborated with him addressing the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God that William Lane Craig loves to cite. I have a question or two for you about your opinion on something that, in the spirit of intuition, might intrigue you to answer. But first: some context.
I know you have already entertained questions about this topic: veganism. In your 3k subs AMA, you were asked about if animals have rights like the right to life and such and you said in the case in which rights means obligations we have towards others essentially, then yes, animals are moral patients and thus have rights. Dogs have the right to not be tortured, as your example. You then say to do with whether everyone should be vegan or not that you haven't delved much into that topic which is fair enough. But you then say that you are aware of the atrocities of factory farming, and that you do not support them; but you were not at that time convinced of the impermissibility of humanely raising animals and killing them painlessly for food, like with anesthetic.
In your 10K AMA, you were given a similar question on what your thoughts were on the philosophy of veganism. You said that it's a respectable ethical view, but that you're not vegan yet, mainly because you're not convinced by the arguments for it. Fair enough.
As such, my first question for you would be this: what do you think of the philosophy as of now, after about half a year since your 10k AMA? I will assume your opinion has not changed that much, so assuming your answers are unchanged, my follow-up would be to ask for the arguments you're not convinced of that point toward advocating for and adopting veganism as a philosophy? Because I would love to discuss them with you and alleviate any of your concerns. I'll take the liberty to briefly do just that with the question of what is wrong with the humane raising and painless killing of animals by humoring one train of thought you could entertain in the process of answering this question.
The approach I'm going to provide for you here is to ask yourself if you can identify any symmetry breakers in your treatment or judgement of sentient subjects that are to be given this same treatment, and to then resolve these asymmetries by justifying them and testing your consistency in applying them - also known as "naming the trait". If you cannot find said symmetry breaker/s, then assuming you do not change your practical evaluation, you will have reduced yourself to contradiction. Alternatively, if you can find said symmetry breaker/s and apply them consistently, you might then commit yourself to a position that posits what could be argued as worse than contradiction: absurdity.
As a practical example: I’m going to assume you, like most people, wouldn’t morally accept the idea of humans being “humanely raised” and then given an anesthetic that kills them painlessly to then become food. Thus, between humans and, say, pigs, assuming you are okay with this treatment of them, there is a symmetry breaker that differentiates your attitude towards the two subjects, morally. So, the question is then: what is the symmetry breaker between these two moral patients, as you put it, that warrants this differential treatment? And furthermore, if you can identify the symmetry breaker/s, if you were to apply them to a human, would you accept this same treatment being given to them? To give you an example of a common symmetry breaker used to justify this differential treatment, intelligence might be raised. Humans are above the sufficient threshold of intelligence that therefore protects them from being deserving of this treatment you would hypothetically apply to pigs. To apply this symmetry breaker consistently, if there were a case of a human with equivalent intelligence to that of a pig, the question becomes if you would morally accept this same treatment being applied to this human with the symmetry breaker resolved? As I briefly mentioned before, if you cannot find the symmetry breaker/s between these two moral patients but do not have your moral evaluation altered in any meaningful way, then you have committed yourself to holding a contradictory judgement of two moral patients. If you can find a situation where you could morally accept this treatment you outlined being applied to a human, then you would have then committed yourself to a position that necessitates the rejection of universal human rights. I would appeal to absurdity at this stage and probably contradiction. It doesn't have to be a human in the hypothetical; you said in your 3k video, after all, that you think dogs have the right to not be tortured. You can replace the humans in this hypothetical with dogs and reason from there. But again, the results will essentially be the same. If you cannot justify the differential treatment between dogs and pigs, then you have a contradictory moral evaluation. If you can apply these symmetry breakers to dogs and remain consistent, you will then have to actively reject your former proposition that dogs have rights.
There is a third logical conclusion, however, that you might be open to: reject the asymmetrical treatment altogether, and thus commit yourself to vegan ethics; one that includes but is not limited to the premise that non-human animals, in virtue of this status of being a non-human animal per se, do not possess the sufficient traits that justify giving them (significantly) asymmetrical treatment as compared with humans - but again, the same logic can be applied to specific non-human animals that warrant the same base treatment as humans (they have the right to not be tortured/killed for food etc.)
This is one route of many that can be taken to explore this topic for yourself. I hope this has interested you enough to consider contemplating it. I would love to talk to you live about this issue if you have sufficient interest in it. Let me know what you think of my question and the argument I provided.
Do you have any thoughts on Husserl's notions of 'eidetic intuition' and 'categorical intuition'?
Initial thoughs - not done with the whole thing. While, as usual, this video is very thorough, I think this line of enquiry would benefit from being a bit more empirical, i.e. actually observing the different ways that people use the word "intuition", particularly in discourses like philosophy where they take themselves to be providing justifcations for things and then providing descriptions of all of those different uses of the word. I don't think there is going to be some sort of "fundamental nature" of intuition-as-thing to be discovered by introspection or conceptual analysis!
I agree. I think an empirical evaluation of how the term "intuition" is used among philosophers would be really insightful. This could involve:
(a) Studying how it's used historically in published texts
(b) Studying how contemporary philosophers think about and use the term. Surveys, interviews, and so on would be informative
(c) Studying the degree to which various notions of 'intuitions' appear to best account for the nature and structure of arguments and other features of philosophical exchanges.
Self-undermining is not a problem for the no-calibration objection. Just take the argument as a reductio: if you go in for intuitions, you go in for premise 1, et voila...
Joe, can you do a video with Michael Heumer talking about his argument for reincarnation and a soul. He is an atheist to my knowledge. Id want to see your objections to his arguments.
We can’t accept this, because it leads to radical skepticism.
* Kane B has entered the chat *
For 3.2, I'm not sure where the circularity problem is coming from, or in other words I'm afraid there might be some slight equivocation going on, which muddies the waters. When we talk about independent justification for the belief that the putative source is reliable, what exactly do we mean here? Do we mean independent of us, or independent of the source?
If we just mean independent of us, then even one independent source will serve as a check. The source, being independent of us, satisfies the independent of us criteria, so we need not appeal to some third source independent of us, and a fourth, and so on. One will do just fine, and every time we run the "is the source independent of us?" check, for that source independent of us, the check comes back positive, closing the regress.
If we mean independent of first source, I don't see why 3, including ourselves, wouldn't be a maximum? Consider a triangle with sides I (for intuition), S (for science), and C (for observation within a community).
We have an intuition that P, we want something independent of I to check if P. So we use S. Is S independent of P? Yep! But how do we know S works, maybe S might be doing some fishy things (replication crisis for example). Well what's a good middle ground between I and S? C would be that middle ground. OK suppose C backs up P. But is there something independent of C and I that backs up P? Yep! S did. Is there something independent of I and S that backs up S? Yep! C does. Is there something independent of C and S that backs up P? Yep, I does! Though, the last one might not be included since I is what's under scrutiny in the first place.
I think people are a bit too hasty to assume vicious regress problems for things like premise 1 in 3.2. Depending on how the crucial things like independence are cashed out, you can usually get away with a (small in fact) finite number of nodes. The only way I could see a regress problem emerging is if independence is interpreted in such an impossible way where every new node you add in gets sucked into a "system" itself having to be justified by an outside node. I -> S, produces (I,S). (I,S) -> C produces (I, S, C). (I, S, C) -> X, and so on. But I don't know anyone who would approve of something like premise 1, which would also demand such a rigid and impossible interpretation of that premise.
We need a video on phenomenal conservatism Joe! :(
oh an, the evidential problem of evil. formatted just like this video
Rip pele
Perhaps you can't verify reasoning, memory or senses alone. It seems that you only need memory and direct sense perception to be somewhat independent in order to use science. By virtue of demonstrating consistency of hypothesized results, you can verify the reliability of logic and reasoning (at least within the experimental domain).
On 3.4.1, I dont see how premise one commits one to any intuitions. When one states a conditional premise, one is not asserting a particular combo of the parts before then and after then. One is just committed to the conditional being true. All that means is that the first part of the conditional cannot be true while the second half is false; all other combos are on the table. Premise 2 seems to provide much firmer ground for the self undermining charge.
I was watching with my fiancé and he started cheering at Intuitions as Sui Generis States.
And then we got sidetracked because he was excited that you were a one-boxer on Newcomb's paradox (and then had to explain what Newcomb's Paradox was).
@@freyjajarnagin768 hahaha that's amazing, tell him i said he's a legend
I would argue that we have to analyze the causality of intuition before we can delve deeper.
It may be a bit annoying, but do you know of any article or book that explains what "powers" are in metaphysics? I remember one, but, being lazy, I forgot to read it when I saw it some time ago and today I can't find the article. Thanks in advance.
The SEP entries on abilities and dispositions will be helpful, as will the references in them. Here are links to those:
plato.stanford.edu/entries/abilities/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/dispositions/
@@MajestyofReason I love you.
I don't believe in beliefs, only have intuitions. And I don't think intuition justifies anything, it's just that there's no way out. Great content btw, watched about half so far, plan to watch the rest later.
Incoming question from a dumbbbby: Is there any problem with saying that intuition points to some type of innatism? Of course, our intuitions can be challenged by ourselves and others, and we are considerably adaptable with fallible memories which can explain the variety of intuitions… but might there be a link between intuition and innatism?
Good question! I don't see a connection there, at least not immediately, but it's an interesting idea and there may be a subtle connection that I'm not yet privy to.
@@MajestyofReason Maybe?!! I kind of just intuited it, but now I’m motivated to put it into words. 😆 Plus, I’m obsessed with the evolution of thought. So while you were speaking, I was imagining two hats: the “innate knowledge” hat and the “tabula rasa” hat. With my TR hat on, it’s kinda hard to think of how we can have intuitions, especially as kids… maybe induction, but even that would require some intuition, right? But with the IK hat on, it’s easier to see where intuitions come from… there just _is_ some knowledge built into us. So experience is a fishing rod, intuition is the string, and innate knowledge is the fish. 🤔
This thought in me culminated in the section about Unreliability and disagreement, by the way. 52:00
1:29:55 Joe's bilingual!
Dude you’re nice at soccer and look decently tall (relative to most soccer players). How didn't you go pro?
Well my intuition says me to like this video before even watching the video for 2 seconds. Am I morally wrong and should be punish to do such thing ?
It is morally obligatory to like my videos😉
@@MajestyofReason So you are saying that I should be rewarded. Right ?
Suiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
I am a scientist, and know that intuition has no part to play in the deductively tested theories on which we base our predictions. However, we spend a large amount of time feeding and developing our intuitions for the creative, flawed, stumbling deductive stage of hypothesis formation. Some people seem to be able to intuit from extremely abstract concepts, but most people need the crutch of interpretations based on our common experience. An example of this is the many interpretations of quantum mechanics: they provide us with intuitions to cantilever our understandings, and develop theories.
In the hierarchy of trustworthiness we have: logic, evidence, intuition. Intuitions are useful, but dangerous if relied upon.
"Intuitions are useful, but dangerous if relied upon" is a conclusion predicated on the fallibility of intuition, which is predicated on the reliability of the senses, which is predicated once again on intuition. Its seemings all the way down.
“Seems the case Intuitions are bad”
@@RefinedQualia was about to leave the same comment, but it looks like you beat me to it! In summation, the notion that intuitions are fallible because they can be defeated by sense experience is predicated on an initution, namely the intuition that sense experience is more reliable (or truth conducive or something like that) than intuition.
@@RefinedQualia Hey I just want to say thanks for the illuminating comment its really helped solidify a position I was exploring and tbh really changed my perception of reality (its good philosophy/reasoning is what I'm trying to say)
intuition: the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning; a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than cognitive analysis. From the Latin “intueri” (“consider”). from late Latin word “intuitio”.
In recent decades, in the domain of Western moral philosophy, the notion of intuition being a determinant in moral decision-making is fairly commonplace, and there are excellent reasons for this being the case. As explained in the twelfth chapter of this Holiest of Holy Scripture, “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, mammals developed an intuitive sense of morality as they evolved into higher and higher species of animal life. In early humans, despite language being undeveloped, humans would naturally (that is, intuitively) recognize certain actions as being untoward. For example, if a man had witnessed his mate being sexually harassed by another male, his instinct would be to defend his wife’s honour in some way (unless, perhaps, he happened to be a rather weak beta-male and the harassing male happened to be the chief alpha-male of the tribe). Therefore, when philosophers speak of intuition as being a potent force in the field of ethics, they have a great deal of justification for their OWN intuition in this regards.
However, as it ought to have been made clear in the aforementioned chapter of “F.I.S.H”, intuition should not be the final arbiter of any suspected moral infraction. For example, it is intuitive for most men (beta-males, in particular) to go to the rescue of females, a phenomenon known colloquially as being a “White-Knight”, a term taken from stories of Medieval knights-in-shining-armour gallantly riding-off on a white horse in order to rescue a damsel in distress. However, according to the principles of ethics/morality explained in this treatise, it is rarely moral for a man to pander to the impetuous desires of his womenfolk. Obviously, women must be protected from harm, but in this case, I am speaking more of instances of blatant gynocentrism (see that entry in this Glossary). One notable example of such gynocentric deeds is in the event of a sinking ship, in which the menfolk invariably forfeit their own lives in favour of the safety of the women and children, when, in fact, as their superiors, the men ought to first save themselves, and then, once they have calculated any possible avenues for saving their families, endeavour to rescue the women and children. That explains the reason why, in the case of an emergency, flight attendants (otherwise known as airline cabin crew) instruct their adult passengers to first fasten their own oxygen masks to their faces, before attempting to assist others, particularly their children.
Who are you and how come you're everywhere???
@@logans.butler285 He is the real vegan/maybe hindu comment daddy. You can see him but you can not believe him. Though seeing him you wil lose faith on him.
I love when philosophers invent word forms. It's a real tragedy how English doesn't have all the word forms for every word. Sanskrit is better for philosophy because it doesn't have this problem.