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Notes
All undated references are to Cappelen (2012).
“Once Centrality is rejected, both methodological rationalism and experimental philosophy can be left behind” (19; in §6.2 the implication is claimed to extend to several other metaphilosophical positions). At the same time, Cappelen emphasizes that PWI does not challenge the idea that intuitions might serve as an epistemically-neutral default or “a creative starting point” (230). As indicated below, I do not share Cappelen’s primarily sociological perspective on the philosophy of intuition. Centrality might be sufficient to motivate the Burning Questions, but it is not necessary. There can be much “urgency in figuring out what intuitions are and what epistemic status they have”, even if Centrality is false.
Interest in philosophers’ ‘intuition’-talk goes back at least to Stocks (1936, §1).
Cappelen treats these as equivalent (cf. 27n1). The expressions ‘ordinary’ and ‘technical’ go unexplicated, although we are told that ordinary (or “day-to-day”; 50) use of a term is linked to “what ordinary speakers consider the core usage” of the term (27), and that a technical term/use is “introduced” (50) and a four-point test is offered for “successful” technical terminology (52); six characteristics of “defective” technical terminology are also suggested (59).
I imagine that some will try to interpret what follows as a defense of one or another of the above Horns (or a refined version thereof). Although I am not fundamentally opposed to such interpretation, so long as its taxonomy of uses includes the subcategory discriminative use (discussed in §3), I do believe it threatens to obscure or miss an important lesson about philosophy more generally, as described next.
Although Aristotle’s metaphysical notion of homonomy might be used to provide a theoretical framework within which to couch and explain the central idea, I will remain neutral between this and alternative frameworks. (See esp. Shields (1999), §§1.6–7) on seductive associated homonomy, which in my view aptly characterizes much good philosophy.) Aristotle aside, what I will (in §3) call ‘discrimination’ arguably is a central component of standard, routine philosophical practice.
While Cappelen sometimes uses “theoretical use” and “special technical use” interchangeably (see, e.g., 50), it is not clear that technical terms are co-extensive with theoretical terms. A possible example is the non-technical term ‘pond’, which features centrally in limnological theories.
In calling the relevant use ‘discriminative’ I do not intend to suggest that ordinary use fails to discriminate, but rather that the relevant use discriminates where the ordinary use does not. We are all familiar with the possibility of (1) a theoretically important distinction that goes unmarked by ordinary use of a given term, or of (2) accretions of meanings and implications in ordinary use of a term that need not attach to every possible use of it (as can sometimes be reflectively demonstrated in a principled manner; see, e.g., Grice 1961, §§2–4). Another possibility is (3) Carnapian explication, whereby an ordinary notion that holds theoretical interest is explicitly refined in such a way that preserves its theoretically important features while eliminating its alleged imperfections (Carnap 1950/1962, ch. 1); if the resulting use is sufficiently rooted in natural language, connected but not reducible to ordinary use, it qualifies as a discriminative use (it is not clear that all Carnapian explications do or must satisfy these further conditions). I will assume that each of these three phenomena may on certain occasions underwrite a distinct use of the term in question, on one plausible way of individuating uses and terms. (This assumption is neutral on whether distinct uses underwrite distinct meanings to accommodate Cappelen’s semantic minimalism and skepticism about “lexical semantics” (30), as well as other views that might deny any straightforward connection.) Cappelen does not discuss these three possibilities.
Philosophers’ use of ‘experience’ lacks Cappelen’s four marks of successful technical terminology (52) and possesses Cappelen’s six characteristics of defective terminology (59): there is widespread disagreement among philosophers of perception (e.g., intentionalists, naïve realists, sense-data theorists, adverbialists, doxasticists, epiphenomenalists, nonconceptualists, conceptualists, singularists, existentialists, enactivists, etc.) about experience and its definition, its core paradigms, its theoretical role, and even its very existence (Byrne 2009). This shows that, by Cappelen’s own lights, my notion of discriminative use cannot be straightforwardly subsumed within (what he calls) technical use.
Let me offer some examples (not discussed in PWI) of these expressions in action, to which the reader may wish to return at the end of this section, in light of the discussion that follows: “Is it not clear that a’s whiteness is not determined by a’s relationship with a transcendent entity? …[C]onsider a without the form of whiteness. It seems obvious that a might still be white” (Armstrong 1980, p. 68). “It seems just obvious that [Mary] will learn something about the world” (Jackson 1982, p. 130). (Cappelen himself notes the potential relevance of ‘obvious’ (76–77), though he interprets it using further ‘intuition’-terminology (“recognize as true”).) “To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory” (Lewis 1996, p. 549 italics in original). “But while [a] quasi-contractual [view of talk exchanges] may apply to some cases, …one feels that the talker who is irrelevant or obscure has primarily let down not his audience but himself” (Grice 1975, pp. 48–49). “Each hypothesis of the form ‘n seconds after noon is the last noonish second’ strikes me as absurd” (Sorensen 2001, p. 18; cf. 58).
Chisholm discusses “‘appear’, ‘seem’, ‘look’, ‘sound’, ‘feel’, ‘smell’, and the like” (1957, 43). Jackson (1977), 30ff.) focuses on “‘look’ (and ‘appear’)”. Others who worked on these terms include Austin, Ewing, Firth, Grice, Price, Quinton, and Vesey. Breckenridge (2007, ch. 2) provides a helpful recent overview of work on ‘look’.
These arguments have not, to my knowledge, been defeated. A popular objection to the idea that there is a discrete, noncomparative use was (and perhaps still is) that in ordinary language a speaker cannot use ‘seem’ without therein making some comparison or expressing a putatively-evidence-based belief or tendency to belief. Notice that such a claim about ordinary use, even if true, is perfectly compatible with there being a discriminative use of ‘seem’, rooted in natural language but not identical to ordinary use, that lacks the indicated addition (again, see Grice 1961, §§2–4).
The literature on intuition contains a host of further possible examples, none of which feature in PWI. See, e.g., Ewing’s inference example (1941, pp. 8–9), Gödel’s axiom example (1964, p. 271), Bealer’s sheep and De Morgan’s Law examples (1992, pp. 100–103), Bonjour’s color exclusion and transitivity examples (1998, §4.2), Huemer’s straight line example (2005, p. 100), Sosa’s conflicting considerations example (2007, p. 47), and Chudnoff’s diameter example (2011, 636ff.). Additional examples are discussed below; see also the examples in my (forthcoming, esp. §§2–3).
The equivalence is suggested by Cappelen’s preferred gloss or paraphrase in terms of “some…evidence (of some kind)” (44). It is also suggested by his choice of examples, which include: “Recession seems to put people in the mood for condoms”; “It seems to me that Fred and others are nuts and totally out of touch with reality”; “The sun seems to be dimming”. These are the kinds of examples Chisholm and Jackson give for the epistemic use, and can be usefully contrasted with those examples proponents of a noncomparative use of ‘seem’ have used when identifying their preferred use (see above).
On Bealer’s view, what the relevant discriminative use of ‘seem’ denotes is a sui generis propositional attitude, a seeming (which could be “physical” or “rational”), one type of which (the so-called rational type) is a basic source of fallible, prima facie evidence. On Sosa’s (2007, ch. 3) view, what is denoted is an attraction to assent; Sosa also holds that such attractions are epistemically significant, even if not in the way that standard “basis-dependent” foundationalists (like Bealer) claim. There are of course other views. For instance, I have argued (forthcoming) that, contra Bealer and Sosa, intuitions are properly understood as presentations (which ‘seem’-talk may be sometimes but not always used to convey). I also disagree with the treatments given by Bonjour, Chudnoff, Ewing, Huemer, and Pust. But, again, the relevant use stands independently of any theory—mine or theirs. One reason why we can ignore the details of various views is that, because the relevant use is discriminative, not technical, we need not look to any such theories to grasp the term or to ascertain its meaning (as might be required if the term was technical, hence defined through, say, stipulation or Ramsification).
Cappelen seems to consider something in the vicinity in a brief footnote (47n33) that discusses the attempt “to pick out a subset of seemings”. But the note focuses on the modifiers ‘intellectual’ and ‘rational’, arguing that we don’t have an “independent grasp of the relevant senses” of these modifiers. The note does not recognize the possibility of a discriminative use of the term ‘seem’ itself.
On Cappelen’s interpretation of Kripke’s ‘intuition’-talk in Naming and Necessity, “one of the greatest works of twentieth-century philosophy” (71), “Kripke is a paradigm of an unreflective user of ‘intuition’-vocabulary” (72), where an unreflective user’s use is “borderline defective” (60). I believe that Kripke’s use of ‘seem’ and ‘self-evidently absurd’ in the above passages cannot be charitably interpreted as defective or, barring that, as expressing a mere pretheoretical attitude, as Cappelen also suggests (72 ff.), Kripke’s favorable remarks about “schoolchildren” and “the ordinary man” notwithstanding: surely, pace Cappelen, Kripke does not endorse/reject the claims in question—or any other claims—simply because, without any additional qualification (e.g., one invoking intuitions), such people would endorse/reject them, or they happen to be/not be ‘pretheoretic’ (74n17). Nor can Kripke’s use be charitably interpreted as hedging: notice, in the Gödel passage, Kripke’s unqualified, emphatic assertion in the ensuing sentence (compare: ?? “p, I think. p.”). Likewise for Kripke’s use of “self-evidently absurd”. At any rate, the main point is that, pace Cappelen, Kripke relies on intuition as evidence and is not an “unreflective user of ‘intuition’-vocabulary”.
This is the interpretation advanced by Deutsch (2010) 451n2; cf. 2009). Cappelen cites Deutsch’s interpretation approvingly (73n16; cf. 19), even though it entails, pace Cappelen, that Kripke does endorse a substantial link between evidence and the intuitive, albeit in a specified set of cases (regarding meaningfulness). Additionally, Deutsch (2010, 453; cf. 2009, 451) emphasizes that on his interpretation, Kripke relies on intuition throughout Naming and Necessity: “I take it as given that, if we [Kripke and his followers] know that ‘Gödel’ does not refer to Schmidt in the Gödel-case, we know this via intuition.” Deutsch regards such reliance as non-evidential, apparently because he assumes (ibid) that if intuition were playing an evidential role, Kripke would have to be making inferences from facts about his intuitions, which Kripke is not. But, as discussed below, this assumption is mistaken. At any rate, evidence does not exhaust the range of the epistemic, and so Deutsch’s position on the role of intuition in knowledge remains compatible with Centrality.
Borrowing Cappelen’s expressions, it does “move and influence” and have a “recognizable effect” on Kripke’s philosophical practice, and hence is “effective”, not “idle” (115 and 119–120).
See, e.g., Deutsch (2010). In a related vein, Cappelen (114, 174) wrongly assumes that proponents of Centrality who focus on, or view intuitions as, a certain type of psychological state (e.g., inclination to belief) are thereby committed to “psychologizing the evidence”.
Nor must a proponent of Centrality view the propositions that are the contents of one’s intuitions as “special and glowing” (173), as Cappelen suggests, no more than in the case of perceptual experience.
Perhaps similar points can be made for other putative disseminators, such as Noam Chomsky and John Rawls. In his hugely influential paper from the same period, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam uses a host of ‘intuition’-terminology and explicitly draws a connection between intuitions and “data” (1975, p. 193).
Such a theory would be fairly described as marginal or even radical from the perspective of mainstream philosophy of intuition—and for good reason (Ewing 1941, pp. 13–16).
For example, an adequate theory of intuition would provide a positive characterization that illuminates the kind of mental state it is. Achieving such a characterization requires reflection on a healthy variety of illustrations and examples, as well as a critical examination of alternative views. Although I cannot undertake this project here, some efforts in this direction can be found in §§2–4, 7 of my (forthcoming).
Cappelen (36) cites Urmson’s article in passing (via Mandy Simons’ reference) as anticipating the notion of a generic evidential. But the citation is misleading, as Urmson’s discussion tells against Cappelen’s treatment of ‘intuition’-talk as applied to the verb ‘to intuit’. Urmson observes that some verbs can be used in the present continuous or progressive form (e.g., “Smith is imagining that p”, “Smith is perceiving that p”), and that these are importantly different from “parenthetical verbs”, which cannot be so used (e.g., ? “Smith is believing that p”). Parenthetical verbs are sometimes evidentials and may function as hedges or convey qualifications of the sort emphasized by Cappelen (as when, e.g., one’s belief is unreflective, or one’s thought is meant for easy consumption, or one’s opinion enjoys some evidence of some kind: recall ‘Snap’, ‘Easy’, and ‘generic evidential’ from §2). But non-parenthetical verbs, used in the progressive form, according to Urmson, “report a contemporary happening” and “describe some goings on” (1952, 480 and 496 emphasis added). Insofar as the verb ‘intuit’ can be used in the present continuous or progressive form (e.g., “Smith is intuiting that p”), it qualifies as a non-parenthetical verb in Urmson’s sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘sensitive’ primarily designated what pertains to the act of sensing at least through the eighteenth century. This is not so today.
Imagine the reaction of a proponent of a Centrality-like claim about experience to an examination that privileges adjectival or adverbial cognates of ‘experience’ and corresponding Google search results (40ff.).
For example, Cappelen makes the remarkable claim that the response to Goldman's fake barn case that Henry does not know that there is a barn is “presented as being pre-theoretically in the common ground between Goldman and his readers” (172).
Gettier employs ‘intuition’-terminology prior to offering additional considerations: “it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) [The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket] is true; for…” (quoted by Cappelen, 195n3). Two comments. First, Cappelen provides no reason to deny that the considerations that follow ‘for’ are capturing or buttressing; in fact, Cappelen himself says that they “explain why” Smith lacks knowledge. Second, Cappelen is not the only commentator that has overlooked Gettier’s ‘intuition’-talk in this passage (e.g., Deutsch 2010). And pace Cappelen’s assertion that the first papers in response to Gettier’s paper also “don’t appeal to intuition” (195n3), ‘clearly’, ‘surely’, ‘see’, and other ‘intuition’-talk pervades the early literature (see, e.g., Sosa 1964, p. 1; Saunders and Champawat 1964, p. 9; Goldman 1967, p. 366). I lack the space to discuss each example mentioned in the main text.
Sainsbury (1995/2009, p. 1) suggests that all paradoxes arise from “appearances [that] deceive” and goes on to invoke the metaphor of “camouflage”, which concerns how a thing looks (used noncomparatively).
Cappelen writes: “[Thomson] doesn’t think that anything specific or clearly articulable follows…We are supposed to get a sense that something has gone wrong, but at this point in the article, exactly what has gone wrong is underdetermined. That is settled by a wide range of further complex arguments” (152). This passage points to a further misconception about intuition operative in PWI, namely, that intuitions, or their contents, must be “specific or clearly articulable” and reliance on intuition for positive epistemic status is incompatible with a question’s being “settled by a wide range of further complex arguments”. Compare perceptual experience: most philosophers of perception maintain that experience, or its content, need not be specific or clearly articulable (as shown, e.g., by Chisholm’s famous speckled hen example), and that experience does not always give conclusive reason; this is compatible with relying on experience for positive epistemic status.
Moreover, proponents of intuition have long emphasized the importance of inference and dialectic, in addition to intuition, to philosophical investigation (see, e.g., Descartes’ Regulae).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Martha Gibson, Andrew Higgins, Jen Hornsby, Dan Korman, Marc Moffett, Anat Schechtman, Alan Sidelle, Nico Silins, Elliott Sober, Denny Stampe, Jared Steinke, Mike Titlebaum, and of course Herman Cappelen, as well as participants in a conference on PWI at the Institute for Philosophy in London, for helpful comments and discussions.
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Bengson, J. How philosophers use intuition and ‘intuition’. Philos Stud 171, 555–576 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0287-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0287-y