Saving the doxastic account of intuitions

Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):357-375 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Many philosophers and psychologists hold that intuitions are, or reduce to, beliefs. The argument from intuition without beliefs threatens to undercut any such doxastic account: since there are clear cases of intuition without belief, intuitions cannot be beliefs. Advocates of the intellectual seeming account conclude that intuitions belong to the basic mental kind of intellectual seeming. I argue that rightly understood, apparent cases of intuition without belief are cases of someone having the inclination to believe that p whilst believing that not-p. These can be accommodated by a disjunctive doxastic account holding that to have an intuition is to either have a belief, or to have an inclination to believe. I conclude that intuitions reduce to beliefs, and that there is no need to acknowledge intellectual seemings as basic states in our mental taxonomy

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 99,322

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-08-11

Downloads
151 (#136,251)

6 months
11 (#254,456)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Christian Nimtz
Bielefeld University

References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The meaning of 'meaning'.Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.

View all 64 references / Add more references