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Philosophy Without Intuitions? A Reply to Cappelen I Herman Cappelen (2012 ) has written a book that’s devoted to arguing against the following claim: Centrality (of Intuitions in Contemporary Philosophy): Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories. In arguing against Centrality, Cappelen is not making a normative claim: that although philosophers rely on intuitions, they ought not to. He’s not making a metaphysical claim to the effect that there are no intuitions, hence none that philosophers can rely on to justify their claims. His view, rather, is that whether or not intuitions exist, as a matter of actual fact they are not relied upon to justify philosophical theories. In particular, Cappelen believes, they play no role in the justification of conclusions arrived at on the basis of thought experiments. II This raises a very good question: What is it for someone to rely on an intuition in justifying a view of his? What would one have to do in order to count as doing what Cappelen says philosophers don’t do? It wouldn’t be enough for a philosopher to offer a justification for some philosophical view of hers, p, by saying ‘Intuitively, p,’ or some such. Cappelen shows this very well. His discussion shows that ‘intuition’ talk is often unclear. Some of it is redundant and can be removed without loss; some of it acts as a sort of hedge; some signals that a particular proposition is part of the common ground and will be assumed without explicit argument; some indicates that a particular proposition is taken to be obvious. All of this is very helpful; it shows that we cannot take it to be obvious that someone is relying on intuitions just because she uses the word ‘intuition’ and its various cognates. But that makes it more pressing than ever to give an answer to our question: What must philosophers be doing to count as relying on intuitions? Cappelen decides against giving necessary and sufficient conditions for someone’s relying on an intuition. This is disappointing but understandable. It’s hard to give necessary and sufficient conditions for anything. Instead, Cappelen says, he will concentrate on “three complex features that, according to at least a fairly wide range of intuition-theorists, are characteristic of appeals to the intuitive.” In other words, he offers us criteria for recognizing appeals to the intuitive. The features are these (pp. 112–113): F1: Seems True/Special Phenomenology. An intuitive judgment has a characteristic phenomenology.F2: Rock. An intuitive judgment has a special epistemic status. Roughly, intuitive judgments serve as a kind of rock bottom justificatory point in philosophical argumentation. Intuitive judgments justify, but they need no justification. They have ‘default justificatory status.’ F2.1 If p is treated as justified even though appeals to experience play no clear evidential role in the judgment that p and p is not inferred from other premises, that is evidence that p is treated as having the kind of special epistemic status that Rock attempts to capture. F2.2 Evidence Recalcitrance. S believes p and S has some arguments A for p. If it turns out that S’s arguments for p are not good arguments for p, that does not remove S’s inclination to endorse p. This is what it is for p to be evidence recalcitrant for S, and such evidence recalcitrance is an indication that p has Rock status. F3: An intuitive judgment is based solely on the thinker’s conceptual competence. According to Cappelen, the presence of features F1-F3 is not sufficient for there to be appeal to intuition. But the absence of all of F1-F3 is strong evidence that there isn’t appeal to intuition. He therefore sets himself the task of showing that the judgments elicited by thought experiments never exhibit any of these features. I think these criteria are in the right ballpark, although I will make some comments about how I think they ought to be understood, and tweak them in certain ways. About F1: Throughout his book, Cappelen prefers to talk about intuitive judgments, as opposed to intuitions. The more fundamental notion, in my view, though, is that of an intuition, which is what an intuitive judgment is based upon. What is an intuition? Well, there is a lot of controversy about that. But, at a minimum, I think we can agree that it is a kind of seeming—an intellectual seeming, as opposed to the sort of sensory seeming that vision, for example, present us with. When we have an intuition—to the effect, for example, that, in the trolley problem, we should not throw the fat man off the bridge in order to save five other people—that proposition seems true to us and that is why we are inclined to judge it. Why should we talk about intellectual seemings in addition to the intuitive judgments themselves? Because we do seem to have occasions when p seems true to us even though we are not, or are no longer, inclined to believe it. For example, even after I stopped believing that there are more whole numbers than even numbers, there is still a sense in which this proposition seems true to me and tempts me. I have to stop myself from believing it. I have to recall the considerations against it. Visual illusions, of course, also exhibit this recalcitrance to being exposed as illusions; I’m sympathetic to the idea that something like that may be true intellectually as well. Some philosophers think that we can accommodate this observation by distinguishing between a temptation to believe p and a disposition to believe p. The seeming would correspond to the temptation. I don’t believe this reduction of intuition to temptation will work, but I won’t take a stand on that at the moment. Is it right to say that these intellectual seemings have a special phenomenology, as Cappelen’s F1 assumes? Many people balk at this. Cappelen, and others, reports that they detect no states with special phenomenologies in themselves when they contemplate and react to thought experiments with judgments. It’s hard to render a verdict about this controversy about phenomenology because many fundamental issues about the phenomenology of intentional states are unclear to us at present. Perhaps it’s right to say that intuitions have no special phenomenology. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that an intellectual seeming is special in that it lacks a special phenomenology. Usually, when a proposition p seems true to you that is because it seems to you to be true in some sensory way. What might be special here is that those usual features of seeming are absent, and yet the proposition seems true to you. It seems true, yet in a non-sensory way. On the other hand, I believe that there is something to the idea that Gödel (1947 ) emphasized—of a proposition’s forcing itself upon you. It’s unclear that we should not regard that phenomenon as having a distinctive phenomenology. As I say, in general, I think we are far from understanding a whole cluster of issues in this neighborhood, issues having broadly to do with the phenomenology of thinking. So, I endorse intellectual seemings but leave aside the question of whether they have a special phenomenology. About F2: According to this criterion, an intuitive judgment serves as a kind of rock bottom justificatory point in philosophical argumentation. Intuitive judgments justify, but they need no justification. They have ‘default justificatory status.’ As I’ve just been explaining, this is not how I think about intuitive judgments: Intuitive judgments are justified by intuitions, the underlying intellectual seemings. The seemings themselves, of course, justify without themselves needing justification. In that sense, they are akin to perceptual states. So, I don’t see any need to talk about ‘default epistemic status.’ That’s a notion philosophers (Hartry Field (2005 ), for example) invoke when they think that a judgment is justified, but that there is nothing in virtue of which it is justified. It’s justified by nothing. On the view I’m recommending, though, intuitive judgments are justified by something after all, namely the underlying seemings. Although this is importantly different from what Cappelen says, the differences I think are largely inconsequential for present purposes. Either way, you will think that a likely mark of an intuitive judgment is F2.1: it will be treated as justified, but won’t be backed up by a perceptual state. (I would rather say that appeals to experience play no clear “justificatory” role rather than no clear “evidential” role.) F2.2. I don’t see that F2.2 is adding anything to F2.1. If the judgment that p does not depend on any argument, then of course we would expect it to survive the rejection of any arguments thought to be in its favor. Of course, someone might intend F2.2 to mean something much stronger: that an intuitive judgment would be expected to survive any and all arguments, including arguments against it. I don’t think anyone should endorse that stronger view, including the most zealous proponent of intuitions. If it turns out that no plausible overall theory of the world could possibly accommodate p, then that would override whatever prima facie justification intuitions provided p. About F3: We come, finally, to F3: An intuitive judgment is based solely on the thinker’s conceptual competence. If we adjust this to take into account the distinction between intuitions and intuitive judgments, we would say that an intuition is an intellectual seeming that is based purely upon a thinker’s conceptual competence with the ingredient concepts. This is exactly Ernest Sosa’s (2007 ) view, a view he shares with a number of other philosophers. (In the case of some philosophers, conceptual competence is invoked not to individuate intuitions, but to supply an account of their ability to justify.) For those familiar with the history of analytic philosophy, it will come as a surprise that conceptual competence (understanding) is called upon to play this sort of role in theories of intuition. In the work of the logical positivists, for example, a big motivation for invoking the notion of conceptual competence was precisely in order to try to do the epistemology of the a priori without invoking intuitions. If one were being friendly to intuitions to start with, why would one want to give such a prominent role to the vexed notion of ‘based solely on conceptual competence’? I can see several powerful motivations for doing so. One would be to furnish a positive account about what makes a seeming intellectual as opposed to an ordinary seeming, or even just an ungrounded hunch. The other would be to explain why intuitions have a special connection to a priori justification. The third would be to evade what looks to be an unpleasant question about mechanism: via what causal route could we have reliable beliefs about modal reality through intuition? It looks as though all three tasks could be accomplished by saying that intuitions are intellectual seemings that are based on understanding or conceptual competence alone. That distinguishes them from ordinary seemings; it promises to explain why the justification they provide is a priori; and it supplies an answer to the question about mechanism that should be broadly acceptable: everyone will need to think that there is some perfectly non-spooky means by which a subject can retrieve information from his concepts. But all this comes at a considerable cost. First, there is a question about what understanding is. Second, there is a question about how we might introspectively recognize when a seeming is based on the understanding alone. Third, there is a question about how the fact that a seeming is based on the understanding alone qualifies it to justify the beliefs that may be based upon it. And, finally, it seems to commit one to saying that the only sort of a priori knowledge one can get in this way is knowledge about one’s own concepts, as opposed to knowledge of the world (of the natures of things). But how could, for example, genuinely normative truths, truths that we often think of as accessed through thought experiments, simply be judgments about one’s own concepts? The question, then, whether the notion of understanding should be invoked in this way in the theory of intuitions is vexed. I will set it aside for the moment and come back to it below. In summary, then, Cappelen’s question about whether intuitions are invoked in thought experiments seems to me to come down to the question: Do philosophers react to thought experiments with judgments that they regard as highly justified, which they regard as supported by a seeming (F1), but which they do not regard as justified by any standard sort of perceptual experience or empirically supported background theory (F2.1)? III Can we find examples of such judgments?Cappelen goes through the presentation of a number of famous thought experiments and patiently argues that we can find no such judgment. He admits that standard textbook presentations of these cases often explicitly describe them as involving elements like F1-F3. But he insists that the original presentations of these cases don’t involve any such elements, and that that’s where we ought to be looking. But if the claim is that intuitions are not appealed to in contemporary philosophy, why should we privilege the original texts as opposed to the way in which we have taught those texts to students? Cappelen’s view seems to be that we need to look at the original pieces rather than at the subsequent explications, because the explications have been corrupted by the onset of the ideology of intuitions. His idea is that at some point in time philosophers mistakenly came to believe that they were appealing to intuitions and so began to describe what they are doing in those terms, even though they were in fact doing no such thing. Cappelen doesn’t tell us when that point in time was, and no doubt that would be a difficult historical question to settle. He mentions as of interest Hintikka’s (1999 ) claim that it was coincident with the influence of Chomsky’s linguistic theories in the mid-1960’s, but notes that central elements of the appeal to intuition could be traced further back: to Rawls in the 1950’s, perhaps to Wittgenstein in the 1940’s. As I say, I think the historical question is difficult, but I am fairly confident that Hinitikka’s view must be wrong. Consider the following famous passage from Kripke (1971/1980 , pp. 41–2). If someone thinks that the notion of a necessary or contingent property … is a philosopher’s notion with no intuitive content, he is wrong. Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.