On philosophy and intuitions: mountains and chickens

I've suddenly come to notice how much philosophical ink has been dedicated to the term "intuition" in recent years. Being almost as innocent as Baby Jesus, I have been convinced that "intuitions" was something pretty much trashed by Wittgenstein during the course of a couple of paragraphs of Philosophical Investigations (I'm thinking §§ 213-4, of course). According to Wittgenstein, 'intuition' is a pseudo-explanation that in no way helps us to understand what we think we can explain by invoking this term. Now it seems as if 'intuitions' are all over the place; epistemology, metaphysics and moral philosophy. There are even some battles going on about the role of intuitions in philosophical analyses (I will come to that). I've read some passages about this that makes me wonder how some writers view the task of philosophy and, what is more, how they perceive their own role in doing philosophical work. The passages I have in mind depict intuitions in two very different ways, but what is interesting is that they share a view of philosophy and language. I will try to say something about this.


"[Some] revisionary metaphysicians deny that there are mountains. They deny the proposition of the sort that G.E. Moore defended in his defence of common sense. They concede that microscopic particles exhibit collective behaviour in the presence of which it is used to believe that a mountain is present, but they classify that belief as false. They hold that although the ordinary use of the word 'mountain' has some utility, because it registers genuine discriminations between different sorts of situation in which different action are appropriate, it also embodies a mistaken metaphysical theory as to what the difference between those sorts of situation consists in. The claim that there are no mountains is usually regarded as counterintuitive. Even its proponents may conclude that it is counterintuitive, but argue that the cost to intuition is worth paying for the overall gain in simplicity, strenght, logical coherence and consonance with the results of the natural sciences that they attribute to their total metaphysical system, of which the claim is a consequence."

This picture of what philosophy should occupy itself with, "the foundation of our ability to know things about the world", seems to have a relation to Hilary Putnam's just as silly thought experiment in which he explains how meaning of concepts has to do with the external world. The idea that philosophy should come up with a final verdict on our ability to know and to give a final characterization of the relation between language and reality seems to be a prevailing one, even though it has also been challenged (by people like Wittgenstein, but I suspect most analytic philosophers would consider him a passed staged in the history of philosophy. Wrongly, I would say.). The philosophical picture referred to in the quote makes our normal talk about mountains seem like a very vague, fuzzy thing to be judged by philosophy, passing verdicts on the status of our "intuitions". Timothy Williamson points out that many philosophers would concede that our "intuitions" (= in this case, how we normally talk about mountains) cannot be assumed to be reliable. I agree with him that scepticism and scientism, in this respect, make up a joint venture.

"The cost to intuition is worth paying for the overall gain in simplicity." In this view, everything we say we know expresses an "intuition". To be sure, there are many philosophers who would not quite agree with the idea that our talk about 'mountains' constitutes a case of false belief. But - I'm sure plenty of contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition consider the things we say about knowing stuff about the world to be theoretical convictions the scientific transformation of which can only count as a sound continuation of what these "intuitions" were about from the start: TRUTH and KNOWLEDGE in their most abstract, no-content sense. The folksy talk about mountains, actions and human beings, the same line of thought goes, could be exchanged with much more stringent scientific talk without any essential change taking place in terms of subject matter.

From this point of view, philosophical points about "the way we talk", "having something to say", "what we say makes a difference" can only appear as charming, however unreliable, chit-chat to be corrected or supplemented by much more serious metaphysical investigations about the conditions of knowledge and truth. These conditions might, somehow, be expressed in "ordinary language", many would argue. But it is still, for them, an open question in what sense our "intuition" that we "know" that there are "mountains" in Schweiz says anything about what it is to "know". Philosophy should prove that the concept of 'mountain' has a relation to reality.

Up till now I have not said a word about the experiment in which experimental philosophers (which is an up-and-coming philosophical discipline) were asking people of various class background about the extent to which they found the action of fucking a dead chicken morally repulsive. Interestly, upper class people were reported to find it less shocking.

"A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it." (Haidt et al. 1993: 617)

"Harmless yet offensive violations of strong social norms." as Standford encyclopedia of philosophy has it. I kid you not. Well, the authors claim to have said something about the reason why philosophy cannot rely on (their own) intuitions as evidence because of the huge variations among our intuitions. The question seems to some extent to be about what philosophical accounts are based on.

The experiment was thus thought to elicit the subjects' moral intuitions, whatever that is supposed to mean. It was thought to provide an example of an interesting variety that challenges some ideas about philosophy. But everything about this example seems crazy. What would you say about the case in question? Do you have a 'moral intuition' about it? "Let me think about this for a while... Well... There's a pro and con to everything, you know..." I don't know, just to come up with this "case" is so gross that I don't know how to express my exasperation without my brain pouring out onto the floor. And still this is taken seriously as an interesting and illuminating contribution to moral philosophy in its quest of elaborating the distinction between arbitrary cultural norms and a sound & firm, neutral foundation of moral theory!

I agree with one of my colleagues who said that there are some forms of philosophy that one cannot help seeing as expressions of male self-contempt; a wiping out of responsibility, of a personal voice, of a desire to say something. "I have nothing to say, I simply want to talk about reality, about truth, about truth-conditions. It does not matter the slightest what I say." The concept of intuitions pops up as a convenient point of departure. In that case, of course, it is all right to discuss "moral disgust" and "copulating with dead chickens" in much the same way as one would discuss prime numbers and the mechanisms of a vacuum cleaner, weren't it for the axis of "condone & condemn" but that has little to do with morality as well. These guys make detachment seem like a virtue. From this point of view, the philosopher is not a person; the philosopher should not be a person. The philosopher should be a thinking computer, a mechanic arm that gropes out into the darkness of metaphysics. In short, philosophers have transformed our personal relation to the world to stuff like qualia and intuitions.

Valerie Solanas gets it right when she says:

"Being empty, he looks outward, not only for guidance and control, but for salvation and for the meaning of life."

Outward, as in, "our moral intuitions differ...", "what people of different class backgrounds would say about copulating with dead chickens". Solanas talks about the inward-looking philosopher who poses the emptiness he finds within himself (an emptiness she has a lot to say about, read the manifesto!) as the Human condition and, voilá!, philosophy has nothing to do with you, it has started to become a completely impersonal affair, musings about problems that concern nobody in particular. It does not matter whether the philosopher gazes inwards or whether he directs his attentions outwards provided that the attitude of self-annihilation and contempt is the same. Someone, Mary Midgley, I think, once wrote that we should address many philosophical ideas with the question: what are you afraid of?' - I couldn't agree more. I find the attitude Solanas is pointing at in myself.

The common dimension of the chicken example and the mountain example is not only that they both build on a conception about intuitions, "what we would be inclined to say". The common denominator here is, I think, a certain disengaged relation to what we say and how we react. It is important here that nobody in particular is talking, and that there is no situation in particular that is being discussed. When we - nobody in particular - talk about mountains - in no particular situation - we seem to be in the business of expressing our convictions about some form of epistemological structure that can be evaluated and criticized by philosophy. When we react to moral questions - I can't find the strenght in me to repeat that horrid example - from the point of view of "intuitions" those reactions are easily reducible to "cultural contingencies". (There are different uses of "intuition" cropping up here, I know that)

Solanas says it best: philosophy has become a nice tool for propping up the feeling of meaninglessness with "the human condition", "essences" and what have you. I'm not saying that all philosophical problems will disappear in a whiff by saying this, but maybe you and I will recognize something, gain sight of something, by acknowledging it?

If you are interested in experimental philosophy you may start with this page along with this article. The idea of experimental philosophy - "get up from that arm-chair!" - seems quite interesting and at first glance it appears quite sympathetic, but I am slightly sceptical nonetheless. "Experimental philosophy" seems to presuppose that there could be empirical answers, perhaps statistics provided by opinion polling, that could resolve the problems of knowledge, truth and morality as these questions have been traditionally stated in philosophical discussion. "If philosophers want to demonstrate that their arguments comport with how the mind really works, say the proponents of experimental philosophy, they need to get off their duffs." At least some experimental philosophers write as if they want to supplement traditional philosophical views on 'reference' or 'intentions' by looking at these 'philosophically problematic concepts' from the point of view of what is called "folk concepts". The focus of attention is hereby switched from "a priori intuitions of philosophers" (considered insufficient for philosophical analysis) to "intuitions of non-philosophers".

I would say to this that these presuppositions need to be evaluated - the idea that philosophy revolves around some inherently problematic concepts that we need to work out a complete account of (as if knowledge and intentions were a specific thing, the structure of which could be disclosed in careful & meticulous philosophical drudgery). Opinion polls will only worsen the situation, however much they bear the promise of clarity, empirical findings and rigour. Empirical methods will not solve conceptual confusion. But of course I want to admit that there might be some work that has been done in this field that has some merits. I know too little to say. Some of the driving force behind experimental philosophy seems to be that philosophy should be connected to the ways we, not just philosophers, actually think. That is, somehow, OK, but I'm afraid that we are talking about very different notions about the role of illuminating "how we think". In this post I was trying to show this. But it'll be interesting to see the development of this philosophical movement. Is it only a trend, or is it here to stay?