Intuitions as evidence

Abstract

This essay addresses the use of intuitions as evidence in contemporary analytic philosophy. Chapter 1 demonstrates that intuitions are currently treated as the primary source of evidence in philosophical investigation. Chapter 2 defends an account of intuition on which an intuition that p involves p's seeming necessarily true. Chapter 3 takes up one broad strand of contemporary skepticism about the evidential value of intuitions. It outlines some contemporary arguments against the use of intuitions in moral philosophy, semantics, modal metaphysics, and epistemology. It concludes with an outline of the general argument form of which the particular arguments presented are instances. Chapter 4 explains why one contemporary attempt to meet this kind of skepticism fails, and then goes on to argue that the skeptical arguments fail because they are unsupported and self-defeating. Chapter 5 turns to a more general ground of skepticism about intuitions: the claim that we have no independent assurance of their reliability. Drawing on the work of Thomas Reid and William Alston, it shows that this fact cannot reasonably ground a skepticism restricted to intuition because the same is true of every one of our basic faculties.