Intuition Talk and Reasoning Markers: A Corpus-Study from the Philosophy of Language

Abstract

Cappelen (2012) argues against the Thesis of Centrality, that is, against the idea that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidential support for their theories. Cappelen challenges this notion by targeting the “Argument from ‘Intuition’-Talk”, i.e., the idea that intuitions must play a decisive role in the arguments of analytic philosophers because they use intuition talk profusely. This paper empirically examines this claim by assessing the prevalence of intuition talk in critical parts of the arguments. Specifically, it explores whether intuition talk coincides with reasoning markers signifying premises and conclusions. To accomplish this, I will first compile a corpus of articles on taste disagreements. Then, I will conduct two types of analysis: a frequency list analysis, and an analysis of the dispersion of both types of vocabulary along the corpus.