Intuitions about meaning, experience, and reliability

Abstract

Speakers’ intuitive judgments about meaning are commonly taken to provide important data for many debates in philosophy of language and pragmatics. The chapter presents two strategies that aim to explain and justify the evidential role and methodological utility of such judgments. The first strategy is inspired by the so-called perceptual view on intuitions, a view that emphasizes the experience-like nature of intuitions. The second strategy is a reliabilist one and derives the evidential utility of speakers’ judgments about meaning from the reliability of the psychological mechanisms underlying their production. What are the merits of the two strategies? Is one of them more fundamental than the other? It is argued that we have reasons to prefer the reliabilist view. This claim is supported in the chapter by three parameters on which the reliabilist strategy fares better than the experience-based one.