The Role of Intuition

Abstract

Since its inception, experimental philosophy has been bound up with methodological questions regarding the status of intuition. Several of the most well-known early experimental studies attracted attention due to their criticisms of “ traditional ” intuition-based argumentation, in which a philosopher takes intuitive reactions to an imagined case to serve as evidence for or against philosophical claims. When, for example, Weinberg et al. (2001) and Machery et al. (2004) found cross-cultural variation in responses to thought experiments, they took this to provide a serious challenge to the default assumption of a “ shared ” set of intuitions on which they claimed traditional methodology rests. Such “ negative ” projects, of course, refl ect only a part of the picture. Over its brief history, experimental philosophy has developed into a crossdisciplinary subfi eld whose practitioners pursue diverse aims. Some experimental philosophers conceive of their project as involving systematic empirical study of intuitions qua intuitions, of the psychological processes that produce them, and of the conceptual frameworks that they refl ect. Some view themselves as pursuing a new, more empirical approach to resolving standard philosophical questions. However, even these nonnegative projects raise serious methodological questions. Th eir empirical methodology is itself a challenge to the image of the philosopher ’ s task as a fundamentally armchairbound exercise; they suggest that intuitive judgments have a diff erent role to play than perhaps previously thought. Experimental philosophy in all its forms, then, invites us to refl ect on the role of intuition in philosophical methodology. Do the intuitive judgments of nonphilosophers provide just as much evidence as those of philosophers?