Rethinking Intuition: A Discuss Of Recent Views In Western Philosophy

The use of intuition abounds in modern analytic philosophy. A theory is commonly judged lacking when it fails to "capture" our intuitions and judged acceptable insofar as it captures more of our intuitions than other extant. This suggests that philosophers take intuitions to have a kind of evidential value. In particular, intuition is considered evidence that is used in the analysis of concepts, often in an attempt to find the individual necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of the concept under consideration. Alternatively intuition is used as evidence that one or more of the proposed necessary conditions is unacceptable, as, in Gettier counterexamples to the classical analysis of knowledge, while intuition is conveniently used in a variety of circumstances, there is no consensus as to the precise nature of scope of this, what some call, mysterious ability.As a means to aiding this end I have very generally divided up the possible attitudes one can take toward intuitions as falling into four camps. Camp one is what I call the Enemies of Intuition camp. The enemies of intuition, as I characterize them, take the use of intuition to be completely unjustified and unacceptable. The philosophical exemplars of this camp are Jaakko Hintikka and Robert Cummins. The second camp is the Acquaintances of Intuition camp and is paradigmatically represented by William Lycan and Hilary Kornblith. The Acquaintances are labeled as such because they give a very minor role to intuitions, but think that overall intuitions are basically unreliable. My discussion of the third camp, what I call the Lovers of Intuition. The exemplars of the Lovers of Intuition camp are George Bealer, Alvin Plantinga, and Laurence Bonjour, and one of the core uniting elements among them is their stipulation that intuition must be of apparent necessary truths.It is obvious that, whatever the ultimate strength of the Lover's position, they have retreat significantly from that held by their classical modern predecessors. As I see it, despite their admittedly questionable status, intuitions still have a fundamental place in philosophy-indeed, in any effort to understand ourselves and our world. They represent the inevitable starting point of any intellectual inquiry.