Kieran
Healy writes on the (slow-)growing controversy over the role of intuitions
in philosophy. For background, see the papers by Jonathan Weinburg et
al here,
here
and here. (If you haven’t seen the survey results about intuitions on Gettier cases across cultural and social groups in these papers yet, you should. And prepare to be a little suprised.)
Kieran has a rather funny caricature of the way philosophers (or at least
metaphysicians) generally argue, but then goes off on a riff about why we
should care more about where intuitions come from.

In the meantime, you might be interested in looking at other writers, who
have explored the
idea that our intuitions might have institutional
roots; that culture might mold conceptions
of rationality and thus deeply affect
how you think; that classification
is a social process which might have its origins in
material life; and that although individual and social cognition interact in
complex ways, getting socialized into a culture often implies subscribing
to its point of view.

I’m
not sure how any of this undercuts the use philosophers make of intuitions. It
seems to me that even if we acknowledge all of this, there are still epistemological
and metaphysical reasons to use intuitions in philosophy. (You
mean you’ll be defending philosophy by using more philosophy? Yeah,
well what did you expect me to use, chemistry or something?)

The
epistemological reason is that for each of these facts about intuition, we
could (I think) find an equally
disturbing fact about perception. How we see the world around us is affected by
the kind of culture we’re in, what we expect to find and so forth. But none of
that implies that we should stop trusting perceptions as a source of evidence,
provided we’re suitably careful about how we employ them. Of course, practically
nothing should stop us trusting perception as a source of
evidence; that way lies madness, if not philosophical
immortality.

The
metaphysical reason is that intuitions are sometimes constitutive of the
concepts we’re aiming to analyse. Want to know what’s a house? Well, presumably
houses are things that satisfy the predicate “house”, or fall under the concept
HOUSE. And presumably the facts about what makes an object satisfy the
predicate “house” include facts about how the term “house” gets the meaning it
gets in the language we speak. And presumably those facts include facts about
the intuitions people have about houses. A similar story is probably true for
the concept HOUSE, though here there are some more prominent
dissenters. Now it’s rather controversial whether a similar story could be
true if we replaced “house” with “item of knowledge”, or “rational belief”, or “mind”,
or “person”, or “just act”, or (I guess most controversially) “object”, but at
least for terms towards the left of that list, it seems plausible enough.