Intuition as Conscious Experience

Description

Is torturing the innocent OK? Just now something happened: it seemed to you that torturing the innocent is wrong. What kind of mental state were you in? What is its nature? Perhaps you now believe that torturing the innocent is wrong because it just seemed to you that it is. If so, that seems appropriate. But is it really, and if so, what could explain this? In this book, Koksvik argues these mental states form a psychological kind called ‘intuition’, and that having an intuition indeed justifies you in believing what it says. What explains this, he argues, is how similar intuition is to perception. Through a detailed examination he shows that intuition, just like perception, is a conscious experience, and that the two experience types have important properties in common, in virtue of which they can both justify belief. In sharp contrast to traditional thought, Koksvik argues that intuition is completely unrestricted in content: we have intuitions about morality and metaphysics, but also about all sorts of everyday things, like danger or trustworthiness, and in all cases they can justify. The use of intuition is thus not only a legitimate part of philosophical and scientific practice, it also plays a pervasive, important and legitimate role in all of our everyday rational lives. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 1.1 First steps 1.2 More rigour 1.2.1 Representational content 1.2.2 Phenomenal character 1.2.3 Relation to belief 1.2.4 Degrees of belief 1.2.5 Justification 1.2.6 Not knowledge 1.2.7 . . . and not evidence 1.3 Aim and approach 1.4 Why this matters 1.5 A new view 2 Reduction? 2.1 Doxastic views 2.1.1 Motivation 2.1.2 Taxonomy 2.2 The standard case against doxastic views 2.3 The argument from rational criticisability 2.4 Partial belief 2.5 Doxastic attitudes with different content 2.6 Intuition as a disposition to believe 2.7 Rational criticisability returns 2.8 A lesson about the nature of intuition 3 The shape of the view 3.1 Intuition is a conscious experience 3.2 The Justification Hypothesis is true 3.2.1 A lower boundary 3.3 Liberalism 3.4 Phenomenalism 3.5 The absent-experience challenge and ‘overlookable’ phenomenal character 3.6 No etiological restrictions 3.7 Intuition is wholly permissive with respect to content 4 Perceptual and intuitional experiences 4.1 Methodology 4.2 No content-specific phenomenology 4.3 Answering the absent-experience challenge 4.4 Phenomenology of objectivity 4.4.1 Recognising objectivity 4.4.2 Objectivity and the content of perception and intuition 4.4.3 Objectivity explains transparency 4.5 Phenomenology of pushiness 4.5.1 Recognising pushiness 4.6 Valence 4.7 Belief 4.8 Objectivity, pushiness, and ‘presentation’ 4.9 What intuition is 5 Phenomenalism 5.1 Perception singlehandedly justifies belief 5.1.1 Perceptual justification without induction 5.1.2 Incoherence 5.1.3 Taking stock 5.2 Perception justifies belief in virtue of its phenomenal character 5.3 Two unsuccessful attempts 5.3.1 Seeming able to ‘just tell’ 5.3.2 ‘Presentational’ phenomenology 5.4 Pushiness and objectivity explain justification 5.5 In defence of the analogy 5.5.1 The disanalogy of content-specific phenomenology 5.5.2 The disanalogy of a known causal mechanism 5.5.3 The disanalogy of valence 5.6 Taking stock 6 The FIFO objection 6.1 The feeling-in-feeling-out objection 6.2 What the objection is not 6.3 Significance 6.3.1 Core 6.3.2 Scope 6.3.3 Depth 6.4 Initial evaluation 6.5 A reply 6.6 Objections 6.7 A verbal dispute, epistemic pluralism, and justification 7 Too much justification? 7.1 Defeat 7.2 Cognitive penetration 7.3 Logical fallacies 7.4 Should’ve known 7.5 There’s (even) more to the full story, of course 7.6 Taking stock 8 Final thoughts 8.1 Two questions 8.2 The role of intuition in philosophy 8.3 The role of intuition in everyday life Bibliography Index