Where Intuitions Conflict

If you ask a group of people a philosophical question or present them with a challenging thought experiment, it’s often the case that they will express very different views about it. We quite naturally interpret this as different people having different intuitions. But is that what’s going on?

In “Conflicting Intuitions,” published earlier this year, Joshua Knobe (Yale) takes up this question. Having imagined posing a question about free will to a group of students who express disagreement over its answer, he writes:

[I]t might be that some people have compatibilist intuitions, while others have incompatibilist intuitions, and similarly for each of the other traditional questions of philosophy. Then the puzzlement we feel regarding these questions might be explained in terms of the conflict between the intuitions of different people.

But that’s not the only possible explanation:

I will argue that experimental research has been providing evidence for a very different hypothesis. On this hypothesis, the difficulty is in large part a matter of individual people having conflicting intuitions. Thus, when a person encounters a thought experiment designed to get at one of the traditional questions of philosophy, she will often have an intuition pulling her in one direction but also an intuition pulling her in the exact opposite direction. This might seem like an obvious hypothesis, and perhaps it is. Still, I think that its implications haven’t been fully appreciated. If true, it would have important implications both empirically and philosophically.

On the empirical side:

The conflicting intuitions hypothesis has important implications when it comes to what exactly our theories about people’s intuition are supposed to explain…

If we assume that the difference in responses is due to different people having different intuitions, we would naturally assume that the theory should explain why different people have different intuitions regarding this case. So we might think that our theory of the underlying cognitive processes should explain why [some] have one intuition and the other[s] have the opposite intuition.

However, if we conclude that the difference in responses is due to each individual person having conflicting intuitions, there is an important sense in which there is more that needs explaining. An adequate theory would not merely have to explain why half of the participants have the intuition that it is a case of causation; it would have to explain why those people are conflicted…

There are various issues on the philosophical side. Here’s one, mentioned after the discussion of some empirical work on cases about which respondents say that apparently conflicting intuitions are both correct:

Independent of anything that could be settled through further empirical work on ordinary intuitions, we need to know whether there is some way of working out a philosophical theory that makes sense of what people seem to be saying in these cases. For example, within the philosophy of law, we can ask whether there is any way of developing a theory on which it can be right to say something like: there is a sense in which this action clearly violates the law, but there is a deeper sense in which it does not violate the law. Similarly, within the work on personal identity, we can ask whether there is any way of developing a theory on which it can be right to say: there is a sense in which this person is clearly Phineas, but there is also a deeper sense in which he is not truly Phineas.

Here again, I suspect we will arrive at different answers for different philosophical issues. For some, we may find that it is possible to develop such a theory, and philosophical work along these lines might lead to important new insights. For others, we will presumably arrive at the opposite conclusion. We will find that there is simply no possible way for both intuitions to be true.

Additionally, “we would need a clear answer to the… question as to how conflicting intuitions can have a larger philosophical significance even when we recognize that there is no possible way that both intuitions can be true.”

The whole article is here. Discussion welcome.