A good summary article on intuitions in biology 21 Feb 2010 The Studia Philosophica Estonia is not a journal I regularly read, but this article – “The Role of Intuitions in Philosophy” – is a good introduction to the topic, and it’s free. I tend to think that “intuition” is an empty word, myself. I like the phrase “traditional faculty view” for its ambiguity – the authors mean “the traditional view that intuitions are a faculty of mind”, but I immediately thought of “intuitions come from faculty members” [of some philosophy department]. Philosophy
Cognition Are emotions 2D? 7 Oct 20137 Oct 2013 I recently became aware that there is a new development in emotion classification. Previously, as far as I knew, emotions were thought to be human universals, give or take some variation (such as the emotion “metagu” among the Ifaluk islanders, see Linquist 2007) and researchers like Paul Ekman, who works as… Read More
Epistemology 50 words for snow, or conceptual confusion 11 Sep 20171 Mar 2019 Series Conceptual confusion The economics of cultural categories What are phenomena? What counts as sociocultural? Species Constructing phenomena Explanations and phenomena In a well-known and generally debunked story, Inuit people have around 50 words for snow. Or so the argument by anthropologist Franz Boas goes. In fact, people who engage… Read More
Philosophy On philosophical practice 8 Aug 2009 One might well want to ask how seriously this doctrine is intended, just how strictly and literally the philosophers who propound it mean their words to be taken. … It is, as a matter of fact, not at all easy to answer, for strange though the doctrine looks, we are… Read More
That reminded me of something I read today on Peter van Inwagen’s essay “Modal Epistemology”. I’ll quote: “[a philosopher who does ‘all sort or fanciful modal judgments’] is unaware that the modal beliefs he expresses or presupposes when he says ‘we’d have had more room if we’d moved the table up against the wall’… and the modal beliefs he gives such confident expression to in his writings… have quite different sources. The former have their source in our ordinary human powers of ‘modalization’… the latter have their source in his professional socialization, in ‘what his peers will let him get away with saying’.”
What philosophers these days mean by the word ‘intuition’ today is pretty close to what Descartes meant by ‘preconceived opinion’, except that the former has an honorific connotation.
Oops. Delete the redundant word ‘today’ from that. I wish that this site allowed editing or deletion of comments.