Saving the Doxastic Account of Intuitions

In order to evaluate philosophical theories of knowledge, causation, consciousness, meaning, properties, free will, and the like, philosophers habitually do not make do with what is gathered by paradigmatic empirical methods, or with what we learn from logic and mathematics. They also rely on what they term their 'intuitions'. This widespread practise of using intuitions as evidence prompts two questions. First, what are intuitions? And secondly, is reliance on intuitions a reliable way to attain insight into the nature of knowledge, causation, consciousness, and the like? Although the second is of greater philosophical import, I will here solely be concerned with the first question. 1 In line with common practise, I suppose that answering it requires providing an account detailing how intuitions fit into our taxonomy of mental states. Many philosophers subscribe to a doxastic account of intuitions. Rather than accepting intuitions as mental states of a sui generis basic kind, doxastic accounts aim to explain intuitions in terms of the established mental kind of belief. This idea has proven rather popular. Lewis (1983, p. x) and Dennett (e.g. 1987c, p. 4f, 1991, p. 332, p. 399f) have prominently identified intuitions with beliefs. Taking judgments to be occurrent beliefs, and statements to be linguistic manifestations of beliefs, we find analogous ideas at the heart of numerous other elucidations of 'intuition'. 2 For all their deflationist appeal, doxastic accounts are widely suspected to founder on a straightforward objection: There are clear cases of someone having the intuition that p whilst not believing that p. Hence, intuitions cannot be beliefs. This argument from intuition without belief has been forcefully employed by George Bealer to argue the case for an alternative view. 3 Intuitions, Bealer maintains, form a mental kind sui generis: they are intellectual seemings. To have the intuition that p is to have the intellectual seeming that p. Champions of a Bealer-style intellectual seeming account deny that we can explain intuitions in terms of the established mental kind of belief. They maintain that we need to broaden our traditional taxonomy and acknowledge intuitions as a basic mental kind.