elwoodblues

My philosophy of language prof (who I've also had for symbolic logic) brought up an interesting point the other day, and I'm still not able to wrap my head around it. Might explain why I've not done so well with philosophy, though.

She said that the ultimate arbiter in any debate or discussion in _science_ is logic, reason, scientific method. The ultimate arbiter in any debate or discussion in _philosophy_ is intuition.

I don't know. It certainly brings into focus the format of a lot of the essays we've been reading (Locke, Lewis, Chomsky, Strawson) and why I've been having trouble swallowing the arguments. I use intuition as a sort of indicator of what I might want to pay more attention to, not as some kind of truth indicator. Leah seems to be saying that it's intuition, not strictly reason, that is the truth indicator in philosophy.

Which makes it entirely subjective. Which I don't like. But it sure makes a lot of sense...

Clutch

Well, assuming that's exactly what she said -- no insult to you, I just know how what you try to say in class often loses something in translation to even the best students -- then it's a careless comment that shouldn't be taken too seriously. As a matter of charity towards your instructor.

First, the term 'intuition' is so radically polysemous in philosophy that just to allude to intuition is to say nothing much. A philosopher of language might be more inclined to think of intuition as used by someone like Chomsky, where it simply refers to the fact that explanatory generalizations about syntax have to be grounded in pretheoretic judgements of grammaticality. This is very different from the notion of intuition as employed by Kant, which in turn is quite different from that alluded to by Brouwer, then there's Moore... and none of them have much in common with the popular usage to the term to mean something like "gut feeling". (So your remark about subjectivity might apply in only a very limited sense -- not one that should obviously be worrisome.)

Second, as the Chomsky, Kant and Brouwer references suggest, the roles of these various concepts (unfortunately designated by a single expression) are specific to philosophers and schools of thought. The claim that philosophy tout court deals in intuition (pick a meaning) to the exclusion of data is one that could only be made in ignorance of vast swathes of philosophy conducted by people like Schlick (supervisor: Planck), Reichenbach, Carnap, Dennett, the Churchlands, Akins, Earman, Salmon, Grunbaum, Gibbard, Gauthier, or any of a hundred influential philosophers of science, mind, language, game-theoretic ethics, evolutionary approaches to X, for any philosophical X.... You see the point.

Obviously there are differences between philosophy and science. But because the distinctions themselves are blurry, and much territory is either known to be common or is at least disputed, there is no reason to think that any one simple criterion is going to limn the difference. The one your prof suggests does not even seem a loose approximation of such a criterion.

Tom Sawyer

Intuition is used in both science and philosophy to get a starting point and to move forward when your theory hits a wall.

A lot of scientific research is started because the scientist thinks a certain thing will happen if he does something. He then tests that intuition and sees the results. Based of those results, he makes other predictions of what will happen. Some are done by crunching numbers and others because he knows something similar happens to something else or he just has a hunch or something weird happened during the experiment, so he tries other tests to see if his intuitions are correct.

In philosophy, the same thing happens, except that the philosopher doesn't perform tests, he just tries to reason out what will happen and goes from there and tries to reason out other things based upon his conclusions.

The process is the same, it's just that the external tests done in science are replaced by internal reason in philosophy. That being the case, science is forced to adapt to the external world while philosophy is only constrained by the phiosopher's perceptions of the world and what he thinks it could be.

Laurentius

The prof might be right taking into consideration the fact that science's goal is establishing the exact facts of reality whereas philosophy's goal isn't that.

Philosophy basicaly defines the fundemantal terms of reasoning/discourse and integrates the multifarious facts into one coherent picture. It's a matter of intuition, you see_

AVE

Clutch

Why say this? Presumably philosophers of language who consider whether "meaning is use" want to know whether the exact fact about meaning is that it's use. Or, if there are abstract objects, then it's a precise fact that there are abstract objects.

The notion of a fact is unsuited to distinguish philosophy from science, just because the notion is so promiscuous; to wonder whether P is to wonder whether it's a fact that P.

Starboy

Was this a philosophy instructor? I suspect so. The ultimate arbiter in any scientific debate is nature. You can argue and intuit all you want. In science it comes down to what are the results of the experiment. Until data can support one side or another, it remains open.

As for philosophy all it has to go with is logic, there is no arbiter in philosophy, so perhaps what your teacher was referring to was the use of intuition to decide between two philosophical positions that were argued logically but resulted in no compelling reason to adopt one over the other.

Starboy

Rusting Car Bumper

It can be argued that science is a philosophical system. In order to "do science" one must accept certain metaphysical constraints. This comes in the form of either explicitly accepting them or by ignoring possible problems.

I don't know who said it but the job of science is not "establishing the exact facts of reality." To Paraphrase Feynman, science is not about proving things but about deciding which ideas about the world are more or less likely.

Philosophy is about a systematic examination of our most "deeply" held ideas and beliefs with the purpose of getting to the correct ones.

Science deals with observable data as an "arbiter" whereas philosophy deals with not just observable data but the relationship of ideas.

Reason is an arbiter in philosophy as well. In fact, the history of reason being used in science rises out of its use in philosophy.

I don't think the two can be cleanly seperated as the prof seems to imply.

DC

elwoodblues

Okay, let me try to recall _exactly_ how things went down...

We're discussing a paper by a philosopher (Locke) concerning linguistics and the arguments he was using. She brought up one, saying that he was taking a very intuitive idea (the concept that we have private thoughts and ideas) and taking it much too far in a very extreme form of empiricism that he can not sustain. We mapped out how this was so, and it was very starkly clear. So I asked why he was so regarded in the first place; how could this be a good argument if it crumbled so easily? She went back to the idea of it being a very intuitive argument, even if it was, at root, wrong.

Anyway, I say, "Well, since when are we listening to our intuition as some sort of truth detector?" Then she said, "Intuition IS the final and ultimate arbiter in philosophy. Once it is not, we're talking about something that is not philosophy. It is medicine, or physics, or economics."

And once I started looking at these philosophical papers in this fashion, looking for blatant appeals to intuition that are unsupported by further argument or proof, it snaps into focus. That IS what philosophy is, at root. At least from the small body of work we're studying right now, plus what I've been exposed to before, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

And this is all coming from a professor who I respect the hell out of. I've taken 2 logic classes and a philosophy class with her. Best teacher I've ever had.

Rusting Car Bumper

It seems that she is taking too broad of approach to what counts as intuition. Further, I'd suggest that you examine old scientific works of the same period. They don't read much differently than philsophy.

DC

Clutch

Yes, this is known to happen when one goes looking for confirming evidence. One finds it. The same thing works for parapsychology.

Notice that I referred you to a list of authors who fail to fit the criterion of demarcation in question. This constitutes recalcitrant data, publicly checkable, offered as disconfirming your hypothesis. In offering it, however, I was manifestly doing philosophy: providing disconfirming data, and not appealing to intuition in any obvious sense.
Well, perhaps it is a very small body of work, since for the people I mentioned, who have in large measure just been 20thC philosophy, the criterion simply fails. And much earlier, for that matter. Was Descartes' plenism based on intuition, or on a generalization from observations of cause and effect? Was the corresponding theory of light as propagating instantly science or philosophy? Do we have to look for something answering the title of intuition in his work on the subject before we can answer that question, or, more likely, conclude that there is no substantive answer to be given since the question presupposes a false dichotomy? (If we answer that it was philosophy, we have the subsequent problem of deciding when the theory of light travelling in a medium became scientific, as it clearly was by the time Michelson and Morley took it on. The primary difference between Descartes' plenum and the luminiferous ether was just the proposed compressibility of the medium -- so is compressibility somehow a matter of intuition?)
From what I know of you, your respect would not be easily earned, so I'm sure she is an excellent teacher. But she's wrong; or, no doubt more accurately, what she said in that one line was wrong. I'd be surprised if she wasn't speaking off the cuff.

Let me be clear that I am not denying that the philosophical literature contains many appeals to intuition, in any one of the various senses of the term (though you do not clarify which you mean). It does. It also contains many arguments from the best current theory, many arguments from empirical data, many arguments from laws of nature, and so forth. For each of the senses of 'intuition', there's plenty of it going on in philosophy, and plenty of other things too.