Mr. Sammi

elwoodblues, the position of being intuitive is constrained by lack of practice. When intuitive ideas air their perspective they have a good chance to become reason.

Perhaps intuition is the result of the imagination.

I agree with the position as an initial cause.

Sammi Na Boodie ()

Amos

Your teacher is right Elwood but be not confused with "gut feeling" and "intuition" because they are not the same. The intuition here is when our "gut feeling" has become rational knowledge through understanding. So she is talking about Pure Reason without gut feeling (even though she may not know this herself).

There is no argument required in such philosophy because the words are spoken by the arbiter himself and all we need to do is find agreement with those words, or else the arbiter could not be the "ultimate" arbiter. In other words, the ultimate arbiter is omniscient and has no need for science or logic (induction as opposed to deduction).

Amos

Well if nobody will ask the question I will volunteer the answer.

If the philosophic mind is onmiscient the scientist extracts the illunination from his own omniscient mind and because the hypothesis came by inspiration the scientist must later use the rigor of logic to affirm the validity of his inspiration and so arrive at the same truth.

Longbow

Well, I do think there is a lot of merit to other responses that note other authors that don't try to appeal to something like "intuition". I think another crushing point, here, that I would think is more obvious direct rebuttal that no one seems to be jumping on is that a statement like "philosophy is all about intuition" is, itself a philosophical statement. Basically, yet again, the paradox of skepticism comes into play. You can only weaken the veracity of philosophical arguments and statements with philosophical arguments and statements. Inasmuch as you are successful, you undermine the veracity of your own contention.

In any case, the reason you and perhaps your philosophy professor react this way is largely for two reasons in my opinion:

1) Philosophy as a field doesn't ever seem to make any progress

It is often felt by many that there is no progress in philosophy. By contrast, in math an science, most of the papers, say, that get published aren't really "debunked" later on. It is true that there are good papers and bad papers, but the papers in math an science always seem to be stating some fact while in philosophy papers just defend a point of view. For the most part, all of the papers in math can stand together consistently as a body of knowledge, some being virtually devoid of any importance or much meaning and others being very central to the field. In philosophy, this is not so. None of the papers can stand together this way, each contradicting virtually every other in some way or another.

This argument is largely predicated on an unfair comparison. For starters, a math paper dying in obscurity is really intellectually equivalent to a philosophy paper being "debunked" or refuted. The reason it seems that philosophy never makes any progress is because it is being held to a much higher standard than math or science. Math an science (in the absense of philosophy) haven't made a lot of progress either with the kind of profound problems that are often thought of as the "problems of philosophy". Meanwhile, any factoid a sceintist or mathematician can muster is deemed "progress" in math and science. If you limit "progress" in math and science to just what is "important" (like one implicitly does in philosophy) then I don't think as much progress has been made there as it might at first seem.

And conversely, a lot of progress has been made over the years in philosophy if you look on a smaller scale. Most philosophers accept the arguments Gettier used to show that knowledge cannot be merely justified, true belief. Most philosophers accept that the principle of universality is an essential aspect to moral statements. Logic -- nuff said. There's a lot of stuff. More than anything else, read Plato and read Kant and then Russell's Principia -- there is a huge difference in the sophistication the authors' arguments -- the number of distinctions they can make and what they can account for.

2) Philosophy lacks rigor

Of course, this isn't exactly true. The foundations of mathematics, for instance, was invented largely by philosophers (like Bertrand Russell who was not a mathematician). But, the point is still more or less legitimate. Philosophy is informal while math is a formal subject and science usually has (at least in principle) a formal method of obtaining and evaluating results. A point like this is usually tied into the above (1) with statements like "you can actually establish or prove things in math and science while you never seem to be able to in philosophy". (And, hence (1) above -- philosophy never makes any progress while math and science do.)

I recently made a post about the nature of philosophical vagueness that was basically aimed at this issue of formality. More succinctly, there is such a thing as philosophical vagueness. If it plays a major role in a given problem in math or science, then it usually kills the project (as a mathematical or scientific one). Actually, it turns the issue into a philosophical one. In any case, this apparent lack of rigor stems primarily from the fact that most meaningful problems start out informally posed by ordinary people in society at large. The connection between them and the rest of academia are philosophers. Philosophy is really the meta-field of every other intellectual pursuit (which is not to say that philosophers, then, must in some sense be the "real" experts in any given field). So, in this way, it will always have to concern itself with these informal or "fuzzy" issues. Basically, it lacks rigor because it doesn't have that luxury like math and science do.

Feather

Very well stated.

I'd also like to add that science is a philosophical system. It can be be summarized as follows:

The metaphysics of science is that reality exists and is, so far as can be understood, objective.

The epistemology of science is empiricism--facts can be known through experiment and verification--coupled with reason (for analysis of the data, of course).

The ethics of science is practically non existent. There is no generalised notion of morality in the scientific method. I would call it amoral; others might call it nihilistic or claim the question of ehtics is simply irrelevent to science.

Likewise for aesthetics.

So viewed this way any statement putting philosophy and science in two separate categories for purposes of comparison is one coming from ignorance, in my opinion.

Synaesthesia

What about when intuition conflicts with what we discover to be the structure of reality?

I am something of a Quinian in my view of the relationship between philosophy and science. Science and philosophy are continuous with each other, both provide conceptual frameworks that can augment the other. Philosophy can forsee conceptual dead ends, science can ensure that philosophy remains relevant.

Metaphysics is all too often an example of what can happen when philosophers think that science has nothing to teach them.

[ October 13, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

Keith Russell

Synaesthesia:

How do you define 'metaphysics'?

To me, the concept encompasses all 'knowledge'; which includes the discoveries of all branches of science.

I'm assuming that your definition is different; I'd be interested in reading it.

Thanks,

Keith.

Rusting Car Bumper

Didn't I already say this?

DC

Feather

Yes, you did.

Clutch

Science doesn't deliver "nature". It delivers data. And the interpretation of data is frequently a controversial thing. Arguing and (pick a sense -- nobody else has bothered to) appealing to "intuition" are exactly what go on in such interpretive processes.

Huh? "There is no arbiter in philosophy"? Why do you think logic is supposed to be useful? It's truth-preserving. A standard move -- perhaps the standard move -- in philosophy is to explode an opposing argument by showing that it entails a known falsehood. Indeed, test of validity itself is given in terms of immunity to counterexamples: again, immunity to proof of known falsehood. By practice and by definition, logic is held responsible to our best theories of the world at every stage.

And when, in a discourse, it begins systematically to fail to capture the empirical results... we change it. Hence quantum logic, for example.

Again, this attempt to give some single criterion distinguishing science from philosophy is just wrong.