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Philosophy Without Intuitions . By Herman Cappelen . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012, pp. 242+xii, £25. ISBN 9780199644865
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Herman Cappelen's aim in this absorbing book is to argue that, despite what they may profess about their methodology, professional philosophers do not place any important reliance upon intuitions in support of their philosophical theories. He takes as his stalking horse the assumption of 'Centrality': the claim that 'contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories' (3). His aim is to show that Centrality is false. The claim is intended descriptively, not normatively: Cappelen is concerned with what our actual philosophical practice is with regard to intuitions, not with how it should be conducted. In discussing the merits and demerits of Centrality, he criticizes the view that intuitions are essentially linked to thought-experiments in a manner that reflects our conceptual competence about a given subject area.
Thought experiments work, Cappelen claims in his chapter 9, by drawing our attention to philosophically interesting features of the world; they do not point to basic intuitions underlying our judgments about a given topic. Philosophers do not in general seek conceptual truths, or a priori knowledge. Rather, they raise questions of various different kinds, which lead a deeper understanding of the issues involved. The resulting meta-philosophical picture is one in which different methodological issues arise depending upon the specific sub-field of philosophy under inquiry. There is no one general methodology that unifies the whole discipline.
In the first half of the book, Cappelen covers some useful ground, arguing against attempts to defend Centrality by appeal to philosophers' use of the term 'intuition' and its cognates. He does a good job in showing how widely these terms are used, and that many of these uses do not function to pick out anything philosophically significant. Three interpretative strategies, which he calls 'hedge strategies', are described in support of his view that philosophers do not make use of the term 'intuitive' in any significant sense. Some forms of intuition talk are like a verbal tick - the point can be equally well conveyed if the references to 'intuitively' and the like are simply removed. Others...