Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
DePaul (Michael) & Ramsey (William)
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Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 1998


"Bealer (George) - Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


Philosophers Index Abstract
    The phenomenology of a priori intuition is explored at length (where a priori intuition is taken to be not a form of belief but rather a form of seeming, specifically intellectual as opposed to sensory seeming). Various reductive accounts of intuition are criticized, and Humean empiricism (which, unlike radical empiricism, does admit analyticity intuitions as evidence) is shown to be epistemically self-defeating. This paper also recapitulates the defense of the thesis of the 'autonomy' and 'authority' of philosophy given in the author's "A Priori Knowledge and the Scope of Philosophy" (Philosophical Studies, 1996).


"Cummins (Robert) - Reflections on Reflective Equilibrium"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"DePaul (Michael) - Why Bother with Reflective Equilibrium?"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"DePaul (Michael) & Ramsey (William) - Rethinking Intuition: Preface"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Foley (Richard) - Rationality and Intellectual Self-Trust"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Goldman (Alvin) & Pust (Joel) - Philosophical Theory and Intuitional Evidence"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Gopnik (Alison) & Schwitzgebel (Eric) - Whose Concepts Are They, Anyway? The Role of Philosophical Intuition in Empirical Psychology"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Graham (George) & Horgan (Terence) - Southern Fundamentalism and the End of Philosophy"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


Philosophers Index Abstract
    We describe and motivate a metaphilosophical position we call Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy, which asserts that inquiry into the nature and workings of human concepts, and into the semantics of the terms expressing these concepts, is both 1) a centrally important component of philosophy, and 2) a broadly empirical enterprise in which semantic intuitions figure as empirical data much as grammaticality intuitions figure as empirical data in linguistics. We also describe, illustrate, and motivate a species of Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy we call Southern Fundamentalist Metaphilosophy, which asserts that philosophically interesting concepts are generally austere, rather than opulent, in their ideological commitments.


"Gutting (Gary) - Rethinking Intuition: A Historical and Metaphilosophical Introduction"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Horowitz (Tamara) - Philosophical intuitions and psychological theory"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


Philosophers Index Abstract
  1. To what extent can philosophical thought experiments1 reveal norms?
  2. Some ethicists have argued that certain thought experiments2 reveal that people draw a morally significant distinction between "doing" and "allowing".
  3. I examine one such thought experiment3 in detail and argue that the intuitions it elicits can be explained by prospect theory, a psychological theory about the way people reason. The extent to which such alternative explanations of the results of thought experiments4 in philosophy are generally available is an empirical question.

Another Abstract
  1. Questions to what extent philosophical thought experiments5 can reveal norms.
  2. Information on Warren Quinn's thought experiments6;
  3. Detailed information on prospect theory;
  4. Conclusion reached.

Author’s Introduction
  1. Some philosophers, particularly ethicists and epistemologists, see as one of their tasks the discovery of norms, ethical or epistemological, that we more or less live by.
  2. Reflection on naturally occurring moral or epistemological dilemmas will reveal these norms to some extent just as observation of the physical world will reveal the laws of physics to some extent.
  3. But just as physicists must perform controlled experiments to decide among rival hypotheses that they cannot distinguish by observing naturally occurring events, philosophers must perform thought experiments7 to illuminate norms that naturally occurring dilemmas don’t reveal. This is not to say that ethics is like physics in other respects. Physicists see themselves as discovering physical laws, whereas philosophers often take themselves to be exploring the structure of our concepts, or, in the case of ethicists, uncovering moral norms. It is an open question to what extent philosophical thought experiments8 can reveal norms.
  4. Only case studies can answer the question or at least answer it in part. This article is such a case study.

Paper Comment

For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File9.


"Kornblith (Hilary) - The Role of Intuition in Philosophical Inquiry: An Account with No Unnatural Ingredients"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Ramsey (William) - Prototypes and Conceptual Analysis"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


Philosophers Index Abstract
    In this paper, I explore the implications of recent empirical research on concept representation for the philosophical enterprise of conceptual analysis. I argue that conceptual analysis, as it is commonly practiced, is committed to certain assumptions about the nature of our intuitive categorization judgments. I then try to show how these assumptions clash with contemporary accounts of concept representation in cognitive psychology. After entertaining an objection to my argument, I close by considering ways in which conceptual analysis might be altered to accord better with the empirical work.


"Rosch (Eleanor) & Mervis (Carolyn B.) - Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Shafir (Eldar) - Philosophical Intuitions and Cognitive Mechanisms"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Sosa (Ernest) - Minimal Intuition"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


"Stich (Stephen) - Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and the Problem of Cognitive Diversity"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


Philosophers Index Abstract
    This is a paper about different ways of thinking or "cognitive diversity," and the problem of choosing among them. It defends a pair of claims. The first is that one influential proposal for solving the problem--a proposal that invokes the notion of reflective equilibrium--will not work. The second is much more radical. It maintains that the argument against the reflective equilibrium approach generalizes into an argument against all epistemological theories that invoke conceptual analysis as a way of resolving the problem of cognitive diversity.


"Wisniewski (Edward J.) - The Psychology of Intuition"

Source: DePaul & Ramsey - Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, 1998


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