“Intuition and the threat of skepticism” by Jennifer Nado (9 Oct)

Current literature surrounding the use of intuition in philosophy has a tendency to focus on extremes. Philosophers in the anti-intuition camps have frequently taken evidence for intuition’s fallibility to license dramatic, wide-ranging doubts about the epistemic legitimacy of appeals to intuition. Meanwhile, friends of traditional methodology have responded with counter-arguments which tend to target positions that reject intuition entirely. This has led to a sort of common conception, occurring implicitly and sometimes explicitly throughout the intuition literature, according to which critics of intuition are in fact nothing more than purveyors of a certain brand of skepticism – in other words, critics of intuition tend to be viewed as ‘intuition skeptics’. This paper develops a new interpretation of what I call the ‘variation’ argument against intuition. This interpretation avoids skepticism by claiming that intuitions really are a source of knowledge in most cases – while still simultaneously denying that intuitions are at all suitable for their current prominent role in philosophical theorizing.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 9 Oct 2012
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Jennifer Nado, Assistant Professor, Lingan University, Hong Kong
Moderator: Dr. Neil Sinhababu

About the Speaker: Jennifer Nado is an Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She received her PhD at Rutgers University in 2011 with a dissertation entitled “Intuition and Inquiry”, under the direction of Stephen Stich. Her primary interests are in metaphilosophy, the epistemology of intuition, experimental philosophy, cognitive science, and moral psychology.

Comments are closed.