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.