Intuitions are what make philosophy, or most of it, what it is. Intuitions, as an idea of currency which can be used to judge an idea, are simply an extension of common sense. Logic, while an excellent tool doesn’t give us the ability to determine false beliefs from true. Instead, what logic does is tells us what beliefs can be derived from what premises. Premises, in turn, bear fruitful (or unfruitful conclusions). This is a similar idea to one used in science, whereby a theory is good depending on its predictive value.
Any set of premises can be tweaked (and have other premises added) to give you basically any conclusion. As such, there are two ways of determining good beliefs from bad: parsimony and fruitfulness. Parsimony is the concept that the premises of the argument should be few and as contentless as possible. After all, if your premises spell out the conclusion, you have a logical fallacy, begging the question. But even assuming only a few key parts of an analysis can weaken a theory. Fruitfulness, on the other hand, is the idea that the conclusions a premise leads to tell something useful. For example, Newton’s theory of gravitation predicted that Uranus’ wobbly orbit must be caused by something, and the best fit was another planet. That planet, later discovered as Neptune, can be used as evidence for the theory. Intuitions are more subtle ideas, and unfortunately, not as verifiable. But if a philosophical theory has conclusions that are simply hard to digest, it is considered unintuitional. This does not necessarily say that it is false, but gives us motivation to find an alternate philosophy, or discard the intuitions.
Up next: Ethical Intuitions and the Trolley Problem
