Supplemental material for Philosophy 5800
Why must intuitions be produced unconsciously

This is from my forthcoming article "Psychology and the Use of Intuitions in Philosophy"

In colloquial use, "intuition" refers to a faculty and also to the deliverances of that faculty: we can say "My intuition tells me P," and also "I have the intuition that P." I will use the term only in the second way, in part because that is how the term is used in contemporary philosophy, and also so as not to assume that there is a single faculty of intuition. Intuitions in this sense are had by people; let's call a person who has a given intuition an intuitor. When an intuitor has an intuition, that intuition has some propositional content, and because of this we can say that the intuition is about something (the things that the content represents). So, if Fred has the intuition that murder is wrong, Fred is the intuitor, the content of the intuition is that murder is wrong, and the intuition is about murder and wrongness.

But what is the intuition? An intuition is not its content, just as beliefs and desires are not identical to their contents. An intuition is a kind of experience. George Bealer's term for it, which I think apt, is "seeming" - an intuition is some content seeming to be true (Bealer, 1998). However, not every seeming is an intuition. Intuitions are typically distinguished from what are sometimes called "perceptual seemings," such as the seeming that there is a computer in front of me that is due to my seeing a computer in front of me; from seemings due to recollection, such as the seeming that I have been to Disneyland that is due to my recalling that I have been to Disneyland; and from seemings that are due to beliefs becoming occurrent, such as the seeming that intuitions are seemings that is due to my becoming once again conscious of my belief that this is true.

I want to distinguish intuitions from one other type of seeming, as this distinction is essential to understanding what intuitions are. Sometimes something seems true to one just because one has consciously employed some sort of reasoning and concluded that it is true. For example, imagine I hear an argument, consider each of its premises and come to understand that they are true, and employ truth tables and come to see that the argument is valid. Based only on this, the conclusion of the argument seems true to me. This seeming is not an intuition. This is true in part because this just is not how we use the term "intuition." What we call intuitions are things that just strike us as true without us knowing entirely why they do. Even more compellingly, if intuitions were seemings due entirely to conscious reasoning, they would not play the role in philosophy that they do. Intuitions are often used as if they were evidence, so the principle of charity tells us that we should take them to be the sort of thing that could possibly be evidence. If a proposition seems true because we have reasoned about it (and only because of this), the fact that it seems true does not give us any evidence that it is true beyond the evidence upon which we based our reasoning. If we counted the feeling as evidence in addition to the evidence we reasoned from, we could be double counting our evidence, since the feeling comes solely from the evidence. To make the same point another way, for any proposition that seems true solely on the basis of conscious reasoning, we would have just as much evidence for its truth even if we had reasoned in exactly the same way to the conclusion and it did not feel true. Thus, if some proposition seems to be true and that seeming arises solely from conscious reasoning, the seeming is not evidence for its truth. Since intuitions are supposed to be evidence (at least some of the time), they cannot be based entirely on conscious reasoning (although they are often based partly on it). That intuitions cannot be based solely on conscious reasoning should not be surprising. Philosophers ought to be interested in a source of evidence that is not based on conscious reasoning, since conscious reasoning often (maybe even always) involves application of theory and we use intuitions to criticize or support theories. The fact that they are not based solely on conscious reasoning makes intuitions seem like a non-question begging source of evidence for and against theories.