Intuition: Epistemology | WIRELESS PHILOSOPHY

[Music] my name is Jennifer Nagel I teach philosophy at the University of Toronto and today I want to talk to you about intuition we'll talk about what makes a judgment count as intuitive and we'll also talk about the role played by intuition in philosophy many philosophers over the centuries have recognized intuition as a way to gain knowledge alongside other ways like perception testimony and explicit reasoning English philosopher John Locke gives us a pretty standard way to map out the boundaries of intuition so that's where we'll start Locke contrasts intuition to sensory perception on one side and to demonstration on the other sensory perception he notices is always about particular things you see this pizza in front of you right now maybe you see that this pizza is round but we aren't restricted to making judgments about particular things when we judge that know round things are square we aren't just thinking about that particular pizza but about a more general and abstract truth judging that circles are different from squares according to Locke is intuitive and at least in this kind of case where Locke thinks were recognizing features of our ideas intuition is a perfectly good source of knowledge we know that no round things are square through intuition Locke also draws a contrast between intuition and demonstration intuition can tell us directly that a circle is not a triangle but when we get to more complex questions we need to use demonstration or explicit reasoning so for example we can figure out that the interior angles of a triangle add up to two right angles but we have to go through a series of steps to gain this knowledge and that's demonstration demonstration requires conscious stages intuition is immediate Locke notices that intuition and demonstration are connected however each we'll stop in a chain of demonstrative reasoning is or at least should be intuitive contemporary thinkers still draw a similar distinction using a variety of labels for it psychologists draw contrasts between implicit versus explicit thinking heuristic versus systematic automatic versus controlled it's been argued that these different labels are marking a common divide and in the spirit of neutrality the two sides are now often labeled type 1 and type 2 thinking but you will also commonly see the type 1 side labeled intuitive and the type to side as reflective the key difference between the two sides according to leading psychologists like Keith Stanovich and Jonathan Evans is exactly the difference the John Locke noticed it's whether you have to go through a series of conscious steps if I ask you to multiply 5 times 11 the answer 55 probably comes to mind immediately and without effort so that's intuitive for you but if I ask you to divide 5 by 11 you probably have to go through a series of steps in doing the long division that's reflection not intuition at work but notice that when you're doing that long division it breaks down into a series of single-digit operations which are each intuitive intuition seems to tell us many things and sometimes when you make an intuitive judgment you can go back and double-check it reflectively even if you naturally judge that 5 times 11 equals 55 intuitively you can force yourself to think about it reflectively going over the digits one at a time so intuition is immediate judgment not necessarily in the sense that it's very fast although it can be but in the sense that it's not mediated by stages of thinking the way reflection is like reflection intuition is a way of judging things that are abstract or a modal not represented in any particular sensory modality where vision can tell you about the colors of particular things and hearing can tell you about sounds intuition can tell you about more abstract stuff like geometry in numbers and the kinds of things that matter in philosophy like causation justice and knowledge for example intuitively it seems wrong to harm an innocent person just for fun philosophers often test ideas against intuition so in Plato's dialogue theaetetus Socrates is asked whether knowledge is the same as true judgment and he describes a scenario that intuitively illustrates the difference in the scenario a lawyer has to defend a client who's been accused of a violent crime the clients actually innocent but there are no eyewitnesses available given that he doesn't have any solid evidence to present the lawyer knows the best strategy is not to try to teach the jury about what happened but rather to use beautiful language to get the jury to like his client the lawyer is charming and the jury comes to believe correctly that this client is innocent Socrates asks do those jury members actually know that the defendant has not committed this crime if your intuitions are like Plato's you'll get the feeling they don't know even though what they believe is true philosophers use intuitive scenarios like this one as evidence for general claims like the claim that knowledge is something more than just true belief notice that it can take effort or sequential thinking to imagine the scenario but when you ask the key question about whether the jury members have knowledge an answer just comes to you and it may not be obvious to you why you get the feeling that you do it's an interesting question where that kind of answer comes from notice that this video has so far defined intuition negatively it isn't sensory perception and doesn't require conscious steps of reasoning philosophers have many different positive theories of how intuition works Plato thought we were guided by our memory of the forms Locke thought we were responding to features of our ideas some 20th century philosophers like John Austin argue that were guided by our grasp of ordinary language inheriting a history of learned distinctions that have passed the test of time still other philosophers take us to have a more direct grip on the nature of targets like knowledge and morality something that intuitions in different areas are generated in different ways maybe some things become intuitive after we have rehearsed them the multiplication example could be in this category but in some areas we seem to have intuitions about novel problems perhaps we're recognizing common patterns and perhaps our instincts about morality work differently from our instincts about causation or knowledge some philosophers they're called experimental philosophers think that it's important to conduct formal studies of people's intuitions rather than just reporting one's own armchair impressions philosophers with very different positive theories of intuition can agree that intuition is often a good way of making judgments while allowing that it can sometimes fail and we can be led astray either because intuition itself is imperfect or because we make a judgment which feels like an intuitive judgment but isn't really learned something can seem intuitively right and on reflection we can realize that we were mistaken on some questions different people may have different intuitions and sometimes you can find that your own personal intuitions are in conflict with each other indeed philosophical progress often begins when you have difficulty building a systematic and consistent theory that fits key intuitions we have various open to us when our intuitions seem to be in conflict we can find out about possible biases and perhaps discount some intuitions as natural cognitive illusions we can defend a frankly counterintuitive theory on the basis of its theoretical virtues like its simplicity we may be able to train ourselves to have new intuitions in some cases finding out about conflict in our intuitions isn't necessarily a reason to be skeptical about intuition we also have some conflict in our ordinary sensory perceptions for example we experience perceptual illusions and we make observational errors but there's enough common ground and consistency in what we perceive with our senses that a general attitude of trust and sensory perception seems well-founded and we can work to correct for our mistakes and explain how they haven't it's an interesting question whether something parallel is possible in philosophy when we tackle the project of building and defending a coherent theory of knowledge morality or some other philosophically interesting target we're tackling something very difficult that has been an ongoing project for centuries so far intuitions seem to have provided some valuable guidance in that kind of project at least it's very difficult to see how philosophy could start if it didn't consult intuitions at all how far intuitions can ultimately take us remains to be seen you

Channel: Wireless Philosophy

Views: 87,488

Keywords: Khan Academy, Philosophy, Wireless Philosophy, Wiphi, video, lecture, course, Epistemology, knowledge, intuition, Plato, Theatetus, Jennifer Nagel, intuitive, University of Toronto, Knowledge 12, Perception, Reasoning, Theory of knowledge, international baccalaureate

Id: vGo7i7gtO8w

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017

Reddit Comments

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[u/whalebreath]

Just a quick comment on the animation: I found the pen writing too slow to follow. It needs to be sped up to the speed of the narrator's speech. (Everyone knows it's being handwritten: no-one needs to watch that in detail). Otherwise it feels frustrating to watch and actually hangs the viewer's attention on this word being slowly written - while the narrator continues with new concepts that won't be heard as well.

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[u/BoboTheDorritoBandit]

Intuition gets a bad rap next to intellect

[u/4lwaysnever]

I really enjoyed this, thanks for the post... This sort of of talk kind of reminds me of the difference between how the brain performs cognitive tasks differently, a la "Thinking, Fast and Slow" via System 1 and System 2.

Maybe intuition versus reflection are simply manifestations of our own neurocognitive function?

Veritasium did a great short on the system 1 vs system 2 phenomenon awhile back, for those who are interested: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVV8pch1dM&t=561s)

[u/TomJoyz]

If you are interested in the mentioned „discountig of illusion“ and correcting the possible bias of intuition, I highly recommend kahnemann‘s „Thinking, fast and slow“. great book! (no advertisment intended, it was master‘s level class „Psychology of Decision Making“ mandatory reading at my university and I loved it)