Close Range

Intuitions and Cross-cultural Variation: Part II, Interpretation

In this post I tried to spell out some of my concerns about the the basic experimental design of the WSN experiments. In this follow up post, I want to say a few things about the interpretation of those findings. Obviously, the two issues can't be wholly independent, and much of what I said previously falls under the heading of "interpretative limitations due to methodological shortcomings." But I do think that there are a few more important points to be made.

Let me begin with WSN's presumption that if there is cross-cultural variation in intuitions, this would be a serious problem for intuition-driven rationalism. There are at least three relevant possible readings of the claim that there exists cross-cultural variation in intuition. (There are probably more, depending on which quantifiers are included, but these will suffice to make my point.) In increasing order of strength these are as follows:

1. For any culture A there is some culture B such that for [all/some] cases of a given type, while most individuals from both A and B have the same intuitions about some of those cases, the relative proportions are higher in A than B.
2. For any culture A there is some culture B such that with respect to at least some cases of a given type, individuals from A differ from individuals from B about the preferred response to those cases.
3. For any culture A there is some culture B such that with respect to all cases of a given type, individuals from A differ from individuals from B about the preferred response to those cases.

WSN do not clearly distinguish between these three, very different, claims nor do they give much attention to the differences in philosophical significance between them. So which of these theses, if any, do their studies support? Well, the True Temp cases establish at most the truth of (1). In those cases, there was no difference in the majority opinion (both groups preferred internalism), but there was a statistically significant difference in the relative proportion of externalists (EAs tended more strongly toward internalism). The Gettier case establishes at most the truth of (2), as do the remaining cases. Their studies provide virtually no evidence for (3).

But I think it is clear that (1) and (2) differ greatly from (3) in their philosophical import. Consider (1). It would still follow that there is significant, indeed universal, cross-cultural agreement in intuitions. Why cultures would differ with respect to the relative proportion of people who have the majority intuition is an interesting question, but one that hardly seems to impugn the evidential status of intuitions themselves. The massive cross-cultural agreement uncovered by this study is far more striking than the relatively minor differences. In any event, it is unclear why cross-cultural differences in relative proportions (that all we really have here, REALLY!) is more troubling than the simple observation that not everybody within a given population has the same intuitions. What more, if anything is the cross-cultural part supposed to add? (Of course, the cross-cultural component has a rhetorical advantage, since philosophers are in general shy about appearing to be ethno-centric.)  Plausibly this would show that some cases are more difficult for members of some cultures to "get their minds around," and this would hardly be surprising given cultural differences of the sort found by Nisbett et al. Indeed, I think the IDR theorist would predict cross-cultural variation of this sort (see the discussion below).

Reading (2). Things are only moderately dicier here for the rationalist. In the majority of cases, I don't see why this would be philosophically surprising or problematic. After all, merely showing that members of culture A, for instance, fail to have the Gettier intuitions about case X doesn't establish that members of A are not Gettierizable. It merely shows that they don't have the Gettier intuitions about case X; it doesn't even show that members of A can't get the Gettier intuition about X, only that they don't get it up front, as it were. Moreover, if they are Gettierizable, then presumably we could eventually get them to see the case as similar to cases where they withold knowledge. After all, if your knowledge attributions are sensitive to factors concerning epistemic luck (you have the Gettier intuitions) but you aren't getting the Gettier intuitions about, say, the Brown/Barcelona case, then there is something about the case you aren't keying into which makes it a case involving epistemic luck. The alternative is to say that the two cases display different kinds of  luck and that knowledge is only sensitive to one kind and that just  doesn't seem like a charitable take on things. But even if that were so,  then I think we would have a fully adequate account of the differences  in a way that would be worrisome for the IDR theorist: either they are locally confused  about knowledge (or I am) or they have a different concept (see below).

Furthermore, reading (2) doesn't show anything about the reliablility of the Gettier intuitions unless we have reason to think that case X is indeed a case of knowledge or we have reason to think that members of A are having counter-Gettier intuitions. But nothing in the WSN data give us any reason to believe either of these things. And even if it did, it is still a long step from here to general skepticism about intuitions. After all, few if any contemporary IDR advocates are infallibilists. Incidentally, it is worth bearing in mind here that, while WSN focus on cases which are similar to cases tabled for philosophically substantive purposes, the IDR theorist will insist that when assessing intuitions we also need to consider all of the boring paradigm cases as well. So not only should we consider, say, the Gettier-type cases, but also run-of-the-mill cases that don't have any philosophical interest in and of themselves. If there weren't on balance, massive agreement on these cases, it is hard to see why we would even take the two cultures to possess the same concept.

So it is reading (3) that would be most worrisome. Or would it? I suppose it depends on the details, but at least one natural explanation for "cultural variation in intuitions" in this sense is culturual variation in concepts or conceptual schemes. This would be a genuinely interesting philosophical result, but one that bears most markedly on issues other than the evidentirary status of intuitions. For instance, if we were to find a culture C that was unGettierizable, this might be a reason for thinking that they lack the concept of knowledge altogether. This might, in turn, be a reason for thinking that concepts like knowledge aren't as central to a theory of the world as one might have thought. And that is an interesting result, but not an interesting result about intuitions. (For instance, this might be the most plausible account of the the Machery et al results [couldn't find a link] concerning cultural variation in rigidity intuitions about "water" and its translations.)

In sum: while it sounds bad for IDR that there might be cultural variation in intuitions, this is so (at worst) only when you read the claim as in (3) and the WSN results just simply don't support that reading.

There is a second concern about how to understand the WSN results regarding the True Temp cases. According to the reported results, they gave three different cases of this type. In the first one, which was intended to reflect a more individualistic Western perspective, they found a statistically significant difference between responses given by Westerners (Ws) and East Asians (EAs). They then wondered if they could "undermine" this result by giving cases which were more reflective of an East Asian perspective. As predicted this is what they found. In the two cases of this type, there was no signficant difference between Westerners and East Asians. But we should simply ignore their "prediction." The fact is that in two out of the three cases WSN ran, they found no significant difference in even the proportions of the responses given. Even if they have a hunch as it why the second two cases found no difference, this is little more than an unsubstantiated guess. As a result, their data just simply don't support the claim of cross-cultural variation in the sense of reading (1) above.

OK. Last point. Despite a relatively long discussion of IDR, WSN don't really give us a clear picture of their target. In fact, I think that their attempt to get results that apply very widely has simply caused them to miss almost everyone. So let me suggest a target that most advocates of IDR would be comfortable accepting and would feel uncomfortable if it were wrong.

[P] If two subjects A and B understand a case C in the same way, then (typically) A and B will have the same intuitions concerning C.

But I just don't see how anything in the study supports the denial of [P]. By the very reasoning they use to motivate the study, we have good reason to believe that individuals from different cultures may not understand a written vignette in the same way. So even if we grant that the subjects are having intuitions and even if we grant that these intuitions vary by culture, we don't really have any reason to think that these intuitions are about the same case (or the same case understood in the same way). In order to show that [P] is false, they need to show that the antecedent obtains and this is precisely what we have reason to doubt. Rather, at most the WSN experiments show that the following principle is false:

[P*] If two subjects A and B read a given case C, they will typically have the same intuitions about C.

But whoever thought that [P*] was true? In the discussion of Part I, I have already expressed concern about identifying reading-and-responding with intuiting. But waving that concern, WSN's interpretation of their results effectively relies on the following assumption: if A and B read C this is sufficient for A an B to understand C in the same way (often enough). But I just don't see any good reason for thinking that this is true in the experimental context under consideration. (And no, this doesn't generate some sort of skepticism about whether or not I know whether or not people are having intuitions about the same case understood in the same way. The point isn't that it is really, really hard to know such things, but only that this is a source of disagreement and one that is hard to control in the experimental setting of WSN.)

[Unfortunately, I will most likely have to beg out of this discussion for a few days and go do my part for the Red Desert. (More)]

Intuitions and Cross-cultural Variation, Part I: Methodology

In light of this exchange with Jonathan Weinberg, I felt the need to defend the honor of intuition-driven rationalism. This will be the first part of a two part entry critiquing Weinberg, Nichols, and Stitch's, "Normativity and epistemic intuitions" (Philosophical Topics, 29 (2001): 429-460)--hereafter, WNS. I want to start with methodological issues, because I believe this paper has some serious design problems (some of which are likely to recur in related work) which make it unreasonable to draw any substantive conclusions from the experiments.

First, those of us who believe that intuitions are a source of basic evidence have been careful to isolate a particular sort of intellectual episode which is distinct from a judgment that p, belief that p, compulsion to believe that p, and a host of other related cognitive states. The states in question, rather, are states in which a given proposition seems necessarily true. Consequently, any study which purports to show that there is cross-cultural variation in intuitions must establish that the subjects are indeed basing their answers on intuitions. This is a base requirement for getting into the game. So the first question that needs to be asked is how WSN establish this preliminary requirement? The answer appears to be this: by operationally defining intuition as "response to question." The assumption (I gather) is that if a person is given a philosophical vignette and given a forced-choice answer concerning that vignette, their answer will be based on an intuition (at least often enough and in a more or less randomly distributed way across subjects). That is, the methodology presupposes that every answer (positive or negative) involves an intuition.

But it is wholly mysterious why they think this. In fact, the most common situation in my experience is that when a given case fails to convince somebody, the most common reason is that they fail to have the intuition that I am trying elicit and not that they have the opposite intuition. For instance, physicalists typically don't claim to have the intuition that zombies are not possible (though, of course, they believe this); rather, they typically claim not to have the intuition that zombies are possible. But this important distinction is simply lost on the WSN approach. So a very rudimentary issue is what exactly the WSN results show. Granting everything else, do the WSN results show that there are cross-cultural differences in intuitions? Do they show that there is cross-cultural variation in the having of intuitions in response to certain examples? Or do they simply show that there is cross-cultural variation in (forced choice) judgments? Not all of these questions have equal bearing on the epistemological status of intuitions, and some of them are downright irrelevant.

Moreover, it is not adequate to respond (as WSN respond) that that while "the sorts of intuitions that [their] experiments collect are not the sorts of intuitions that some [sic!: any] IDR theorists would exploit," nevertheless their "findings raise serious questions about the suggestion that [philosophically relevant intuitions] are anything close to universal." Why? In response to a related concern they say, "It is extremely likely that [the observed differences] would be recapitulated—or even strengthened—in any reflective process." But why on earth should we accept this? Do WSN have a theory about the connection between intuitions in their sense (i.e., forced-choice responses to written vignettes) and intuitions in the philosophically relevant sense? If so, it would be nice to hear it. They also suggest that "if philosophers' intuitions on simple Gettier intuitions are [philosophically relevant] intuitions, then [their] data indicate that strong intuitions are far from universal" because they get cross-cultural variation in a Gettier-case. But this is to suppose, mistakenly, that reading and making a judgment about a Gettier case is sufficient for having a philosophically relevant intuition about that case. It is as if they think you can individuate intuitions by the cases they are about rather than the characteristics they have. Nobody, of course, believes this; they are battling a straw man.

This leads me to a second methodological point. In the WSN experiments, subjects are asked to read a vignette and give one of two responses: (A) the person "really knows" or (B) the person "only believes". This terminology is also reflected in the phrasing of the vignettes. This decision is bizarre from a design perspective. The most obvious probe is to ask whether or not: (A) the person knows or (B) the person doesn't know. This makes it pretty clear to the subject what is being asked of them. The WSN response options, by contrast, leave a lot of room for interpretation. In particular, it is well known that the addition of focal stress by means of locutions like "really" and "only" can significantly affect meaning and are frequently used to indicate that the term in question is not being used with its standard meaning. How exactly are the subjects to understand the response "only believes"? The intention, presumably, is for it to be read as "only believes, but doesn't know". Nevertheless, it is not unnatural to read it instead as "believes without justification". And clearly if one reads it this way, the best response in the Gettier vignettes is "really knows". And what about the other answer, "really knows"? Does this suggest to respondents (it seems to) that the experimenters are assuming that he appears to know?

Of course, WSN try to control for this issue. (The fact that they have to try to control for it in the first place is suggestive of the sorts of concerns one might reasonably have over the experimental design.) Here is what they do: They worry that subjects were interpreting "really know" as a question about subjective certainty. To rule this out, they gave subjects the following vignette:

Dave likes to play a game with flipping a coin. He sometimes gets a "special feeling" that the next flip will come out heads. When he gets this "special feeling", he is right about half the time , and wrong about half the time. Just before the next flip, Dave gets that "special feeling", and the feeling leads him to believe that the coin will land heads. He flips the coin, and it does land heads. Did Dave really know that the coin was going to land heads, or did he only believe it?

Frankly, I don't see how this rules out the subjective certainty reading. The case is not clearly one in which Dave is subjectively certain and, in fact, it is most natural for him not to be understood this way. But if that is so, then whether or not subjects are reading "really knows" as "subjectively certain" the best answer is the one the subjects gave, namely, "only believes". Moreover, this one control is not nearly enough to rule out all possible interpretations of the answers as indicated above.

So their response to this problem--a problem of their own making--is inadequate. Again, what exactly do the data show? Do they show cross-cultural variation in intuitions? Or do they merely show cross-cultural variation in how one resolves the open interpretive questions about the two choice options?

Third methodological concern. It is a commonplace observation that some people find some examples more convincing than other examples. Moreover, variation in people's intuitions about a given case can depend on such factors as how people are filling in various parts of the back story or their grasp of various concepts occurring in the story. (Think here, for instance, of how hard it is to get students who don't have a background in logic or phil language to grasp Gettier's first counterexample, which turns on understanding the way definite descriptions work.) In my experience, most of the work in convincing students of a given point comes simply in getting them to understand the concepts involved in the story and/or making explicit what background assumption are or are not being made. This is NOT (as WSN suggest) a matter of "coaching intuitions" but rather a matter of getting the students to understand example in the intended way. These considerations suggest that, when designing experiments of the sort run by WSN, a great deal of care and thought needs to go into phrasing the vignettes.

But WSN do a pretty poor job on this count on at least some of the vignettes. Here, to take one example, is their Gettier vignette:

Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it?

Unfortunately, it is not even clear that this is a Gettier case. After all, in colloquial English to say that someone drives an x is to say that they own an x. (Notice, for instance, that if Jill were merely renting the Pontiac and someone asked here, "What kind of car do you drive?" it would be misleading, perhaps even false, for her to say "A Pontiac" w/out further clarification.) But, of course, the mere fact that Jill's car was stolen does not mean that she no longer owns it. So if the question is understood as one about ownership, this isn't a Gettier case. Moreover, it might be that some subjects are telling themselves a back story according to which Bill knows that Jill prefers American made cars (she is driving a Buick, after all). Who knows, maybe East Asians are more likely to tell some such back story than Westerners. And let me just register my own impression that this is for me far from an obvious Gettier case. The point is not that these possible explanations are the right ones. The point is rather that the vignette is just badly written to control for such things.

Let me put this concern more generally. IDR theorists typically think that philosophically relevant intuitions are a function of one's grasp of the example. Obviously, if two subjects understand a given scenario in even slightly different ways, they may respond to it differently (either by having different intuitions or, more likely, by one or the other simply failing to have an intuition about the case). So in this sort of experimental design it is essential that the vignettes be written in such a way as to effectively guarantee common understanding of the given case. Obviously, this is a tall order. But at the very least what one would hope for are examples that are cultural (and class) neutral to as great an extent as possible. Doing so will help to ensure that all subjects are actually responding to the same case, which is essential if the results are to have any validity whatever. As the preceding discussion suggests, it is not clear to me the WSN are very successful on this count.

In light of these methodological reservations, I don't think any substantive philosophical conclusions can be drawn from the WSN experiments as they stand. Moreover, some the concerns voiced here will be very, very hard to overcome in any sort of simple read-a-vignette-and-give-an-answer-style experimental setting.

[Update: Incidentally, I have been reading through "The instability of philosophical intuitions" and, despite the much touted tentativeness of the WSN conclusions, we nevertheless find comments such as this (p. 4): "Weinberg, Nichols and Stitch revealed that epistemological intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background."

One of my biggest concerns about WSN is that, even under the most charitable of readings, it is at best a pilot study. The sample sizes, for instance, are simply so small (24 East Asians; 24 Sub-continenters) that the external validity (i.e., generalizability) of the results is highly suspect. It is doubtful that a scientist with this data would be very comfortable generalizing to Rutgers undergrads, much less East Asian culture! Nonetheless, here we have a forthcoming PPR paper which boldly asserts the variability as experimentally established fact.]

Do you see tinted lenses?

You’re looking at a white wall which appears pink because you're wearing tinted sunglasses. Do you see anything pink? The wall isn't pink; and you're not seeing a pink sense datum (just ask my new blogmate). But how about the lenses of the sunglasses -- do you see those?

I’d always been tempted to say: no. You see through them (which is why the wall, of which you are directly aware, appears pink) but you don't see them. But now I have my doubts.

For suppose that you remove the glasses and hold them at arms length. Now you have no trouble seeing the lenses. Nor do you have any trouble seeing the part of the left lens that was moments ago right in front of your left eye. Now you slowly put on the glasses, continuing to attend to that part of the left lens (it may help to close your right eye). If you were seeing that part of the lens before, surely you are seeing it now as well (it's still in plain view, still looks pink, etc).

Moreover, it looks like your run-of-the-mill causal theory of perception (e.g., that S perceives o iff o exists, o causes S to have experience e, and o roughly satisfies the content of e) will yield a positive verdict in both cases. If, when the glasses are at arms length, you're having an experience as of a pink expanse (there, where the lens is) which is caused by, and whose content is roughly satisfied by, that part of the lens, then presumably the same is true at all the times leading up to and including putting the glasses back on.

rationality and justification

Working on a paper on rationality, it occurred to me that there might be a distinction between epistemic justification and theoretical/epistemic rationality; or at least, it might be useful, if possibly somewhat revisionary, to draw such a distinction.  (i) A reason for holding that not all cases of being epistemically justified are also cases of being theoretically rational (justified and rational, from now on) may be found in this passage from Grice’s Locke lectures from 1977:

“Suppose .... I [produced...] this argument: “I have two hands (here is one hand and here is another). If I had three more hands, I would have five. If I were to double that number I would have ten, and if four of them were removed six would remain. So I would have four more hands than I have now.” Is one happy to describe this performance as reasoning? There is, however, little doubt that I have produced a canonically acceptable chain of statements.” (Grice, 2001, 15) (by ‘canonically acceptable’, he means ‘acceptable from the perspective of the formal canons of logic and probability theory’)

If we suppose that one has to be engaged in reasoning to be properly called rational, it would seem that if I do this Gricean dance, I am justified in believing the conclusion, while I am not rational in doing so.
    Of course, one has to be careful here. What makes it doubtful that this dance constitutes reasoning may be the fact that it has no point, or the fact that it seems practically irrational, for it wastes cognitive resources that could be spent on other things. However, even if we assume that it’s not practically irrational (say, I am sitting on a plane and really have nothing better to do), we may still doubt whether it is rational for me to believe the conclusion, precisely because it’s the result of a pointless deduction.
    Pollock recently has argued that reasoning (what he calls ‘epistemic cognition’)  is always carried out in the service of some practical goal, which includes such theoretical-looking goals as desiring to find out what exactly happened during the first instance of the Big Bang. Although he doesn’t state it explicitly, one may take Pollock to suggest that as a matter of fact (about humans), theoretical rationality needs an appropriate context to manifest itself.
    So, if it is true that one is only theoretically rational if one (i) reasons canonically and (ii) such reasoning serves a goal, then it follows that whether someone is rational in believing p depends, not only on whether p was arrived at by canonical reasoning, but also whether believing p serves some goal of the agent. On the other hand, it is not the case that epistemic justification is similarly dependent on goals. In one of Gettier’s original examples, Smith is justified in believing that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. However, it seems somewhat odd for Smith to even form this belief. There is no point to it. According to the current view, what’s odd is that Smith is not theoretically rational in believing what he does. (Is that maybe an additional reason we don’t think he knows? Could somebody know that p but not be theoretically rational in believing that p?) So, maybe being justified in believing that p does not ensure that one is also rational in believing it.
    (ii) Here is a case that suggests that one can be rational in believing p without being justified in believing that p. Even on an internalist view, it must be possible that an agent is wrong in believing that she is justified in believing that p. Suppose now that S inferred p from q (which she is justified in believing), but her inference involved a couple of erroneous steps, of which she is not aware. It seems to me that S is not justified in believing p, although she is rational in believing it. Two considerations support that view. First, if we assume she is justified, despite the errors, we come close to endorsing the dubious principle that whenever an agent believes she is justified in believing something, she is indeed justified. In other words, it would be impossible to be wrong about whether one is justified in believing something or not. But that seems odd. Consider a case where S erroneously inferred p from q. She tells you about it, and you are quick to point out to her the inferential mistakes. It seems that the appropriate reaction for her is to say something like “Oh; I guess I was wrong in thinking I was justified in believing that p”.
    Second, suppose that p indeed follows from q, p is true, S is justified in believing that q, and S infers p from q by a chain of inferential steps in which an earlier error was fortuitously canceled out by a later error. Does S know that p? At least to me, it seems she doesn’t. But since this case is not a Gettier-case, the only thing we can do is deny that S is justified.
    It seems, then, that we can be justified without being rational, and rational without being justified. Maybe we should think of theoretical rationality as capturing the sense of justification that has to do with what an agent is epistemically responsible for (e.g., S did all she could to avoid errors, but committed them nonetheless), and restrict the concept of epistemic justification to the sense of justification that has to do with truth-guidance.

fpg

SEP & Synthese

This is an update concerning this call for papers for the upcoming SEP conference. In addition to hosting the conference here in Laramie, there will also be an associated volume of selected papers to be published in Synthese. S

The SEP/Synthese association will be an ongoing association between the two organizations and it seems like a really good fit. I look forward to seeing everyone here in the high plains!

The Internality of Intuitions

In my commentary on this post, I suggested that rational intuitions not only have the properties of seeming necessary, true and justified, but that these properties must somehow be internal to the intuition itself. This kind of point is suggested in the following passage from A. C. Ewing:

Another important difference between a priori and empirical knowledge is that in the case of the former we do not see merely that something, S, is in fact P, but that it must be P and why it is P. I can discover that a flower is yellow (or at least produces sensations of yellow) by looking at it, but I cannot thereby see why it is yellow or that it must be yellow. For anything I can tell it might equally well have been a red flower. But with a truth such as that 5+7=12 I do not see merely that it is a fact but that it must be a fact. It would be quite absurd to suppose that 5+7 might have been equal to 11 and just happened to be equal to 12, and I can see that the nature of 5 and 7 constitutes a fully adequate and intelligble reason why their sum should be 12 and not some other number. (The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy, NY: MacMillan, 1953, p.26).

While I don't agree with everything Ewing says here, I am nevertheless very sympathetic to (though not in complete agreement with) his claim that he "can see that the nature of 5 and 7 constitutes a fully adequate and intelligible reason [for taking their sum to be 12]." In a genuine intuition, it is not just that we have, as it were, a sense that the proposition is necessarily true; rather it is that the conceptual content of the proposition itself seems to provide a prima facie ground for the truth of the proposition. In this sense, rational intuitions are what we might call concept-driven seemings.

SEP: Call for Papers

I am pleased to announce that the University of Wyoming will be hosting the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. If you are not already familiar with the SEP, it is an outstanding group of people who care about philosophy done in a careful and philosophically rigorous manner. Although the Society has an air of technicality about it, it is a pretty big tent organization. The call for papers can be found here.

Some highlights.

• Conference Dates: May 13th-17th.
• Keynote Addresses: George Bealer (Yale), Graeme Forbes (Colorado), and Charles Chihara (Berkeley).
• Submission Deadline:  January 31st, 2008.

In addition, we have planned the conference so that May 16th, the penultimate day of the conference, will be entirely free so that participants can enjoy a bit of fun and games before wrapping things up with a bang on the 17th. Our hope is that this format will help ease some of the conference-fatigue we all experience, while simultaneously allowing for a more informal, intimate atmosphere.

Intuitions and Other Attitudes

Many philosophers have suggested that intuitions are equivalent to beliefs (e.g., Peter van Inwagen), hypotheses (e.g., Rob Cummins), conceivings or imaginings, conscious inclinations to believe or judge (e.g., Timothy Williamson), or attractions to assenting (Ernie Sosa). George Bealer and Mike Huemer have attempted to give counterexamples to some of these views by identifying cases, such as that involving the naive comprehension intuition, in which the proposed mental state is either not necessary or not sufficient for having the corresponding intuition. They've also pointed out that these views appear to be incapable of accommodating the simple observation that in many of the relevant cases the proposed mental state is grounded in the corresponding intuition. For instance, why are we consciously inclined to believe or judge that p? Because it seems to us that p.

I find George's and Mike's arguments pretty convincing. But I'm aware that many others do not. So recently I've been thinking about another problem with these views.

Intuitions have a very interesting property, one which is also possessed by perceptions: intuitions do not merely represent their contents; in addition, they present those contents as being the case. In other words, in intuiting that p, it thereby seems to one that p is so, and thus one is thereby under the impression, if only for a moment, that p is the case. For example, when I have the intuition that Putnam's Spartan-pretender might experience pain, this is presented to me as being the case. It thereby seems to me that it is possible that Putnam's Spartan-pretender experiences pain, and I am thereby under the impression that this is so.

Beliefs and judgments seem to lack the property of being presentational. In simply believing or judging that, for instance, virtually all actual-world disagreements between peers are epistemically acceptable, I'm not thereby presented with this as being the case. I just think that it's true. Hypotheses are likewise not presentational. In hypothesizing (making the educated guess) that virtually all actual-world disagreements between peers are epistemically acceptable I'm not thereby under the impression, even for a moment, that this is so. When I merely form this hypothesis, at no point is it presented to me as being the case. At that moment, I just think that, given the evidence, it's the best view. Similarly for conceivings: in conceiving that p, I'm not presented with p as being the case -- given that I'm not entirely crazy, in conceiving that p I'm not thereby under the impression that p is so. The same goes for imaginings.

What about the conscious inclination to believe or judge? Inclinations, whether conscious or not, are not presentational. When one is merely consciously inclined to believe that virtually all actual-world disagreements between peers are epistemically acceptable, one is not thereby presented with this as being the case. One is not thereby under the impression that it's true. Rather, in that moment, one is simply inclined to think that, given the evidence, that's the position to adopt. The attraction to assenting is no different in this regard. Attractions to assenting, like attractions in general, are not presentational. When one is merely attracted to assenting to the proposition that virtually all actual-world disagreements between peers are epistemically acceptable, one is not thereby presented with this as being the case. One is not thereby under the impression that it is so. Rather, it may just be a view that, in that moment, one finds, well, attractive.

This is not to say that intuition is not typically accompanied by an attraction to assenting to its content or an inclination to believe or judge that its content is true. On the contrary, it seems quite plausible that intuitions do tend to produce acceptance of their contents. Since intuitions present their contents as being the case, it's only to be expected that, absent reason to the contrary, we'll be attracted to assenting to our intuitions' contents or inclined to believe or judge that those contents are true. But reflection on the presentational character of intuition indicates that, despite this, intuition cannot be equivalent to this inclination or attraction.