Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments.We hold that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe 1 : Not all inclinations to believe are intuitions, but all intuitions are inclinations to believe. 2 2 Elizabeth Barnes worries that our thesis does not tell us what kind of inclinations to believe intuitions are. However, we think it is possible to informatively classify a species as belonging to a genus without giving a full specification of its nature (consider the case of classifying a platypus as a mammal). We hold that, in counting intuitions as a species of inclination, we are able to perform a great deal of explanatory work. 123Philos Stud (2009) 145:89-109 DOI 10.1007 that the proposal unifies too much of the extant data to be wrong. 3 In particular, it explains why intuitions appear to be used, in philosophical methodology, as evidence, without conceding either that they are evidence or even that they are really treated as such. 4 Our position therefore falls outside the traditional dialectic, where the two sides disagree over whether intuitions should play the evidential-role that they do. 5 We deny the presupposition: We say that whether or not they should, they do not. 6 In Sect. 1, we distinguish between something being evidence and its playing an evidential-role. In Sect. 2, we introduce the notion of a credence-entailing mental state and use it to sort good from bad mental inferences. In Sect. 3, we use the conceptual machinery developed in the first two sections to argue that intuitions are not treated as evidence by philosophers-that they do not play an evidential-role in philosophy. This leaves several demands for explanation that are met by the inclinations-to-believe-hypothesis in Sect. 4, where we also show that the proposal predicts and explains phenomena with which more structurally simplistic rivals struggle. We conclude in Sect. 5 by considering and rejecting a major objection to the positive proposal.We use the term 'intuition' for the attitude one has towards a proposition when one finds it intuitive. One might protest that John could find a proposition P intuitive without having an intuition that P-for example, if P is the intuitive conclusion of a detailed proof. In other words, intuitions are (perhaps) basic and unsupported whereas P, though intuitive, is too well supported to count as an intuiti...

Many philosophers claim that intuitions are evidential. Yet it is hard to see how introspecting one's mental states could provide evidence for such synthetic truths as those concerning, for example, the abstract and the counterfactual. Such considerations have sometimes been taken to lead to mentalism-the view that philosophy must concern itself only with matters of concept application or other minddependent topics suited to a contemplative approach-but this provides us with a poor account of what it is that philosophers take themselves to be doing, for many of them are concerned with the extra-mental facts about the universe. Evidentialism therefore gestates a disaster for philosophy, for it ultimately demands an epistemology for the investigation into such matter as the abstract and the modal that simply will not be forthcoming. We make a di erent suggestion: at intuitions are inclinations to believe. Hence, according to us, a philosophical argument does well, as a socio-rhetorical matter of fact, when it is founded on premises philosophers are generally inclined to believe, whether or not those inclinations to believe connect appropriately to the extra-mental facts. Accordingly, the role of intuitions (inclinations to believe) in philosophical methodology is non-evidential, and the question of how they could be used as evidence falls away.

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