So, why don’t philosophers do their intuition practice? I think the clue to a better explanation goes something like this: to most philosophers the very idea of intuition practice would seem like it could only be a symptom of a really weird understanding of what role intuitions are playing in philosophy. I think that our collective distaste for intuition practice betrays something important about our understanding of the role that intuitions play in philosophy.

There are various different hypotheses which could explain a collective distaste for intuition practice. I don’t argue for any particular explanation in this paper. Nonetheless, I think it is important to give you a sense of the type of explanation which I have in mind. So, in a moment, I will consider one particular idea in a little bit of detail. First, however, I should briefly mention three other ideas which might have some mileage. (1) Perhaps the reason that philosophers don’t do their intuition practice is that they secretly recognize that intuitions are of no evidential value to begin with and there’s no way to polish them up. (2) Perhaps philosophers don’t really think intuitions play any important role in philosophy. (3) Perhaps philosophers think intuitions play an important role but it is not an evidential one. Each of those ideas could potentially be used to explain why philosophers would have a distaste for intuition practice.

The explanation I want to explore a little is that philosophers think (or at some level are committed to the idea) that the intuitions which drive philosophy are supposed to be untutored intuitions—when relying on intuitions in philosophy the intuitions we rely on should ideally not be altered by our experience within philosophy. This is not an eccentric metaphilosophical position among those who think about the role of intuitions in philosophy, and it should be clear that a philosopher with this sort of metaphilosophical commitment could excuse themselves fairly easily from intuition practice. Indeed, if intuition practice were to have any effect at all, such a philosopher should view the effect of intuition practice as deleterious to their abilities to do good philosophy. However, of course, if one is going to explain why philosophers in general don’t do their intuition practice, then one can’t just focus on those philosophers with convenient explicit metaphilosophical commitments. One would also have to say that the rest of us (or a significant proportion of the rest of us) in some sense share in these commitments (or at least that some such commitments are implicit in our practice).

That said, although I don’t aim to defend it here, it is not so difficult to provide some motivation for the idea that most/many philosophers think that the intuitions which play an important role in philosophy are supposed to be untutored in some important sense. One source of motivation can be found in the way we think about our students’ intuitions. Which of us, when presenting our first year undergraduates with hypothetical cases, experience receiving a barrage of faulty intuitions? Few of us conceive of the responses we get in this way, I would contend, even when they are unpredictable and strange. This is not to deny that novices often response to philosophical cases in ways which are somehow off-target. Of course, it takes students a while to become accustomed to the practice of considering hypothetical cases. Trained philosophers will typically be quicker to understand the contours of cases or will be less likely to be distracted by extraneous details. But this is not a matter of their having a more reliable intuitive capacity, expert intuitions, trained intuitive responses, or anything similar. We don’t, I think, tend to think of this advance in terms of our intuitions being better. Likewise, we wouldn’t tend to criticize the novices for having bad intuitions, less reliable intuitions, or anything like that. Of course, this might be a matter of politeness or pedagogical nous. However, it might also be because we conceptualize the situation as one in which what students need to improve is not their intuitive capacities but their abilities to parse cases, recognize relevant and irrelevant features of cases, and so on.Footnote 10

A second source of motivation might be found in intuition-using philosophers’ typical reactions to certain kinds of project in experimental philosophy. There are very many types of project within experimental philosophy. One which has received a somewhat overblown press is the idea that philosophers’ own intuitions might be supplemented by the intuitions of untutored subjects gathered empirically. The proportion of actual experimental philosophy studies which take this form is fairly tiny. But suppose that it was seriously on the table that we start using such experiments to gather intuitions instead of relying on our own intuitions. Many philosophers would probably have some worries about this proposal. But it is important to attend to the nature of those worries. One type of worry concerns whether the relevant experiments could reliably get at participants’ intuitions. Philosophical cases can be difficult to grasp properly. How do we know the participants properly understand the relevant issues? How do we know whether the participants are reporting their untutored intuitions rather than drawing on some theoretical model? These worries are not about the reliability of untutored intuitions but about the reliability of the evidence about untutored judgments. I’m inclined to think that this kind of worry would be the dominant kind of worry in the minds of most who have concerns; if that is right, it speaks to a metaphilosophical outlook which says that the intuitions which play a role in philosophy should be untutored intuitions, but thinks that simply polling the folk is a bad way to get at intuitions.