"Throughout the text I will appeal to my intuitions on some metaphysical thesis or other, and I will invite the reader to reflect on whether she shares these intuitions
...
I will freely and without apology appeal to my intuitions about possibility and plausibility, consequences and counterexamples, when choosing among metaphysical theses." (Hud Hudson: The Metaphysics of Hyperspace, 2005)
Finally a metaphysician who doesn't try to give the false impression that intuitions are not playing a central evidential role in analytic metaphysics, as Cian Dorr does in his
review of Every Thing Must Go.
"Really - what else are we supposed to appeal to?" (ibid.)
Try empirical evidence.
Unless one can tell us exactly what one means by intuitions, it's pretty vague to claim that intuitions are used as evidence in some field of study, since
VastaaPoista1) there are so many competing claims about which mental states deserve to be called intuitions. Just look at the SEP article "Intuition", which lists at least nine such accounts.
2) it's noted in the same article that "using intuitions as evidence" can refer to using as evidence the fact that one has the intuition that p, or it can refer to using the proposition content of p as evidence
3) one can even question whether the kind of intuitions that are of interest to philosophers constitute a single psychological or epistemic kind. For example, would it be more helpful to think of the term intuition as a family resemblance concept, an analogous concept or a completely context-bound concept with no family resemblance or analogous continuity?
Most of the input for philosophizing does not come from science, and philosophers often make claims and assumptions that are in conflict with empirical science. The output produced by philosophers shows that whatever it is that they use as their evidential source, it resides in an epistemically dark place. It could be intuition (perhaps intuition1, intuition2 and intuition3), religious insight, abstract theoretical principles learned from reading the ruminations of other armchair philosophers, or who knows what. It doesn't make much of a difference.
VastaaPoistaThe lesson I take from your comment is that if we really want to understand philosophy as an activity, we should study it scientifically, i.e. with the tools of cognitive science. I indicate this (and also the supposedly philosophical nature of all anti-philosophy) with the ironic title of my blog. But this just proves my general scientistic point: it is always better to just do science instead of sitting in an armchair and philosophizing.
To address your points in reverse order: I'm not opposed to philosophy being studied with the methods of cognitive science, psychology, sociology, etc. But how would questions related to intuitions and their role in philosophy be studied "with the tools of cognitive science" and without doing any philosophical work at all?
VastaaPoistaFor example, if one considers whether intuitions constitute a single epistemic or psychological kind, or whether they are a case of family resemblance, analogy, etc, then how does one avoid engaging with philosophical literature on kinds, family resemblance and analogy, i.e. becoming immersed in a philosophical debate?
As for your point about the evidential source of philosophy being "in an epistemically dark place," this is of course an incredibly sweeping claim about an activity that spans thousands of years, whereas all the specific examples in this blog are taken from a very speficic corner of late 20th century or early 21st century English-speaking philosophy.
This may be an effective rhetorical strategy for an audience who already considers this specific corner of philosophy to be above other traditions, schools and currents, by virtue of being "taking science more seriously", "having more respect for science", "forming a direct continuum with science" or something to that effect, but anyone with an appreciation for and knowledge of the history of philosophy will be unimpressed.
There have been empirical, scientific studies about scientific cognition and practices. I don't think that all of these studies contain specifically philosophical work. Some kind of conceptual ground clearing is always necessary, but it is just an ordinary part of any kind of empirical inquiry. Not everything conceptual or abstract should be counted as philosophy. So why wouldn't it be also possible study philosophical cognition and philosophers' justificatory practices "purely" empirically, with empirical hypotheses and empirical evidence, without philosophizing? After all, philosophy is just another empirical phenomenon, done by individual members of the species Homo sapiens.
PoistaPeople are already studying empirically how words like "intuitively" are used in philosophical texts, what philosophers consider to be good evidence, and what kinds of cognitive or even brain processes philosophical intuitions are based on. We can just keep expanding this kind of empirical metaphilosophy, trying to do it more rigorously.
Some ways of categorising and modelling a complex empirical phenomenon are more scientifically useful than others, and the concepts used to describe it can be honed as the data becomes more fine-grained. Again, this just ordinary scientific inquiry. At what point does it become necessary to start consciously philosophizing about kinds and other metaphysically loaded philosophical concepts, unless we purposefully frame the questions in terms of debates internal to philosophy?