Apr
11

*This talk is associated with the Workshop: Generics in Context. 

Conflicting Intuitions

One striking fact about philosophical questions is that they tend to be confusing. Ask a room full of people about a philosophical question, and you will not find that they all converge on the exact same answer. Instead, you will find an array of different intuitions that seemed to point toward different answers. One traditional explanation of this phenomenon is that different people have different intuitions. On this traditional answer, the phenomenon is fundamentally one of interpersonal disagreement. I will argue that a growing body of data provides evidence against this explanation. Instead, this body of data suggests that the phenomenon is best understood in terms of each individual person having conflicting intuitions. On this rival hypothesis, the phenomenon is fundamentally intrapersonal.