Today I’m going to do something different: instead of telling you guys what I think, I want to hear what you think.
The twin towers of knowledge are logic and evidence. I think that intuition, or gut feeling, is a way of knowing things that sits on top of these two towers. As I blogged yesterday, intuition is justified inductively. Since intuition is a weak justification for knowledge, and since it derives its validity from evidence and logic, it can never trump either of the two.
The problem I’ve run into is with philosophical arguments. Often these are justified with logic. However, it is only too easy to make big mistakes with complex logical arguments. Fallacies of equivocation can sometimes be very hard to spot, and throughout history such hidden fallacies have been made by a number of people. Fallacious arguments, I’ve noticed, often have counter-intuitive or absurd implications. On the other hand, intuition can be and often is wrong. So, if someone has a complicated logical argument, how can we be sure that it doesn’t commit a fallacy of some kind?
If we try to use intuition to help us judge, what would make us think that our intuition is more likely to be right than a (seemingly) logical argument?
