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One apparently distinctive feature of current methodology in the broad tradition known as "analytic philosophy" is the appeal to intuition. Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge- generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard "intuition" as an obscurantist term for folk prejudice, a psychological or social phenomenon that cannot legitimately constrain truth-directed inquiry. Linguistic or conceptual philosophers treat intuitions more sympathetically as the deliverances of linguistic or conceptual competence.... [T]he common assumption of philosophical exceptionalism is false. Even the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori turns out to obscure underlying similarities. Although there are real methodological differences between philosophy and the other sciences, as actually practiced, they are less deep than is often supposed. In particular, so-called intuitions are simply [armchair] judgments (or dispositions to [armchair] judgment); neither their content nor the cognitive basis on which they are made need be distinctively philosophical.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137347954_10

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