Where Intuitions Conflict

If you ask a group of people a philosophical question or present them with a challenging thought experiment, it’s often the case that they will express very different views about it. We quite naturally interpret this as different people having different intuitions. But is that what’s going on? In “Conflicting Intuitions,” published earlier this year, Joshua Knobe (Yale) takes up this question. Having imagined posing a question about free will to a group of students who express disagreement over its answer, he writes: [I]t might be that some people have compatibilist intuitions, while others have incompatibilist intuitions, and similarly for each of the other traditional questions of philosophy. Then the puzzlement we feel regarding these questions might be explained in terms of the conflict between the intuitions of different people. But that’s not the only possible explanation: I will argue that experimental research has been providing evidence for a very different hypothesis. On…