RE: No reason justifies disbelief.
March 25, 2019 at 12:42 am
(This post was last modified: March 25, 2019 at 12:49 am by Abaddon_ire.)
(March 24, 2019 at 4:57 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote:(March 23, 2019 at 9:58 am)Gae Bolga Wrote: It's a good question, isn't it? We find ourselves facing the same question with empirical knowledge. How can we distinguish between accurate and inaccurate intuition, how can we distinguish between accurate and inaccurate sense experience? Most would offer deduction in either case...or any of a number of other methodological ways of organizing our thoughts.
Describing accurate intuition as a lucky guess leaves open the door for accurate sense experience to be, equally, a lucky guess. I could, after all, look to my left and see a fairy outside the window. I'm lucky that I don't..because if I did, then I would very likely be wrong about the issue of whether or not fairies are outside my window. Ultimately, this weakest form of the other than empirical doesn't posit that we are or can be certain, that it will always be possible to distinguish between accurate intuitions -or- accurate experiences and inaccurate ones, it doesn't even make the claim that intuition is the foundation of all knowledge, or that a nominally rational person would have to accept a conclusion derived from intuition....it merely seeks to add intuition to the possible sources of knowledge. It only establishes, if accepted, that the claim of empiricism is wrong.
I've been thinking about this intuition thing. It's totally bologna, lol. What is intuition in the first place? It's an unconscious assessment of empirical data, expressed as an innate, informed sense. Without sense experience, there is no information, and so there couldn't be intuition. Empiricism is the platform off of which intuition takes its leap. Sure, maybe its a "back of the house" assessment, like you said, but its still an assessment. That it feels different is irrelevant, and as you said, we use the same methods to distinguish between good/bad intuition and good/bad sense experience. That's because they're essentially the same thing. Giving something a different label doesn't magically transform it into something other than exactly what it is.
I'm not sure that is quite right. "Intuition" can still work absent any data at all. Data is not required. I suspect that baseless intuition is preferentially selected by evolution and the unintended consequence is religion.