关于直觉是否能帮助我们了解真相，哲学界展开了激烈的争论。

The intuitions in question are psychological states that arise in response to real or hypothetical examples. A classic example (mentioned on the recent intuitionsshow): imagine Jewish people are in your basement and a Nazi is at your door in 1942. Is it right to lie to the Nazi? Intuition in this case favors lying.

But is this intuition really showing us the truth? Do intuitions tell the truth in general?

Three positions have emerged.

Position 1:Yes…intuitions show truth!Skeptics be damned—when one has an intuition, one has an insight.George Bealer突出主张这一观点。Intuitions are “intellectual seemings,”a prioriappearances of basic truths to the intellect.

Position 2:No way…intuitions are just subjective burps!If we’re trying to figure out whatrealityis like, what good is intuition? Intuition is just aninternalsubjective response.Stephen Stich经常代表这个阵营。And we’ve also seen some of this skepticism from中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播’s own Director of Research,Laura Maguire.

Position 3:Well…intuitions teach us aboutconcepts.While intuitions might not tell us about a reality “out there,” they do teach us about our own concepts—internal representational structures. We often use concepts like RIGHT, WRONG, JUSTICE, KNOWLEDGE, etc. As Alvin Goldman put it on the show, intuitions can give us insight into “basic, pervasive concepts.”

Must we choose one of these three? I wish to argue thatallof these positions fail to characterize what’s most important about intuitions.

An important prerequisite to any interesting knowledge, I claim, ishaving a sense of what questions are important. And here the philosophical and scientific activity of doing thought experiments and getting intuitions is most useful. AsDaniel Dennettputs it, “Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place” (Intuition Pumps, p. 20). And figuring out what questions to ask is often the precursor to doing science. This leads to our fourth position.

Position 4:Intuitions tell us when we need to ask more questions—and what to ask about. Intuitions about a given subject matter, from morality all the way to physics, tell us, effectively: “Look here! You maythinkyou’ve gotten everything figured out on this subject, but really you’ve gotmore work to do在你获得知识之前。”正确理解直觉，会让我们从智力上的自满中摆脱出来，激发我们提出更确切的问题。

Position 4 is the view I take, inspired very much byDennett. An MA student of mine, Ben Freed, is also developing a version of it. Let’s illustrate it with a classic thought experiment from science.

伽利略用一个关于下落物体的思想实验与亚里士多德进行了著名的辩论。亚里士多德的观点(在伽利略的时代仍然很流行)认为较重的物体比较轻的物体下落得更快。伽利略问:根据亚里士多德的理论，如果我们把一个较重的物体绑在一个较轻的物体上，然后把组合好的物体扔下去，会发生什么?亚里士多德的理论似乎做出了不一致的预测。On the one hand, the light object (on Aristotle’s theory) should put a drag on the heavier object, since the lighter is slower, which means that the combined object shouldfall slowerthan the heavy object alone. On the other hand, the combined object isheavierthan the heavy object by itself, so (on Aristotle’s theory) the combined object shouldfall fasterthan the heavy object.

Fall fasterandfall slower? Yikes!

Is this not a straightforwardreductio ad absurdumof Aristotle’s theory of fall? Well, no. If we look carefully, we see that this thought experiment doesn’t pin a simple contradiction on Aristotle. But it does elicit an intuitionthat something isn’t right, no matter which way you try to fix the view. And this latter intuition guides us to the questions we should ask, exactly as Position 4 predicts.

First, let’s see why the thought experiment doesn’t pin a simple contradiction on Aristotle. Aristotle could say something like this: “Well, if the objects areproperly connected, the combined object will fall faster than the heavy object by itself. If the objects arenot properly connected, the combined will fall more slowly due to the drag of the lighter.” Technically, the supposed contradiction is escaped by this reply.

But here we have anotherstrongintuition: namely, the reply isbullshit! …something (to use Aristotle’s own words) only a philosopher would say for the sake of remaining consistent.

Our intuition that the Aristotelian reply is bullshit isnotknowledge. Rather—properly taken—it shakes us from our prior complacency. Given our antecedent views about the physical world, itwaseasy to accept Aristotle’s theory. But the intuition we have in response to Galileo’s thought experiment tells us that we need to do more research.That’sthe key. In particular, we needdatafrom timing falling objects.

Not until we do further empirical research do we actually arrive at theknowledgethat falling acceleration in a vacuum is the same for all objects regardless of mass. But—and this is the crux of Position 4—doing the thought experiments and having the Galilean intuitions were crucial steps on the road to that knowledge.

In sum, without thought experiments, we are sometimes not even able to have the right thoughts thatwouldlead to knowledge. So thought experimental intuitions don’t yield knowledge straightaway. They are rather, in some cases, conditions for the possibility of acquiring knowledge.

How does this view apply moral cases, like the Nazi at the door example? The key point will still be that intuitions point the way to the right questions, even if they don’t give answers. Our intuition in response to that example raises the questions, “Are thereexceptionsto the general wrongness of lying? And if so, what’s the principle behind the exceptions?” To date, it’s not clear thatthesequestions have been answered satisfactorily. Moral philosophy is hard. But we should certainly thank our intuitions for raising them. Further, I would argue that the intuitions here make us feel the relevance of the psychological consequences of lying and being lied to, thereby joining moral and psychological research programs. That, at least, is some progress.