The reliability of intuitions

Often, analytic philosophers give some case to elicit intuitions. Intuitions elicited by certain kinds of cases count for less. Here is one dimension of this: Intuitions elicited by worlds different from ours are, other things being equal, reliable in inverse proportion to how different the worlds are from ours. Here is the extreme case: intuitions elicited by cases of impossible worlds.

For an example of such an intuition, consider the argument against divine command theory that even if God commanded torture of the innocent, torture of the innocent would be wrong. Now, the obvious response is that it's impossible for God, in light of his goodness, to command torture of the innocent. But, the opponent of divine command theory continues, if God were per impossibile to command it, it would still be wrong, but according to divine command theory, it would be right. (E.g., Wes Morriston has given an argument like that.)

I've criticized this particular argument elsewhere (not that I think divine command theory is right).[note 1] But here is a point that is worth making. This argument elicits our intuition by a case taking place in an impossible world. But impossible worlds are very different from ours. So we have good reason to put only little weight on intuitions elicited by per impossibile cases.

This does not mean that we should put no weight on them.

My odd intuitions

I have a hard time not thinking of myself as a being that is extended in four dimensions or fully present at multiple times. After all, any time I look at myself, I see myself in motion. Moreover, not just in motion, but in a multiplicity of states occupied over an interval of times. I never see myself just at one time—I always see myself at multiple times, i.e., as either existing at multiple times (the endurantist reading of my intuition) or as existing in a way that extends between multiple times (the perdurantist reading of my intuition). Presentism just plain doesn't fit with my intuitions about myself. But this is just autobiography.

Eddington's Two Tables

As far back into my childhood as I remember thinking about such things, I thought of the physical objects around me as made up of particles. I learned last night, in talking to various philosophers, that this attitude in childhood is not universal. In fact, apparently, many educated people have Aristotelian intuitions that material objects are solid and continuous through and through, and while they can think the particle hypothesis, it does not come naturally to them.

This is an interesting case of how theory-laden the "intuitive" can be. To me, it is entirely intuitive to see an object as a bunch of particles, though I wouldn't say that I have a positive intuition that it is so—just a pervasive belief. At the same time, this is a belief I need to think myself out of (and into a suspension of judgment) because I do not think current physics gives one good reason to think there are particles.

This little case study is kind of scary to me. For instance, right now it seems entirely intuitive that space-time be a four-dimensional manifold, with time being ontologically on par with other dimensions. In fact, I've gotten to the point where a philosophical statement that says something like "substance S has accident A at time t" seems clearly incomplete: I want to know which reference frame this is in, and how the accident is spread out in a space-like hypersurface.

But since these intuitions are highly dependent on a physics that might turn out to be wrong (quantum theory and relativity theory are not both true, since they are incompatible), I need to be more open to three-dimensionalist ideas, which I find kind of scary. Three-dimensionalist ideas induce a kind of conceptual vertigo in me—the thought that I am this three-dimensional object in some kind of flow of time is weird, though I do of course think such metaphors sometimes.