An analysis of the centrality of intuition talk in the discussion on taste disagreements

Abstract

According to Cappelen (2012), analytic philosophers have traditionally used two arguments to defend the role of intuitions in philosophy. On the one hand, The Argument from Philosophical Practice claims that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions when defending their theories. On the other hand, The Argument from Intuition Talk contends that intuitions must play a prominent role in analytic philosophy because analytic philosophers use intuition talk profusely. Cappelen (2012) identifies three questions to be considered when assessing the Argument from Intuition Talk: a quantitative question, a centrality question, and an interpretative question. The available studies have mainly focused on the quantitative and interpretative questions. In this paper, I examine the centrality question, taking as a case study the literature on taste disagreements — a topic that has received significant attention in the philosophy of language in the last fifteen years. To this end, I first build a corpus with the most relevant works in the area and then examine the centrality of intuition talk. The results show that the use of intuition talk is central in the literature on taste disagreements, and that intuitions are taken as evidence in favor of a given theory if the theory can account for them.