This is a nice post by Lance spelling out some reasonable suspicions all should have about so-called intuitions and intuition-based methodology in philosophy. Here I add a a little extra fuel to the fire.

One complaint about intuitions I don’t see voiced often enough in the relevant literatures concerns the nature of the alleged “non-inferential” aspect of intuitions, and how suspicious that aspect is, especially within the context of certain philosophical debates, especially debates about the nature of consciousness.  To bring the issue in view, consider the question of how a supposed intuition-haver would know whether some occurrent mental state of theirs was non-inferential. Is it simply a matter of one not being conscious of the mental state arising as the termination of a chain of inferential steps? That would be sufficient grounds for being non-inferential if inferences couldn’t occur unconsciously. If instead there were unconscious inferences—chains of inference of which one were unaware or not conscious of—then simply failing to be conscious of an inference is insufficient grounds for denying there having been an inference. Further, if there were unconscious inferences, appeals to intuitions as a distinct kind of evidentiary base become far more vexed, for one will need some additional basis for the claim that the mental state in question did indeed arise non-inferentially.

Besides the *general* problems that this point raises for intuition-based philosophical methodology, there are specific problems that arise in the contexts of specific debates, debates in which the nature of consciousness itself is at issue. Whipping out a methodology that depends on assuming that inferences always occur consciously risks begging many questions across various debates in the philosophy of consciousness. Several positions in the philosophy of consciousness, e.g. illusionism, higher-order representationalism, Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness, depend on there being mental states and processes that occur unconsciously. Moves in debates against them that put significant epistemic weight on intuitions, like the intuition that pre-release Mary must be phenomenally ignorant, or the intuition that zombies are conceivable, or the intuition that there’s an explanatory gap aka hard problem, or the intuition that babies have pain qualia, or the intuition that there is something it’s like to be a bat but not a baseball, etc etc, all are in deep danger of being massively and importantly question-begging.