ABSTRACT
For better or worse, intuitions are a pillar of philosophy. In particular thinkers in the tradition of twentieth-century analytic philosophy frequently base claims on specifi c intuitions about what to say in or about specifi c cases, situations or scenarios presented for the purpose. Such intuitions can be largely put down to the exercise of recognitional, classifi catory or linguistic skills and have often been used to support philosophical claims about concepts like ‘knowledge’, which seem to play a central role in many familiar philosophical problems. In the previous chapter, we have embarked on the study of philosophically relevant intuitions of a different and perhaps more infl uential kind: We have started to examine intuitive judgements which are not about specifi c cases or situations and which have not been used to support conceptual claims but rather led philosophers to advance metaphysical or other ‘substantive’ claims without much, if any, argument. We examined the intuitively compelling claims that-I1-there are in us spaces and organs of perception (‘minds’), in and with which we perceive things (‘ideas’), namely-I2-whenever we think of or about something. We concluded that their champions advance and accept these claims because they are under the spell of philosophical pictures: because they excessively assimilate the targets to the models of conceptual metaphors, in non-intentional analogical inferences which they make unwittingly but systematically. In this chapter, we will further develop and defend this hypothesis and show that it is the key to the resolution of a wide range of philosophical problems.
