Philosophers are always constructing thought experiments and eliciting intuitions.
Instead of viewing them as designed to elicit authoritative intuitions to which philosophical theories must defer, they can instead be seen as devices which help us to articulate our implicit assumptions when we are threatened with paradox and have difficulty finding a solution.
Since, Kauppinen says, only philosophical dialogue can elicit robust intuitions, philosophical claims "cannot be tested with methods of positivist social science" (2007, 95).
Indeed, by subtly changing the spin on the story, you can sometimes elicit quite different intuitions.
My colleagues who do "experimental philosophy" love to harass subjects with Philippa Foot's Trolley Problem, which elicits non-utilitarian intuitions that set our teeth on edge.
The debate in linguistics over the use of linguistic intuitions (elicited metalinguistic judgments) as data, and how that data should be collected has resulted in enduring, rancorous, often ideologically tinged disputes over the past 45 years.
Similarly, Chomsky (1995) argues that the intuitions elicited by the above thought-experiments at most constitute data for ethnoscience, but "the study of how people attain cognitive states, interact, and so on, will proceed along its separate course".
We employ regret theory, since regret is a cognitive emotion that combines both rationality and intuition, which are key elements for decision-making[ 22, 23], to develop a novel methodology for eliciting decision makers' personal preferences.
They turned from epistemology to semantics, and found that one of the most influential thought experiments in the philosophy of language elicits different intuitions across cultural groups.
The issues contested range so broadly and elicit so many competing intuitions (about which, arguably, reasonable people may disagree), that some question whether a resolution is even possible.
This perspective on philosophical thought experiments shows why we should positively expect many of the intuitions they elicit to prove wanting.
