What is the evidential status of introspective mental states? Can they be used as a source of knowledge like other classical candidates, e.g. experimental data, induction, or visual perception? Over the last few decades these questions have been addressed in philosophy of mind and epistemology in particular.[1] While on the one hand optimists consider the wide-ranging use of introspection in philosophical debates unproblematic, pessimists on the other hand are very skeptical about the same subject matter. But how far can their skepticism go? Is it really the case that introspective insights are not only sometimes misleading, but generally false? These are the questions underpinning Tim Bayne’s article “Introspective Insecurity”. Here Bayne argues that a total dismissal of introspection as a tool for gaining information about one’s own conscious states (global pessimism) would not only be tremendously hard to imagine, but is also not warranted by the arguments raised in favour of that position. What these pessimistic arguments show, however, is that not all kinds of introspection can be used without thorough examination of their truth-tracking capacities. The resulting milder form of skepticism is what Bayne calls local pessimism. This distinction is what I consider Bayne’s most important contribution to the introspection debate, because it helps to avoid an overhasty dismissal of a source of information that is used widely, not only in theorizing, but also in everyday life. He points out that what the global skeptic is missing is the idea that there are different kinds of introspective judgments, where not all are equally insecure. To distinguish between more secure cases of introspection and less secure ones, Bayne emphasizes a distinction introduced by him and his colleague Maja Spener in their paper Introspective Humility (2010), namely that of scaffolded versus freestanding judgments. While scaffolded judgments about one’s introspective states are quite reliable, because their contents match closely with the contents of the non-introspective processes at work (e.g., visual experience), freestanding judgments lack this sort of reliability due to their abstract character. Simply put, the contents of freestanding judgments lack the close connection to what one wants to find out about the world or one’s own mental states.
Another prominent, but also controversial candidate for being an epstemically useful source of evidence is intuition. Much like in the case of introspection, there is a large debate about the reliability and usefulness of intuitions in philosophical theorizing. This debate not only concerns epistemology and philosophy of mind, but also methodology, since many people claim that what philosophy does at its core is conceptual work on the basis of our rational (or conceptual) intuitions (Bealer 1997; Goldman 2007). In the last few years, however, this idea of how to do philosophy has been harshly criticized from many different perspectives. While proponents of the fairly new project called experimental philosophy have tried to investigate the reliability of intuitions by conducting survey studies collecting lay intuitions Weinberg et al. 2008; Knobe 2007), others have even gone so far as to argue that we do not use any intuitions at all in philosophical theorizing (Cappelen 2012). In any case, it is still open to debate whether intuitions can be used as reliable sources of evidence or not. Here I will first argue that this debate can be substantially informed by Bayne and Spener’s idea of scaffolded versus freestanding judgments; this will be referred to as the Scaffolded vs. Freestanding Intuitions Thesis (SFIT). I will try to show that this is the case by highlighting some close connections and similarities between intuitions and introspection. Second, I will argue that in fact intuitions are often made accessible to the debates by introspection, namely in form of introspective insight about one’s own private concepts.[2] This will be called the Introspection of Private Concepts View (IPCV). Thereafter I will make my third claim, namely that many intuitions, at least those relevant in the debates in epistemology and methodology, are best regarded as freestanding judgments and thus should not count as reliable sources of evidence in philosophical debates. This third and last claim will be what I call the Unreliable Freestanding Intuitions Thesis (UFIT). As in the case of introspection, a total dismissal of intuitions is not (yet) warranted, but neither is their wide-ranging use in contemporary methodology. By applying Bayne’s framework, i.e., the distinction between scaffolded vs. freestanding judgments, to the phenomenon of intuitive judgments, I will try to use this new conceptual tool to find a possible answer to the question of which kinds of intuitions are trustworthy and which should not be considered as reliable in philosophical debates.