Eugen Fischer

It is no surprise that empirical psychology refutes, again and again, assumptions of uneducated common sense. But some puzzlement tends to arise when scientific results appear to call into question the very conceptual framework of the mental to which we have become accustomed. This paper shall examine a case in point: Experiments on colour-discrimination have recently been taken to refute an assumption of first-person authority that appears to be constitutive of our ordinary notion of perceptual experience. The paper is to show that those experiments do not refute this assumption, and will suggest that the impression to the contrary is, ultimately, due to two factors: to misleading imagery and, above all, to mistaken translation from the technical idiom of empirical psychology into the plain English we use every day. This is to take the mystery out of what we shall see to constitute a pretty puzzle; it is to remind us just how careful we need to be when drawing conclusions from results of scientific psychology; and it is to bring out the virtues of methods commonly lumped together under the entirely misleading label of 'ordinary language philosophy', of methods far more useful than their common caricature would make one think.

The paper outlines the evolution of on-going meta-philosophical debates about intuitions, explains different notions of 'intuition' employed in these debates, and argues for the philosophical relevance of intuitions in an aetiological sense taken from cognitive psychology. On this basis, it advocates a new kind of methodological naturalism which it finds implicit, for instance, in the warrant project in experimental philosophy: a meta-philosophical naturalism that promotes the use of scientific methods in meta-philosophical investigations. This 'higher-order' naturalism is consistent with both methodological naturalism and methodological rationalism about first-order philosophy, and can help us adjudicate between the two, in a piecemeal manner.