Anderson has recently written about what he perceives to be the problem of depending on intuitions here. I have mentioned on many occasions that we all depend on intuitions including Gangadean. But Gangadean also speaks out against the use of intuitions and so finds himself in a pickle of inconsistency. The reason that the hypocrisy isn't immediately apparent is because he throws around expressions like "reason is authoritative" and "the laws of thought are self-evident". This is nothing more than a smokescreen. Anderson's recent post illustrates this nicely. He writes:
Not all that is immediate is an intuition. The important piece is to determine what is the highest authority and can be used to critically examine intuitions. For instance, the law of non-contradiction is not an intuition. Intuitions, and any thought at all, presuppose it. Something might seem to be true but not actually be true. The skeptic says we cannot know because all we have are intuitions. The fideist agrees we cannot know but says we must choose to believe something.I appreciate this comment because it does a great job of showing how the rational presuppositionalism that Gangadean develops is about critically examining assumptions only to an arbitrary set point. Here are the main points from Anderson's post.
1) There is immediate knowledge that is not intuition.
2) The laws of thought are not (known via) intuitions, but are immediately known.
3) Intuitions presuppose the laws of thought.We should treat each of these claims like any other claims. We should ask whether they are true and what reasons we have for accepting them. So is it true that there is immediate knowledge that is not intuition? Are the laws of thought instances of such? Now, as I understand intuitions, they are by definition those things that are known immediately or non-inferentially. So definitionally, 1) and 2) are false by my lights. Anderson seems to have a different and more narrow definition associated with 'intuition' (although he doesn't say what that is) and I've already talked about the dispute over definitions at length here. Suffice it to say, since Anderson views the inability of a worldview to rationally settle any and all disputes as a serious weakness for that worldview, he had better show us how rational presuppositionalism can settle our lexical dispute at this point or else his system is bust and this from his own perspective.
And it seems to me that 1) simply presupposes his unspecified theory or definition of 'intuition' (or else how could he make a distinction?). So in addition to wondering how Anderson knows that his account of 'intuition' is correct, we need also ask, how does Anderson know with certainty that 1) is true? What reasons can he give us to think there's a difference? We shouldn't agree with every proposal for a distinction--some purported distinctions are unmotivated. In fact, I suspect Anderson is going to have to say that he just knows 1) immediately. But again, why think that this is anything other than an intuition? Because he says so? Hardly.
Similarly, how does one know 2)? How does he know that the laws of thought are not known via intuitions? Likewise, with 3). How does he know that all intuitions presuppose the laws of thought? Indeed, there's a more general question in relation to 3): how does anybody know when one proposition presupposes another? Again, no reason is given for such substantive and foundational claims. All Anderson has done is asserted them.
This is what I think is going on. Anderson realizes that he's got to start with claims that aren't proven (Gangadean speaks of "the first act of reason" as that of "grasping" concepts). You can't have deductive arguments for everything because deductive arguments need premises. You've got to start somewhere. But he also criticizes appeals to intuitions as unreliable. So he can't say that we know the laws of thought, our own existence, or anything for that matter, on the basis of intuition. His solution is to invent fancy labels that have the appearance of intellectual rigor. He tries to force a new distinction between "immediately known" claims on the one hand and intuitions on the other. It's his way of having his cake and eating it too. But that only brings us back to one of my questions about 1). Why should we accept such a distinction as reflective of reality?
As far as I can tell it's entirely unmotivated excepting for the fact that it helps the Gangadeanian worldview avoid certain criticisms. Philosophers refer to such illegitimate moves as ad hoccery. In fact, this is not a new move. Gangadean once tried to make the distinction between "rational intuitions" and "non-rational intuitions" with me before. Anderson is essentially trying to do the same but with different words. Both Anderson's and Gangadean's attempts rise and fall together. Just as both are unmotivated distinctions, they also face a problem of criteria. That is, even if we assume that there is a real distinction here, the problem then becomes how it is that Anderson (or anybody for that matter) can determine when a proposition is "immediately known" or the result of a "rational intuition" on the one hand, and "mere-intuition" on the other. Surely, we don't want to say that everything that anybody ever refers to as "immediately-known" is thereby immediately known. That would make such knowledge too cheap. At this point it's quite easy to give unhelpful and question-begging responses, and that's all I've heard from the Gangadeanian camp. But I would hope that they could provide responses that don't already assume certain things as "rational intuitions" or "immediately known".
I've had a number of conversations with Gangdeanians about many of these points and it's as if they can't even begin appreciating the questions or perhaps they are to some extent unwilling. They just don't ask about the truth of 1), 2) and 3). They don't ask how they know such things. It's as if it just doesn't occur to them. Hence, they take Gangadean or Anderson's assertions on these matters as articles of faith. This is perhaps why I get some version of 1), 2), and 3) simply reiterated to me in response to my questions about how we can know 1), 2) and 3).
In fact, there's another way we can approach the matter as it concerns Anderson's three claims. For instance, suppose we want to evaluate Anderson's claim that knowing something via an intuition presupposes the law of non-contradiction (i.e., his claim 3). The question on hand is how he knows with certainty that intuitions depend on the law of non-contradiction. I suspect he will claim that such things are known 'immediately, but not via intuition' and it's just the sort of thing I want to say is known via intuition. But we can adopt a neutral vocabulary at this point so as not to prejudge the issue. Let's call whatever process or means by which he knows the likes of 3), 'X'.
We can then raise the question in the following manner. How does Anderson know that X is a perfectly reliable means of knowing 3)? He might try to say something like, "well X is that which makes thinking possible and so it must be reliable." But that only introduces another proposition which he presumes to know and so pushes the question back a level. This new proposition, we'll call it '4)', is the following (I'll omit the second conjunct for the sake of simplicity).
4) X makes thinking possible.But how does Anderson know 4)? That is, how does he know that X is that which makes thinking possible? Well, either this involves another process call it Y, or else it depends on the very process by which he knows 3) namely, X. If the former, then we can generate a new question about how he knows that Y is a reliable means of knowing and we approach an infinite regress. If the latter, then his account is circular--it presupposes that X is reliable in order to argue that X is reliable. Alternatively, we can just take the reliability of X on faith. To be clear, my point is not to say that these latter two options are bad in fact, many philosophers (myself included) take certain claims as basic--namely, those which are known via intuitions. Instead what I'm saying is that Anderson's distinction does no better. It too must take certain claims on faith. And then the question is how this is really different from trusting one's intuition.
Anderson and Gangadean have a rather Cartesian approach. They want to find that which can't possibly be questioned as the foundation for all knowledge. In these terms I can drive my point of criticism home. In effect, what I am asking is how one can know when something can't be questioned. That is, what is the process by which you determine that some proposition can't be doubted or questioned? Gangadeanians say if something makes questioning possible, it can't be questioned. But that only pushes the line of inquiry back a step. How does one know that? Or how does one know when something makes questioning possible? At some point, the Gangadeanian will say that somethings are immediately known, and I will say that it's via an intuition. What I'm proposing now is that we call this process 'X'. Doing so not only keeps both sides honest, it starts to reveal how useless the distinction that Anderson introduced actually is. Even if it's motivated (which it isn't), it just doesn't do the work that Anderson or any Gangdaeanian needs for their worldview. This is because however X differs from intuition, it has this in common by Anderson's own admission: it's an immediate process. And what 'immediate' means in the current context is that it isn't mediated via anything like logical inferences or arguments. You either come to accept immediately apprehended claims or you don't. If one does and another doesn't, there's no public or "objective" process to evaluate. You haven't got anything like a deductive argument with logical inferences to consider. So Anderson can call the process by which he knows the most basic of his beliefs whatever he likes. It's of no consequence. It simply doesn't help insulate him against my criticisms of inconsistency because all the purported problems he raises against intuitions apply to his favored "immediately known truths" solely in virtue of them being immediate. We can't independently determine either as reliable (we take their reliability on faith) and we have no "objective measure" by which to settle disputes should they arise.
The upshot is this: Anderson wants to crap on intuitions (qua the starting points of philosophy). He tries to offer an alternative by distinguishing between intuitions and "immediately known truths". But we have no good reason to accept this distinction as reflective of reality or even if we did, it utterly fails to guard the Gangadeanian worldview from charges of inconsistency anyway.
