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Chapter Four dives into the politics of intuition, and how the Intuitionism scale not only predicts magical beliefs, it predicts a host of political views as well. Since Intuitionism is often as important as ideology in determining Americans’ political opinions. Data in this chapter shows how modern life often clashes with this way of thinking, and how Intuitionists view politics in terms of feeling and metaphor.

John Harris famously rejects basing views in bioethics on what Orwell called “moral nose”: detecting wrongness by how something “smells”. This chapter supports his view that moral intuitions without critical evaluation can reflect mere prejudice. But it gives reasons for giving some of them more respect than he allows. When moral nose merely reflects disturbance at the unfamiliar, or at the disruption of categories based only on tradition, it has no credentials at all. But sometimes, as in Orwell's reaction to Stalinism (“there is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years … the Russian regime stinks”) or in the reactions of many of us to Guantanamo, they are based on our human responses to killing and cruelty. Moral intuitions coming from these human responses can be an early warning system it is dangerous to ignore. They should be over-ridden after a strong case has been made that the alternative will be, in human terms, even worse.

This chapter describes the distinction between positive and negative xphi, identifying xphi’s negative branch as the book’s main target. It also canvasses five different xphi studies and their perceived connection to traditional philosophical disputes in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and action theory. The chapter describes a phenomenon, “pragmatic distortion,” that stands in the way of deriving accurate information about subjects’ intuitions but concludes that criticism of xphi solely on these grounds is shallow. The chapter also sketches a very minimalist account of the “nature” of intuitions—the No-Theory Theory—and presents the negative xphi critique in a general and perspicuous format.

This chapter collects more examples of philosophers arguing for their judgments about important thought experiments. Kripke’s long and multi-faceted argument for his judgment about the Godel Case is reviewed. Also described are arguments for judgments about thought experiments from Lehrer, Jackson, Searle, Davidson, and Lackey. The chapter criticizes the idea that, in any of these cases, we are meant to accept a given judgment on the basis of brute intuition alone. The second half of the chapter returns to the Relocation Problem introduced in chapter 3 and argue that it is not a genuine problem, or at least not a problem for the methods of philosophy alone. The Relocation Problem is a version of the problem known as the “regress of reasons,” but this problem is fully general, affecting all methods of inquiry equally.

One central purpose of experimental philosophy (hereafter, x-phi) is to criticize the alleged reliance on intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In the book Philosophy without Intuitions, the author argues that philosophers don’t rely on intuitions. If those arguments are good, experimental philosophy has been engaged in an attack on a Straw man. The goal of the current chapter is to bolster the criticism of x-phi: experimental philosophy doesn’t (need to) target intuitions; its criticism of philosophical practice stands even if it isn’t the case that philosophers rely on intuitions. The aim is to convince the reader that experimental philosophers underestimate the difficulties involved in the revision this reply gestures at. They talk as if what is required is nothing but a slight terminological revision, but it is not. In this chapter, eight options for how to reformulate the x-phi project are considered. It is argued that they all fail.