Yeah I was in fact making a cheeky reference to Wittgenstein ;)
We were talking about the reliability of intuition versus sense perception.
Yeah I was in fact making a cheeky reference to Wittgenstein ;)
We were talking about the reliability of intuition versus sense perception.
Ah ok, I thought after I posted that maybe I missed the intent of your somewhat cryptic remark;
I'm not sure, though, that the intuitive appearance of the sun moving is the same sense of intuition as some philosophers use. We don't perceive the Earth to be in motion, and from a frame of reference based on the surface of the Earth, the sun actually is in motion. The mistake was thinking that this was an absolute reference frame. I would say that was more a misinterpretation of our perceptions than an intuition. People could give reasons for why they thought the Earth was motionless: wouldn't buildings fall down, and birds find it harder to fly in one direction rather than another? etc. It wasn't just an intuition in the sense that it's something that people believed without being able to say why. They could say why they believed it, and they could relate it to perceptions to justify those beliefs. I think there's a distinction there.
I think it'd kind of defeat the argument of the article to say that those two types of intuition about the sun, and of philosophers, are separate. And besides, before experiment the motion of the sun was pondered by philosophers - and there's some arguments that say the boundaries of philosophy are set by what slips out of theory into experiment!
> I think it'd kind of defeat the argument of the article to say that those two types of intuition about the sun, and of philosophers, are separate.
That's ok, I don't think it's a good argument. It's based on redefining the word "intuition" to mean something else, e.g. "5+7=12" is an intuition according to the article's definition.