In a paper just published online in Erkenntnis, “Intuition Talk is Not Methodologically Cheap: Empirically Testing the ‘Received Wisdom’ About Armchair Philosophy,” Zoe Ashton and Moti Mizrahi mention the following note by Anscombe as an example of an appeal to intuition:
The nerve of Mr. Bennett’s argument is that if A results from your not doing B, then A results from whatever you do instead of doing B. While there may be much to be said for this view, still it does not seem right on the face of it. (Elizabeth Anscombe, “A note on Mr. Bennett,” Analysis, 26(6), 208. Emphasis supplied by Ashton and Mizrahi)
Part of their evidence that this is indeed an appeal to intuition is the fact that the quoted pair of sentences is the entirety of Anscombe’s published note. In other words, the only thing Anscombe has to say against Bennett, in the published note, is that his conclusion “does not seem right on the face of it.”
Ashton and Mizrahi claim, in effect, that Anscombe here provides an argument against Bennett’s view, an argument that has the following form: “It seems to me, Elizabeth Anscombe, that Bennett’s conclusion is false. Therefore, Bennett’s conclusion is false.” This is, it should be said, a terrible argument. And that provides some reason to doubt that it’s the argument Anscombe was giving. And if there’s no other argument she could have been giving, perhaps that’s because she wasn’t giving an argument.
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