Theorising Intuitions and Political Theory

A recent trend has seen various studies seek to interrogate the use and role of intuitions in political philosophy (see Floyd 2017) and political theory (see Rossi and Argenton 2021; Bosworth and Dowding 2019; Handby 2022). In this respect, Bosworth and Dowding show how ideology, sophistry, and assumptions can become embedded in terms throughout the history of ideas, thereby potentially biasing their use for contemporary purposes. In a broadly similar vein, Rossi and Argenton illustrate how an empirical and social/historical enquiry will reveal the fallacy of relying on certain intuitions for certain political arguments. Lastly, Handby draws on studies in cognitive psychology to show how intuitions can be biased by the city or country in which one lives, the institutions they live under, and their contingent life history of intuition holders. Each of these accounts seek to interrogate and examine the role of intuitions and, consequently, give us have serious reason to doubt the reliance of intuitions in contemporary normative political theorising. The purpose of this paper is to examine what comes next for political theory. If much of our contemporary theorising is premised on intuitions, can we continue to have faith in those arguments more broadly. To address this question, I set out four possible theories of critique targeted at political theory, and seek to assess whether the conclusions of Rossi and Argenton, Bosworth and Dowding, and Handby (among others), support those theories. The four theories I propose are: i) error theory, that arguments in political theory are false, given they are reliant on biased intuitions rather than ground truth, (ii) subjectivism, that arguments in political theory are for claims whose truth depend on the intuitions of the specific subject, (iii) relativism, that arguments in political theory are for claims whose truth depends on the intuitions of the arguer’s cultural group, and (iv) weak objectivism, that arguments in political theory are potentially biased by intuitions but can sometimes be corrected in ways so that they objectively track the ground truth.