By "intuition" I just mean "something I am strongly inclined to say even in the face of contrary argument." It's not some special faculty of mind. I don't have an intuition about where Uruguay is. I either know or I don't. But I have an intuition that the external world is independent of my beliefs and desires. The thought si that intuirions are preflective, not terribly considered, but more or lessstrongly held judgments that we try to systematize in reflective equilibrium.
I think it would be
> > more appropriate to talk about a belief in God rather than just an
> > intuition about God (at least in the case of someone jumpting out of an
> > airplane at 10,000 feet with no parachute).
In the sense described above, one might have an intuition that there is a God. Lots of people do.
A belief, in good pragmatic
> > fashion, is a rule of behaviour.
No, that's just behaviorism. Lots of beliefs have no behavioral consequences beyond the propensity to utter statements asserting them in the appropriate circumstances. I reject the proposition that there is no more to having a belief that having such a propensity, or one to act on the belief. Beliefs are (at least partly) internal states, and behavior, verbal and other, is evidence--no more--that one is in such a state.
Btw, Luke, if you are interested, you can look up my dissertation in the first floor philosophy library in Angell Hall: Justin Schwartz, Materialism and the Unity of Science (1989). It has a lot of stuff about what are beliefs, what are their contents, and about pragmatism and method.
>
>I think your distinction is valid, yet Ken Hanly's point stands because the
>belief in question is presumably based on intution and not reasoned
>argument.
>
These are not inconsistent.
As the epigraph for my M.Phil thesis (on realism), I used a quip of Bradley's: "Metaphysics is the practice of giving bad reasons for what we believe on instinct."
--jks
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