Chris over at Mixing Memory has an other great post, this one on our folk theories and intuitions of various disciplines. I had to read some of the studies on this back in college for one of my classes. It seemed odd at the time but the professor had us do all these outside readings of papers on how people learned physics and math. It was pretty weird for a hard science class, but in hindsight it was a very wise thing to do. Most people in those disciplines would end up either teaching college and possible freshmen or end up teaching high school. Even those, like myself, who ended up in the business world still interact with non-scientists. Knowing how radically different peoples intuitions of phenomena are from how scientists perceive phenomena is very important. The study I recall from my class was that of physics sophomores where some outrageous percent of those studied couldn't draw the proper path a falling object takes. (A parabola) When you get into more difficult physics, the problems get far worse.
Of course I also fear the person who think they are educated about modern physics from reading popular accounts of subject. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. My quantum professor used to joke about how you really can't understand physics until you are very, very comfortable with the math and solving problems and can get other people to do the same. I think there's a lot of truth in this.
I bring up Chris' post because I think a lot of philosophy is still grounded in common sense and intuitions. I've talked about that a lot here before. (here, here, here, and here among others) My basic complaint is that I truly don't feel intuitions are trustworthy in the least. You can see that a lot in my approach to the free will issue. I think we ground our philosophy in common sense, but how we do this is careful. Someday I really ought to write up a little bit from Peirce on this. He really offers a good insight here.
Clark, I agree, 100%. The further problem is that the intuitions that ground so much of professional philosophy are finely tuned through education, making it difficult to conceive of intuitions that differ radically (for example, those from other cultures). Even the problems that philosophers address (in the free will literature, for instance) arise out of the intuitions, rather than the other way around. This is analogous to the problem in the sciences of experiments derived from theories, and therefore interpretation, and knowledge, are constrained by the present theories. In science, there is a way around this, through falsification. In philosophy, the only means by which we can falsify a set of intuitions is through more intuitions. It's not surprising, then, that philosophy has hovered around a few different general intuitions (empiricism and rationalism, for instance) for more than two millenia.
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