My point was not that conclusions don’t have (at times) subconscious reasoning underlying them. Rather, my point was that what Caplan calls “intuition” and, in my experience, what many philosophers call “intuition”, is irreducible, not simply a conclusion without knowledge of how it was arrived at.

I’m at fault here, because what you’re calling intuition is also an accepted definition of the word. Indeed, I suspect I’ve simply misread you by assuming one definition when you intended another.

For example, you can reduce music down to its objective elements. You can say that this song has this frequency and then this one and then the next. But by doing this you kill the existential aspect of the song. The subjective element is what makes music, music.

Soren Kiekegaard talked about how the more objective a fact is the less existential personal relevance the fact has and vise versa. The fact that 2+2=4 is highly objective but it has little meaning to me on an existential level on the other extreme my eternal salvation has a lot of existential importance to me but it is unprovable. A philosopher to sacrificing the intuitive (existential data) comes at too high of a cost. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as such a philosopher needs not to look for a wisdom to serve him/her but a wisdom to serve. The truths found by a restrictionist philosophical method are below man and are not worthy to serve.

Now, perhaps we should rely on a broader base of intuitions. But what evidence is there that such a pool will be more accurate than my singular intuition? Are you relying on some sort of meta-intuition to make that claim?

Before on this blog I have discussed whether a machine could calculate the answer to ethical problems. Could a machine generate intuitions in response to philosophical queries? One definition of intuition given is a conclusion from the subconscious without evident reasoning. The working of most machines is usually known at least to the designer, so perhaps by definition couldn’t have intuitions. I don’t think they could answer the sort of epistemological questions posed in the pdf (whether someone “really knows” or “just believes”). It seems like an issue of language. Before I have excluded normative statements from the class of statements which have truth value, but I think these sorts of things could be included as well. They do not seem to alter our expected experience at all, so it doesn’t really matter what the answer to the question is.

Would philosophers have simpler theories or lesser theories too? How do you imagine some philosophical theory would be if they realize that intution data is less reliable? Like, do you have any instance in mind on how some theory, any theory, is viewed currently and how would it be simpler like an economic theory?