The practice of appealing to intuition is central to the way many philosophers conceive of their discipline. There is, however, no agreed upon account of what intuitions are, let alone how they are supposed to function as evidence for philosophical theories. Worse still, research by experimental philosophers seems to have revealed a troubling sensitivity of our intuitions to a range of philosophically irrelevant factors. Some philosophers have argued that these findings represent a challenge to the ‘standard justificatory procedure’; we have discovered that our intuitions are not truth-tracking. Thus, we should abandon (or at least restrict) their use in philosophy.

What animates this challenge is an alleged reliance, by philosophers, on a special and especially suspect form of evidence.

I will argue that philosophers do not, in fact, rely on intuitions as evidence because no such theoretically interesting category of mental states exists. Our profession’s use of ‘intuition’ talk is nothing more than an unfortunate verbal tic. The X-phi results are relevant to philosophical debate, but not in the way usually conceived of by opponents of armchair philosophy.