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For example, John Searle famously appealed to intuition to challenge the notion that a computer could ever understand language: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output)… If the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.” Should we take Searle’s intuition that such a system would not constitute “understanding” as good evidence that it would not? Many critics of the Chinese Room argument argue that there is no reason to expect our intuitions about intelligence and understanding to be reliable.

Ethics leans especially heavily on appeals to intuition, with a whole school of ethicists (“intuitionists”) maintaining that a person can see the truth of general ethical principles not through reason, but because he “just sees without argument that they are and must be true.”6

Intuitions are also called upon to rebut ethical theories such as utilitarianism: maximizing overall utility would require you to kill one innocent person if, in so doing, you could harvest her organs and save five people in need of transplants. Such a conclusion is taken as a reductio ad absurdum, requiring utilitarianism to be either abandoned or radically revised – not because the conclusion is logically wrong, but because it strikes nearly everyone as intuitively wrong.

British philosopher G.E. Moore used intuition to argue that the existence of beauty is good irrespective of whether anyone ever gets to see and enjoy that beauty. Imagine two planets, he said, one full of stunning natural wonders – trees, sunsets, rivers, and so on – and the other full of filth. Now suppose that nobody will ever have the opportunity to glimpse either of those two worlds. Moore concluded, “Well, even so, supposing them quite apart from any possible contemplation by human beings; still, is it irrational to hold that it is better that the beautiful world should exist than the one which is ugly? Would it not be well, in any case, to do what we could to produce it rather than the other? Certainly I cannot help thinking that it would."7

Although similar appeals to intuition can be found throughout all the philosophical subfields, their validity as evidence has come under increasing scrutiny over the last two decades, from philosophers such as Hilary Kornblith, Robert Cummins, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Weinberg, and Jaakko Hintikka (links go to representative papers from each philosopher on this issue). The severity of their criticisms vary from Weinberg’s warning that “We simply do not know enough about how intuitions work,” to Cummins’ wholesale rejection of philosophical intuition as “epistemologically useless.”

One central concern for the critics is that a single question can inspire totally different, and mutually contradictory, intuitions in different people.

For example, I disagree with Moore’s intuition that it would be better for a beautiful planet to exist than an ugly one even if there were no one around to see it. I can’t understand what the words “better” and “worse,” let alone “beautiful” and “ugly,” could possibly mean outside the domain of the experiences of conscious beings

If we want to take philosophers’ intuitions as reason to believe a proposition, then the existence of opposing intuitions leaves us in the uncomfortable position of having reason to believe both a proposition and its opposite.

“I suspect there is overall less agreement than standard philosophical practice presupposes, because having the ‘right’ intuitions is the entry ticket to various subareas of philosophy,” Weinberg says.

But the problem that intuitions are often not universally shared is overshadowed by another problem: even if an intuition is universally shared, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. For in fact there are many universal intuitions that are demonstrably false.

People who have not been taught otherwise typically assume that an object dropped out of a moving plane will fall straight down to earth, at exactly the same latitude and longitude from which it was dropped. What will actually happen is that, because the object begins its fall with the same forward momentum it had while it was on the plane, it will continue to travel forward, tracing out a curve as it falls and not a straight line. “Considering the inadequacies of ordinary physical intuitions, it is natural to wonder whether ordinary moral intuitions might be similarly inadequate,” Princeton’s Gilbert Harman has argued,9 and the same could be said for our intuitions about consciousness, metaphysics, and so on.

We can’t usually “check” the truth of our philosophical intuitions externally, with an experiment or a proof, the way we can in physics or math. But it’s not clear why we should expect intuitions to be true. If we have an innate tendency towards certain intuitive beliefs, it’s likely because they were useful to our ancestors.

But there’s no reason to expect that the intuitions which were true in the world of our ancestors would also be true in other, unfamiliar contexts

And for some useful intuitions, such as moral ones, “truth” may have been beside the point. It’s not hard to see how moral intuitions in favor of fairness and generosity would have been crucial to the survival of our ancestors’ tribes, as would the intuition to condemn tribe members who betrayed those reciprocal norms. If we can account for the presence of these moral intuitions by the fact that they were useful, is there any reason left to hypothesize that they are also “true”? The same question could be asked of the moral intuitions which Jonathan Haidt has classified as “purity-based” – an aversion to incest, for example, would clearly have been beneficial to our ancestors. Since that fact alone suffices to explain the (widespread) presence of the “incest is morally wrong” intuition, why should we take that intuition as evidence that “incest is morally wrong” is true?

The still-young debate over intuition will likely continue to rage, especially since it’s intertwined with a rapidly growing body of cognitive and social psychological research examining where our intuitions come from and how they vary across time and place.

its resolution bears on the work of literally every field of analytic philosophy, except perhaps logic. Can analytic philosophy survive without intuition? (If so, what would it look like?) And can the debate over the legitimacy of appeals to intuition be resolved with an appeal to intuition?

Of course, while there are similarities between the positions adopted in the "positivism/scientism versus non-positivism/scientism" and "Western medicine versus alternative medicine" debates, I suppose that one main difference is however that the latter is not just a theoretical debate but involves people's health and lives.

As was mentioned earlier, the general impression is perhaps that while Western medicine, which generally has its roots in Western societies, is scientifically proven, TCM, or alternative medicine, is however not as scientifically proven. The former is thus regarded as the dominant mainstream model of medical treatment while non-Western medical knowledge or treatment is regarded as "alternative medicine".

The process by which the above impression was created was, according to the postcolonial theorists, a highly political one. Essentially, it may be argued that along with their political colonisation of non-European territories in the past, the European/Western colonialists also colonised the minds of those living in those territories. This means that along with colonisation, traditional forms of knowledge, including medical knowledge, and cultures in the colonised terrorities were relegated to a non-dominant, if not inferior, position vis-a-vis Western knowledge and culture. And as postcolonial theorists may argue, the legacy and aftermath of this process is still felt today and efforts should be made to reverse it.

In light of the above, the increased push to have non-Western forms of medical treatment be recognised as an equally valid model of medical treatment besides that of Western medicine may be seen as part of the effort to reverse the dominance of Western knowledge and culture set in place during the colonial period. Of course, this push to reverse Western dominance is especially relevant in recent times, in light of the economic and political rise of non-Western powers such as China and India (interestingly enough, to the best of my knowledge, when talking about "alternative medicine", people are usually referring to traditional Indian or Chinese medical treatments and not really traditional African medical treatment).

Here, it is worthwhile to pause and think for a while: if it is recognised that Western and non-Western medicine are different but equally valid models of medical treatment, would they be complimentary or competing models? Or would they be just different models?

Moving on, so far it would seem that , for at least the foreseeable future, Western medicine will retain its dominant "mainstream" position but who knows what the future may hold?

the standard approach to article preparation is for planners to work hand-in-glove with drug companies to create a first draft. "Key messages" laid out by the drug companies are accommodated to the extent that they can be supported by available data.Planners combine scientific information about a drug with two kinds of message that help create a "drug narrative". "Environmental" messages are intended to forge the sense of a gap in available medicine within a specific clinical field, while "product" messages show how the new drug meets this need.

In a flow-chart drawn up by Eric Crown, publications manager at Merck (the company that sold the controversial painkiller Vioxx), the determination of authorship appears as the fourth stage of the article preparation procedure. That is, only after company employees have presented clinical study data, discussed the findings, finalised "tactical plans" and identified where the article should be published.Perhaps surprisingly to the casual observer, under guidelines tightened up in recent years by the International Committee of Journal Editors (ICMJE), Crown's approach, typical among pharmaceutical companies, does not constitute ghostwriting.

What publication planners understand by the term is precise but it is also quite distinct from the popular interpretation.

"We may have written a paper, but the people we work with have to have some input and approve it."

"I feel that we're doing something good for mankind in the long-run," said Kimberly Goldin, head of the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP). "We want to influence healthcare in a very positive, scientifically sound way.""The profession grew out of a marketing umbrella, but has moved under the science umbrella," she said.But without the window of court documents to show how publication planning is being carried out today, the public simply cannot know if reforms the industry says it has made are genuine.

Dr Leemon McHenry, a medical ethicist at California State University, says nothing has changed. "They've just found more clever ways of concealing their activities. There's a whole army of hidden scribes. It's an epistemological morass where you can't trust anything."Alastair Matheson is a British medical writer who has worked extensively for medical communication agencies. He dismisses the planners' claims to having reformed as "bullshit"."The new guidelines work very nicely to permit the current system to continue as it has been", he said. "The whole thing is a big lie. They are promoting a product."