You shouldn’t say, “Well, if you can’t provide any evidence, you shouldn’t believe what you do.”
There are at least two justifications I can think of for this.
A reductio: basically saying “since you do believe X, you must have some evidence, so see if you can figure out what it is”. This can start a discussion on how not all evidence is definite/based on statistics etc.
If they don’t have a good track record, then you’re trying to influence them to drop the belief because of lack of evidence (this rarely works, unfortunately).
I agree with your second point. If your intuition has proven to be false more than true (in a given context), then the intuition your brain produces would be evidence that the intuition is wrong (sorry if that was poorly worded).
As for the first point, I agree that it’d be nice to make an attempt to figure out what it is, but if the attempt fails, I don’t think the observation that “Person X reports an intuitive belief that Y is true” should be ignored as evidence.
There are at least two justifications I can think of for this.
A reductio: basically saying “since you do believe X, you must have some evidence, so see if you can figure out what it is”. This can start a discussion on how not all evidence is definite/based on statistics etc.
If they don’t have a good track record, then you’re trying to influence them to drop the belief because of lack of evidence (this rarely works, unfortunately).
I agree with your second point. If your intuition has proven to be false more than true (in a given context), then the intuition your brain produces would be evidence that the intuition is wrong (sorry if that was poorly worded).
As for the first point, I agree that it’d be nice to make an attempt to figure out what it is, but if the attempt fails, I don’t think the observation that “Person X reports an intuitive belief that Y is true” should be ignored as evidence.