Intuitions and individual differences: The Knobe effect revisited
by Shaun Nichols

Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people's intuitions about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how "intentional" gets interpreted. That is, in Knobe's cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of "intentional" opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe's results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the use of
intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern.