1.) What is, and what isn’t, intuitive is very malleable. What is intuitive for 20th century people in industrialized societies is likely to be quite different from what is intuitive for a 13th century person in any society, or a 21st person in a less developed or tribal society. This isn’t to say that our intuitions are better, just different, because they are largely based on different sets of experiences.

2.) In most sciences, counterintuitive results are the most productive. This is in part because intuitions are just bad guides in general, but it’s also because counterintuitive results open up regions of epistemic space that had been entirely unavailable before (consider one of the most counterintuitive paradigms in history, quantum mechanics). In fact, counterintuitive results often lead to strikingly new intuitions.

3.) Science will tend to procede away from our intuitions. While intuitions may be good starting points, science is, and has been since Aristotle, about getting at what’s “underneath” (a fact that has opened it to criticism from some circles, e.g., phenomenology). What’s underneath is quite often beyond the scope of our intuitions. Furthermore, as scientific paradigms become more complex, they will inevitably become more counterintuitive.

4.) Heidegger once noted that the most difficult thing to see is that which is closest to us. This makes intuitions particularly problematic for any scientific pursuit that has anything to do with us (especially the cognitive and social sciences). So much of what we know about ourselves and the behavior of others is built around assumptions and intuitions that have very little basis in empiricla reality. Instead, they come from cultural, linguistic, and other sources that are not designed to capture reality in the way that science is. 

Puported by Chris

Puported by Illusive Mind

In some cases it seems the entire purpose of a theory is merely to systematize our intuitions. Consider ethics.

I think prescribing behaviour is different from empirical investigation. I also think that it if it is accurate that common sense is in of itself worthless, then so is a system of ethics that takes as its foundation our intuitions.

I wonder if we could generalize this, and say that a theory that’s too counterintuitive runs the risk of “changing the subject”. After all, explanations must appeal to concepts that we are familiar with, for how else are we to even understand them? I think you might be talking about two different things here. Say we are dealing with an area that is in of itself counter-intuitive (everyone’s favourite: certain aspects of quantum mechanics) it is likely that there are explanations within this field which themselves are completely counter-intuitive. This doesn’t mean we don’t understand them because it is using the same terminology and describing the things we (as learned scholars) are familiar with about quantum mechanics.

One physicist put it like this:
Once you go beyond the subatomic level, things get very strange. And it makes sense that they do, for why should the human mind be familiar with what it is like inside of a quark? That is not something a primate would ever encounter. 

Puported by Illusive Mind

Puported by geniusnz

Sometimes this effect is dominant - at other times it may not be. I have a feeling that it is indeed true in my field. (once upon a time I had an academic article supporting that).
If you want an exact answer the key thing is how you define the possible theories and how you define intuitive.

Note this is only if those theories are proposed by others not if you thought them up yourself because ideas you thought up yourself will not be “intuitiveness filtered”. 

Puported by geniusnz

If a theory is counter intuitive and yet has existed for many years in the public debate there must be somthing more to it, either a bigger bias (intitiveness is to an extent the “sum of all biases” but individuals may have different biases) OR it is indeed true.

I think this is a significant effect in the area of academia that I studied so much so that one could bet on it (in fact I remember an academic artile from a cynic like myself saying somthing somewhat similar) - but maybe this is not true in all other fields. 

Puported by geniusnz

I do think explanatory power is probably more important - especially for scientific theories, where our intuitions are notoriously unreliable - but that doesn’t mean common-sense counts for nothing at all.

And what about philosophical theories (or ‘conceptual analysis’, or whatever you want to call it)? In some cases it seems the entire purpose of a theory is merely to systematize our intuitions. Consider ethics. If a moral theory suggested that torturing children for fun was morally right, then that would be definitive grounds for rejecting it. Whatever the theory is talking about, it’s not what *we* mean by “ethics”.

I wonder if we could generalize this, and say that a theory that’s too counterintuitive runs the risk of “changing the subject”. After all, explanations must appeal to concepts that we are familiar with, for how else are we to even understand them? 

Puported by Richard

Puported by Illusive Mind

Now whilst predictability is of great value to astronomers, it is less so to literary theorists. We can’t ask Shakespeare to tell us what he meant, or to rewrite a variation to see if our theory still fits. All we can do is ask that it fits within the entirety of the work and this assumes that the author is good enough to be consistent, or does not utilise inconsistency as another device. So in the text, explanatory power I would argue is what matters most.

But what, praytell, would the “hidden mechanism” be in the case of a fiction like MacBeth, and what would the hidden mechanism be “linking”?If one were to take the first interpretation, what would be hidden is Macbeth’s rationalistic nature. That even in the grief of his wife’s death he uses Nihilism as a way of attenuating not only the significance of her death but his responsibility. If life is meaningless then so are the egregious crimes they committed. This links together the whole story and the theme of his character. 

Puported by Illusive Mind

As for your claim that counterintuitiveness doesn’t count against a theory, well, the obvious response is: that’s counterintuitive! ;) 

Puported by John Turri