Intuition, Disagreement, and a Rope Around the Earth
Check out this awesome new philosophical video by philosopher Jon Ellis at Santa Cruz.
The video starts with this thought experiment from Wittgenstein:
Suppose that a very long piece of rope is wrapped around the equator of the Earth. Now imagine that the rope is lengthened by one yard, but its circular form is preserved, so that the rope no longer fits snugly but occupies a circle at some slight constant distance from the Earth's surface. How great would that distance be? (reported in Horwich 2012, p. 7).
Your attitudes toward philosophical and political propositions might be kind of like your attitude toward that rope -- but with no clear mathematical means to resolve the disagreement.
If you like the video, you might check out Jon's on my paper Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical Thought.