Abstract
I agree with Sosa that intuitions are best thought of as attractions to believe a certain proposition merely on the basis of understanding it. However, I don’t think it is constitutive of them that they supply strictly foundational justification for the propositions they justify, though I do believe that it is important that the intuition of a suitable subject be thought of as a prima facie justification for his intuitive judgment, independently of the reliability of his underlying capacities. I also think that we need to be able to explain how mere understanding of a proposition can confer upon us an ability to have reliable intuitions, that we cannot simply take that idea for granted. And that when try to explain that, our best avenue for doing so is to take the intuitions as constituting the understanding of which they are said to be a manifestation.
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Notes
See my “Analyticity Reconsidered” and “Blind Reasoning,” both reprinted in my Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers,” (Oxford: OUP, 2008).
The answer I favor is that it is not the conscious judgment that p that provides the reason for the second-order belief, but rather one’s awareness of that conscious judgment—but this is best left for another occasion.
For the dispute between liberalism and conservatism about perceptual justification see Jim Pryor, “The Skeptic and the Dogmatist,” Noûs 34 (2000), 517–49 and Crispin Wright, “The Perils of Dogmatism,” in Themes from G. E. Moore, edited by Susanna Nuccetelli and Gary Seay, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
I heard this example from David B. Barnett.
See “Analyticity Reconsidered” and “Blind Reasoning,” in my Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers,” (Oxford: OUP, 2008). My own formulations tend to be in terms of our disposition to follow certain rules of assent or inference, but the proffered explanations are easily adaptable to talk of intuitions as here understood (temptations to assent).
See especially Timothy Williamson: The Philosophy of Philosophy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
This may seem to contradict various things I say in “Blind Reasoning” and “How Are Objective Reasons Possible?” (see Content and Justification), but that appearance is misleading. What I was opposed to in those papers was intuitions conceived of as quasi-perceptual glimpses into the nature of modal reality. That spooky picture need not be involved in the conception of intuitions as intellectual seemings, especially if these are thought of as playing a constitutive role in the account of concept-possession. What I am emphasizing in the text is that the relation between intellectual seemings and the judgments they justify should be thought of on analogy to the way the liberal conceives of the relation between perceptual states and the judgments they justify.
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Boghossian, P. Virtuous intuitions: comments on Lecture 3 of Ernest Sosa’s A Virtue Epistemology . Philos Stud 144, 111–119 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9379-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9379-5