Title: The Intellectual Given
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Some things we seem to know just by thinking: that identity is transitive, that Gettier’s Smith lacks knowledge, that it's wrong to wantonly torture innocents, and other propositions that simply strike us as true when we consider them. But how?
I investigate the prospects of a rationalist account of this phenomenon that critically develops a significant comparison between intuition and perception. The central idea is that intuition and perception, though different, are at a certain level of abstraction the same kind of mental state, and that states of this kind are, by their very nature, poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justified and even knowledgeable belief without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as given.
The dissertation proceeds in three stages. In the first stage, I offer reasons to think that, when suitably disciplined, the perceptual analogy affords a fully general and psychologically realistic view of intuition. Intuition is neither a doxastic attitude, such as a belief or judgment, nor a tendency to form such an attitude, nor a mere seeming, but a presentation: a conscious state that, like perception, directly and immediately presents the world as being a certain way. I articulate a non-metaphorical theory of presentation that locates this type of mental state in a plausible ontology of mind. The result is a view of intuition with several theoretical virtues. For example: it makes sense of common descriptions of what happens when one has an intuition; it correctly classifies examples of intuition (or the absence thereof); it explains prima facie distinctions between intuition and “nearby” phenomena (e.g., guesses and hunches); and it accounts for several heretofore unexplained psychological roles of intuition.
In the second stage, I argue that these broadly metaphysical reflections on the nature of intuition serve an epistemological end: they enable a sober, non-skeptical perspective on how intuition might function as a legitimate epistemic source. When a proposition, otherwise undefeated, is presented, non-voluntarily, to a subject as being true, matters are not neutral from the subject’s perspective. The subject thus has at least some reason to believe that proposition—reason, I argue, that is properly viewed as epistemic. In this way, a presentation is apt to provide immediate prima facie justification: whether sensory or intellectual, it stands ready to justify belief without requiring justification in turn. The result is a unified account of perceptual and intuitive justification, one which allows (but need not entail) a positive verdict on the common practice in mathematics, logic, and philosophy of regarding at least some intuitions about particular cases and “first principles” or axioms as possessing a positive, albeit defeasible, epistemic status.
In the third stage, I engage Benacerraf-style worries about how intuition works, given a realist view of their subject matter. The worry is that numbers, sets, and various other objects of intuition are causally inert, and thus there cannot be a causal explanation of how our intuitions could be non-accidentally correct; how, then, are successful intuitions and intuitive knowledge possible? I explore the answer that successful intuitions constitutively depend on the facts intuited. Just as a naïve realist view of perception regards successful perception as an intentional state partly constituted by the empirical facts that are perceived, a naïve realist view of intuition regards successful intuition as an intentional state partly constituted by the non-empirical facts that are intuited. That the intuition constitutively depends on the fact intuited introduces, I suggest, the possibility of a constitutive, rather than causal, explanation of how intuition can be non-accidentally correct—and, in turn, how intuition may serve as a source of knowledge. Such a non-causal, constitution-based approach is independently motivated by the possibility of acquiring knowledge of facts about, say, colors and shapes via hallucinatory experience, in which there also need not be a causal relation between the experience and the fact known.