The Faculty of Intuition

The present paper is a defense of the view that there is a faculty of rational intuition that delivers prima facie justified beliefs about philosophical propositions. I have no high-church analysis of the concept of faculty, and only employ the word in the following innocuous sense. If anything is a faculty, then sense perception is. If intuition is sufficiently similar to perception, then it too counts as a faculty. Moreover, if perception produces prima facie justified beliefs about its target subject matter and thereby serves as a source of knowledge, then so does intuition. Some philosophers, such as George Bealer (2008) and Ernest Sosa (2006), have argued that intuition has an essential connection to the truth and that because of this truth connection, intuition justifies beliefs that are formed on an intuitive basis. The present paper offers an analogical support for the use of rational intuition, namely, if we regard sense perception as a mental faculty that (in general) delivers justified beliefs, then we should treat intuition in the same manner. I will argue that both the cognitive marks of intuition and the role it traditionally plays in epistemology are strongly analogous to that of perception, and barring specific arguments to the contrary, we should treat rational intuition as a source of prima facie justified beliefs. There are two main arguments against the intuition–perception analogy that I will consider and find lacking. First is that while we do use perceptions as evidence to believe certain propositions, in fact no one ever does use intuition evidentially. The second argument, stemming from experimental philosophy, grants that philosophers do use intuitions evidentially, but this practice is fatally unlike that of perception, in that perception yields warranted beliefs and intuition does not. It will be made clear in section IV that while some experimentalists do not object to an evidential use of intuitions, many object to intuition as ever providing ultima facie or even prima facie justification.