Before we examine whether philosophical intuitions are best understood as scaffolded or freestanding judgments, it will be helpful to take a closer look at how intuitions are treated in philosophical theorizing. For this we go back again to the paradigm case of intuition-based philosophy: Gettier (1963) cases. The expected (and therefore long unchallenged) outcome of those thought experiments is that the person reflecting on the cases admits that they describe instances of justified true belief that at the same time fail to count as knowledge. How do we know they’re not knowledge? We just know! Reflecting on that answer one can come to the conclusion that one has an intuition about the concept of knowledge. The next question that then needs to be answered is how a person arrives at that conclusion. I claim that this is done by introspection. As described above, introspection is best understood as the act of paying attention to one’s conscious states of experience, or in other words about the phenomenal aspects of experience. In the case of an intuition, this phenomenal aspect would be the above-mentioned phenomenology of certainty. To summarize this, conceptual intuitions are reflected upon by introspecting on one’s own concepts and their applicability conditions. This practice is what I call the Introspection of Personal Concepts View of Intuitions (IPCV).
IPCV =Df Conceptual Intuitions are made accessible by introspecting one’s own phenomenology of certainty towards the applicability of a certain concept.
Following IPCV, this practice is then of course vulnerable to the same skeptical challenges that have been raised against introspection in general. How accurately can I introspect what constitutes my concept of knowledge? What about modal aspects like the necessity of a proposition? These questions can be made more accessible by thinking about intuitions in terms of scaffolded or freestanding judgments.
Again taking the Gettier intuition about knowledge, what makes this intuition, even though not universal, so astonishingly stable among Western philosophers? I argue that this is due to the close match between the content of the intuition (i.e. “She doesn’t know!”) and the rules that one learns about how to successfully use the concept of knowledge in our cultural niche (i.e.: “Only ascribe knowledge if a person is justified in the right way to believe a proposition!”).[14] So in the context of Western philosophy, the intuitive judgment can be regarded as a scaffolded and thus reliable judgment. It is reliable because it is embedded in our conventional, everyday use of the word “knowledge”.[15] But what about knowledge in general, i.e., outside the context of Western culture? In that case, the content of the intuition, due to its personal character, would not match the context-free, abstract use of the concept of knowledge. The judgment would be a freestanding judgment and thus an unreliable source of evidence for making general claims about knowledge. This would perfectly fit the idea of intuitions as individually-acquired concepts and also explain findings from experimental philosophy, which indicate that intuitions are highly variable among different cultures (Weinberg et al. 2008). One could now argue that, even if I am correct about conceptual intuitions like those in Gettier cases, there are basic intuitions that are reliable. A candidate for such an intuition is presented by Bealer in the form of rational intuitions:
By contrast, when we have a rational intuition—say, if P then not not P—it presents itself as necessary: it does not seem to us that things could be otherwise; it must be that if P then not not P. (I am unsure how exactly to analyze what is meant by saying that a rational intuition presents itself as necessary. Perhaps something like this: necessarily, if x intuits that P, it seems to x that P and also that necessarily P […].) (1997)
The reliability of such a basic intuition can also be accommodated in the terminology of scaffolded and freestanding judgments. Due to the close match between our intuition and the way in which we learned to describe the world, in which it never is the case that p while simultaneously not p, we can regard that intuition as a scaffolded judgment. Concerning the intuition about the necessity of this intuited content, however, the personal character of intuitions again does not warrant the generalization. Statements about the modal status of the claim are perhaps secured by correctly applying the laws of logic (like in the above mention example of the principle of contradiction), but not by my personal intuition (Alexander 2012; Pust 2014). But even if this is true and thus if such basic intuitions are always reliable, it still needs to be shown by general optimists, concerning the reliability of intuitions, how this extends to more complex phenomena like those often discussed in the intuition debate (Cappelen 2012). I take the above-discussed cases of Gettier-intuitions and Bealer’s rational intuitions as evidence that we should at least doubt that most intuitions that are taken as reliable sources of evidence are sufficiently scaffolded. Until this is shown I would advise that we stay skeptical and regard those intuitions as Unreliable Freestanding Intuitions (UFIT).
UFIT =Df Many intuitions that are treated as reliable sources of evidence in philosophical theorizing lack the right scaffolding and must thus be regarded as freestanding intuitions, which makes them epistemically unreliable.