Let me begin by thanking Maximilian H. Engel for his commentary. I take the heart of his paper to consist in the suggestion that the distinction between freestanding and scaffolded judgments which Maja Spener and I (Bayne & Spener 2010) developed in connection with introspection can be usefully applied to the epistemology of intuition. I will start by revisiting the freestanding/scaffolded distinction, before turning to Engel’s proposal.
The epistemology of introspection is that it is not flat but contains peaks of epistemic security alongside troughs of epistemic insecurity. Any attempt to understand the epistemology of introspection needs to take this landscape into account, for although our pretheoretical views concerning the epistemology of introspection are not sacrosanct they do form a useful constraint on theorizing about introspection. Any account of introspection should explain why some introspective judgments strike us as highly secure whereas others seem to be insecure.
This is where the distinction between scaffolded and freestanding judgments comes in. Both types of judgments have as their intentional objects current conscious states that one takes oneself to be in. (The notion could also be applied to judgements concerning the states that one is not in.) An introspective judgment is scaffolded when the subject is disposed to make a first-order judgment whose content bears a rough correspondence to that of the introspective judgment. For example, the judgment that one is experiencing a red light in front of one is scaffolded by the disposition to judge that there is a red light in front of one, whereas there is no such first-order disposition corresponding to the introspective judgment that one is merely imagining or thinking about a red light. Experiences that are the intentional objects of scaffolded judgments are themselves employed in world-directed first-order judgments, whereas that is not the case where free-standing judgments are concerned. Contrary to what Engel suggests, there is no commitment here to the idea that only scaffolded judgments are epistemically trustworthy. The idea, rather, is that scaffolded judgments have a certain kind of first-person warrant that free-standing judgements tend to lack.