Engel argues that the distinction between scaffolded and free-standing judgments can also be applied to the kinds of judgments deployed in debates about philosophical intuitions, and also suggests that most such judgments—or at least, those which are of central philosophical interest—are best regarded as free-standing, and thus lack the kind of warrant that we might want for them.
Although I welcome Engel’s attempt to extend the distinction between scaffolded and free-standing judgments beyond the domain of introspection, I am not convinced that it does much to illuminate the epistemology of intuition. The first issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that intuitive judgments don’t form a single, well-behaved class. One kind of intuitive judgment that is of philosophical interest concerns the modal structure of the world, as when one judges that it is necessarily true that 2+2=4 or that it is only contingently true that Aristotle was a philosopher. But as far as I can tell, Engel is not concerned with intuitive judgments of this kind, but with what we might call intuitions of concept application. Such judgments are concerned with the question of whether a certain concept (such as <knowledge>) ought to be applied to a certain state of affairs.
In explaining how the contrast between scaffolded and free-standing judgments might apply to intuitive judgments Engel writes:
Again taking the 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 one learns to use [regarding] the concept of knowledge in our cultural niche (i.e.: “Only ascribe knowledge if a person is appropriately justified in believing a proposition!”). So in the context of Western philosophy, the intuitive judgment can be regarded as a scaffolded and thus reliable judgment. (this collection, p. 6)
It is certainly true that an individual’s use of a concept is scaffolded by the practices of the culture in which they are embedded. As Kant pointed out, we learn how to apply concepts by noting how they are applied by those around us. Kant (A134/B174) described examples as the “Gängelwagen of thought”, where a Gängelwagen is a walking frame or go-kart that is harnessed to an infant in order to help it learn to walk. But although this form of support is indeed a kind of scaffolding, it differs in important ways from the kind of scaffolding that I had in mind. In the sense of the term that Spener and I had in mind, a scaffolded judgment is a judgment that is underpinned by a disposition to make a first-order judgment who content roughly corresponds to the content of the scaffolded judgments. As far as I can see, intuitive judgments are not scaffolded in this sense, in part because intuitive judgments are already “first-order”. So, although I would certainly agree that the possession of such concepts as <knowledge> is supported by one’s cultural niche, it doesn’t follow that the intuitive judgments about when it is and isn’t appropriate to apply this concept are scaffolded.