engleski

The Explainability of Intuitions

Explaining intuitions in terms of “ facts of our natural history” is compatible with rationally trusting them. This compatibilist view is defended in the present paper, focusing upon nomic and essentialist modal intuitions. The opposite, incompatibilist view alleges the following. If basic modal intuitions are due to our cognitive makeup or “ imaginative habits” then the epistemologists are left with mere non-rational feeling of compulsion on the side of the thinker. Intuitions then cannot inform us about modal reality. In contrast, the paper argues that there are several independent sources of justification which make the feeling of compulsion rational: the prima-facie and a priori ones come from obviousness and not being able to imagine things otherwise, others, a posteriori, from epistemic success of our basic modal intuitions. Further, the general scheme of evolutionary learning is reliable, reliability is preserved in the resulting individual’ s cognitive makeup, and we can come to know this a posteriori. The a posteriori appeal to evolution thus plays a subsidiary role in justification, filling the remaining gap and removing the residual doubt. Explaining modal intuitions is compatible with moderate realism about modality itself.

intuition; modality; explanation

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