HIGH STANDARD EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE APPEAL TO INTUITION

In the analytic tradition, the appeal to intuition has been a common philosophical practice that supposedly provides us with epistemic standards. I will argue that the high epistemological standards of traditional analytic philosophy cannot be pursued by this method. Perhaps within a naturalistic, reliabilistic frame intuitions can be evoked more coherently. Philosophers can use intuition as scientists do, in hypothesisconstruction or datacollection. This is an ironic conclusion: Traditional analytic epistemologists rely on the appeal to intuition, but cannot justify it. Naturalists, on the other hand, are not that needy of such a method; yet they can better accommodate it within their view.