Epistemic Intuition and Disagreement

Abstract

This chapter examines skeptical objections to epistemic intuition that are based on disagreement. Section 1 distinguishes internal from external rationality in order to facilitate our understanding and analysis of the epistemology of disagreement. Section 2 lays out a variety of kinds of disagreement with respect to epistemic intuition. Section 3 explains why disagreement gives rise to a defeater in cases where it is not rational to view the one disagreeing with you as a person with worse evidence than you or as a person who is worse than you at responding well to evidence. Section 4 considers, in light of the previous sections, whether the intuitionist particularist anti-skeptic’s beliefs based on epistemic intuition can withstand disagreement-based skeptical objections in a way that is compatible with the requirements of intellectual humility. Section 5 works through the implications of disagreement about the proposed response (in Section 4) to disagreement about epistemic intuition.