INTUITIONS, SIMPLICITY AND EXTRAPOLATION FROM CONCEPTS

Abstract

I present and defend a theory about intuitions and the justification they provide. The theory relies on a familiar notion: having direct prima facie justification merely on the basis of understanding concepts. But, under the assumption that not all intuitively true propositions are so directly justified, I advance and develop an original thesis about the rest of cases in which someone has an intuition: when a subject has the intuition that P, she/he makes a (tipycally implicit) estimate about the comparative simplicity of possible extensions of certain parts of her/his system of beliefs.