Epistemic Intuition and Underdetermination

Abstract

After briefly considering (in Section 1) the self-undermining worry that arguments for skepticism about epistemic intuition themselves rely on epistemic intuition, this chapter responds to underdetermination-based arguments for skepticism about epistemic intuition. Section 2 lays out the rationale for underdetermination-based skepticism about epistemic intuition and presents the noninferential anti-skeptic’s response. Section 3 highlights the epistemic circularity that is so obvious in that response and explains why, instead of causing trouble for that response, it provides us with a paradigm case of unproblematic epistemic circularity. Section 4 identifies several worries about the possibility of our having duplicates who are victims of deceptive demons (worries connected with disjunctivism, the New Evil Demon Problem, and the positions defended in Sections 2 and 3), and responds to the alleged problems these worries cause for epistemic intuition.