Intuition: An Integrated Account

This paper is a defense of the evidentiality of epistemic intuitions. To that end, I will first briefly discuss both experimentalists’ and some salient forms of reliabilists’ accounts of intuition, showing that they bring us up to a stalemate. To find a way out of this standoff, I will argue that reliabilists’ accounts pave the way for experimentalists’ challenge to the epistemic value of intuitions in two ways. First, each of reliabilists’ accounts leaves enough space to be occupied by normativity. Second, their foundationalism being established on an intuition-perception analogy also does so. Subsequently, I will argue that reliabilists’ line of argument overlooked what I call as the metaphysical necessity of epistemic intuitions. Keeping in mind this necessity, I say, allows us to eliminate the standoff and to draw the boundaries between two distinct kinds of intuition which, I will conclude, should be isolated but also fit together in a unified and inclusive model.