A Unified Theory of Basic Evidence: Perception and Intuition

Marc A. Moffett
University of Texas at El Paso

March 7, 2019
4:00 PM
Breland Hall, Room 333

A Unified Theory of Basic Evidence:
Perception and Intuition

Basic evidence is a creature of foundationalist epistemology. Specifically, the foundationalist maintains that there is a class of evidence that is either (a) self-justifying, or (b) justification-conferring but not justification-requiring. In either case, this class of evidence – hereafter, “basic evidence” – functions to stop the epistemic regress argument. Perception or perceptual experience is taken as a paradigmatic form of such evidence. Granting this, the rationalist who believes that intuition also counts as a source of basic evidence must either (a) adopt a non-unified or disjunctivist theory of basic evidence or (b) somehow explain the relevant commonality between intuition and perception. The value of the latter approach, the one I will adopt, is that it promises to help de-mystify the nature of intuition.