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PAGE PAGE 1 DRAFT – Please do not quote without permission. Comments and criticism are most welcome! Most recent changes 11/6/07 Reply to Sosa I’m grateful to Michael Bishop, Edouard Machery and Jonathan Weinberg for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this reply. I’m grateful to Michael Bishop, Edouard Machery and Jonathan Weinberg for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this reply. Sosa’s topic is the use of intuitions in philosophy. Much of what I have written on the issue has been critical of appeals to intuition in epistemology, though in recent years I have become increasingly skeptical of the use of intuitions in ethics and in semantic theory as well. In the first half of his paper, Sosa discusses my critique of analytic epistemology, which I use as a technical term for epistemological projects in which conceptual or linguistic analysis is taken to be the ultimate court of appeal for many disputes in epistemology, and intuitions are used to support or challenge the conceptual analysis. I maintain that projects of this sort are widespread in philosophy, and in several publications I have cited parts of Alvin Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition (1986) as an important example of the sort project I have in mind. Here is the relevant passage from Stich (1988) – the paper on which Sosa focuses. Goldman notes that one of the major projects of both classical and contemporary epistemology has been to develop a theory of epistemic justification. The ultimate job of such a theory is to say which cognitive states are epistemically justified and which are not. Thus, a fundamental step in constructing a theory of justification will be to articulate a system of rules evaluating the justificatory status of beliefs and other cognitive states. These rules (Goldman calls them justificational rules or J-rules) will specify permissible ways in which a cognitive agent may go about the business of forming or updating his cognitive states. They “permit o