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How intuitive a statement is is not generally taken as evidence to the truth of a statement. After all, it's a psychological state, and it makes no sense for a psychological state to influence the truth of something out there in the world such as whether the earth is flat or not.

But from an experiential point of view, how does one know if a belief is justified or if it "makes sense". Isn't a statement "making sense" usually correlated with a feeling, and thus a psychological state? The statements "2+2=4", "Most men have penises", etc etc, have a conscious signature attached to them, a psychological state where the statement "just feels right".

Without this psychological state occurring, how can one verify any belief?

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from an experiential point of view, how does one know if a belief is justified

Rational justification is based by definition on facts and logic. However, facts are essentially perception and perception is essentially subjective. Thus, although we can in effect convince ourselves in a rational way, there is no absolute verification. All we can hope for is to be able to justify a belief to ourselves on the basis of our own perception, including when our perception seems to confirm that other people agree with us. Consequently, we do not actually know that our beliefs about the world outside are true. Our justifications of our beliefs about the world rest on more beliefs about the world, which should themselves be justified, leading to an infinite regress with no resolution.

or if it "makes sense".

The point where it makes sense is where we usually stop requiring more justification, and so our justifications are ultimately all entirely grounded on our intuitions.

Science starts where something does not make sense and stops at the point where it makes sense again.

From a practical point of view, it does not matter that we have no actual knowledge of the real world. Beliefs based on logic and perception seems good enough. We apparently all do this and we survive. The vexation is really limited to people with a metaphysical perspective who persist in trying to conjure knowledge of the real world out of thin air.

Speakpigeon
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  • Very interesting answer, thank you. I want to play devil's advocate here and attack the notion that "something requiring no justification" -> "it is based on intuition". What about logical truths? For example, why does "2 + 2 = 4" make sense? This doesn't seem to rely on our perception. And yet, it results in a "making sense" feeling in our heads. But so do other statements such as "There is a laptop in front of me." Both seem intuitive yet the latter is the only one that seems to depend on perception being real. So does "2 + 2 = 4" make sense because of intuition? –  Dec 04 '22 at 10:56
  • @thinkingman "requiring no justification" -> "based on intuition" Not my point. My point is that when intuition makes sense, we don't look for justification. Second, there is no absolute justification so no actual knowledge of the real world. 2. "logical truths?" Logical truths are either intuitive or unknown, and we are very limited in this respect. We don't have any justification than our intuition. 3. "2 + 2 = 4" This is not a logical truth. It is a mathematical truth. – Speakpigeon Dec 04 '22 at 17:01
  • @thinkingman Logical truths are things like the Modus ponens etc. 4. "This doesn't seem to rely on our perception." It does. Humans learn 2 + 2 = 4 from their fingers, pebbles and any set of four distinct objects. The mathematics of it comes once we have the relevant notions firmly in our intuition. Only logical truths are only intuitive. – Speakpigeon Dec 04 '22 at 17:06
  • +1 for last sentence. There are a lot of those people here. – Scott Rowe Dec 06 '22 at 14:44
  • @ScottRowe Thanks. I knew someone would be moved. 2. "There are a lot of those people here" Yeah, this is just one of those empirical data. – Speakpigeon Dec 06 '22 at 16:30