ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the epistemology of reference, focusing on a range of justified beliefs and knowledge about reference whose status has been the subject of vast philosophical controversy. After identifying an array of data that an adequate epistemological theory of the relevant range must handle, it distinguishes inferentialist and intuition-based theories. The chapter develops and defends a version of the latter, by showing that it can both handle pertinent data and respond to two prominent challenges. One arises from experimental research taken to show that intuitions are unreliable, while the other questions the idea that philosophers rely on intuitions. The Myth of Quick and Easy Intuitions is familiar. It is displayed in philosophical activity whenever disputants simply toss around appeals to ‘intuitions’, as if intuitions are, well, quick and easy. It is equally there in many perfunctory dismissals of intuition, which fail to appreciate just how arduous it can be to develop intuitions.
