Abstract

Intuitions are sometimes conceived as intellectual perceptions. They share with physical perceptions being direct and, in that way, non‐inferential. Contemporary epistemologists tend to consider all knowledge dependent in some way on perception but not as requiring countenancing abstract objects. We do, however, speak of seeing truths of logic and mathematics, even if we do not view the abstracta they apparently concern as in the causal order. How, then, is knowing them possible if, as is quite plausible, knowledge depends on a causal connection between objects known and beliefs constituting knowledge of them? Much language concerning abstracta—using “seeing”, “grasping”, “perceiving”, and the like—invites comparing the apprehension of abstract entities with the perception of concrete entities. How much like perception of the physical is apprehension of the abstract? And can an account of perception encompass both? Might intuition, taken as apprehension in the way W. D. Ross did, be a kind of intellectual perception and, if so, must there be a causal element in it after all? This paper draws on an overall account of perception to frame a theory that provides for an ontology applicable to perception of the physical, apprehension of the abstract, and knowledge of the normative.