Intuition (philosophy)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2008)

Intuition is the act by which the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas. When using only intuition, the truth of the proposition is immediately known right then, the moment it is presented. This is without the intervention of other ideas or deductive reasoning.^[1]

Some philosophers consider human experience of raw empirical data (sometimes called "qualia") to be intuitive. For example, when a person sees a patch of yellow, that person is directly acquainted with the yellowness of the object, even if he or she has no name or concept for yellowness^{[citation needed]}.

Intuition is widely seen as an intellectual seeming. Following this approach, an epistemic subject who is going through intuitive reflection is checking whether a given proposition seems immediately true or false^{[citation needed]}.

Intuition differs from opinion in the sense that intuition is a way of experiencing, while opinion is based on experience. Intuition also differs from instinct, which does not necessarily have the experiential element at all. A person who has an intuitive basis for an opinion probably cannot fully explain immediately why he or she holds that view. However, a person may try to justify an intuitive decision by developing a chain of logic to demonstrate more structurally why the decision is valid^{[citation needed]}.

In popular understanding, intuition is one source of common sense and it may also affect induction^{[citation needed]}.

In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, intuition is one of the basic cognitive faculties, equivalent to what might loosely be called perception. Kant held that our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space, and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time^{[citation needed]}.

Intuitionism is a position in philosophy of mathematics derived from Kant's claim that all mathematical knowledge is knowledge of the pure forms of the intuition - that is, intuition that is not empirical (Prolegomena, p.7).

Intuitionistic logics are a class of logics, devised and advanced by Arend Heyting and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer and more recently by Michael Dummett, to accommodate intuitionism about mathematics (as well as anti-realism more generally). These logics are characterized by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence they do not in general accept rules such as disjunctive syllogism and reductio ad absurdum. Intuitionism is a form of constructivism^{[citation needed]}.

A situation which is or appears to be true but violates our intuition is called a paradox (a paradox can also be a logical self-contradiction). An example of this is the Birthday paradox^{[citation needed]}.

Intuition plays a key role in Romanticism, and it is the highest form of skill acquisition in the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] In analytic philosophy

In contemporary analytic philosophy, appeals to our intuitions are an important method for testing claims. A characteristic example is the post-Gettier literature concerning the analysis of knowledge. A philosopher proposes a definition of knowledge, such as the justified true belief account. Another philosopher constructs a hypothetical case where our inclination is to judge that the definition is met but the subject lacks knowledge or vice versa. Typically, this leads to the rejection of that account, though Brian Weatherson has noted that the weight placed on intuitions varies between different subfields.^[2]

Intuitions are customarily appealed to independently of any particular theory of how intuitions provide evidence for claims, and there are divergent accounts of what sort of mental state intuitions are, ranging from mere spontaneous judgment to a special presentation of a necessary truth.^[3] However, in recent years a number of philosophers, especially George Bealer have tried to defend appeals to intuition against Quinean doubts about conceptual analysis.^[4] A different challenge to appeals to intuition has recently come from experimental philosophers, who argue that appeals to intuition must be informed by the methods of social science.

[edit] References