Method

Intuition

Overview

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate or heuristic.

The word intuition comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as 'consider' or from the Late Middle English word intuit, 'to contemplate'. Use of intuition is sometimes referred to as responding to a "gut feeling" or "trusting your gut".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Intuition is discussed.

But if it should appear, on examination, to be at least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive. Apart from self-knowledge, one of the most notable examples of intuition is the knowledge people believe themselves to possess of those with whom they are in love: the wall between different personalities seems to become transparent, and…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
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In the above proposition, then, lies the beginning of a deduction of the pure conceptions of the understanding. Now, as the categories have their origin in the understanding alone, independently of sensibility, I must in my deduction make abstraction of the mode in which the manifold of an empirical intuition is given, in order to fix my attention exclusively on the unity which is brought by the understanding into…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object only at distant intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first to sustain them, then to expand them and so unite them together. The more it advances in this work, the more will it perceive that intuition is mind itself, and, in a certain sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a process resembling that which has generated matter. Thus is…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
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All _hypotyposis_ (presentation, _subjectio sub adspectum_), or sensible illustration, is twofold. It is either _schematical_, when to a concept comprehended by the Understanding the corresponding intuition is given _a priori_; or it is _symbolical_. In the latter case to a concept only thinkable by the Reason, to which no sensible intuition can be adequate, an intuition is supplied with which accords a procedure of…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
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Intuition is not necessarily founded on the evidence of the senses; the senses would soon become powerless; for example, we can not represent to ourselves a chiliagon, and yet we reason by intuition on polygons in general, which include the chiliagon as a particular case. You know what Poncelet understood by the _principle of continuity_.
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
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Intuition

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Intuition

Related ideas

Place in the tradition