WOK: Intuition

Reason, can be defined as using a rational process to arrive at knowledge. Intuition is quite different from this. Intuition is having an immediate sense of knowing, without any prior thinking. After a footballer kicks a ball toward a goal, an expert at the game might ‘know’ whether there will be a goal or not. The fact that this person has reached this knowledge without having to consciously calculate the outcome shows that what is being used is his or her intuition. But how is this sort of knowledge possible? Psychologists believe that the subconscious mind is able to make many more observations than we consciously can in any given situation. All this data would be too much for us to think about consciously. However, we are able to process it on a subconscious level. This is often described as having a gut feeling about what is going to happen, or what the solution to a problem is.

Intuition can be defined as immediate awareness it is a very powerful way of knowing because what we would call flashes of insight may come from our capacity of intuition. Imagine taking a sofa and trying to fit it through a doorway. If you were to look at the sofa you could probably make an instant judgement about whether it would fit through. This is using your intuition (and perhaps some of the other WoKs as well. Computers do not have any capacity for intuition, they are forced to use logic and analytic processing or thinking. This means that for a computer to decide whether your sofa would fit through the door, it would have to try every possible way of fitting the sofa through. The computer would have to calculate whether the sofa would fit through on its side, its end or even diagonally. Using intuition you can tell instantly. If this is a strength of intuition, what do you think might be a weakness of this WoK? How reliable is this Way of Knowing, and how well can it be used to justify your actions? Is the phrase ‘I just know’ very useful in a debate?