an autodidact meets a dilettante…

various more or less feeble attempts to capture intuition 

Many years ago I spent quite a bit of time getting my head around formal logic, filling scads of paper with symbols whose meanings I’ve long since forgotten, obviously through disuse.
I recognise that logic has its uses, tied with mathematics, e.g. in developing algorithms in the field of information technology, inter alia, but I can’t honestly see its use in everyday life, at least not in my own. Yet logic is generally valued as the sine qua non of proper reasoning, as far as I can see.
Again, though, in the ever-expanding and increasingly effective field of cognitive psychology, reason and reasoning as concepts are undergoing massive and valuable re-evaluation. As Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue in The enigma of reason, they have benefitted (always arguably) from being taken out of the hands of logicians and (most) philosophers and examined from an evolutionary and psychological perspective. Charles Darwin read Hume on inference and reasoning and commented in his diary that scientists should consider reason as gradually developed, that’s to say as an evolved trait. So reasoning capacities should be found in other complex social mammals to varying degrees.    

An argument has been put forward that intuition is a process that fits between inference and reason, or that it represents a kind of middle ground between unconscious inference and conscious reasoning. Daniel Kahneman, for example, has postulated three cognitive systems – perception, intuition (system 1 cognition) and reasoning (system 2). Intuition, according to this hypothesis, is the ‘fast’, experience based, rule-of-thumb type of thinking that often gets us into trouble, requiring the slower ‘think again’ evaluation (which is also far from perfect) to come to the rescue. However, Mercier and Sperber argue that intuition is a vague term, defined more by what it lacks than by any defining characteristics. It appears to be a slightly more conscious process of acting or thinking by means of a set of inferences. To use a personal example, I’ve done a lot of cooking over the years, and might reasonably describe myself as an intuitive cook – I know from experience how much of this or that spice to add, how to reduce a sauce, how to create something palatable with limited ingredients and so forth. But this isn’t the product of some kind of intuitive mechanism, rather it’s the product of a set of inferences drawn from trial-and-error experience that is more or less reliable. Mercier and Sperber describe this sense of intuitiveness as a kind of metacognition, or ‘cognition about cognition’, in which we ‘intuit’ that doing this, or thinking that, is ‘about right’, as when we feel or intuit that someone is in a bad mood, or that we left our keys in room x rather than room y. This feeling lies somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, and each intuition might vary considerably on that spectrum, and in terms of strength and weakness. Such intuitions are certainly different from perceptions, in that they are feelings we have about something. That is, they belong to us. Perceptions, on the other hand, are largely imposed on us by the world and by our evolved receptivity to its stimuli.

All of this is intended to take us, or maybe just me, on the path towards a greater understanding of conscious reasoning. There’s a long way to go…

References

The enigma of reason, a new theory of human understanding, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017

Thinking, fast and slow, by Daniel Kahneman, 2011