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Suppose you decide to go to a new restaurant for dinner. You are alone, and nobody has
recommended you this restaurant. You sit down and study each item on the menu closely, none
of which you have ever tried in the past. Suddenly, you are instinctively drawn to a
dish that you just know will be delicious, and so you order it. How have you arrived
at this decision?
It could be argued that your knowledge was derived from memory and reason, because you're
taking into consideration similar food that you have tried before. But you were unlikely
to be consciously recalling every single dishes you've tried in the past. Sure, you can spend
an hour rationally weighing the pros and cons of each dish-- but rationality is not a useful
tool when taking into account unquantifiable factors. In the end, you might push aside
our reasons and realise that you've already made that choice, without being aware of it
in the first place.
Thus, our knowledge question is: To what extent can intuition be used as a source of knowledge?
Whilst we are aware that the term "intuition" is highly polysemic, for the purpose of this
presentation we will regard it as the faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition
without evident rational thought or inference. It involves the arrival at a conclusion or
decision without the need for conscious reasoning, a decision that cannot be empirically verified
or rationally justified.
Gary Klein is a psychologist who interviews decision-making professionals. One of his
subjects was a firefighter in Cleveland, Ohio. One day, the firefighter and his crew encounter
an abnormally persistent fire that seemed to be consuming the kitchen of a house. The
commander was gripped by an uneasy feeling that "something was wrong". It seemed to be
abnormally hot and there wasn't much sound.
He immediately ordered everyone to leave. Just as the crew reaches the street, the floor
collapsed. Klein stated that the firefighter "didn't know why he had ordered everyone out."
His decision to leave was based merely on a hunch that, at the time, was not completely
rationalised.
It was only after the incident that the firefighter was able to piece the evidences together.
it was abnormally hot because it wasn't just a kitchen fire-- it originated from the basement.
The water didn't help it was directed to the wrong place.
It seemed quiet because the sound of the blaze was blocked and muffled by the floor.
Here, we can see that sense perceptions and reason, both fairly valid and reliable ways
of knowing, had failed him in times of need. Within those dire moments, the firefighter's
subconscious had somehow made these connections before he was consciously aware of it. Had
the crew still been inside the house discussing with each other and deliberating on what to
do, they would all have fallen into a blazing basement.
In the domain of art, intuition has been used to detect forgeries. Frederico Zeri was an
Italian art historian who served for the Getty Museum in 1983. Upon the first two seconds
of seeing a Greek statue supposedly dating back to 6th century BC, he immediately felt
an "intuitive repulsion" that he could not articulate, and insisted that the statue was
a forgery. For a period of time, controversy raged over the origin of the statue, but gradually,
evidences began to emerge to point out that the statue had in fact originated from a forger
in Rome. By using intuition, Zeri was able to come to a conclusion that 14 months of
extensive scientific studies failed to uncover.
In the field of mathematics, intuition can play an equally important role in acquiring
knowledge. The famous mathematician Euler developed the Euler formula intuitively without
being able to explain its geometrical interpretation. It wasn't until 50 years later that this formula
was probed by Casper Wessel.
Our intuition is a powerful force, but it's fallible. Our instinctive reactions often
have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions. So, when should we be wary of
them?
Klein argues that intuition is the heightened awareness for pattern detection resulting
from the accumulation of experience.
However, German neurologist Klaus Conrad coins the term "apophenia" to describe the experience
of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. One notable example of
this is the gambler's fallacy. In 1913, the ball of a roulette wheel at Le Grand Casino
of Monte Carlo landed on black 26 consecutive times. People began to place enormous bets
that the ball was "due" to land on red next, to "even out" the probability. Intuition,
in this case, defying simple mathematical probabilities and reasoning, has misinformed
the gamblers, costing them fortunes.
We as humans are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition. We live in a world
that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort
that went into making it. We too often hear sayings like "Look before you leap," "Stop
and think," "Don't judge a book by its cover." We believe that we are always better off gathering
as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
This presentation has shown that sometimes, intuition can be a very useful tool. The knowledge
it reveals may be just as reliable and "true" as knowledge acquired through other ways of
knowing. However, intuition is subjected to many fallacies and cognition bias that is
inherent to human nature. Thus, we believe the usefulness of intuition can be augmented
when used in conjunction with other ways of knowing.
We leave you with some more questions to consider: Is there knowledge that can only be accessed
via intuition? Under what circumstances can intuition be
preferential or desirable? Does intuition work in conjunction with or
against other ways of knowing?