As humans, we are able to know through many ways. Out of all of them, intuition is the strangest one. Today, many people still debate whether intuition is a way of knowing. But in order to further expand on the reasoning behind this statement, a definition is crucial. Intuition is the perceiving of truth of something immediately without reasoning or analysis (a priori knowledge).
In my opinion it should be one of the most fundamental ways of knowing that we have for the following reasons: a person’s thought process starts off using intuition as the primary way of knowing, intuition can be a great source of knowing doesn’t matter whether other ways of knowing exist during a certain action or thought. Intuition can’t be proved, however that means that it is fundamental. Any statement can be questioned, and if we were to prove every single statement, knowledge would be impossible.
Eventually, we would arrive at something we seem to have a direct awareness of and for which we need no further evidence. On the level of intuition no further analysis is needed, that is a huge positive for intuition because it is a great stepping stone to start of from. So, in fact, this knowledge is already simple enough that we don’t have to question further on every issue that is being solved by this way of knowing. Intuition is the way we start knowing everything. “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. ” (C. S.Lewis)
There has to be a starting block from which humans start to think from, without that first step we would fail to apply all the other ways of knowing. For example, if someone doesn’t know that two plus two equals four then it would be impossible to convince them of such equation because the number representation would not make sense to them. The more complicated the questions get in any subject the less the intuition can help. Sometimes a question can overwhelm a person and not even their intuition can solve such question because people in this case don’t even know from what to start from.
Intuitions can only help if the question is basic; therefore much of the intuition comes up in day-to-day issues. Not only this is problematic, but also intuitions can be helpful, however they are not very convincing since they come with no proof. For instance, when I don’t know a question on a test, I am forced to take my best guess. Usually my first guess is correct, but if I sit longer and think about it and try to logically deal with it and I end up being wrong. In this case, my logic takes over, but it ends up incorrect since in the first place I didn’t know what the question was asking.
Even though intuitions can be false or completely unreliable, people, even today, use this way of knowing very frequently since it solves many day-to-day issues. Intuition is natural for people in every day lives and that is what makes it such an irreplaceable way of knowing. Playing cards is a perfect example. Players do not know what others have in their hand, so; as a result, they can only use limited number of ways of knowing to try to figure that out. Of course, players can cheat and find out through the five senses; however one of the widely used possibilities is intuition.
Whatever the player feels they have to play, they play. Furthermore, this is largely focused on probability, but somehow and sometimes intuition helps to pick the right card. That is why it is hard for scientists to justify this way of knowing. It would only prove that based on intuition people behave irrationally. Only in rare cases, people to a great extent use emotion or reason in such games. Some people are actually taught how to count cards or read expressions on other people’s faces. Moreover, in rare cases, intuition helps out people by saving their lives.
In one instance, a person took out a bullet from the revolver and that ended up saving his life when the revolver was turned on him. Intuition is a complex way of knowing because we do not know when, in fact, we have intuition. Sometimes we can be sure that something was pure luck, while in other cases we just might be guessing in a rational way and not thinking about what we are actually doing. For example, if every time that a person passed by a mall and they heard a certain sound, next time when the person is by that same mall, he might have an intuition that they may hear the sound again.
This instance may not be intuition, but quick reasoning that is done automatically by the person’s brain. That reasoning may be: since every time he passed by the mall he heard that certain sound, hence he will probably hear it again. Another interesting example of intuition was when a woman was sleeping in her bed and suddenly she woke up, she moved the bed to the other side of the room, and she fell asleep again. Next morning when she woke up she saw how intuitive she was. The roof collapsed on the side of the room where, previously, her bed was located.
If it wasn’t for that sudden waking up she would be killed by the roof that collapsed while she was sleeping. Again this can be a very weird case, intuition can be perceived as the way of knowing that saved her, but it just could have been her hearing when she was sleeping. She might have just heard a crack in the ceiling and that is why she woke up and moved her bed to the other side of the room. To conclude, even though intuition can be a faulty way of knowing it is a very useful one.
To know something by intuition means that the truth of the proposition is immediately evident and needs no further justification. Not only is intuition the basis of our thinking it also is one that we use in many occasions. From playing cards to saving lives, intuition shapes lives of nearly every individual. Therefore, not only should intuition be a way of knowing, but it should also be one of the most fundamental ones just because hunches do not need further proof, therefore we don’t have to spend lots of time analyzing everything which can be both positive and negative.