Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Hereandnow »

Yes, but when you explain all of these processes, your understanding comes into play, and the question here is when you speak the word 'brain' have you any understanding of any of the explanatory structures that lie underneath this? I say no,because all explanations are bound the dynamics of language and have little to do with any transcendental absolute existential setting it may "be" in.
That doesn't stop us from doing and tinking, it is just that the question here addressed is that of intuition, and intuition lies beneath language/knowledge claims, beyond them.
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Burning ghost
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Burning ghost »

Hence why I said “unconscious”.

We can at least make some educated guesses. Intuition is “felt” and “talked about”. If we’re talking something that isn’t “felt” or “talked” about then ... why bother pretending there is anything to talk about?

We can infer, and we’re kind of in the habit of doing so meaningfully or not. That is human.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Hereandnow »

You have to address the question what are we doing when we talk about things. I hold that talk is pragmatic in nature, as is thought--judgment, belief, knowing, and so on. When a thought occurs in my head, it is an historical event issuing from millennia of pragmatic interfacing with the world, that is, engaging the world to figure how things are in order to solve problems. We are in our talk and thought carrying the torch of the history of pragmatic symbologies that "made" utterances like "pass the salt" possible. This look at language puts the Real in the hands of what works. So, as to the brain: We use this term a lot, but its meaning rests not with the intuition, what Kierkegaard (my current muse) called the eternal present, but with the language that is what terms like 'brain' is all about, i.e.,pragmatics.

As to pretending there is anything to talk about, I rather like this. Is there any kind of discussion that is not "pretending" in its nature? This can be asked a different way: Is there anything that a person do to get beyond the mere pragmatics of the language we use to talk about the world?
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Burning ghost
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Burning ghost »

H&N -

What you call “intuition” I don’t. Let’s leave it at that.
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ThomasHobbes
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by ThomasHobbes »

It's simple enough.
When we define senses as inputs from the nervous system to the brain, then anything the brain does with those inputs is not a sense, as such.
Therefore intuition in the widest possible definition or the narrowest, is not a legitimate sense.
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Papus79
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Papus79 »

Considering how much information gets discarded before it comes to conscious awareness it seems very unsurprising that we might have much more abstract calculations rattling around other parts of our brains perhaps structured better to handle such things.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Hereandnow »

Thomas Hobbes;
It's simple enough.
When we define senses as inputs from the nervous system to the brain, then anything the brain does with those inputs is not a sense, as such.
Therefore intuition in the widest possible definition or the narrowest, is not a legitimate sense.
So you are saying that intuition is defined as of the brain and is therefore not a sense of any kind. Puzzling: is any sense at all therefore a sense of any kind, given that no sense is ever brought before consciousness as independent of what the brain does (can't imagine what that would even be)? And why talk about sense as what an intuition is? What is intuited is simply what is apprehended immediately, spontaneously without any further reduction to what is really is. Most philosophers lately dismiss such a thing because all knowledge is seen as complex. There are no simples, no "innocent eye". I agree with this, but I also think that since an apprehension of any kind in the world is grounded in an "unknown territory" (Husserl) then all discursive accounts fail to show how complexity stands up. There is "something" about my seeing this cup on the table that registers both as incontrovertible and direct in its apprehension: in intuition is acknowledged inside the complexity. This latter is intuition. And as to cognition itself, apriority can only be intuited.
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Consul
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by Consul »

For example, in his book Intuition, Elijah Chudnoff defines intuition as "intellectual perception", which as such is a form of nonsensory perception. It is also different from inner perception of one's mind aka introspection, which has been called "inner sense". However, there seems to be no special sense organ of introspection—unless you're prepared to call the brain a sense organ—, so it's not clear that introspection is properly called a form of sensory perception.
Also note that introspection qua inner perception of one's mind is different from interoception (or proprioception) qua inner perception of one's body, the latter of which can properly be regarded as a form of sensory perception (with "interoception" defined as "the sense of the physiological condition of the body").
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Re: Is intuition a legitimate sense?

Post by jlaugh »

That senses are used solely to perceive things about the external world is wrong. Senses can be controlled. You can listen to your own heartbeat; you can "watch" your eyelid turn orange when you close your eyes against light. In other words, the "internal vs external" debate presents a particular metaphysical assumption or stance. Merleau Ponty's phenomenology does away with questions such as "inside-outside" and "subject-object." How is this related to intuition? It is because some of you argue that it cannot be a sense and define a sense as that which allows one to perceive the "external" world. Intuition, I'd argue, is a sense, a capacity, a guide.
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