Investigating human intuition: Knowing without knowing why
Guy Claxton on the value of not always understanding what is going on.
INTUITION has been an uncomfortable,
and therefore, for most of this
century a neglected, notion in psychology.
It smacks too much of things
from which psychology as an empirical
science has had to distance itself: arm-chair
philosophy, unbridled subjectivity,
the unconscious, the dangerous worlds
of aesthetics and even mysticism. If
Freud’s claim that dreams constitute the
‘royal road’ to the subconscious is suspect
to a hard-nosed psychologist, how
much more so the assertion by Spinoza,
and later by Bergson, that intuition was
the royal road to ‘truth’ itself?
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(Please note that some pictures may have been removed for copyright reasons)
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