Investigating human intuition: Knowing without knowing why

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?