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The uneasy feeling that a stranger is untrustworthy, an email is fraudulent, or a business deal is questionable may have a rational basis even when we cannot explain it, argues philosopher Marc A Moffett in Aeon’s “How intuitions work.” His central claim is that intuition resembles perception, both can present a situation as having a particular character before we consciously reason about it or decide what to believe. Just as seeing a tree ordinarily gives us a reason to believe it exists, immediately sensing that something is wrong can provide an initial, revisable reason for caution. Moffett connects these everyday experiences to philosophical thought experiments, including the trolley problem and the case of someone who correctly identifies a real barn in an area filled with convincing fake barns, arguing that both ordinary judgments and abstract reasoning depend on the same capacity to apprehend relationships among concepts, possibilities, and reasons. He challenges the idea that intuition must involve a distinctive inner sensation, proposing instead that its rational significance comes from how the mind apprehends something as actual, rather than from how vivid or convincing the experience feels. On this account, intuition helps make reasoned judgments possible, but it does not guarantee that those judgments are correct or immune to contrary evidence. A complementary psychological perspective comes from Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, whose research on intuitive expertise emphasizes that dependable intuitive judgments require a sufficiently predictable environment and opportunities to learn its regularities, while subjective confidence alone does not establish accuracy. Together, these perspectives suggest that gut feelings should neither be dismissed automatically nor accepted as proof, their significance depends on the reasons they offer, the experience behind them, and whether further evidence supports or undermines them.

Source Citation:

This article summary by CRAYY.co, partnered with SURFMAN.co, @surfmanco on X is from: Aeon, How Intuitions Work, By: Marc A Moffett.

Related Resources:

1. https://aeon.co/essays/sometimes-you-just-know-somethings-off-but-how
2. https://aeon.co/users/marc-a-moffett
3. https://count.perplexity.ai/bs#a0f1b6fd-32a6-496c-b7ff-bbe36f1e030e
4. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=daniel+kahneman&id=EJ859788
5. https://hb2504.utep.edu/Home/Profile?username=mamoffett
6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rati.12443
7. https://philpeople.org/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBCT1ZPcEFJPSIsImV4cCI6bnVsbCwicHVyIjoiYmxvYl9pZCJ9fQ==–5b66d045b878fcf33cb92c341e5dfc258653399e/Moffett-CurriculumVitae(web).pdf
8. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037/a0016755
9. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-13007-001
10. https://qoshe.com/aeon/marc-a-moffett/how-intuitions-work/189377881
11. https://utep.academia.edu/MarcMoffett
12. https://www.enr.com/authors
13. https://www.managementcraft.co/sources/kahneman-klein-conditions-intuitive-expertise
14. https://www.marcmoffett.com/
15. https://www.ovid.com/journals/ampsy/fulltext/10.1037/a0016755~conditions-for-intuitive-expertise-a-failure-to-disagree
16. https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Marc-A.-Moffett/1958109
17. https://www.utep.edu/liberalarts/philosophy/people/marc-moffett.html

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