Q&A: Grounded Intuition
Grounded Intuition
Question
I wanted to ask about intuition.
In your series of lectures on faith, you argued that the fact that my intuition works in cases that can be proven strengthens its credibility for me.
Even so, couldn’t one understand the logic as saying that we should rely on intuition only in cases that can be checked?
Answer
I didn’t understand the question.
Discussion on Answer
That I understood; I just didn’t understand what the question was. After all, that itself is exactly what I explained and what he quoted. From the fact that our intuition succeeds in places where it can be tested, there is an indication that the faculty called intuition is not a shot in the dark but a reliable cognitive faculty. And from that it follows that we should take it seriously even in places where it cannot be tested. That’s how science works. Once I have a theory that has been tested, I build on it also with regard to cases that haven’t been tested.
What isn’t clear here?
It’s easy to understand that he’s asking how one can rely on intuition in non-scientific claims—claims that aren’t testable.
Because we’ll never know whether that tool is reliable there.
And so all the evidence you bring, like our ability to perform extrapolation in Newton’s second law, isn’t valid there.