Talk:Intuition

I get the message of this article, but is it really true that all claims of intuition are bunk? I mean, isn't it possible that training oneself to be more observant could somehow help with cold reading? There was an AMA on Reddit (tweeted by the RW Twitter account) by a guy who said he used to be a psychic, and he also talked about being unconsciously observant as part of cold reading.--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 02:02, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

I think you can separate intuition and cold reading. I havent seen any studies where anyone has shown better (or worse) than chance for any form of psychic gift (including intuition) Hamster (talk) 04:31, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

The main point, I think, is that 'intuition' is not nearly a label that focuses narrowly on psychic gifts alone. It's a common attribute of cognition, but the concept of 'just knowing' something with minimal effort and minimal mental discursion can be extended by magical thinking into the ability to 'just know' practically anything without any objective explanation at all for how you could reliably know that sort of thing. Talking about intuition and the intuitive is not necessarily woo, but woo often invokes the idea of intuitive (innate and supranatural) epistemological gifts, including psychic intuition about the contents of other minds. Shirtsleeves (talk) 05:28, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

The problem with the term "intuition" is that it implies different meanings. There is a woo psychic side and a immediate first impression side, which doesn't have to be "woo". If someone wants to expand the article more to include the non-"woo" side of intuition, I'm all ears.--NerdyWizard^{you believed that why?} 08:47, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

In contrast to technical thinking and formal deduction

Intuition is big in human life and arguably covers not only what pop culture regards as intuition, but much, much more. Prominent research (e.g. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) contrasts quick heuristic thought with the slower, careful, deliberate thought which includes checking the details for errors. Cultural distinctions including in spiritual circles between what is and is not intuitive mainly seem subjective. That's because almost all thought is intuitive (if intuitive = "fast thinking"), since only a small fraction of thought includes that extra effort to be precise and deliberate and check each step for accuracy, the human capacity for that being limited. Thus intuition includes nearly all informal logic, except bits and pieces of more careful thought in informal argumentation.

There's also cognitive research into mathematical thinking (David Tall, Shlomo Vinner, etc.), which contrasts the "everyday life mode of thought" which most people use most of the time, with the "technical thought" which crucially includes the critical examination of each step necessary for technical purposes. This is also related to a distinction between analytical and pseudo-analytical behavior. It also seems worth pointing out a conclusion from such work that intuition can be trained, an example being that those who do a lot of mathematical or other technical work more often have intuitions regarding such which are correct (though errors still happen in the absence of properly checking). --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:56, 23 April 2022 (UTC)