Evaluate the Role of Intuition in different Areas of Knowledge

Evaluate the role of intuition in different areas of knowledge

As a female, I may consider intuition to be an important element in my life. This is mainly because I find that when I’m intuitive I am using my sixth sense or , in other words that I’m receiving an alert call from within whenever I do not feel strong about a certain thing, situation or person. For example, a person might be walking in a dark alley and all of a sudden get a feeling or some kind of vibe that something is wrong. That person’s intuition has become strong enough to warn of the possible danger ahead. The information that contributes to the intuition comes from different, hardly noticeable, observations about the environment that a person doesn't consciously register.

However after studying intuition, I’ve come to realized that my intuition differs from my instinct, my sixth sense. A person who has an intuitive basis for an opinion probably cannot immediately fully explain why he or she holds that view. On the other hand, a person may later rationalize an intuition by developing a chain of logic to demonstrate more structurally why the intuition is valid. In popular understanding, intuition is one source of and it may also help in stimulating anyone to gain empirical knowledge.

Intuition has an important role in the areas of knowledge which are the following: Natural & Human Science, Math’s, History, Art and Ethics. Each of these areas focuses on different ideas that surround us since we are born. As stated previously, intuition has an important role in the areas of knowledge as it is part of the many ‘building block’ ideas which put together knowledge. Hitherto, intuition does not have as much as a role in areas as it has in others. In order to evaluate which is the ‘truthful’ role in certain areas of intuition, not only is it required to have a basic understanding of what is meant by the term ‘intuition’ but one must understand, to its fullest, what each area of knowledge consists of.

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Natural Science is the rational study of the universe (biology, chemistry and physics) via rules or laws of natural order. This term is also used to be distinguished from Social Sciences which study the human behavior. In Natural Sciences intuition allows hypothesis to be made and therefore theories. Intuition plays a role in the area of knowledge when predicting a result in a certain experiment. This may be exemplified in a very simple experiment such as that when testing for which type of food mice’s lean to; sweet(piece of candy) or smelly and salty(cheese). To reach to an appropriate conclusion I did not only researched on such experiment but I also tested two people on whether their intuition gave them the correct answer or not. When I asked my sister’s six year-old student what he thought a mouse would choose he immediately answered that the mice will go for the piece of cheese; a guess made mainly based on the child’s gathering on stories he recalls since he remembers. A child may say that mice’s will prefer cheese rather than sweet but my older brother used what he has gathered in his brain to hypothesize that mice’s will prefer something sweet rather than a piece of cheese because of what he has previously found out by certain studies made around the world. Therefore, in natural sciences although one may consider intuition to have an essential role as it is required to form hypothesis, its role is rather small compared to the role of small pieces of information we have been given by our surroundings as we grow up.

As for social sciences, intuition can allow a person to see the human behavior with more deepness. Intuition can include the capability to know valid solutions to problems and . For example, the (RPD) model was described by in order to explain how people can make relatively fast decisions without having to compare options. Klein found that under time pressure, high stakes, and changing parameters, experts used their base of experience to identify similar situations and intuitively choose feasible solutions. Up to now, there are no known studies that show that intuition does not have a vital role in social sciences which lead me to conclude that intuition does have an important role in this area of knowledge.

Nonetheless, in other types of sciences it is not the same. Mathematics which is a formal science does not involve intuition as it is involved in the natural and social sciences. Math’s is a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement. As stated by a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, ‘intuition is one of the basic cognitive faculties of what may also be called perception’. He also held that ‘our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time’. Intuitionism is a position in philosophy of mathematics derived from Kant’s claim that all mathematical knowledge in forms of intuition. In math, what we basically need is analysis and although it does require certain level of intuition it does not require it as much as the other areas of knowledge do.

Ethics, however, which is the branch of philosophy that defines what, is good for the individual and for society and establishes the nature of obligations, or duties, that people owe themselves and one another, do require intuition. In ethics, intuition bases morality on an intuitive hesitation of the moral principles and laws or considers intuition as a skill of distinguishing what is, action wise, morally correct and what is not. It is by my intuition that I distinguish when my decisions are morally wrong or, I hope to always be, morally right.

Lastly, History is the objective study of nature; It is the study of the earth and the events throughout the human life. More precisely, it is the study of the fundamental elements of the , the and interactions they make use of on one another, and the results produced by these forces. In history our intuition may help us to decide whether we believe what we are told or not and decide which side of the story we are told we decide to give our support to. However, since history is mainly based on facts, our intuition does not play as huge a role as it does on other areas of knowledge. We may only use it to intuitively realize when we are given biased information however to do such is mostly done by common sense or by ethics and perception.

In conclusion, intuition does have an important role in our lives, in every area of knowledge. So far, it has been proven that intuition is certainly a unit of many more which act as a base for each area of knowledge but one must keep in mind that although intuition is present in immense levels in many areas of knowledge, it does not mean that every single area of knowledge requires intuition to function properly yet its development could have not been the proper one if it were not for intuition to be involved.

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