Intuition as a way of knowing
As humans, we are able to know through many ways. Out of all of them, intuition is the strangest one. Today, many people still debate whether intuition is a way of knowing. But in order to further expand on the reasoning behind this statement, a definition is crucial. Intuition is the perceiving of truth of something immediately without reasoning or analysis (a priori knowledge). In my opinion it should be one of the most fundamental ways of knowing that we have for the following reasons: a person’s thought process starts off using intuition as the primary way of knowing, intuition can be a great source of knowing doesn’t matter whether other ways of knowing exist during a certain action or thought.
Intuition can’t be proved, however that means that it is fundamental. Any statement can be questioned, and if we were to prove every single statement, knowledge would be impossible. Eventually, we would arrive at something we seem to have a direct awareness of and for which we need no further evidence. On the level of intuition no further analysis is needed, that is a huge positive for intuition because it is a great stepping stone to start of from. So, in fact, this knowledge is already simple enough that we don’t have to question further on every issue that is being solved by this way of knowing. Intuition is the way we start knowing everything. “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.” (C.S. Lewis) There has to be a starting block from which humans start to think from, without that first step we would fail to apply all the other ways of knowing. For example, if someone doesn’t know that two plus two equals four then it would be impossible to convince them of such equation because the number representation would not make sense to them. The more complicated the questions get in any subject the less the intuition can help. Sometimes a question can overwhelm a person and not even their intuition can solve such question because people in this case don’t even know from what to start from. Intuitions can only help if the question is basic; therefore much of the intuition comes up in day-to-day issues. Not only this is problematic, but also intuitions can be helpful, however they are not very convincing since they come with no proof. For instance, when I don’t know a question on a test, I am forced to take my best guess. Usually my first guess is correct, but if I sit longer and think about it and try to logically deal with it and I end up being wrong. In this case, my logic takes over, but it ends up incorrect since in the first place I didn’t know what the question was asking. Even though intuitions can be false or completely unreliable, people, even today, use this way of knowing very frequently since it solves many day-to-day issues.
