A Short Defence of Intuition
The slightly embarrassing sibling of science and reason deserves more love.
Look: I have no problem with machines. I like my phone. I like my computer for that matter. But they do funny things to us. And it is surely the growing role that machines play in modern life that is behind the widespread denigration of that most human ability, intuition—indeed, of all ways of knowing and experience that are hard to describe and even harder to defend in words. We live in the age of the algorithm: administrators and managers try to quantify expertise, everything must be ‘data-driven’, and we must pursue clearly defined ‘key performance indicators’, or KPIs. We are told that to start a sentence with ‘I feel’, as in ‘I feel that perhaps the right thing to do here is not to have another bottle and just go home instead’ weakens our position by making what we are suggesting or asserting seem less ‘factual’ than it would be if we had simply stated it. It is taken as read, partly thanks to the work of Danny Kahneman (R.I.P.) and others, that intuition has no place alongside science and reason as a means of finding out what’s what.
The claim, made by those like Kahneman (who was a brilliant psychologist), is that intuition is fallible. Very true. We often get things hopelessly wrong. But no one is saying that all our intuitions should be taken as true, let alone perfectly true. We can and should subject our intuitions to whatever scrutiny we can. In fact, where possible, we should deploy all of our paths to the truth if we want to get anywhere near to it. And since intuitions are most reliable in the realms in which we have the most experience — the intuitions of a painter about painting are far more reliable than the intuitions of my highly incurious friend about the sleeping habits of fish — we have a useful rule of thumb to quicken that process. If someone has experience in something, her intuitions are more likely to be right. This is certainly the case with experienced judges and doctors, many of whom cannot justify precisely why they think what they think—only that it ‘feels’ right.
And speaking of doctors—it is worth noting, of course, that science is also fallible, as one of the most widely cited studies of the past 10 years, by John Ioannadis of Stanford, has made as clear as day. Should we therefore abandon science? Obviously not. Our eyes are fallible, for goodness’ sake, as anyone who has encountered an optical illusion knows. Ought we to tear out our eyeballs? You get what I’m driving at. And while we are on the topic of eyeballs — Iain McGilchrist tells a remarkable story about a man who has made a very comfortable living as a tipster at horse races simply by eyeballing the runners before they started. This man, who is an expert in the physiology of horses, initially fought against his intuitions, believing them to be ‘unscientific’; but was finally defeated because their astonishing accuracy was undeniable—and were making him and many others a lot of money.
Our eyes are fallible, for goodness’ sake, as anyone who has encountered an optical illusion knows. Ought we to tear out our eyeballs?
That’s an anecdote. So here’s a study. In a famous experiment, participants were given a pack of red cards and a pack of blue cards and told they would receive the monetary equivalent of the number stamped on the back of each card. Though the other side of some of the red cards had higher numbers than could be found on any blue card, some also had much lower numbers, meaning that participants who only or mostly overturned blue cards would make more money. After 80 goes, participants could explain what they had figured out. After 70, they could say that the blue cards were a better bet than the red. After 50, they had started to turn over only blue cards without realising. And lie-detector tests reveal that after 10, they showed signs of stress when their hand hovered over the red cards. In other words, after just 10 cards, they had learned from experience and begun to act accordingly. The moment of insight came much later.
Intuition is a form of embodied knowledge. I can tie my shoelaces (just about) since I have had to almost every day for most of my life. But I will not be able to give you an accurate account of this in language, just as a footballer will struggle to explain with any precision how she knows when to swing her foot to shoot as the ball comes to her, and at which part of the goal to aim at. We pick up much as we go about our lives, and we act well on this knowledge so long as we do not overthink everything. The root word of ‘expert’ is the same as ‘experience’. A true expert is not a bookworm, but a craftsman.
Einstein’s sister Maja said he played the piano to quicken the unconscious processes that gave rise to insights. He would then work back from the insight to explain not how he reached it, but how one could reach it in an articulated, logical way. Bergson, one of history’s great heretics, said that it ‘cannot be too often repeated: from intuition one can pass to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition’. Analysis must start somewhere, and we cannot find out where that is by other means than intuition. Consider science, which claims that the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained is a valid path to knowledge. This is true, but you cannot use the methods of science to prove it is true.
Analysis must start somewhere, and we cannot find out where that is by other means than intuition.
I also picked this up reading McGilchrist: schizophrenia, commonly thought to be a failure of rationality, is in fact the opposite: people with schizophrenia must ‘work their way up’, in a deliberate manner, from first principles, which has the practical upshot of rendering them inert, or dysfunctional. The rest of us have hunches, make snap judgements and use heuristics, shaped by experience, to take the appropriate action in a new context. Those who attack intuition as vague and ‘unscientific’ use it all the time. There is no other way that a healthy person can live.
Though we might detect a note of condescension in a term like ‘female intuition’, our ancestors respected it more than we do. Though it is a generalisation (almost everything to do with biology is a generalisation), women are thought to be more attuned to their bodies than their male counterparts. Since intuition is embodied, it follows that women may by and large have better intuitions than men. I am sure it is no coincidence that historically, mediums, diviners, seers, and other types of spiritual intermediaries across various cultures, even those in which women had few rights, have been women. The Oracle of Delphi, also known as the Pythia, is one of the most famous examples. Food for thought, if nothing else.
I care about this because I feel there is a tendency to exalt technical knowledge, metrics, ‘STEM’ skills and so on (all very valuable, by the way) to condemn the wisdom of experience, which is the wisdom of older folks, to think the past has nothing to teach us, and to condemn those who have not had the good fortune of a thorough education as having nothing to contribute to the great conversation of society, when it seems to me that someone who has only ever read books and not lived—which is take risks, make mistakes, and grow—is missing something essential, as much as I personally adore reading.
But of course, this is just an intuition.
