Intuition has many meanings across many cultures, including:

• quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences and empirical knowledge
• immediate apprehension or cognition
  • knowledge or conviction gained by intuition
  • the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.
• the perceiving of unconsciousness

The verb to intuit means to grasp by intuition.

Intuition is by definition not the same as an opinion based on experience but may have unconsciously been formed by previous experiences. A person who has an intuitive opinion can not fully explain why he or she holds that view.

Intuition is an unconscious form of knowledge. It is immediate and not open to rational/analytical thought processes. It differs from instinct, which does not have the experience element. It is the highest form of skill acquisition of Dreyfus and Dreyfus model.

Intuition has advantages in solving complex problems and finding new results.

Intuition is one source of common sense. It can also help in induction to gain empirical knowledge. Sources of intuition are feeling, experiences and knowledge.

An important intuitive method is brainstorming.

Intuition does not mean to find a solution immediately. Sometimes it helps to sleep one night. There is an old Russian maxim: The morning knows more than the evening.

Intuition plays a key role in Romanticism.

A situation which is or appears to be true but violates our intuition is called a paradox (a paradox can also be a logical self-contradiction). An example of this is the Birthday paradox.

In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, intuition is one of the basic cognitive faculties, equivalent to what might loosely be called perception. Kant held that all of 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 is knowledge of the pure forms of the intuition.

Intuitionistic logics are a class of logics, devised and advanced by Arend Heyting and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer and more recently by Michael Dummett, to accommodate intuitionism about mathematics (as well as anti-realism more generally). These logics are characterized by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence they do not in general accept rules such as disjunctive syllogism and reductio ad absurdum. Intuitionism is a form of constructivism.

Intuition is one of the four axes of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

See also

• Medical intuitive

External links

• Essay about the philosophical and psychological dimensions of four types of intuition (http://samvak.tripod.com/intuition.html)