Deep Intuition Research Articles

Novel Evidence and Severe Tests

While many philosophers of science have accorded special evidential significance to tests whose results are “novel facts”, there continues to be disagreement over both the definition of novelty and why it should matter. The view of novelty favored by Giere, Lakatos, Worrall and many others is that of use-novelty: An accordance between evidence e and hypothesis h provides a genuine test of h only if e is not used in h's construction. I argue that what lies behind the intuition that novelty matters is the deeper intuition that severe tests matter. I set out a criterion of severity akin to the notion of a test's power in Neyman-Pearson statistics. I argue that tests which are use-novel may fail to be severe, and tests that are severe may fail to be use-novel. I discuss the 1919 eclipse data as a severe test of Einstein's law of gravity.

BOHM AND WHITEHEAD ON WHOLENESS, FREEDOM, CAUSALITY, AND TIME

Abstract. David Bohm's developing postmodern thought (combining precision and wholeness) is seen to contain two tendencies. One is a vision of “underlying wholeness,” in which all causation is vertical, and the implicate‐explicate relation is ubiquitous. This provides a possible solution to certain problems, but creates many others involving freedom, causation, and time. Second, many of Bohm's statements suggest that his deepest intuitions could be formulated without those problems in terms of the distinctions developed in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of “prehensive wholeness,” in which the ubiquity of creativity would require a more restricted use of the implicate‐explicate relation.

Intentionality: spontaneous ascription and deep intuition

Journal Article Intentionality: spontaneous ascription and deep intuition Get access Kim Davies Kim Davies Sunderland PolytechnicChester Road, Sunderland SR1 3SD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Analysis, Volume 42, Issue 3, June 1982, Pages 169–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/42.3.169 Published: 01 June 1982

Intentionality: Spontaneous Ascription and Deep Intuition

Intentionality: Spontaneous Ascription and Deep Intuition

The Role of Consciousness in Marx's Theory of History

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy we have Marx's famous phrase is not the of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being which determines their consciousness.[1] Again in the German Ideology we find Marx saying that life is not determined by consciousness, but by life[2] and that consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all. . . . moreover, it is quite immaterial what starts to do on its own.(3] Finally, in the Communist Manifesto Marx asks rhetorically does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in a word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?(4] These well-worn phrases of Marx have been cited by many a writer who in attempting to explicate Marx's materialist conception of history have concluded that with Marx has exactly the opposite role that it had for Hegel. Whereas Hegel treated nature as a shadowy product of mind (Geist) Marx treats as a more or less epiphenomenal manisfestation of material forces--a manifestation which at best can have the quality of being a mirror-image of reality, but which oftentimes functions as an illusion when it, attributes to itself causal powers which are really attributable to material forces. Marx himself seems to give credence to this interpretation when in the 1872 afterword to Capital he states that:

Debussy's Concept of the Dream

In his study of Turner's great picture of the sea, The Snowstorm, Sir Kenneth Clark draws attention to Turner's preoccupation with ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’. These words, he says, ‘were commonly applied to Turner's pictures in his own day, and in the vague, metaphysical sense of the nineteenth century they have lost their value for us. But with our new knowledge of dreams as the expression of deep intuitions and buried memories, we can look at Turner's work again and recognise that to an extent unique in art his pictures have the quality of a dream. The crazy perspectives, the double focuses, the melting of one form into another and the general feeling of instability, all these are forms of perception which most of us know only when we are asleep. Turner experienced them when he was awake’.

Whitehead's Philosophy of Science in the Light of Wordsworth's Poetry

Admirers of Whitehead who know him best have suggested that Wordsworth had possibly a greater influence upon him than anyone except Plato. Nowhere apparently has Whitehead admitted such an influence, as he has that of Plato and Locke and that of William James, Bergson, and Alexander among traditional and contemporary philosophers But he had a predilection for poetry, and attributes to the great poets philosophical importance. They capture uniquely, he says, “a fragrance of experience”; and “… express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.” As observers of nature both Wordsworth and Whitehead ascribed to animate and inanimate life a degree of feeling or satisfaction in the course of being and becoming. Like the poet, Whitehead must have found “joy in widest commonalty spread.” The multiplication table, he noted at one time, “… is no good to the realist. It shuts him up with Plato's ideas out of space and out of time” when “… like Wordsworth and the rest of us he wants to hear the throstle sing.”