Intuition In Order Research Articles

Conceptual Resources in Self‐developed Explanatory Models: The importance of integrating conscious and intuitive knowledge

This study explores the spontaneous explanatory models children construct, critique, and revise in the context of tasks in which children need to predict, observe, and explain phenomena involving magnetism. It further investigates what conceptual resources students use, and in what ways they use them, to construct explanatory models, and the obstacles preventing them from constructing a useful explanatory model. Our findings indicate that several of the children were able to construct explanatory models. However, of the six children interviewed multiple times (three third‐graders and three sixth‐graders), only one was consistently able to critique and revise her models to arrive at a consistent, coherent, and sophisticated explanatory model. Connecting intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge was important in her construction of a coherent and sophisticated explanatory model. Students who relied only on intuitive knowledge constructed tentative and non‐sophisticated explanatory models. Students who relied only on verbal‐symbolic knowledge at an abstract level without connection with their intuition also did not construct coherent and sophisticated models. These results indicate that instruction should help students to become meta‐conceptually aware and connect their verbal‐symbolic knowledge and intuition in order to construct explanatory models to make sense of abstract scientific knowledge.

Experimental Appeals to Intuition

Today, experimental philosophers challenge traditional appeals to intuition; they empirically collect folk intuitions and then use their findings to attack philosophers’ intuitions. However this movement is not uniform. Radical experimentalists criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy altogether and they have been mostly attacked. Contrariwise, moderate experimentalists imply that lay persons’ intuitions are somehow relevant to philosophical problems. Sometimes they even use folk intuitions in order to advance theoretical theses. In this paper I will try to challenge the so-called moderate experimental attempts to rely on intuition in order to promote philosophical theses.

Folk Intuitions, Science Fiction and Philosophy: Comment on Experimental Philosophy

AbstractSome experimental philosophers imply that philosophers should endorse folk intuitions and even use them to advance philosophical theses. In this paper I will try to contrast experimental appeals to intuition with J. L. Austin’s, whom some experimentalists cite as a precursor of their method. I will suggest that Austin evokes ordinary intuitions in order to dismantle philosophical quests. He even suggests (a) that the appeal to ordinary intuitions of the folk can hardly prescribe answers to extraordinary circumstances and (b) that philosophical quests themselves are extraordinary. Therefore, the appeal to folk intuitions cannot prescribe answers to philosophical problems. It can only dissolve philosophical quests; yet, the dismantling of philosophy hardly accords with the experimentalists’ agenda.

Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe

: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself.

DE HUTCHESON A SMITH: UN SENTIMENTALISMO 'SOFISTICADO

Francis Hutcheson is known as a proto-utilitarian. Adam Smith, though, his most prominent student an successor on the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, focuses on some different trends of his teacher's ethics and founds, based on the same sentimentalism, a completely different theory of morals. On this paper I explore what aspects of Hutcheson's ethics -particularly those of ‘sympathy' and the ‘impartial spectator'- where already present in his theory, and how Smith develops those intuitions in order to introduce a moment of rationality in moral judgments, whereby he is able to construct a theory that includes practical reasoning, without betraying the Scottish sentimentalist tradition.

Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (review)

Reviewed by: Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Eric Entrican Wilson Jay F. Rosenberg. Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 312. Paper, $29.95. In the Preface to his impressive and engaging new commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, Jay Rosenberg informs us that the book is both a product of his own lectures and a “direct descendent of Wilfrid Sellars’ legendary introduction to Kant” (vi). Its origins in the classroom give Accessing Kant a refreshingly pedagogical tone. Throughout, Rosen-berg—who was a student of Sellars’ at the University of Pittsburgh—makes felicitous use of clear examples, familiar problems and authors, and visual aids to clarify “the Big Picture” operating in the first Critique. Mercifully, however, his style owes little to Sellars’ own brutally opaque prose. Rosenberg also shares his teacher’s enthusiasm for the history of philosophy. The reader will not find Rosenberg sloughing off Kant’s “lesser predecessors” in the manner of P. F. Strawson. However, the history on display in Accessing Kant has more to do with the curricular demands of English-speaking philosophy departments than with Kant’s own intellectual and cultural context. This means that his Kant argues across the ages with giants rather than with his peers in Halle and Berlin. Nor, despite the occasional reference to Kant’s handwritten marginalia, does Rosenberg devote any effort to tracing the internal development of Kant’s thought. He does not consider whether insight might be gained from looking at particular problems in the light of the Dissertation (1770), for example, or of Kant’s polemics against Eberhard in On a Discovery (1790). The Prolegomena gets described as “not particularly helpful for understanding the First Critique, especially the difficult bits” (3n). Yet Rosenberg’s “whirlwind tour of the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Hume” (10) is sophisticated and compelling, despite its brevity and “relaxed” style. Tough-minded historicists may resist the idea that Kant’s question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” is just another version of the “Pythagorean puzzle” regarding the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world. But if one grants the reasonable assumption that important philosophical work often transcends the context of its production, one will appreciate the concision of his historical discussions as well as the lack of clutter. The substantive claims Rosenberg makes about the first Critique register his Sellarsian heritage as well. He finds Kant responding most directly to the problems of Hume’s “Concept Empiricism,” rather than, say, his skepticism. Kant is concerned to show that empiricist theories cannot explain either the coherence of perceptual experience (our ability to perceive particulars as instances of universals) or the legitimacy of the synthetic a priori judgments (which Rosenberg calls “every-must judgments”) that underwrite our cognitive practices. According to Rosenberg, Kant’s solution to the problems of Concept Empiricism stems from the commitments expressed in his claim that “the same function that gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B104–05). Particularly important here are two main ideas. One is that possession of a concept amounts to possession of the ability to apply it in a judgment. Concepts “rest on” those functions of the understanding that supply propositional form. The other is that the ability to intuit particular items in space (and time) requires the ability to draw on concepts. Thus, to perceive something as an instance of a general concept (as a chair, for example) is to have an experience whose content can be articulated in the form of a judgment. This reading implies that the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity does not neatly parallel the distinction between understanding and sensibility. It is not merely that concepts must combine with intuitions in order to yield cognition, but that the capacity to intuit must already involve the understanding (qua “faculty of rules”). Properly understood, these ideas provide the key to understanding the central claims of the Transcendental Analytic. Rosenberg’s admirable reconstruction of this difficult line of thought is the heart of...

On the Amnestic Modification of the Category of State Property Systems

State property systems were created on the basis of physical intuition in order to describe a mathematical model for physical systems. A state property system consists of a triple: a set of states, a complete lattice of properties and a specified function linking the other two components. The definition of morphisms between such objects was inspired by the physical idea of a subsystem. In this paper we give an isomorphic description of the category of state property systems, thus introducing a category SP, which is concrete over Set. This isomorphic description enables us to investigate further categorical properties of SP. It turns out that the category SP is not amnestic. In our main theorem we prove that the amnestic modification of SP is the construct Cls of closure spaces and continuous maps. Moreover we observe that the categorical product and coproduct in Cls find, through SP, application in physics.