The Limits of Intuition

Popular lore suggests that intuitive value judgments guide artists in their work and that judgments based on reasons could not provide the sensitive insight needed. Coupled with this are other informal beliefs about intuition. This paper assesses these beliefs. Intuition is analyzed as cognition without reasons and argued to be closely related to perception. While some might think that intuition represents a rare or special mode of cognition, much of perceiving amounts to intuiting. Though intuition often serves where reasons offer little help, just the opposite frequently occurs. Intuition is not endowed with special certainty. Intuition does bear a special kind of relevance, but not a special degree of relevance, in making value judgments in the arts. A laboratory analysis of the thoughts expressed by poets and artists while at work suggests that their value judgments most often carry reasons; in this sense their work is nonintuitive. But intuition usually supports these reasons. Finally, far from being at odds, reasoning and intuition seem to be complementary in the complex process of making art.