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Notes on Intuition
…with comments on meaning
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1.‘Intuition’ has a variety of meanings or uses
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2.A term, e.g. Intuition, may have, in use, a single core meaning or,
alternatively two or more core meanings. The core meanings may be closely or
loosely related… or even unrelated. The lack of relation may be due to
divergence of related meaning or ‘convergence’ of signs of unrelated ideas
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3.Often when there is debate about the meaning of a word, such debate
carries on at a futile level because different core ideas are being compared
at cross purposes. What is required, then, is, first, recognition of what is
happening and, second, separation out of core ideas which are the real focus.
Because use and definition remain meshed, this separation out is not always
going to be a clean process brought to termination. However, having a framing
system of thought is a context in which such separation can be done. If the
framework should happen to represent reality or a portion or abstract of it
then precision of meaning may be possible for the relevant domain. As will be
seen, the ‘Universal metaphysics’ is perfect for an abstract of the entire
Universe. Here, it should be noted ‘abstract’ refers to empirical knowledge
of general features and not a removed concept of all features
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4.The core sense of Intuition here is touched by the idea of knowledge
that precedes analysis, e.g. the Intuition of space, time, and cause. Even
though the Intuition of space, time and cause is distinct from the idea of
intuition of events occurring without clear and direct knowledge of them (due
perhaps to the presence of knowledge of features at a sub-conscious level)
the two uses are related in being cases of knowing whose process is not
wholly within consciousness
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5.Kant may have used Intuition as, roughly, perception and not reason
under the idea that reason is explicit and has a precise and perfect symbolic
foundation at least in logic. However, as we have seen, even the foundation
in logic is not perfect, logic is synthetic and not entirely analytic and
even logic lies in Intuition. Therefore, the approach here is to regard the
entire scope and mechanism of human knowledge as lying in Intuition and to
ask what portions, if any, of this scope is perfectly faithful
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