IRC-Galleria

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"Our general thesis is that, in principle, cognition fulfils behavioral aims
and is shaped by behavioral constraints. The same is to be said about
intuition which is a particular form of cognition.

Intuition has its roots in the syncretic type of thinking of the child and of
human beings in the early stages of civilization. But it does not survive in
adults and in highly developed cultures only as a mere residuum. We claim
that intuition expresses a profound necessity of our mental behavior.

During the very course of our reasoning, of our trial-and-error attempts,
we have to rely on representations and ideas which appear, subjectively, as
certain, self-consistent and intrinsically clear. We cannot doubt everything at
every moment. This would be a paralysing attitude. Some representations,
some conceptions have to be taken for granted. They have to appear, subjectively,
as autonomous, coherent, totally and directly acceptable cognitions in
order to keep the process of reasoning working fruitfully.

An intuition is, then, such a crystallized - very often prematurely closed
- conception in which incompleteness or vagueness of information is
masked by special mechanisms for producing the feelings of immediacy,
coherence and confidence.

Such mechanisms have been described in the research literature, but very
often without any apparent connection with a theory of intuition. In the
present work an attempt has been made to take advantage of these research
sources. Studies in overconfidence, in subjective probabilities, findings
referring to mental models, to typical errors in naive physics, to misconceptions
in mathematics, to the evolution of logical concepts in children etc.
represent, in fact, rich potential sources for a theory of intuition.

I should like to emphasize again this interesting phenomenon: simply
because intuition is tacitly but firmly considered to be a primitive feeling, rich
sources of information, based on experimental findings, have been ignored by
most of the theorists. A primary purpose of this book has been to overcome
this obstacle.

INTUITION IN SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS An Educational Approach

EFRAIM FISCHBEIN
School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel"

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