intuition
English, from Latin · intuitio
Intuition is a looking-into. Later it became a hunch. The looking is the older claim.
- in-
- into, upon
- tueri
- to look at, to watch
Morphology
Late Latin intuitio, a gazing upon. In scholastic use, intuitive cognition is knowledge of a present object, opposed to abstractive. Kant made Anschauung a technical seeing. Popular English made it a gut feeling.
Semantic range
Immediate knowing, Kantian Anschauung, informal hunch.
History of the word
The word slides from a theory of immediate knowledge to a compliment for fast judgment. Keep the slide visible.
A key source
Kant
Critique of Pure Reason, on Anschauung (often “intuition”).
Associated traditions
Parallels, not equivalents. Different attempts to notice something about knowing.
German
Anschauung
A looking; Kant’s term is not a hunch.
Greek
nous
Sometimes translated intuition; a risky convenience.
A distant linguistic echo
dhawq
Arabic · Tasting; another immediate knowing, another world.
How the word shifts
Business-speak intuition is not Kant’s, and not Aquinas’s.
gut feeling
The claim of immediate presence to the mind.
A story where the word matters
Nearby words
Neighbors, not translations of one concept.
From this word
When a knowing has no steps we can show, is it deeper, or only faster?
One question remains
What does this word let us notice that English “consciousness” does not?
It lets us notice a knowing that arrives without a visible staircase.