This seems related to what we call locating the hypothesis. By the time you can come up with a decent hypothesis in the first place, you’ve already gathered most of the evidence for it.
In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington led expeditions to Brazil and to the island of Principe, aiming to observe solar eclipses and thereby test an experimental prediction of Einstein’s novel theory of General Relativity. A journalist asked Einstein what he would do if Eddington’s observations failed to match his theory. Einstein famously replied: “Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.” This sounds like Einstein is defying the sovereignty of experiment—jumping to conclusions in advance of the experimental data. But since Einstein was in fact right, it would be extremely improbable for him to have been right just by jumping to conclusions. Einstein must have had enough rational evidence already in hand to locate General Relativity in theory-space.
“Intuition” like that is properly understood as a form of Bayesian reasoning! To say “No great discovery has ever been made by the power of reason,” is Straw Vulcan Rationality. Intuition is reasoning. And well-calibrated intuition is rational.
To see the problem of privileging the hypothesis, suppose that the police in Largeville, a town with a million inhabitants, are investigating a murder in which there are few or no clues—the victim was stabbed to death in an alley, and there are no fingerprints and no witnesses.
Then, one of the detectives says, “Well… we have no idea who did it… no particular evidence singling out any of the million people in this city… but let’s consider the possibility that this murder was committed by Mortimer Q. Snodgrass, who lives at 128 Ordinary Ln.”
If the detective does not have evidence already in hand to justify singling out Mortimer for such special and individual attention, then this is, or ought to be, a violation of Mortimer’s civil rights.
There is a big difference between an educated guess and a shot in the dark. And that difference is evidence.
Thank you all for the enlightening answers! I would also like to ask how much correct flashes of intuition are themselves a product of making once mind think acording to rational rules. Dont discoveries usualy come from long research where initial flashes of intuition are often wrong and the scientist slowly reaches the truth step by step trough reasoning, experimenting and many intuitive flashes? Intuition is not arriving from some mysterious other place but is tied to their previous scientific research/rational ordering. Also can one really reduce reason to sylogisms or trial and error?
“Intuition” is just a name for the ideas and beliefs we arrive at without being able to articulate why. They’re all around us, not just in deep mathematics, but in trivial matters, like how I know I’m sitting in a chair right now. (If we could articulate things like that, we would already have humanoid robot servants that could take care of all the housekeeping.)
Intuitions can as easily be right as wrong, in fact more easily wrong than right, for truth is a small target. Look at all the stuff that here we would generally dismiss as “woo”: astrology, alternative medicine, chakras, etc. Pretty much all writings about these are based on no more than intuition. “Here’s a flower that looks like an eye—it must be good for treating eye diseases!”
To have right intuitions rather than wrong ones, then just as for explicit reasoning, one must have been entangled with the world in order to obtain those right intuitions. They will not happen by chance, by the raw animal spirit in a state of religious intoxication that Pbfgva Iynq Nynznevh (translate using rot13.com) (who has a BA in Mathematics) valorises. Even if we do not know the process by which, for example, we learn to ride a bicycle, there must be such a process. You don’t get to have the insight of a Gauss without having laboured long and hard over mathematics.
Neither do you get to be the Beatles without working at your craft, practicing and practicing while your age peers are out partying every night and lazing in in the morning. You don’t get to be the Beatles, or anything else of note, without putting in the work.
BTW, logic has moved on a long way from “syllogisms”, which is now a significant concept only in the history of logic, no longer in logic. I guess Pbfgva Iynq Nynznevh’f (translate using rot13.com) “BA in mathematics” did not include any courses on mathematical logic.
This seems related to what we call locating the hypothesis. By the time you can come up with a decent hypothesis in the first place, you’ve already gathered most of the evidence for it.
“Intuition” like that is properly understood as a form of Bayesian reasoning! To say “No great discovery has ever been made by the power of reason,” is Straw Vulcan Rationality. Intuition is reasoning. And well-calibrated intuition is rational.
The converse of this, we call the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis
There is a big difference between an educated guess and a shot in the dark. And that difference is evidence.
Thank you all for the enlightening answers! I would also like to ask how much correct flashes of intuition are themselves a product of making once mind think acording to rational rules. Dont discoveries usualy come from long research where initial flashes of intuition are often wrong and the scientist slowly reaches the truth step by step trough reasoning, experimenting and many intuitive flashes? Intuition is not arriving from some mysterious other place but is tied to their previous scientific research/rational ordering. Also can one really reduce reason to sylogisms or trial and error?
“Intuition” is just a name for the ideas and beliefs we arrive at without being able to articulate why. They’re all around us, not just in deep mathematics, but in trivial matters, like how I know I’m sitting in a chair right now. (If we could articulate things like that, we would already have humanoid robot servants that could take care of all the housekeeping.)
Intuitions can as easily be right as wrong, in fact more easily wrong than right, for truth is a small target. Look at all the stuff that here we would generally dismiss as “woo”: astrology, alternative medicine, chakras, etc. Pretty much all writings about these are based on no more than intuition. “Here’s a flower that looks like an eye—it must be good for treating eye diseases!”
To have right intuitions rather than wrong ones, then just as for explicit reasoning, one must have been entangled with the world in order to obtain those right intuitions. They will not happen by chance, by the raw animal spirit in a state of religious intoxication that Pbfgva Iynq Nynznevh (translate using rot13.com) (who has a BA in Mathematics) valorises. Even if we do not know the process by which, for example, we learn to ride a bicycle, there must be such a process. You don’t get to have the insight of a Gauss without having laboured long and hard over mathematics.
Neither do you get to be the Beatles without working at your craft, practicing and practicing while your age peers are out partying every night and lazing in in the morning. You don’t get to be the Beatles, or anything else of note, without putting in the work.
BTW, logic has moved on a long way from “syllogisms”, which is now a significant concept only in the history of logic, no longer in logic. I guess Pbfgva Iynq Nynznevh’f (translate using rot13.com) “BA in mathematics” did not include any courses on mathematical logic.