This week we're answering the question: What are two ways of understanding intuition?

As I begin writing a book chapter on intuition, I am getting right on how different fields actually define the term. Drawing on philosophy, Black feminist thought, and religious studies, I explore two distinct understandings of intuition I’ve encountered so far.

First, I introduce a philosophical conversation that understands intuition as *evidence* or a form of perceptual knowledge that helps explain how we arrive at beliefs before we have empirical proof.

Then, I turn to Black thought, where intuition becomes something much more than evidence. Through thinkers like Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Louise Little, and Alea Lovely, I argue that intuition is also a method: a disciplined practice, a cultivated mode of knowing, and a way of making decisions in a world where dominant ideas of evidence have often been used to deny Black people's realities of things (and justify their dehumanization).

At the heart of this episode is a bigger question: What happens when intuition isn't just something you have, but something you practice and develop?

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

0:12 - Grounded in Navigating Adult Friendships

9:15 - Two Different Ways of Understanding Intuition

12:28 - Intuition As Evidence Conversation in Philosophy

15:09 - Intuition as Perceptual Knowledge

20:41 - Intuition as Method

References

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000).

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).

Wilfred Little, "Our Family From the Inside: Growing Up with Malcolm X." Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 1 (1995): 7–47. (Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 18, 1995.)

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol13/iss1/2/

Mark Moffett, "Intuition as Evidence: An Introduction," in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, edited by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio and Clayton Littlejohn (New York: Routledge, 2021).

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intuition":

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/

Alea Lovely, Spiritual Shit podcast:

https://www.thelovelyalea.com/