Intuition

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge, without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate. The word intuition comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as "consider" or from the late middle English word intuit, "to contemplate". Use of intuition is sometimes referred to as responding to a "gut feeling" or "trusting your gut". According to Sigmund Freud, knowledge could only be attained through the intellectual manipulation of carefully made observations. He rejected any other means of acquiring knowledge such as intuition. His findings could have been an analytic turn of his mind towards the subject. In Carl Jung's theory of the ego, described in 1916 in Psychological Types, intuition is an "irrational function", opposed most directly by sensation, and opposed less strongly by the "rational functions" of thinking and feeling. Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, or ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious. Jung said that a person in whom intuition is dominant—an "intuitive type"—acts not on the basis of rational judgment but on sheer intensity of perception. An extroverted intuitive type, "the natural champion of all minorities with a future", orients to new and promising but unproven possibilities, often leaving to chase after a new possibility before old ventures have borne fruit, oblivious to his or her own welfare in the constant pursuit of change.