For me, it’s a conscious experience that happens quickly and subtly. I suspect it can be psychological and physiological, and it is layered upon the sensation.
For example, 2+2=4 appears visually as squiggles (sense), meaning gets assigned to the squiggles (perception) and then the recognition of truth (intuition). 2+2=5 would be sensed and perceived in the same way, but there would not be the intuition that it’s true. Is that getting me anywhere?
Maybe. The issue is that while each of us can introspect as best as we can, psychology can't reasonably be built up just off of introspective reports. We need better data about the processes generally involved in judgments to see what kinds of patterns and tendencies emerge, and to understand how different processes function.
That describes a transitive relation, but doesn't refer to any specific psychological process. For instance, "2+2=4" isn't a psychological process. When people are talking about intuitions, they are talking about psychological processes. I want to know what process is involved when people refer to intuitions.
I find myself confused about how you're interpreting "intuitions" here. You frequently say "I think..." or "I don't think..." or that you make judgements or have dispositions towards beliefs/credences, which accords exactly with how I've seen "intuitions" used in practice.
As best I can tell, the role of "intuition" in analytic philosophy is to explicitly call out an not-explicitly-justified assumption. This seems (as long as they're given due, which is to say weak, evidential weight) hard to avoid; for instance, when I gave qualifiers like "as best I can tell" or "this seems." The alternative to this kind of intuition or intuition-adjacent talk would be mere assertion - assuming you can't track everything back to first principles on the spot, something I'd be surprised (note intuition tag again) if even hardcore foundationalists thought they could do in practice.
Of course, there are plenty of instances where philosophers infer from their inarticulate credence that p to that "we" intuit p, or that we *ought* to assign high credence to p, or show little curiosity in consulting other possible sources of evidence, and one could certainly on those grounds criticize philosophy as excessively intuition-centric. But I think a revisionary project of exorcising intuitions from philosophical discourse is doomed to either failure or, worse, being merely linguistic.
Interesting post, Lance. I was blissfully ignorant of philosophers’ use of intuitions until about 7 months ago, when I started reading articles here and elsewhere to inform myself about Chalmer’s knowledge argument and Jacksons oft-cited Mary’s Room problem. (I’m working on a post on this.) I wouldn’t say my intuitive spidy sense was triggered, but something simply didn’t ring true as I read the papers. Without being able to articulate exactly what, I was pretty sure there was a sleight of hand (or two) being used to make the Chalmerian/original Jacksonian case.
I’m more familiar now with how philosophers (in this area anyway) make use of intuitions, and I agree with much of your critique. As I’ll explain in a moment, I think intuitions do exist, and can be useful, but they prove nothing. In an arena where the goal is to draw conclusions about some phenemonon, an intuition has, at best, the status of a hypothesis. If you develop an argument based on that intuition and then argue that your conclusion is “logically coherent”, then in the scientific world, we might say, bravo- your conclusion/model *approaches* face validity. But nothing more than that. Now apply for a grant, and get some actual evidence.
On the other hand, I’m not inclined to entirely dismiss intuitions as a way of knowing. In the 70’s we talked (overly simplistically) of the “right-hemispheric” mode of information processing- synthetic/integrative/holistic as opposed to analytic/linear/sequential. Intuitions seemed to fit in here- it certainly seemed possible that in this mode one could have “insights” arising from the perception of patterns or relationships. But just as you can’t say how you arrive as the perception of the gestalt of, say, a face, you cannot explain (to yourself or anyone else) how you arrived at your intuition. The beauty of a conclusion arrived at logically is that you can trace back and check your steps. You can move forward and develop its implications. You can’t do that with an intuition, but that does not mean they are useless. As I was studying the “two modes” of consciousness/information processing, I was delighted to come across a quote from Einstein, who said something along the lines of “for me, intuition was the most important part of the process”. Einstein greatly valued his intuitions and the intuitive process, but of course, he didn’t stop with them. He went on to develop and verify his intuitions using logic and mathematics. Others then tested the implications of his theories empirically. Without those two steps, there would have been no progress. As there has not been re the knowledge argument in the 40+ years since Frank Jackson shared his intuitions about Mary. If that’s how you roll, intuitions can be valuable. But they are just the starting point. You’ve got to then do the rest of the work.
I have to say that while I generally think you're right about their usefulness I'm always really puzzled by your reported non-experience of what intuitions feel like. It's not philosophy specific, for me - it's the same pseudo-physical sensation I get of being pretty sure this puzzle piece will fit, or going "Oh I bet I left my keys on the table." There's something ... not just pseudo-physical in how it feels, but in how I conceptualize my own thoughts, I guess, and the phenomenon of something feeling intuitive is that of it feeling uniquely natural as a fit.
But then it's interesting in general that people conceptualize their own thinking differently. For example, I was really jazzed to find this blogpost, which describes how thinking feels for me strangely well: https://adamelkus.com/posts/srwk
But sharing it with friends because that was a neat thing to put words to, they... did not relate!
This is great! But now I feel like I've been using the word "intuition" to mean something different from philosophers.
Namely...I just view intuition as a cognitive reaction to external situations of some sort. I don't think intuitions are truth apt; they're just, like, opinions. They're shaped by our cognitive history (upbringing, language, education, culture).
They're reliable only in the sense that if they weren't reliable, you wouldn't get this far in life (which is different from saying they're true or immune from deception or being wrong). I also consider intuitions "valid" to the extent that they are reactions that we can't control, and to the extent that I don't think there's any telos or purpose to the universe, it doesn't matter what decisions we make (in an absolute sense), and so there's no transcendent consequences to relying on your intuition most of the time.
I think this is an insightful criticism of intuition-based philosophy. Let’s say, following Huemer, that seemings are a kind of sui generis propositional attitude. Seemings are “intellectual perceptions;” they are neither beliefs nor dispositions to believe. A seeming occurs when the mind presents a proposition to you as true.
You apparently think that seemings are not real propositional attitude because they may not fit into a complete cognitive science. But why is this a problem for the reality of seemings as defined above? Maybe there is no place for mind-independent moral, aesthetic, or epistemic values in a completed science, but I think that some philosophers would still affirm the reality of such values. The intuition defender might take an anti-naturalist stance and claim that the methods of philosophy go beyond, and are not answerable to, the methods of science.
I'm not saying they aren't a real propositional attitudes. I'm saying I don't think anyone is having any kind of intellectual perceptions at all. As in Huemer is not doing what he thinks he is and is simply mistaken about his experiences.
>It would be like saying our senses aren’t reliable because people sometimes sense things that aren’t there
The analysis is at too high a level to be meaningful. There are many circumstances when senses are more unreliable than they're reliable. Let's say that the visual sense makes people believe colors are out there painted on objects. This is not true, and you don't need to use your visual sense to convince yourself it's not true - you can just imagine a priori different ways for color to exist, like for example as a function of your visual system interacting with photons and with other parts of your brain. And imagination isn't some necessarily reliable sense either, since using it to navigate the world will probably go very bad for you.
>After all, we have intuitions about lots of things that seem (seem!) super-duper obvious: the external world (that we’re not brains in vats), that other people have minds (that my wife isn’t just a cleverly programmed android), about identity through time (that I am substantially the same self-person today that I was ten years ago), about contingency (that certain things could have been otherwise—or not at all), about possibility and impossibility (that I could possibly work at Jersey Mike’s, but could not have been an ostrich), about causality, logic—and, of course, various moral matters as well (that murder is wrong and ought not be done).
This reads to me like repeating a cult ritual or mantra or hypnotic command. "I know I experience the holy ghost." "We all submit to the almighty God." It has a coercive force behind it, like the speaker is trying to gaslight you into believing there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Idk how to place it.
Additionally to the general critique of seemings, I don't have any super-duper strong gut feeling that I'm not a brain in a vat or that things could have been otherwise.
I think there's something to your remark. And I think this is a general problem in philosophy: I think a lot of analytic philosophy involves a kind of passing down of "received wisdom." There's something almost quasi-religious about it, and I find it unappealing. I really disliked the adoration people heaped on renowned dead philosophers. They were often treated more as saints than thinkers of their times.
Much of analytic philosophy has the whiff of incense to it, and it's remarkable many of those engaged in it don't seem to notice.
I'm a bit unclear what you're getting at. I think I experience mental states where I am disposed to believe something (but not certain), or it "seems likely", or "feels right", and I think this picks out the common sense of the word "intuition". Do philosophers assign some more technical, and ontologically heavier, meaning to the term?
However, I don't think my intuitions in themselves are reliable guides to the truth of any matter - they have to be stated precisely and tested in some way. And when I do that, I find that they're often inconsistent with one another, or with something else I already consider that I know. They're also background-dependent: folk physics represents common intuitions about how the world works (and is more or less what Aristotle systematized). But anyone who internalized high school and frosh mechanics will have replaced them with a new set of intuitions, based largely on Newton. And if one goes on to take courses on relativity and QM, they'll further modify or replace those intuitions.
In ethics, I think the proposition "People (and not just me) ought to be happy" starts as an intuition, at least. If I had to justify that, I would probably appeal to some sort of contractarianism (e.g.. the most reliable way to keep me happy is to be embedded in a society of happy people, ergo I should encourage that sort of society). But my desire for the basic principle precedes that justification, and constitutes a stance (in your sense) that I assume. Possibly many or all of my ethical stances start as intuitions.
>>I'm a bit unclear what you're getting at. I think I experience mental states where I am disposed to believe something (but not certain), or it "seems likely", or "feels right", and I think this picks out the common sense of the word "intuition". Do philosophers assign some more technical, and ontologically heavier, meaning to the term?
I'm talking about the use of intuition among philosophers when they're doing philosophy, not the term as its used in ordinary language. Philosophers may or may not be using it in a way that matches any particular ordinary usage. To determine that this is the case we'd have to figure out how ordinary people use the term (and they use it in multiple ways, so that's already going to make things challenging), and then find out how philosophers are using the term (and they're also using it in multiple ways).
Some uses of the term among philosophers probably do overlap with some ordinary uses of the term. But it's not clear which ones, or how often, or how many don't overlap, and when they don't, what those philosophers do mean.
You mention a disposition to believe. But note that this is just *one* of several accounts given by the SEP entry on intuitions, and that entry (a) isn't exhaustive at all and (b) doesn't even comprehensively cover ordinary uses of the term, either. See here:
Note, too, that I quoted sections on intuitions as sui generis states. Do you take yourself to have those? If you're not sure, you can read the section in the SEP intuition article in the link above.
As far as whether philosophers assign some technical, or heavier notion: some do, some don't. Philosophers are just not very clear about what they're doing. And some will insist that their "technical" uses are actually just specific forms of ordinary use, though I don't think those who make such claims have actually done any empirical work to establish that this is the case.
In my experience ordinary people use the word intuition to mean some sort of paranormal sense that something is or will go wrong. In my college courses in philosophy there was never any explanation of what phillosophical intuitions were supposed to be and I thought they were synonymous with "gut feelings" which are also underdescribed in ordinary usage - and in philosophy the intuition lovers will usually start their explanation of intuitions by saying they are not gut feelings. So I never knew and still don't know what people mean by the term.
Yes, this is exactly my experience. I was assured they don't mean what ordinary people mean. But I wasn't told what they do mean. I repeatedly asked. I even designed my own course on intuitions and even after reading a bunch of papers it remains unclear.
Very interesting. I just take 'intuition' to refer to conscious thought. So I have intuitions about philosophy because I've consciously thought about various topics. I might think that there's a burglar upstairs but that's not a conscious thought, that's a belief about what's upstairs.
Philosophers are definitely not typically referring to conscious thought when they talk of intuitions, at least most of the time. One of the most common features of intuitions is that they're non-inferential; whatever is prompting the intuition is supposed to happen outside conscious awareness. There's lots of ways of using the term; I don't at all think you're "using it wrong." Its many uses is one of the key problems I am pointing to: it's just not clear what philosophers take themselves to be doing.
I wonder if: Intuitions are such that conviction(A) that x is true or false is accompanied by another conviction(A1) that conviction(A) is missing or valid in justification (for now). Whereas a belief is a conviction(B) accompanied by another conviction(B1) that conviction(B) is justified.
Belief is a taking for granted, as valid or justified, the inferential process for one's convictions about one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc.
Intuitions are convictions about one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc. with a degree of confidence about the inferential process.
'I'm not really sure that mouse is working' is a belief. 'I'm not sure why, but I'm not really sure that mouse is working' is an intuition.
The first statement does not question the unassuredness. It takes it for granted that it's true. The second questions the unassuredness's inferential validity.
In the case where one is 100% sure that their conviction's inferential trail is true. It is still an intuition. So, ' I am 100% confident that my conviction that I am not sure if the mouse is working is inferentially justified' is an intuition. This is why Philosophers tend to see intuition as a powerful tool. Once you start questioning your convictions inferential validity you no longer believe.
I think one of the reasons intuitions are confusing are because they’re private. They’re the linguistic-like thoughts that bounce around in around in our brains.
Now we can have a belief that McDonald’s as a company sell more food than any one hotdog street vendor, say. But this as a linguistic-esque conscious thought may never have formed. Now it is still true that we ‘think’ McDonald’s sells more food than the the vendor. But it becomes an ‘intuition’ only when we stop to mull it over, and then express it with words.
I thought an intuition was like: A is taller than B and B is taller than C so A is taller than C. Is that what you’re calling a judgment?
For me, it’s a conscious experience that happens quickly and subtly. I suspect it can be psychological and physiological, and it is layered upon the sensation.
For example, 2+2=4 appears visually as squiggles (sense), meaning gets assigned to the squiggles (perception) and then the recognition of truth (intuition). 2+2=5 would be sensed and perceived in the same way, but there would not be the intuition that it’s true. Is that getting me anywhere?
Maybe. The issue is that while each of us can introspect as best as we can, psychology can't reasonably be built up just off of introspective reports. We need better data about the processes generally involved in judgments to see what kinds of patterns and tendencies emerge, and to understand how different processes function.
That describes a transitive relation, but doesn't refer to any specific psychological process. For instance, "2+2=4" isn't a psychological process. When people are talking about intuitions, they are talking about psychological processes. I want to know what process is involved when people refer to intuitions.
I find myself confused about how you're interpreting "intuitions" here. You frequently say "I think..." or "I don't think..." or that you make judgements or have dispositions towards beliefs/credences, which accords exactly with how I've seen "intuitions" used in practice.
As best I can tell, the role of "intuition" in analytic philosophy is to explicitly call out an not-explicitly-justified assumption. This seems (as long as they're given due, which is to say weak, evidential weight) hard to avoid; for instance, when I gave qualifiers like "as best I can tell" or "this seems." The alternative to this kind of intuition or intuition-adjacent talk would be mere assertion - assuming you can't track everything back to first principles on the spot, something I'd be surprised (note intuition tag again) if even hardcore foundationalists thought they could do in practice.
Of course, there are plenty of instances where philosophers infer from their inarticulate credence that p to that "we" intuit p, or that we *ought* to assign high credence to p, or show little curiosity in consulting other possible sources of evidence, and one could certainly on those grounds criticize philosophy as excessively intuition-centric. But I think a revisionary project of exorcising intuitions from philosophical discourse is doomed to either failure or, worse, being merely linguistic.
Interesting post, Lance. I was blissfully ignorant of philosophers’ use of intuitions until about 7 months ago, when I started reading articles here and elsewhere to inform myself about Chalmer’s knowledge argument and Jacksons oft-cited Mary’s Room problem. (I’m working on a post on this.) I wouldn’t say my intuitive spidy sense was triggered, but something simply didn’t ring true as I read the papers. Without being able to articulate exactly what, I was pretty sure there was a sleight of hand (or two) being used to make the Chalmerian/original Jacksonian case.
I’m more familiar now with how philosophers (in this area anyway) make use of intuitions, and I agree with much of your critique. As I’ll explain in a moment, I think intuitions do exist, and can be useful, but they prove nothing. In an arena where the goal is to draw conclusions about some phenemonon, an intuition has, at best, the status of a hypothesis. If you develop an argument based on that intuition and then argue that your conclusion is “logically coherent”, then in the scientific world, we might say, bravo- your conclusion/model *approaches* face validity. But nothing more than that. Now apply for a grant, and get some actual evidence.
On the other hand, I’m not inclined to entirely dismiss intuitions as a way of knowing. In the 70’s we talked (overly simplistically) of the “right-hemispheric” mode of information processing- synthetic/integrative/holistic as opposed to analytic/linear/sequential. Intuitions seemed to fit in here- it certainly seemed possible that in this mode one could have “insights” arising from the perception of patterns or relationships. But just as you can’t say how you arrive as the perception of the gestalt of, say, a face, you cannot explain (to yourself or anyone else) how you arrived at your intuition. The beauty of a conclusion arrived at logically is that you can trace back and check your steps. You can move forward and develop its implications. You can’t do that with an intuition, but that does not mean they are useless. As I was studying the “two modes” of consciousness/information processing, I was delighted to come across a quote from Einstein, who said something along the lines of “for me, intuition was the most important part of the process”. Einstein greatly valued his intuitions and the intuitive process, but of course, he didn’t stop with them. He went on to develop and verify his intuitions using logic and mathematics. Others then tested the implications of his theories empirically. Without those two steps, there would have been no progress. As there has not been re the knowledge argument in the 40+ years since Frank Jackson shared his intuitions about Mary. If that’s how you roll, intuitions can be valuable. But they are just the starting point. You’ve got to then do the rest of the work.
I have to say that while I generally think you're right about their usefulness I'm always really puzzled by your reported non-experience of what intuitions feel like. It's not philosophy specific, for me - it's the same pseudo-physical sensation I get of being pretty sure this puzzle piece will fit, or going "Oh I bet I left my keys on the table." There's something ... not just pseudo-physical in how it feels, but in how I conceptualize my own thoughts, I guess, and the phenomenon of something feeling intuitive is that of it feeling uniquely natural as a fit.
But then it's interesting in general that people conceptualize their own thinking differently. For example, I was really jazzed to find this blogpost, which describes how thinking feels for me strangely well: https://adamelkus.com/posts/srwk
But sharing it with friends because that was a neat thing to put words to, they... did not relate!
This is great! But now I feel like I've been using the word "intuition" to mean something different from philosophers.
Namely...I just view intuition as a cognitive reaction to external situations of some sort. I don't think intuitions are truth apt; they're just, like, opinions. They're shaped by our cognitive history (upbringing, language, education, culture).
They're reliable only in the sense that if they weren't reliable, you wouldn't get this far in life (which is different from saying they're true or immune from deception or being wrong). I also consider intuitions "valid" to the extent that they are reactions that we can't control, and to the extent that I don't think there's any telos or purpose to the universe, it doesn't matter what decisions we make (in an absolute sense), and so there's no transcendent consequences to relying on your intuition most of the time.
I think this is an insightful criticism of intuition-based philosophy. Let’s say, following Huemer, that seemings are a kind of sui generis propositional attitude. Seemings are “intellectual perceptions;” they are neither beliefs nor dispositions to believe. A seeming occurs when the mind presents a proposition to you as true.
You apparently think that seemings are not real propositional attitude because they may not fit into a complete cognitive science. But why is this a problem for the reality of seemings as defined above? Maybe there is no place for mind-independent moral, aesthetic, or epistemic values in a completed science, but I think that some philosophers would still affirm the reality of such values. The intuition defender might take an anti-naturalist stance and claim that the methods of philosophy go beyond, and are not answerable to, the methods of science.
I'm not saying they aren't a real propositional attitudes. I'm saying I don't think anyone is having any kind of intellectual perceptions at all. As in Huemer is not doing what he thinks he is and is simply mistaken about his experiences.
>It would be like saying our senses aren’t reliable because people sometimes sense things that aren’t there
The analysis is at too high a level to be meaningful. There are many circumstances when senses are more unreliable than they're reliable. Let's say that the visual sense makes people believe colors are out there painted on objects. This is not true, and you don't need to use your visual sense to convince yourself it's not true - you can just imagine a priori different ways for color to exist, like for example as a function of your visual system interacting with photons and with other parts of your brain. And imagination isn't some necessarily reliable sense either, since using it to navigate the world will probably go very bad for you.
>After all, we have intuitions about lots of things that seem (seem!) super-duper obvious: the external world (that we’re not brains in vats), that other people have minds (that my wife isn’t just a cleverly programmed android), about identity through time (that I am substantially the same self-person today that I was ten years ago), about contingency (that certain things could have been otherwise—or not at all), about possibility and impossibility (that I could possibly work at Jersey Mike’s, but could not have been an ostrich), about causality, logic—and, of course, various moral matters as well (that murder is wrong and ought not be done).
This reads to me like repeating a cult ritual or mantra or hypnotic command. "I know I experience the holy ghost." "We all submit to the almighty God." It has a coercive force behind it, like the speaker is trying to gaslight you into believing there is no war in Ba Sing Se. Idk how to place it.
Additionally to the general critique of seemings, I don't have any super-duper strong gut feeling that I'm not a brain in a vat or that things could have been otherwise.
I think there's something to your remark. And I think this is a general problem in philosophy: I think a lot of analytic philosophy involves a kind of passing down of "received wisdom." There's something almost quasi-religious about it, and I find it unappealing. I really disliked the adoration people heaped on renowned dead philosophers. They were often treated more as saints than thinkers of their times.
Much of analytic philosophy has the whiff of incense to it, and it's remarkable many of those engaged in it don't seem to notice.
I'm a bit unclear what you're getting at. I think I experience mental states where I am disposed to believe something (but not certain), or it "seems likely", or "feels right", and I think this picks out the common sense of the word "intuition". Do philosophers assign some more technical, and ontologically heavier, meaning to the term?
However, I don't think my intuitions in themselves are reliable guides to the truth of any matter - they have to be stated precisely and tested in some way. And when I do that, I find that they're often inconsistent with one another, or with something else I already consider that I know. They're also background-dependent: folk physics represents common intuitions about how the world works (and is more or less what Aristotle systematized). But anyone who internalized high school and frosh mechanics will have replaced them with a new set of intuitions, based largely on Newton. And if one goes on to take courses on relativity and QM, they'll further modify or replace those intuitions.
In ethics, I think the proposition "People (and not just me) ought to be happy" starts as an intuition, at least. If I had to justify that, I would probably appeal to some sort of contractarianism (e.g.. the most reliable way to keep me happy is to be embedded in a society of happy people, ergo I should encourage that sort of society). But my desire for the basic principle precedes that justification, and constitutes a stance (in your sense) that I assume. Possibly many or all of my ethical stances start as intuitions.
>>I'm a bit unclear what you're getting at. I think I experience mental states where I am disposed to believe something (but not certain), or it "seems likely", or "feels right", and I think this picks out the common sense of the word "intuition". Do philosophers assign some more technical, and ontologically heavier, meaning to the term?
I'm talking about the use of intuition among philosophers when they're doing philosophy, not the term as its used in ordinary language. Philosophers may or may not be using it in a way that matches any particular ordinary usage. To determine that this is the case we'd have to figure out how ordinary people use the term (and they use it in multiple ways, so that's already going to make things challenging), and then find out how philosophers are using the term (and they're also using it in multiple ways).
Some uses of the term among philosophers probably do overlap with some ordinary uses of the term. But it's not clear which ones, or how often, or how many don't overlap, and when they don't, what those philosophers do mean.
You mention a disposition to believe. But note that this is just *one* of several accounts given by the SEP entry on intuitions, and that entry (a) isn't exhaustive at all and (b) doesn't even comprehensively cover ordinary uses of the term, either. See here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuition/
Note, too, that I quoted sections on intuitions as sui generis states. Do you take yourself to have those? If you're not sure, you can read the section in the SEP intuition article in the link above.
As far as whether philosophers assign some technical, or heavier notion: some do, some don't. Philosophers are just not very clear about what they're doing. And some will insist that their "technical" uses are actually just specific forms of ordinary use, though I don't think those who make such claims have actually done any empirical work to establish that this is the case.
In my experience ordinary people use the word intuition to mean some sort of paranormal sense that something is or will go wrong. In my college courses in philosophy there was never any explanation of what phillosophical intuitions were supposed to be and I thought they were synonymous with "gut feelings" which are also underdescribed in ordinary usage - and in philosophy the intuition lovers will usually start their explanation of intuitions by saying they are not gut feelings. So I never knew and still don't know what people mean by the term.
Yes, this is exactly my experience. I was assured they don't mean what ordinary people mean. But I wasn't told what they do mean. I repeatedly asked. I even designed my own course on intuitions and even after reading a bunch of papers it remains unclear.
Very interesting. I just take 'intuition' to refer to conscious thought. So I have intuitions about philosophy because I've consciously thought about various topics. I might think that there's a burglar upstairs but that's not a conscious thought, that's a belief about what's upstairs.
Philosophers are definitely not typically referring to conscious thought when they talk of intuitions, at least most of the time. One of the most common features of intuitions is that they're non-inferential; whatever is prompting the intuition is supposed to happen outside conscious awareness. There's lots of ways of using the term; I don't at all think you're "using it wrong." Its many uses is one of the key problems I am pointing to: it's just not clear what philosophers take themselves to be doing.
I wonder if: Intuitions are such that conviction(A) that x is true or false is accompanied by another conviction(A1) that conviction(A) is missing or valid in justification (for now). Whereas a belief is a conviction(B) accompanied by another conviction(B1) that conviction(B) is justified.
Belief is a taking for granted, as valid or justified, the inferential process for one's convictions about one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc.
Intuitions are convictions about one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc. with a degree of confidence about the inferential process.
'I'm not really sure that mouse is working' is a belief. 'I'm not sure why, but I'm not really sure that mouse is working' is an intuition.
The first statement does not question the unassuredness. It takes it for granted that it's true. The second questions the unassuredness's inferential validity.
In the case where one is 100% sure that their conviction's inferential trail is true. It is still an intuition. So, ' I am 100% confident that my conviction that I am not sure if the mouse is working is inferentially justified' is an intuition. This is why Philosophers tend to see intuition as a powerful tool. Once you start questioning your convictions inferential validity you no longer believe.
I think one of the reasons intuitions are confusing are because they’re private. They’re the linguistic-like thoughts that bounce around in around in our brains.
Now we can have a belief that McDonald’s as a company sell more food than any one hotdog street vendor, say. But this as a linguistic-esque conscious thought may never have formed. Now it is still true that we ‘think’ McDonald’s sells more food than the the vendor. But it becomes an ‘intuition’ only when we stop to mull it over, and then express it with words.