When Should We Discard Explanations that are Intuitively Appealing?

Our intuition has brought confusion to many humans in the past and present. Intuition can be very confusing. At times, it may greatly help us. Yet, it can cause us to make the greatest mistakes. Intuition can be defined quite differently. Abella Arthur defines intuition as a combination of historical (empirical) data, deep and heightened observation and an ability to cut through the thickness of surface reality. Intuition is like a slow motion machine that captures data instantaneously and hits you like a ton of bricks. Intuition is a knowing, a sensing that is beyond the conscious understanding a gut feeling. Intuition is not pseudo-science. According to dictionary.com, A thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning. Although the two definitions are different, the bottom line is still that, intuition is not something that requires any thinking, it is just a feeling. As we continue on with life, well slowly learn that intuition can be surprisingly correct quite often. Should we solely depend on intuition? Should we trust this feeling or ignore it? Above all, should we discard explanations that are intuitively appealing? I shall attempt to answer these questions through this essay. This will be done by using the Ways of Knowing. To begin, I shall utilize a personal example to answer this question. Almost every morning, I stop by McDonalds to grab a Sausage McMuffin with Egg. McDonalds is known for their unhealthy fast food, and this product of theirs is no different. So to justify eating this nearly every morning, I searched up on a nutrition website to find that they contain 21.0 g of protein and 30% calcium. Knowing this, I was able to construct an intuitively appealing explanation for myself that would help justify my consumption of Sausage McMuffins with Egg. Of course, we know that the negatives far out balance the positives in this case. Although those facts may be true, they do not prove that Sausage McMuffins with Egg are healthy. In fact, they contain 50% saturated fat, 38% sodium, and 95% cholesterol. This example demonstrates to us that intuitively appealing explanations that have obvious evidence that they are false, should be discarded. Although the answer to this question is simple, we cannot jump to conclusions without examining other situations. So how do we know which intuitively appealing explanations are to be kept and which ones are to be discarded? Well, sometimes intuition can go hand in hand with reason. This means any intuitive feelings you may have that are based on logic and reason should not be so easily discarded. There must be alien life somewhere out in the universe. This is intuitively appealing, and this example connects well with our statement. Although we have nearly no evidence that there is life besides ours in this universe, our technology only expands to the edges of our solar system. We cannot prove whether there is life beyond that of Earths. Yet, we cannot be the only ones, can we? One of the worlds leading scientists, Steven Hawking, says that in a 100 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of millions of stars, it is unlikely that we

are the only ones. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. We must reason that if it was possible for our planet to produce life, then there must be another planet somewhere out there than has also produced life. This is a logical argument, because although there isnt any definite evidence to prove it true, there is also no evidence against it. Religion is an important category that must be examined. Christianity dates back as one of the oldest religions. It was stemmed off from Judaism. To be Christian, is to believe in Jesus, and all that happened according to the bible. Can we prove these explanations? Because the birth of Jesus was roughly 4 BC, we are unable to accurately trace back to find evidence to determine whether these intuitively appealing explanations are true or not. This does not just apply to Christianity, it applies to other religions as well, such as Hinduism or Judaism. If we accept religions as intuitively appealing explanations, then we should not discard of them. When considering whether to discard intuitively appealing explanations or not, we must acknowledge sense perception. How is sense perception important in this case and to what extent does it affect our intuition? Can our sense perception affect our intuitively appealing explanations? I do not believe that we should discard intuitively appealing explanations when they are constructed with both intuition and perception. For example, when you go to work or school everyday, you see your coworkers or classmates. Day after day after day. Soon, you expect to see them everyday because an intuitive feeling was created from seeing them everyday. In this case, this example suggests to us that when sense perception is combined with our intuition, we should not discard our intuitively appealing feelings. Although, now that we have brought up sense perception, a new knowledge issue arises. To what extent do our emotions influence our sense perception? According to an experiment done at Lewis and Clark college by Lauren Whitelaw, John Daters, Mike Tengan and Taulia Tuua, that people tend to choose Coke over Pepsi when asked which tastes better. Yet when a taste test was performed on the blindfolded participants, Pepsi was the one that was much more often chosen as the better tasting cola. Although when people were told of this, they still continued to choose Coke. This suggests that our emotion can affect our intuition, but lets not be too hasty. Taking your lover as an example. When you fall in love with someone, you accept that person for who they are. You would love them for those quirky habits, but normally, on any other person, you may find those habits weird and even annoying. Yet your still with that person. You create intuitive appealing explanations for their quirky habits because of your personal emotions towards that person. In this case, those intuitive appealing explanations should be discarded, because of the influence that your emotions have on your intuition and reasoning.

What about intuitively appealing explanations that cannot be proven by science? If you take our best understanding of gravity and physics, apply it to the way galaxies spin, then supposedly galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin. It seems the only valid response that physicists could come up with is that there is much more stuff out there than we can see. But nobody can explain what this dark matter was. To this day, dark matter is still unexplainable. Scientists suggest that dark matter makes up about 90% of the mass in the universe. This means we are still incapable of knowing what 90% of the universe is made up of. This example shows us that intuitively appealing explanations that may not have definitive scientific explanations should not be discarded. Therefore, we can conclude that if an intuitively appealing explanation has much more evidence against rather than for, then it should be discarded. We also discovered that when emotion is mixed with intuition, results can drastically vary. All this was shown by the Sausage McMuffin with Egg example, the lovers example, and the cola example. Acknowledging the above assertion, we can also state that an intuitively appealing explanation that has much less evidence against rather than for, then it should not be discarded. Although to support these, you must use other ways of knowing, such as perception and reasoning. Based on our examples on religion, we can also state that when an intuitively appealing explanation does not have an overwhelming amount of evidence either against or for, then it should not be discarded. Lastly, although some intuitively appealing explanations do not have sufficient scientific evidence to be proven true, they should not be discarded. To conclude this, the question of whether to discard an intuitively appealing explanation or not, can only be answered after considering all of reason, emotion, and perception.