In the previous post I proposed intuition as being a good term for non-verbal knowledge about the world, that is, as being both a category for beliefs about the world that we do not express linguistically and as a mechanism by which 'facts' communicated about the world can be received. Intuition, I argued, lies outside language and perhaps precedes it. 'Truths' made manifest via intuition are not linguistic propositions. Although intuitive knowledge can usually be expressed in language (some intuitions taking longer to express than others, sometimes whole books), intuition, I argued, actually precedes language. In today's post I thought I would elaborate on this idea of intuition as a source of knowledge outside language.
The Aristotelian definition of a human is "rational animal". Another definition that emerged later was "language-using animal". Now, there is some evidence that many animals possess communicative behaviors that resemble, in a limited way, language, but it surely true that language is far more conspicuous among humans than among other species. It is not just that humans communicate with friends, family and acquaintances using words, we think in words. If not otherwise occupied by a film or physical activity that requires mental concentration, if, say, just walking the streets, a human maintains a continuous internal monologue and the material of that monologue is words. Leopold Bloom's stream-of-consciousness in Ulysses is a good example of how we think. When reading a book, the author's narrative, the author's language, replaces the internally generated monologue that characterizes human consciousness when not engaged in some task or focussed on some text – but the constituents of thought remain the same. Words. Furthermore our experience of the world is structured, saturated, by language. Sitting here writing I can look at the objects in my apartment and name each one - "book", "table", "oven", "chair". The appropriate words for describing my world are almost always immediately available to me. Language is always at hand. It can seem from this that experience is always capable of being expressed in language, even if some experiences take longer to describe than others.
Because language is so central to the human experience of the world, it may seem that all knowledge is linguistic. In analytic philosophy, I think, true justified beliefs are always presented in the form of propositions, statements. Yet if we consider types of animal other than humans, we are forced to recognize that non-human animals also possess knowledge even when they don't possess language. I remember once coming home to find my pet dog had locked herself in the study and the doorknob full of dents. Presumably the clever animal had tried to escape the room by attempting to turn the handle with her teeth. This idea that she had had, that turning doorknobs opens doors, was not an instinct – dogs evolved in a time before doors or door handles. Rather it was something she had learned from years of watching her human owners open doors. Dogs and cats and other animals can be very clever; I often suspect they know much more than we realize. Yet this knowledge is not verbal. It is intuitive.
If animals possess extra-linguistic knowledge and humans are also animals, it seems logical that humans should also possess extra-linguistic knowledge.
Intuition is not only a non-verbal form of knowledge, it is also a non-verbal way of acquiring knowledge. The other night on the music channel on TV I was watching, a flamboyantly gay man appeared to report on celebrity gossip (Hollywood gossip having been for a long time the province of gay men). I knew immediately that he was gay even though he never announced the fact. How then could I know that he was gay? I recognized or intuited his homosexuality from a quality of his body language and of vocal intonation. The nearest words that I can find for the mannerisms he exhibited is 'camp' or 'swish' but neither word seems adequate. (Check out the wikipedia entries on these terms to see how they are usually defined.) Sometimes people describe the signals gay men display as 'effeminate' but this word also fails to encompass the phenomenon. Few women I know are limp-wristed. It seems there is no word for the quality of demeanor these men exhibit, a quality that enables others to know that they are gay or not; we have arrived at the limit of language. And yet we easily 'intuit' gay-ness from a person's demeanor.
It would be interesting to know if homosexuality comes before camp-ness or whether camp-ness precedes homosexuality. But I digress.
In this post and in the previous one, it may seem that I am prioritizing intuition over verbal knowledge, suggesting that the former is superior than the later because it precedes it. In fact the opposite is true. Intuition, as I argued in the earlier post, is often fallible. I have often falsely intuited things about others and others have often falsely intuited things about me. The notion that we should trust our 'instincts' is obviously quite wrong. Humans possess language for a reason. It is through language that we most truly manifest ourselves and come to understand others. When intuition fails, language can provide the remedy. And nothing should be off limits.
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