Intuitive knowledge as a function of observation, insight and social interaction

We generate intuitive knowledge via a particular part of our consciousness which I will call the intuitive knowledge process (what Gladwell calls the adaptive unconscious, perhaps [1, 11]). Intuitive knowledge is the output of this process; the inputs are observations, personal insights and previously generated intuitive knowledge. The intuitive knowledge process does not exist in isolation from the world: it directly influences the kinds of observations we make; social interaction affects the value of the the meaning created; and the process is constantly tuned with feedback from observations, insights, and social interaction with others.

The intuitive knowledge process

The intuitive knowledge process takes in observations of the world, analyzes them via a very large set of learned rules, does some estimations and makes some inductive or deductive leaps (personal insights), and creates meaning. [1, 12] This meaning is intuitive knowledge. This process differs from the logical knowledge process of the conscious mind, by which we create meaning by explicitly gathering data, and consciously applying a logical framework to it. The intuitive knowledge process is not observable: it is opaque to us. We offer it observations (or it directs us in gathering them), and it analyzes them and returns a judgment to our conscious mind. It works quickly to arrive at meaning, once enough data has been gathered. One of the inputs of the intuitive knowledge process are observations both of ourselves, and of the world.

Our intuitive knowledge process needs observations of the world to act on: both enough data (the temporary autism examples of Blink [1, 221]), and needing enough of both the right kind of data and not too much extraneous data (the Cook County Hospital heart attack detection example from Blink [1, 130]). We are not perfect observers, however. The process directly influences our observations either by directing our perceptions or by filtering or prioritizing what we perceive (which can be either good or bad, depending on what needs to be decided). As Eisner says, “We learn to see, hear, and feel.” [5, 21] It is our intuitive knowledge process that, in large part, does the learning.

People who are deeply trained in a discipline perceive more of things within their expertise than the rest of us who are not such experts, as in the story of the professional food tasters Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun [1, p. 176-179], although I disagree with Gladwell in that I do not think that the tasters “have a much better understanding of what goes on ... [in] their unconscious;” I think that they are in large part more aware of their perceptions: they taste more fully than the untutored do, as well as being able to assign more meaning to what they taste. Our background and base of experience affects what we observe, as Eisner says: "The kind of import that emerges in any portrayal of a situation is shaped by the kind of schema that is employed. If anthropologists study a village, the traditions, habits, and theoretical constraints within the brand of anthropology they practice will provide the windows for perception and the terms within which meanings are made." [5, 36] Personal insight acts as a second, pure feedback, second input to the intuitive knowledge process. While the process can work well in collating and analyzing observations of the world, we mostly do not have enough data to create an obvious logical meaning. Sometimes we don't even have a definite problem or question in mind which requires a decision. When we make create meaning in these cases, we have had a personal insight. The story of the kouros from Blink describes a good example of a personal insight. When Arthur Houghton brought Evelyn Harrison to see it, he was not asking her for her judgment as to its authenticity, yet she both discovered that problem and made her judgment on it based on something she was not aware of consciously [1, 5].

Feedback and dynamism of the intuitive knowledge process

The intuitive knowledge process is not static, nor is it perfect. It is constantly adjusted by the impact of new observations of ourselves and the world, new insights we have had, and most especially by our social interaction with others.

New observations of the world can train or fine tune the working of the process. We see this in how Elkman in Blink trained his process with detailed observations of faces over many years, eventually making him become far more perceptive than most people in interpreting the messages facial expressions convey [1, 205] . Similarly with Gottman and his analysis of the interaction of couples and his subsequent prediction of their likelihood of getting divorced. [1, 18-23]

Personal insights can update the process as well. The insights themselves form new observations or rules which will be incorporated by the process (when the insight is shown to be correct). The insight can cause reinterpretation of old data, or cause us to make observations we might not have been aware of before.

The process is affected greatly by social interaction. While the process is part of each of us as individuals, society has a profound influence on its development and tuning. The knowledge we produce itself feeds back to our process as new data. The value of the intuitive knowledge we produce, and thus its power in influencing our future judgments, can be increased or decreased by validation from peers and experts. Knowledge which was shown by others to be wrong or inaccurate is not likely to be given much weight later, and is likely to have less influence than knowledge which was validated by others.

Social interaction with other people also corrects and adds to the intuitive knowledge we produce by offering other meanings and observations that we would not have arrived at by our- selves, leading to a re-evaluation of that knowledge and an adjustment of our process. I saw this well demonstrated during Allan Wicker's lecture of Sep 20, 2006 [6]. Presented with the same image of a 16th century European man interacting with a Native American woman on the coast of the New World, members the audience offered many different interpretations, and each revealed different, non-identical, bits of intuitive knowledge. As Eisner says: “... each person’s history, and hence world, is unlike anyone else’s. This means that the way in which we see and respond to a situation, and how we interpret what we see, will bear our own signature.” [5, 34] We absorb some of the knowledge offered to us by others, particularly that offered to us and reinforced throughout our lives by the culture and society we live in — Berger and Luckmann’s “social stock of knowledge” [2] — and our process is changed as a result. As Berger and Luckmann say, “Everyday life is, above all, life with and by means of the language I share with my fellowmen.” and “... language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience.” [2] Socially interacting with others can offer us (but does not guarantee) a short cut to meaning and especially a reinterpretation of our own experience, training our process by incorporating their knowledge. Secondly, the intuitive knowledge process can be tuned explicitly by training: we can become expert in areas in which we are not currently by interacting with mentors and expert practitioners in order to observe them at and be guided by them in the work of being expert. On things out of our expertise, Berger and Luckmann say, “I may do so reluctantly or with professional curiosity, but in either case I am faced with problems that I have not yet routinzed.” [2, 5] This routinization can be accomplished by training and education. This is John Seely Brown's learning-to-be, or "knowing how" instead of "knowing that". [3, 128-129] The new learning environments he speaks of in "New Learning Environments for the 21st century" [4] and the organizational structures he describes in The Social Life of Information [3, 129-133] are structured to enable students or workers to gain the practice of something instead of the knowledge about something. Brown speaks of how a newcomer to a phone center became effective in such an environment where formal training had failed her: “The researchers noticed, however, that the newcomer had a desk opposite the veteran. There she could hear the veteran taking calls, asking questions, and giving advice. And she began to do the same. [...] Instead of training courses, the sociologists suggested restructuring the phone center [...] by putting all its operators in positions to learn from one another.” [3, 133].

This describes the training the intuitive knowledge process with carefully filtered observations and prepared, validated knowledge.

Conclusion

The connection between intuitive knowledge, our observations of the world, our insights and our interactions with others is complex and is centered around a process via which we unconsciously create meaning about the world. It is full of both strong and weak feedback in nearly every combination, as well as constant adjustment. It is this which gives the intuitive knowledge process its power and value to us and allows us to be expert at being, instead of merely knowing.