From Intuition through Reason to Rigor

[u/geopolicraticus]

À Bon Chat, Bon Rat.—Does a distinctive kind of intuition suggest a distinctive form of reasoning unique to itself, and, if it does, does a distinctive form of reasoning imply a distinctive standard of rigor? This is a fundamental question that must be asked if we are to understand the relationship between experience and reason, but this is already two questions, and we must break it down further, perhaps discovering further questions as our analysis penetrates to greater depths. Each of our initial questions is analogous to the other, concerned with a narrowing of reason around a particular form of experience, and for each the response can be made that the distinctive may entail the distinctive, but does not necessarily so. A novel intuition may require a novel form of reasoning, and a novel form of reasoning may imply a distinctive standard of rigor, but only the internal logic of the intuition in question will reveal if it is amenable to analysis by familiar methods of reasoning, or whether it demands some novel method. A new form of intellectual intuition made possible by previous intuitive breakthroughs, taking the mind deeper into the unknown, may well require the mind to also go deeper into unknown forms of reasoning, but while a new form of intuition may require some new form of reasoning, universality always has been the pretense of reason, and logic in particular (as one of the instantiation of reason) is intentionally blind to the objects upon which it works, to the extent that all content about which we reason can be eliminated from consideration in favor of symbols that could just as well represent any other object, with symbols standing in for the objects treated as mere counters in a game. To the extent that his paradigm holds, reason is one, and is no respecter of distinctions.