In Search of Intuition

What are intuitions? Stereotypical examples may suggest that they are the results of common intellectual reflexes. But some intuitions defy the stereotype: there are hard-won intuitions that take deliberate effort to have, improved intuitions that contravene how matters naively seem to us, and expertly guided intuitions in which an expert in some domain guides a novice toward having an intuition that, otherwise, he or she would not have had. I argue that reflection on these three phenomena motivates a conception of intuition that emphasizes its phenomenology over its aetiology, as well as its grounding in malleable problem-solving abilities.