Intuition

In CF, an intuition is any subconscious or inexplicit idea — including emotions, hunches and gut feelings — that you cannot readily put into words. Crucially, CF treats intuitions as real ideas carrying knowledge and information, not as an inferior or irrational category. They are different from explicit ideas, not worse. Most of our thinking relies on them because the subconscious has far more computing power than the conscious mind, and intuition is how we draw on it cheaply.

This puts CF directly against the “rationalist” stance that explicit arguments win debates and gut feelings should be overridden. CF rejects suppressing intuition with willpower as fake rationality. When an intuition conflicts with your stated reasoning, that conflict is an unsolved problem — and you don’t know in advance which side is right. “It’s just an intuition” is not a criticism, because an idea can be both intuitive and correct; a real criticism must say why the idea is wrong.

Because intuitions resist words, CF offers methods to work with them rather than around them. You can articulate them through introspection, or treat them as black boxes — posing many questions and scenarios, recording the intuitive yes/no reactions, and hunting for the pattern. An intuitive objection is a legitimate move in a debate: it means the explicit case is incomplete. CF connects this to Rand’s view of emotions as automatized value-judgments and to Goldratt’s respect for experience-based intuition. Intuitions can still be mistaken (e.g. from propaganda), so they get scrutiny, never blind deference.