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loquor | 4 years ago

Edsger Dijkstra was suspicious of terms like intuition. He reasoned:

My Pocket Oxford Dictionary --which requires a rather large pocket-- defines "intuition: immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning". If we don't believe in miracles, we seem to have only two possibilities: either the reasoning required is so short and standard that it is hardly worth being recorded or mentioned, or the "immediate apprehension" does not amount to much. In the first case "intuitively clear" means "obvious", in the second case it probably means no more than the absence of obvious counterexamples. In both cases, mathematical texts "recommended" for their appeal to the reader's intuition should be ignored, for such texts promote non-reasoning instead of better reasoning.

Despite the above, there are still people that believe that intuition is a good thing; there is no point in arguing with them for they prefer to believe in miracles.

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Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...

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