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Difference Between Instinct And Intuition

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Responding to the smile of a baby, jumping-up when startled by a sudden sound, or even pulling your hand away from a hot fire are all examples of instinctive behaviour; instinct does not involve thought but is an automatic, evolutionary response to external stimuli. Instinctive judgements are more intuitive in nature but though related, in terms of both not involving conscious thought, instinct and intuition are not the same. Intuition is based on subconscious thought; a pattern recognized by the brain based on, for instance, past experiences, whereas instinctive judgements appear to be independent of experience or rational thought. As a student of psychology, I like to make the distinction that instinct is a behavioural process while intuition is a cognitive, but subconscious, process. The term ‘judgement’ used in the above TOKstatement implies taking an objective or considered decision based on instinct alone rather than on conscious, rational thought. I believe the absence of conscious …show more content…

For instance, the cognitive scientist and psychologist, Steven Pinker , argues that all thought is composed prior to its linguistic form. In his book, The Language Instinct, he talks about how children learn language instinctively, without the need for complex thought and analysis, and feels that ways of knowing, such as the use of reason to understand grammar rules, actually slows down the process of language learning. On the other hand, linguistic determinism states that knowledge is shaped by language and is a cultural construct; people of different languages have different thought processes. Demonstrating this latter view, a situation, albeit fictional, where language limits instinctive judgements, can be seen in the success of "Newspeak", the state imposed language in George Orwell's 1984 , that prevented people from even thinking critically of the

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