In practice it often happens that forecasts from econometric models are manually adjusted. There can be good reasons for this. Foreseeable structural changes can be incorporated. Recent changes in data, in measurement or in the relevance of variables, can be addressed. A main issue with manual adjustment is that the end user of a forecast needs to know why someone modified a forecast and, next, how that forecast was changed. This should therefore be documented. We discuss an example to show that one may also need to know specific details of econometric models, here growth curves, to understand that even a seemingly harmless adjustment by a priori fixing the point of inflection leads to any result that you would like. In this chapter we discuss why people manually adjust forecasts. We discuss the optimal situation when it comes to adjustment and the experience with manual adjustment so far. A plea is made to consider model-based adjustment of model forecasts, thus allowing for a clear understanding of how and why adjustment was made.

I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

The final two Metaphysical Expositions argue that our original representation of space must be intuitive. I draw some surprising connections between Kant’s discussion and Leibniz’s account of the continuum. These connections indicate that the point of Kant’s analysis of <space> is to show that our original representation of space is infinitely complex in content. Since no discursive representation can be infinitely complex, our concept <space> cannot derive its content from discursive spontaneity. Its content must rather be given to the mind in order to be thought at all and thus originates in receptive intuition. Kant’s argument does not hinge on the singularity or holistic structure of space, as many hold, but on its infinite complexity and consequent givenness. I develop a novel account of the discursivity of conceptual representation that preserves the validity of Kant’s argument, defend Kant’s account of the infinity of space against prominent objections, and finally indicate how Kant’s argument entails the singularity of intuition (rather than presupposing it).

I argue that the sensibility/understanding distinction announced at the end of Kant’s Introduction to the Critique can be justified via pure apperception. I first defend an account of the analytic/synthetic distinction, arguing that analytic judgments articulate intellectual grounds of truth. Synthetic judgments, then, are based on nonintellectual grounds of truth. This provides Kant’s “baseline conception” of receptive intuition as a capacity for representing nonintellectual grounds of truth. This is a “top-down” approach to intuition: a characterization of intuition not in terms of its intrinsic properties but in terms of a prior account of the intellect and its cognitive needs. I then argue that this version of the analytic/synthetic distinction follows from the idea that judgment must track the truth – an idea that is available to us via pure apperception. Thus, Kant’s baseline conception of intuition, as expressed in the sensibility/understanding distinction, can be justified via pure apperception.

I provide a Stufenleiter of human intuition that systematizes Kant’s discussions. Starting with intuition überhaupt, as object-giving representation, I distinguish spontaneous from receptive intuition. I divide receptive intuition into sensible and non-sensible; and divide sensible intuition into inner and outer sense, under which our human varieties of temporal and spatial intuition fall as instances (not species). This chapter offers detailed accounts of givenness and of cognitive spontaneity (the other differentia are addressed in Chapter 8). I argue that givenness, the fundamental criterion of intuition überhaupt, involves securing both (i) the existence of the object and (ii) thought’s cognitive access to it. One might worry that these functions could come apart. I address this worry by developing a novel interpretation of spontaneity and its opposite, receptivity. As applied to representations, I argue, these notions are fundamentally epistemic and explanatory. This is why the functions cannot come apart and why a representation that performs one function spontaneously (or, as the case may be, receptively) must also perform the other spontaneously (or receptively).

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the conventional view of science and of the scientific paradigm is under question. This chapter presents a perspective on science for social work practice that is not against science per se but that critiques positivist science’s heavy emphasis on evidence-based practice and draws instead on alternative, more fluid and creative approaches. Science is, of course, important for its insights and its ways of studying the world, and to attack science is to allow anti-scientific arguments a legitimacy they do not deserve. The approach here values science and scientific inquiry but not to the point of denying the importance of other ways of knowing and being.

If some of our knowledge cannot be articulated, how does it make itself manifest? It will not surprise anyone who has followed the argument of this book up to now that there are things that we can do with knowledge besides talking about it. Millikan, as we saw, used his knowledge of experimentation and of professional discourse to guide his exemplary investigations of the charge of the electron. Neither was something he made explicit; I doubt that he (or anyone) could have. No practitioner who looked at Millikan’s work found any basis for these accusations, because their training endowed them with a knowledge only available to practitioners. They all made effective use of this knowledge, despite not being able to articulate its content. That kind of knowledge manifests itself not in the form of beliefs, but rather in the scholar’s sense of how things seem.

Intuition is an ultimate experience, beyond words: we know more than we can tell. This phenomenon upsets those who believe in rationality as a purely conscious activity. Its detractors tend to dismiss intuition as crazed superstition, while others have confused it with God’s voice. The Intelligence of Intuition extends the argument for the rationality of intuition made in my book Gut Feelings with a deeper scientific analysis. I locate intuition in its larger societal context and argue that intuition is based on the unconscious use of adaptive heuristics. These simple rules make intuition smart.

Intelligence evolved to cope with situations of uncertainty generated by nature, predators, and the behavior of conspecifics. To this end, humans and other animals acquired special abilities, including heuristics that allow for swift action in face of scarce information. In this chapter, I introduce the concept of embodied heuristics, that is, innate or learned rules of thumb that exploit evolved sensory and motor abilities in order to facilitate superior decisions. I provide a case study of the gaze heuristic, which solves coordination problems from intercepting prey to catching a fly ball. Various species have adapted this heuristic to their specific sensorimotor abilities, such as vision, echolocation, running, and flying. Humans have enlisted it for solving tasks beyond its original purpose, a process akin to exaptation. The gaze heuristic also made its way into rocket technology. I propose a systematic study of embodied heuristics as a research framework for situated cognition and embodied bounded rationality.

How does a person curious about or wanting to do science learn it? The thesis of this book is learning science requires not only digging deeply into the subject but learning how to learn. It is not enough to learn facts about the history of science or to study chemistry, biology, or physics per se. One must also have a sense of the roles of psychological and social factors in science. We can read about the development of Newtonian mechanics or quantum physics, but that does not tell us why Newton, or Planck, Bohr, Born, or Heisenberg studied these subjects in the first place or what thought processes they used in their work. It does not tell us how their personalities and intuition drove their work. It also does not tell us why the work of these scientists was or was not accepted by the scientific community, rightly or wrongly. Most importantly, it does not tell us why we think we know what we do or even if what we study is real. Epistemology and metaphysics are required here. This chapter explains why such knowledge is obligatory if one is to do science well.

After revisiting Bohm’s implicate and expliocate orders, the chapter looks into the kinship between the implicate order and both Bergsonian duration and the continuity of the reading consciousness. Articulation and form also particpate intimately in ongoing duration. But what is the nature of the time of reading and how do we apprehend it? The chapter goes on to examine and criticize Bergson’s cinematographic account of language perceived as movement. Bergsonian duration and the dynamic of translation are compared with Impressionist painting. The chapter then moves on to consider the part played by voice and rhythm in the realization of duration and of intuitional relationships with text. It finally sets itself the task of identifying a rhythm pecular to translational activity itself. The chapter includes, as illustrations, translations from Eluard, Laforgue and Leconte de Lisle.

This chapter outlines a theory of moral perception, describes a structural analogy between perception and action, and indicates how perception can provide an objective basis for moral knowledge. It is shown to have a basis in the kinds of grounds that underlie the moral properties to which moral perception responds, such as the violence of a face-slapping. With this outline of a theory of moral perception in view, the chapter describes the presentational phenomenal character of moral perception. Prominent in this presentationality is the phenomenological integration between our moral sensibility and our non-moral perception of the various kinds of natural properties that ground moral properties. Moral perception is possible without moral judgment but commonly yields it. It is also possible without moral emotion but may arise from it in some cases and evoke it in others. Many perceptually grounded judgments are justified; many also express empirical moral knowledge.

Cognitive models that assume that judgments are based on processes of sampling from memory have a long history in psychology and take a variety of forms, but the exact cognitive interpretations of them differ, are unclear, or remain elusive. Using the Precise/Not Precise (PNP) model (Sundh et al., 2021) we have revived an old approach to intuition and analyses, originally proposed by Egon Brunswik (1956). The model is based on the distinction between analytic algorithms that usually yield the same exact output and approximate intuitive algorithms that are rarely far off the mark but are inevitably perturbed by a random noise. The PNP model distinguishes intuitive and analytic processes depending on the error distributions around the model estimates. By combining the PNP model with specific cognitive algorithms, one can determine if analytic or intuitive cognitive processes implement the cognitive algorithms. In this chapter, we argue that also the memory sampling processes observed in multiple-cue judgments, characterized by good fit of the Generalized Context Model (Nosofsky, 2015), come in two different forms: one that involves analytic application of root-memorized individual exemplars and one that involves a noisy similarity-based inference about the likely criterion. We demonstrate that different parameterizations of the Generalized Context Model naturally imply response distributions that realize the distinction implied by the PNP model. With data from multiple-cue judgment, we show how the PNP model identifies, not only intuitive and analytic rule-based processes, but also processes of memory sampling with the empirical hallmarks of intuition and analysis.

Evidence-based policing (EBP) is perhaps the most significant police reform movement of the last 30 years. Most notable for identifying what does or does not work, and for trying to integrate science into policing, much of EBP’s focus remains on program evaluation methods and investigating crime prevention strategies. This vision for policing often characterizes the craft of police work as an obstacle rather than a useful contributor to science. This is changing, as proponents of EBP begin to embrace a wider variety of methods to assess a broader range of outcomes, and to treat both science and experience as necessary elements of successful police reform. In this chapter, we recommend that EBP focus more attention on assessing the choices that patrol officers make in their everyday encounters with the public. Drawing on a case study of a neighbor dispute, we show how EBP could benefit from listening to practioners and learning what their rich experiences have taught them about how best to respond. We also suggest ways that research might help generate knowledge on the essential normative or moral questions that characterize street-level discretion, and thus combine knowledge about what works with knowledge about doing the right thing.

In this chapter, I reconstruct the metaphysical deductions that, in my account, Kant presents in the Aesthetic, Analytic and Dialectic, respectively. I read metaphysical deductions as accomplishing the first task of transcendental philosophy as it is established in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the task of cataloguing pure root concepts (Stammbegriffe) for the cognition of objects and to track their origin. I argue that the metaphysical deductions do not simply assume a distinction between different faculties. Rather, they contribute to establishing this distinction by identifying the origin of the root concepts they clarify and catalogue. Moreover, I show that Kant does not follow a univocal model in the different deductions. Rather, his approach is pluralistic.

While trudging through the landscape of his rambles, Coleridge filled his notebooks with reference to and drawings of geometric figures. The question arises: Given his fascination with the uncultivated, irregular wild hills and rivers of his rambles, why would he utilize the fixed, abstracted geometric idiom removed from time? This chapter addresses this seeming contradiction by suggesting that his attraction to the geometric figure in his landscape descriptions is neither perplexing nor inconsistent but rather an expression of his immersion in an environment that nurtured a geometric frame of mind and believed in a mathematical ordering of the entire universe. Beginning with his mathematical training both at Christ’s Hospital School and at the University of Cambridge, Coleridge inherited a cultural conviction that one should take Euclid seriously. Furthermore, this training sharpened his powers of attention, abstraction, and an a priori intuition. Ultimately, his attachment to a geometric perspective did not distract him from his attraction to the sensuous movements, sounds, and colors of his natural surroundings. He intertwined them both and in so doing tempered his contemporaries’ way of thinking that separated the two modes of perception.