The value of intuition

A recent thread on the listserv for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) concerned the power and effects of visual metaphor in determining how viewers respond to film adaptations of novels. Implicit in the question was the notion that one had read (or was familiar with) the paper "text" before viewing the film and that somehow the film was unable to fully "capture" (even with the aid of visual metaphor) some of the more subtle points of the originating text. But one respondent poked at the notion that there are visual metaphors that are--to use my own words--canonical in themselves; that they can be used to evoke and invoke subtexts found in the originating text without the use of long-winded passages. A respondent to this speculated that one still had to have read the originating text in order to "get" the visual metaphors. This led me to respond that--for instance--while not having read Jane Eyre before having seen the Welles' version of the story in film, I formed an image of Jane consistent with the originating text (discovered later when I read it) as a consequence of the ways in which Welles evoked her character using what I refered to as stock/canonical metaphors. In the end, I speculated that perhaps there is an analog to mirror neurons which affects our processing of visual metaphors in a manner not dissimilar to the way mirror neurons affect our reading of the body language of others.

Okay, so now you have the prologue and are probably asking just what the hell this has to do with the value of intuition. Well . . . a respondent to my post pointed me in the direction of the work of one Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., professor in Cognitive Linguistics at UCSC. I used my college computer account to access the article databases and found quite a number of articles by Gibbs dealing with metaphor, irony, and other rhetorical tropes in relation to our sense of meaning. This evening, I read one of them: "Psycholinguistics and Mental Representations," from Cognitive Linguistics, volume 10.3, 1999. In the article, Gibbs argues against a complete dismissal of intuition in the field of epistemology. While it cannot be used wholly as proof of a point, particularly in the realm of linguistics, he argues quite convincingly that intuition has value insofar as it serves as a seed bed for hypotheses, (dis)proof of which can then be undertaken using sound scientific methods.

Think of the ways in which you use your own intuition. Does it spur you to know more, more certainly? Or, do you gobble it blindly to feed empty calories to your ideology?