Intuition, for Whitehead, is a form of judgment on the threshold of consciousness. He divided what he called "intuitive judgments" into three classes: affirmative, negative, and suspended. The first two address prehensive conformation...
moreIntuition, for Whitehead, is a form of judgment on the threshold
of consciousness. He divided what he called "intuitive judgments" into
three classes: affirmative, negative, and suspended. The first two address
prehensive conformation (affirmatively or negatively) with external data.
The third form of intuitive judgment neither affirms nor denies conformity
with the data. It entertains propositions (to use Whitehead's
term) but does not judge them (PR 270). This "suspense" form of intuitive
judgment most closely corresponds to C. G. Jung's idea of active
intuition and C. S. Peirce's abductive inference in that it is creative and
speculative, originary, and not reproductive. Whitehead believed that
this active mode of intuition creates novelty and contributes to the creative
advance, in Bergson's language, of the universe. Similarly, Peirce's
abductive inference originates the premises of scientific inquiry, thus
new potential knowledge.Whitehead considered consciousness to be interstitial: it is "located" between the biological cells rather than "in" them. This interstitiality is structurally similar to active, i.e., nonjudgmental, intuition, which is suspended between a pair of binary opposites, i.e., affirmative/negative judgment.
