We tend to think of reason as something we do deliberately. We weigh evidence, follow arguments and arrive at conclusions. Intuition, by contrast, is often dismissed as a gut feeling, something we should be suspicious of until we can explain it.
Marc A. Moffett asks us to reconsider this distinction. When a stranger seems untrustworthy, a deal feels wrong, or an action strikes us as cruel, we often recognise something before we can explain why. Moffett argues that these intuitions can provide genuine reasons for belief, much as perception does.
His argument goes beyond defending gut instinct. He suggests that intuition is woven into the process of reasoning itself. Before we can judge whether something is right, wrong or relevant, we may need to apprehend it as such. Reasoning doesn’t always begin with explicit arguments. Sometimes it begins with recognising something we cannot yet articulate.
The essay connects an ordinary experience to a deeper question about how we know what we know.
Intuition may not be the opposite of reasoning. It may be one of the things that makes reasoning possible.
Read: How intuitions work
Marc A. Moffett, Aeon, 20 October 2026.
Why RareRead picked it
We often judge thinking by how well we can explain it. If we cannot give reasons for a judgment, we tend to regard it as unreliable. Moffett challenges this assumption by asking whether some of our reasons emerge through recognition rather than explicit reasoning.
The argument doesn’t establish that our intuitions are always trustworthy. It offers something more useful: a way to think about the role intuition plays in rational thought, and why dismissing it as mere feeling may be a mistake.
The essay is worth reading because it makes us reconsider an activity we engage in every day but rarely examine closely.
If reasoning depends partly on recognising what matters before we can explain why, what does that tell us about the limits of deliberate thought?