Abstract
WHEN a man of science deals with subjects outside his special sphere the result is always interesting, but not always illustrative of the caution and rigour of the scientific method. It is rather startling to find Dr. Irving Langmuir declaring (see NATURE, March 6) that “Reason is too slow and difficult”, and adding that when we do not possess the necessary data or when we find a problem too complex for the methods of reasoning we must use “common sense, judgment and experience” and should not underrate the importance of intuition. Surely common sense (carefully controlled), judgment and experience are factors in the process of reasoning ? As for intuition, the example given by Dr. Langmuir is this : “In almost every problem which I have succeeded in solving, even those that have involved days or months of work, the final solution has come to my mind in a fraction of a second by a process which is not consciously one of reasoning”. Can this culmination of days and months of concentration be properly described as intuition? Or are we to conclude that Dr. Langmuir's concentration on the problems of physics has prevented him acquiring any knowledge, even intuitive, of unconscious cerebration ?
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WHYTE, A. Science, Common Sense and Decency. Nature 151, 450 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151450a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151450a0
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