How do we find a candidate phenomenon in interactional data? In this chapter we examine a number of methods for doing so. We make an initial distinction between observations and discoveries. Drawing on the cumulative experience of a number of conversation analysts, we provide some guidelines to help analysts develop observations into discoveries. We then investigate a range of approaches to identifying action: the heart of CA method. This includes an overview of Schegloff’s analytic ‘keys’ as a way into data. All of these approaches have the radically inductive methods of CA at its core. However, there are other starting points, and we discuss some of these alternative ways of bringing CA methods to bear on the data of interaction.

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.