Theory of Knowledge: When should we discard explanations that are intuitively appealing - Essay Example

I usually loved to spend my time in the beaches. On this day, however, my brother started fighting with me saying we will go to somewhere else instead of beach when we were about to leave for the beach, and due to this, my father become angry and cancelled the trip. This was the day when the tsunami had hit the shores of Chennai. Thus, my brother’s intuition saved our lives! What would have been the reason for this perception of him for insisting we do not go to the beach at the last moment?

The next day I found an article about a 10-year-old British girl, Tilly Smith, whose geography lessons helped her save 100 tourists from a Thai beach1. In this case, it is rational thinking that came into play. Many scientists and wild life experts have noted that all the animals escaped from this Tsunami. Is this intuition that facilities animals with the remarkable ability to foresee the changes about to occur in nature? The scientific reason for the strange behaviour of animals before the tsunami struck was that they have keener senses compared to the human beings that about the impending changes in the sea, earth or air, which help them save them selves from earthquakes, tsunamis wild fives, thunder stems to.

My favourite subject is mathematics. Once, in my math class, when my teacher was teaching us about the imaginary number, ‘i’ (equal to square root of ‘-1’) by Euler, refused to agree with the concept as it had no convincing proof, for the existence of any imaginary number in particular. This is the formula initiated by Euler through his intuition. I was asking my teacher for the proof about the existence of the complex number. She asked me to think about proofs which contradict the existence of this particular number.

Although there is also no proof for the existence of this number, there is no proof to contradict the same. This explanation appears reasonable and it convinced me. Even more, this intuitive