So is N about ideas or is it about picking up on "vibes', attitudes or whatever that nobody else is picking up on. I thought the traditional definition of being intuitive is being able to just "tell". Does that make sense? Wher do ideas fit into it?
Bear with your neighborhood S........
The difference between S and N is concrete vs abstract. When a person is picking up on "vibes" or they can just "tell", that might be a result of either S or N. The "vibes" mean that the person is relying on an unconscious function. If the person were relying on thinking or feeling, then they would know why they reached their conclusion. When a person relies on S or N they only know the conclusion, but probably don't know how they got there, because the process is unconscious.
For example when a wide receiver runs out 50+ yards and catches a football, then he is using Se. How does he know where to be and when to get there in order to catch the ball? He just knows. He is just able to "tell". If Te were used to catch the football, then he'd have to know the speed and trajectory of the ball when released, and he'd have to know his running speed, etc.... He'd have to do a lot of measuring and calculating to get the same result. Se does all the measuring and calculating unconsciously, and then just gives the result, "Go here at this time to catch the ball". Although he doesn't even really think this thought, he just knows where to go without thinking about it.
Intuition is like this only it is about ideas rather than something concrete or tangible. Say Isaac Newton is sitting under a tree trying to figure out why the planets revolve around the sun. An apple falls and the idea comes to him suddenly, "the force moving the planets is the same force that dropped the apple to the ground". This flash of insight is intution (Ni specifically). He didn't sit down and methodically come to that conclusion like a person consciously using thinking. The calculations were done unconsciously and he only got the result. Later he went out and performed the necessary calculations on paper (i.e. thinking) to show everyone else the insight is true, but that isn't how he got the idea in the first place.
Now both the football player and Isaac Newton had a way of just "knowing" their result. The difference is that Isaac Newton's "knowing" had to do purely with an idea, while the football player's insight was more concrete in nature (a ball, a field, etc...). The concept of gravity is an abstraction of concrete things, while the football really is concrete.
edcoaching said:
Actually I think of Ni as asking "What if" rather than Why which Nardi for sure attributes to Ti...
Heh, I may have used the word "why" too much, but the idea is that intuition tries to get at the meaning behind something instead of simply seeing it as it appears. "Why", "What if", "How" etc... are all questions that intuition might ask. It simply does these unconsciously, and then we get the result without really knowing how it got there.