13 - I Have a Hunch

Summary

I have hunches; I experience them sweeping through me, registering deep in me. My hunches are about moments in some possible future and they cause me to adjust my behavior in the present. It's difficult to put into words, but I have hunches and I live my life accordingly; in fact, I'm having one right now: I have a hunch that you know what I'm talking about.

It was my belief in the universal nature of the hunch which first suggested that a scientific study of hunches was worth pursuing, a field both diachronic (i.e., I believe that hunches have evolved over time) and synchronic (i.e., cross-cultural comparison can determine the deep structure of the hunch). But I can guess what you're going to say— and by the way, substituting that utterly dismissive term “guess,” which is nothing more than an ignorant stab in the dark, is an insult to those who have hunches—you might say: “Russ, cognitive scientists already study these sorts of things. Why do we need to establish a phenomenology and a hermeneutics of hunches?”

My reply? I believe that we are ethically compelled to correct the over-emphasis on the cognitive content of the hunch, for it overlooks the lived experience of those who have them. This is why I distinguish hunches not just from guesses but also from hypotheses that can be tested empirically. Certainly, parts of the hunch can be reduced to a prediction, but, in my experience, reductionists fail to take seriously that, even when a hunch is incorrect, it nonetheless teaches us something about ourselves—indicating that the truth of the hunch lies in its value and not in its accuracy.