and that the horse he predicts always does win the next day's race. In that case, we would doubtless be justified in laying odds on the truth of the boy's predictions. But we would still not know how the boy was enabled to make the right predictions. The answer "By as we have seen, would tell us nothing about the "validating intuition procedure." The word "intuition" simply a cover-up term for our ignorance, revealing only that we do not know how he was able to do this. If asked to explain his successful predictions, we would be at a loss. In fact, of course, this phenomenon does not occur; people's intuitions are notoriously fallible, and only when they turn out to be right do their authors proudly claim that they "knew it by intuition" (when the intuitions don't turn out right, their authors do not advertise this fact)
But if the intuitions did always turn out to be right, what would we say? Should we still say that he didn't know which horse would win the race, or that he did know but we don't know how he knew?
thus far, we have mentioned only intuitions about what can later be verified in sense-experience. What about intuitions where no such check is possible? "Reality is one," "There is a God in heaven," "I saw eternity the other night," "There is a witch inside her"-these and many other statements have been claimed to be true, solely on the basis of intuition, What shall we say of such claims? We have already observed that intuition itself cannot suffice as a means adjudicating between conflicting claims, so we must look of mistaken. In beyond intuition to discover whether or not the intuitions were But when cases we previously considered, we could look to sense-experience. this does not suffice, where shall we turn? It would seem that we are forever prevented from knowing whether such claims are true or not. But even this conclusion would be premature: perhaps some of them are meaningless; perhaps some, though meaningful, are untestable ; and perhaps some, though they may not seem at first to be testable, will turn out to be so when their meaning has been more clearly set forth.