Illative sense
epistemological concept
The illative sense is an epistemological concept coined by Catholic academic John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in his Grammar of Assent. For him it is the unconscious process of the mind, by which probabilities converge into certainty.
Origin of the term
Newman wrestled 20 years before he wrote the Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. His difficulty was that some people do believe in supernatural agents, and others do not. It is hard to get to the real cause of this difference. And, although supernatural reasons might be given from theology, as a philosopher he also looked into ordinary life experiences: when and why do we start or stop believing a person?
He discovered that real assent, i.e. firm belief, as opposed to notional assent, comes about, not through ordinary syllogisms, but by a mysterious cumulation of probabilities of lived experience. There must be, therefore, in the mind a power that collects, accumulates, and connects probabilities to a higher degree of certainty.
For this power, or inner sense, he uses the neologism "illative sense".
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This entry incorporates text from “Illative sense” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.