[MD] Intuitive Reasoning?

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Case]:
As for Sherlock Holmes, he was the master of logic and reason. He is fictional
after all but while one might say he was blessed with intuition, he was not
limited or guided by it. ... 

[Arlo]
Charles Pierce, a fan of Holmes, attempted to formalize a third style of
reasoning. He called this "abduction", and also at times "hypothetical
inference", and later as "retroduction". He explains how it relates to
deduction and induction with the following "beans in bag" example.

Deduction
Rule: All the beans in the bag were white
Case: These beans were in the bag
Result: These beans are white

Induction
Case: These beans were in this bag
Result: These beans are white
Rule: All the beans in the bag were white

Abduction
Rule: All the beans from this bag are white
Result: These beans are white
Case: These beans are from this bag

Both Pierce and Pirsig, I'd note, were intrigued by "hypothesis generation".
Pirsig wrote, "The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the
categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person
is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly...flash!...he
understands something he didn’t understand before." Pierce too wrote that
"the abductive suggestion comes to us as a flash".

Remember too that Pirsig had quoted Einstein as saying, "The supreme task—is
to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built
up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition,
resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them --"

There is a short article on abduction at:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/abduction.html