Hi there,
I was wondering if I could the exact difference, if any, among the concepts above. I've almost got no difference between 'instinct' and 'common sense'. Thanks.
We use it quite a lot in BrE, yes, and it pretty much means the same thing. It's pronounced to rhyme with "mouse" but spelt without the "e".
I have literally never heard this. Do you know anything about it's origin? Is it informal? (I like adding to my BrE vocabulary.)
I have literally never heard this. Do you know anything about it's origin? Is it informal? (I like adding to my BrE vocabulary.)
To return to the original question:
To me, instinct refers to behaviour that has been built into all organisms by evolution. Instinct causes us to feed, avoid pain, seek pleasure and so forth.
Intuition is the faculty we have of guessing accurately without resort to detailed reasoning. Give us a clue or two, and suddenly we are pretty sure of something.
Common sense, on the other hand, means conventional wisdom. Perhaps it originally meant common knowledge, but nowadays it has been so charged politically that it means the quality that those who agree with us share and those who disagree lack.
I am equally astonished. Just when you think you have heard all of the BrE differences, something comes out of the blue. I would have also figured someone was using the French for "we," if I had to guess.
It's rather informal.
Can we also put it this way that by 'intuition' we mean a level of unconscious perception we have of the surrounding environment and things happening there, while 'instinct' deals with the (immediate) reaction we have and show to the phenomena around?