The nurture of unsymbolized thinking

Some philosophers and psychologists have recently paid significant attention to the phenomenon of unsymbolized thinking, particularly following the research on inner experience conducted by psychologist Russell Hurlburt. Philosophers Fernando Martínez-Manrique and Agustín Vicente have further characterized this phenomenon as a mental activity endowed with propositional features and syntactic structure. In this paper, I argue for a sustained critique of the notion of ‘unsymbolized thinking’ and a more decisive rejection of its propositional and syntactic characterization, while proposing an alternative, yet more conceptually orthodox, conception of the phenomenon, which leads me to identify it as a form of intuition.