No reason justifies disbelief.

[Belacqua]

My view of things is this: we start with raw experience, filter it through our world view, and then categorize and systematize it.  

This has got to be right, I think.

All the raw materials get into the mind through the senses. Or "nothing in the mind not first in the senses," as the man said. 

Then the interesting part is in what we do with it. How we massage it, manipulate it, edit it, plug it into existing interpretive structures, etc. Some of this is conscious, some not. 

The manipulation and interpretation of ideas that can be given added credence through further empirical research is science. The manipulation and interpretation of ideas through making ideas work together, we hope in a logical way, is metaphysics -- and some other things. 

The idea of intuition without raw material that was first in the senses is unbelievable to me. A thought is always a thought about something. How can a thought have no content? Intuition, it seems clear, is the unexpected combination of data that gives a conclusion. Maybe the data is from the memory, not quite conscious, or maybe it comes from very small amounts of observed data -- like a very subtle tilt of the head in someone you know, from which you intuit that something much bigger is going on. But there's nothing unique about it. It's a difference of degree and not kind. A big interpretation from a small prompt. 

One of the more interesting thinkers on this subject was Coleridge. He was working in reaction to Locke's idea that the mind is blank at birth and everything we know comes in through the senses -- again, a restatement of a peripatetic idea. Coleridge was interested in how the mind combines existing data to put together new images. As a poet, this was important to him. So for example no one here has seen a griffin, but we all can imagine one in detail if we want to, by combining elements of real animals in our minds. 

Coleridge made an interesting distinction between what he called "imagination" and "fancy." The former was a genuinely creative act, while the latter was more passive. The important thing in imagination, for him, is the active quality that the mind takes in forming its mental pictures. It isn't a mirror of the world. It is an actively put-together thing, and thus might be profoundly different for people in different times and places. Imagination here isn't only dreaming up stuff, it's fundamentally image-making, of the type that the mind makes of the world we see. (Coleridge learned German and was among the first Brits to read Kant, which should be obvious here.) This is why it's so important to read novels; the differences in perception as recorded by different types of people is varied and fascinating. The mental world that people in The Tale of Genji have is just profoundly different from us today. They saw differently because they interpreted differently. 

This is where the arts took a major turn in history. Previously people thought good art was art which reflected the world well -- either as it is or idealized. After the Romantics the whole thing changed to the view we have today: what is great in art isn't the thing depicted, but the mind of the artist doing the showing. The mental interpretive structure that is unique to van Gogh is what makes him a great painter.