Herbert Simon defined expert intuition as fast recognition of learned cues within a domain, not a mystical faculty

In a 1986 McKinsey Quarterly interview (read here via a Farnam Street essay carrying the quote), Herbert Simon reframed "intuition" away from a mystical or unanalyzable faculty and toward a specific cognitive mechanism:

"We usually use the word 'intuition' ... to refer to this ability of experts to respond to situations in their domains of expertise almost instantaneously and relatively accurately."

On this account, expert intuition is pattern recognition — the expert has seen enough instances of a domain's structure that a new instance triggers fast, accurate retrieval, not a step-by-step deliberation. Simon developed this view elsewhere (cf. Sciences of the Artificial, ch. 2) as part of the same research program that produced bounded rationality and satisficing — all three are attempts to describe cognition as it actually operates under real constraints, rather than as ideal optimization.

The definition carries a load-bearing scope condition that Simon's framework makes explicit elsewhere: recognition is only as reliable as the domain's history of trainable cues. That scope condition is developed in claim-kahneman-klein-2009-intuition-reliable-only-in-high-validity-environments, and the pair together supply the mechanism used in observation-simon-intuition-framework-diagnoses-perceptron-sterility-conjecture.