Beyond the Einstein-Bohr Debate: Cognitive Complementarity and the Emergence of Quantum Intuition

Recent high-precision experimental confirmations of quantum complementarity have revitalized foundational debates about measurement, description, and realism. This article argues that complementarity is most productively interpreted as an epistemic principle–constraining what can be simultaneously accessed and represented–rather than as an ontological claim about quantum reality. Reexamining the Einstein-Bohr debate through this lens reveals a persistent tension between descriptive completeness and contextual meaning, a tension experiments clarify but do not dissolve. Building on this analysis, we introduce cognitive complementarity as a structural principle governing reasoning under non-classical uncertainty, where mutually constraining representations cannot be jointly optimized. Within this framework, we propose quantum intuition as a testable cognitive capacity: the ability to sustain representational plurality, regulate commitment timing, and resolve perspective-incompatibilities in a context-sensitive manner. Formulated as a naturalistic construct grounded in shared informational constraints, quantum intuition offers a principled bridge between quantum measurement theory and cognition. This work reframes the historical debate, extends epistemic lessons from quantum foundations into cognitive science, and outlines empirical pathways for studying decision-making in contexts of irreducible uncertainty.