Most of us have experienced moments when something “felt connected” before we could explain why.
A scientist senses a hidden relationship before finding the evidence.
An engineer recognises a design flaw immediately, without calculation.
A person feels that a situation makes sense long before they can articulate the reasons.
In my new paper, From Intuition to Explanation: How Belief Systems Form, I explore a simple but important idea:
Human beings detect patterns before they explain them.
The explanations we construct, whether scientific, religious, philosophical, or everyday, are shaped by the conceptual tools available to us at the time.
This perspective helps explain:
- Why belief systems of different kinds can resemble one another
- Why people can hold their views so strongly
- Why communication across disciplines and cultures can be difficult
- And how dialogue can be improved without dismissing the underlying experiences people are trying to explain
The paper draws on cognitive science, psychology, and systems thinking to propose a general model of how belief systems form and evolve.
It also has important implications for systems science itself, which historically has often sensed patterns of connectedness before fully formal tools were available to explain them.
Ultimately, the argument is simple:
The progress of knowledge is not a replacement of intuition, but a refinement of how we explain what we have long sensed.
You can read the full article here:
Rational-Understanding.com 