A mental model left uncontested long enough begins to feel like perception — not interpretation, but direct sight. The fourteenth-century logician Jean Buridan noticed something similar in his work on supposition theory: that the same word, used repeatedly in the same context, gradually loses its status as a sign pointing at reality and becomes reality itself in the mind of the speaker. The model stops being a tool you picked up and becomes the hand holding it. What Buridan's insight suggests, and what modern cognitive linguists like George Lakoff later confirmed through conceptual framing research, is that the danger isn't a bad mental model — it's an invisible one. The model you trust most completely is the one you've stopped treating as a model at all. The practical edge here is narrow but real: your most reliable frameworks are the ones most urgently due for a stranger's reading — give one of your load-bearing mental models to someone who doesn't already live inside your assumptions and ask them what it's actually saying.

Who in your life is least impressed by your most confident frameworks — and have you genuinely asked them why?

Drawing from Medieval Scholastic Logic (Buridanian supposition theory) synthesized with cognitive linguistics (Lakoff's conceptual framing research) — Jean Buridan (Summulae de Dialectica, c. 1330–1340 CE) synthesized with George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By, 1980, with Mark Johnson)