Most scientists assume their job is to explain what they observe. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides thought this was precisely the wrong starting point — and he may have been onto something modern researchers keep rediscovering. In his 'Guide for the Perplexed', Maimonides argued that our minds have a built-in tendency to treat the familiar as the foundational, which means the phenomena we understand best are often the ones we investigate least. Contemporary philosophy of science calls this the 'problem of the taken-for-granted': the more fluent you become in a field, the more invisible its deepest assumptions become. The practical implication for anyone doing serious intellectual work — scientific or otherwise — is counterintuitive: fluency is a kind of blindness. The researcher who cannot explain why they're measuring what they're measuring, only how to measure it well, is operating in a narrowing corridor. Maimonides' prescription was what he called 'negative knowledge' — systematically cataloguing what you do not and cannot know as rigorously as what you do. Try it today: pick one thing you explain confidently, and instead of explaining it, map its edges.

In your area of deepest expertise, what is the last assumption you actually tested — not applied, but tested?

Drawing from Jewish Philosophy (Rationalist tradition — Maimonides) — Moses Maimonides