Ibn Tufayl, the 12th-century Andalusian philosopher, wrote a thought experiment called Hayy ibn Yaqzan — a child raised in total isolation on an uninhabited island, with no teachers, no language, no cultural inheritance, who nonetheless arrives at sophisticated empirical knowledge purely through sustained observation of nature. The story is usually read as a parable about reason. But there's a harder, more useful claim buried in it: Ibn Tufayl believed the deepest obstacle to understanding nature is not ignorance but received description — the categories and framings handed to you before you've looked. Jainism makes a structurally identical point through the concept of naya — partial standpoints — arguing that any single description of a phenomenon captures only the angle from which it was approached, not the thing itself. Together, these traditions suggest something with real teeth for anyone doing scientific work: the moment you have a word for something, you've also inherited a perceptual habit. The vocabulary doesn't just name the phenomenon — it quietly determines which features of it you continue to notice and which you stop seeing. The practical move isn't to strip away all prior knowledge, which is impossible. It's something more targeted: periodically treating your own terminology as the object of investigation, asking not 'what does this concept explain?' but 'what does this concept make it harder to see?'

Which term in your current work have you stopped questioning — and what would you actually observe if you temporarily refused to use it?

Drawing from Andalusian Islamic Philosophy / Jain Epistemology — Ibn Tufayl (Hayy ibn Yaqzan, c. 1160 CE) in dialogue with Jain doctrine of naya