Peirce's student John Dewey made a distinction that most people collapse without noticing: the difference between *having* an experience and *thinking* with it. His point was that raw experience accumulates constantly, but almost none of it gets converted into genuine understanding — because understanding requires a second act, one most people skip. In his framework, you don't actually learn from experience until you consciously examine what your experience led you to *expect*, and then compare that expectation against what happened. For anyone building secondary thinking models — frameworks about how other thinkers think, or how systems behave over time — this is the quiet trap: you keep acquiring new inputs while the inference layer stays frozen, never updated, never pressure-tested against its own track record. The practical move is small but uncomfortable: before importing a new framework, audit whether any of your existing ones has been falsified lately, and you just didn't want to notice.

What is the opposite of what you're currently doing when one of your mental models quietly stops working — and what would it cost you to do that instead?

Drawing from American Pragmatism / Dewey's Experimentalism — John Dewey (How We Think, 1910)