Original Reality Theory

2.8 Thinking About Your Own Thinking

What a person has already lived through can serve as a starting point for investigating what they do not yet understand. Over a lifetime, we observe other people’s behavior, test ways of acting, notice regularities, change our minds, and accumulate explanations about the world. Much of this learning happens without planning, protocols, or formal records. It remains distributed across memories, habits, expectations, and associations that form part of each person’s cognitive matrix.

This accumulated experience and knowledge need not be discarded to develop another way of reasoning. It must, however, stop serving only as the reference point from which we judge. In section 2.6, meta-awareness meant noticing what is happening in our own experience. Metacognition goes a step further: it examines our own thinking. Recognizing a thought is not enough; we need to ask how a conclusion was reached, what criteria support it, what information was left out, and whether another interpretation would better explain the situation. Psychologist John Flavell, who helped establish the concept in the late 1970s, described it as the knowledge we have of our own cognition and the monitoring of what it does during a task.

Imagine someone who has grown plants for many years. They have seen seedlings of the same species grow differently and learned, through trial and error, to connect these differences to sunlight, water, and planting location. When studying drainage and transpiration, they may recognize relationships that previously appeared as isolated episodes. But they may also discover that a problem they attributed to a lack of water was actually a root problem. New knowledge does not create earlier experiences; it offers other ways to relate them. Those experiences, in turn, help generate questions the concept alone might not suggest.

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This process also requires examining where our own certainties come from. If someone concluded, from three similar situations, that a particular behavior always produces the same result, it is worth recalling the circumstances of each case. What was repeated? What was different? Were there contrary instances that did not remain in memory? What new observation would distinguish between two possible explanations? These questions do not turn a memory into an experiment. They make explicit a line of reasoning that may previously have operated without examination.

There is an important difference here between everyday experience and scientific inquiry. Both may begin with observing phenomena. In everyday life, however, observations are often incidental, selective, and reconstructed by memory. Science seeks to subject them to methods, records, comparisons, and checks that make it possible to correct individual impressions. Personal experience and knowledge are valuable for recognizing patterns and generating hypotheses; on their own, they are not enough to demonstrate the mechanisms that produced those patterns. And, as the stocking experiment showed, introspection does not fully recover the causes of our thoughts.

The exchange runs in both directions. A concept learned today can give new meaning to something experienced years ago. And an earlier experience can raise a question that did not appear in the explanation being studied. What matters is not immediately agreeing with the new interpretation, but being able to reconstruct the relationships that support it and compare them with other possibilities. In studies of learning, Michelene Chi and colleagues observed that students who generated their own explanations while studying physics examples were better at connecting the steps of a solution to the principles involved.

This work need not happen all at once or follow a rigid sequence. One way to begin is to choose an old conclusion about something we know well, recall the experiences that supported it, consider an alternative explanation, and look for what would need to be observed or consulted to decide between them. If the conclusion holds up, it gains support; if it changes, the error itself becomes a source of information. The exercise is especially fruitful when lived experience meets concepts from other fields, provided the differences between those fields are not erased.

This makes the construction of the second cognitive matrix proposed in section 2.5 more concrete. It does not replace the reference points readers already have or grant privileged access to the truth. It is an additional organization of relationships, definitions, and criteria that can be developed by examining accumulated experience, studying new knowledge, and putting interpretations to the test. ORT itself must be subjected to this process: understanding it within its definitions and then testing its propositions against what is known, including in order to disagree with them.

Summary for Reflection

• Everyday experience provides material for new questions, but does not, on its own, amount to scientific evidence.
• Metacognition allows us to examine the criteria, strategies, and limits of our own reasoning.
• An earlier experience can take on new meaning when related to another concept; that relationship needs to be examined.
• An additional cognitive matrix is built by relating, reconstructing, and testing interpretations, without erasing the previous one.

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