Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Scientific Paradigms Are Incommensurable
proponents of competing paradigms cannot fully communicate because terms carry different meanings within each framework.
Consciousness Requires Global Neural Integration
Conscious awareness requires that information trigger activation across large-scale prefrontal and parietal networks, making it available for report and deliberate action.
Mental Models Are Singular by Default
People typically construct a single mental model of a situation and reason from it as if it were complete, without spontaneously generating alternative models.
Conscious Processing Is Metabolically Expensive
Conscious deliberation consumes significantly more metabolic resources per unit of information processed than automatic processing.
Cognition Operates Through Dual Processing Systems
Human cognition operates through two distinct systems: System 1 (fast, automatic, parallel, effortless pattern recognition) and System 2 (slow, controlled, serial, effortful deliberation), which have fundamentally different operational characteristics and failure modes.
Valid Intuition Requires Stable Regularities and Feedback
Expert intuition develops validity only in domains with stable environmental regularities and only through prolonged practice with accurate, timely feedback.
Tacit Knowledge Exceeds Linguistic Expression
Humans can know more than they can articulate in language—tacit knowledge exists as genuine understanding that resists complete linguistic formalization.
Compiled Pattern Recognition Outpaces Rule-Following
Pattern recognition compiled from experience operates orders of magnitude faster than sequential rule-following for equivalent tasks.
Mental States Are Cognitively Imputable
Mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, emotions) can be systematically imputed to oneself and others through dedicated cognitive mechanisms that generate predictive models of behavior.
Constructivist Epistemology
Knowledge is actively constructed by learners through engagement with experience, not passively received as transmission from external sources.
Egocentric Anchoring in Perspective-Taking
Humans exhibit egocentric anchoring when modeling others' perspectives, beginning from their own viewpoint and adjusting insufficiently to account for differing knowledge, beliefs, or perceptual access.
Cognitive and Affective Empathy Are Distinct
Understanding another person's reasoning structure and mental states (cognitive empathy) is neurologically and functionally distinct from feeling what they feel (affective empathy).
Categories Are Human Constructions
Categories are constructed by humans for specific purposes and contexts, not discovered as objective, mind-independent features of reality.
Looping Effects of Human Classification
Classifying people creates feedback loops where the classification changes the behavior of those classified, which in turn changes the category itself in ways that don't occur with classifications of inanimate objects.
Automatic Pattern Perception
The human brain automatically generates and perceives patterns, relationships, and regularities in sensory input prior to and often independent of conscious verification, subject to systematic biases such as confirmation bias that preferentially encode pattern-consistent information while filtering contradictory evidence.
Hierarchical Chunking Expands Capacity
Chunking allows working memory to treat hierarchically organized groups of items as single units, effectively expanding functional processing capacity beyond the raw item limit, and hierarchically organized systems with stable intermediate subsystems evolve faster and demonstrate greater robustness than flat systems.
Abstraction Requires Grounding
Abstract representations that lack connection to concrete, embodied, or perceptual experiences become unstable and lose meaning under cognitive load or when transferred to novel contexts.
Dunbar's Number Limits Stable Relationships
Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships simultaneously, representing a cognitive limit on the number of individuals about whom one can track social state and obligations.
Transitive Inference Is Automatic Cognition
The human brain performs transitive inference automatically as a fundamental cognitive operation, computing implied relationships from chains of explicit relationships without conscious effort.
Global-to-Local Perceptual Processing
Human visual perception processes global structure before local details.
Basic-Level Category Privilege
There exists a privileged 'basic level' of categorization (e.g., 'chair' rather than 'furniture' or 'desk chair') where categories maximize information gain while minimizing cognitive effort.
Construal Level Effects on Perception
The level of abstraction at which you construe a situation (high-level why versus low-level how) changes what features appear relevant and what actions feel immediately available.
Hick's Law of Choice Time
The time required to make a decision increases logarithmically with the number of equally-probable options presented (Hick-Hyman Law).
Demonstrative Knowledge Requires Indemonstrable Foundations
All demonstrative knowledge ultimately rests on indemonstrable first principles that cannot themselves be proven through demonstration.