In this article, I am refining my thoughts on re-entry as a wonderful tool to tackle cognitive blind spots. A common saying states that a fish doesn’t know it’s in water. The phrase is usually offered as a comment on unexamined assumptions. The fish is fully immersed in a medium that makes its life possible, and yet that very immersion renders the medium invisible. We the observers, standing outside the water, can easily point to what the fish cannot see.

The metaphor is useful, but only if we don’t misunderstand what it implies. The problem isn’t ignorance in the sense of missing information. The problem is immersion—being inside the loop and not being aware of it. In other words, I posit that cognitive blind spots arise not because we lack data, but because we fail to notice the conditions under which noticing itself takes place. We assume that observation is independent of the observer, and in doing so, we negate the very act that makes observation possible.

This negation isn’t accidental. It’s built into many of our conceptual frameworks.

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