I believe there is a psychology term for a case where an idea is so alien to a person that they cannot even comprehend it. I’m not talking about something that involves specialized understanding like discussing quantum mechanics to a third grader. Think of it as discussing freedom to someone raised in a cult their whole life. The conversation may go like:
You could do whatever you want.
I don’t get it.
You could live wherever you want.
Why would I want to do that?
Make you own choices.
But FATHER tells me what to do.
You don’t have to always do what FATHER says.
Hmmm. I know exactly what you’re talking about, but I can’t think of a term for it. I feel like there is one, though, if I could only remember it.
It’s somewhat related to the emic/etic dichotomy, but not exactly. “Emic” accounts are not necessarily incomprehensible to outsiders; they’re just different from how an outsider would see/explain/contextualize the same events.
Unofficially, I’ve heard a specific variation of this phenomenon described as blue and orange morality.
It’s not learned helplessness and at first I thought cognitive dissonance but that’s not it.
It’s the idea that cognitively you should be able to comprehend something. What stops you is not a lack of information but that it is so far outside of your schema that you can’t see it. So yes it is almost like a cognitive version of a blind spot.
Here’s another example. You are on a small islands with native that have no concept of a plane. You explain it to them, show pictures, take them inside your plane, everything you can think of to make them understand but since the concept of manmade heavier than air transport is so far outside their view of how the world works that despite all of your work they cannot even comprehend that an airplane even exists.
For this question, OP has specifically excluded technical stuff, like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a third grader or whc.03grady in this thread
How about trying to explain 4-(or more)-dimensional and/or non-Euclidian spaces to a 3D-Euclid-lander? Does this fall into the “technical” area, or is this also a kind of concept that OP is asking about?
Consider the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott – Wikipedia summary here – Full text on-line here! A critter living in a two-dimensional universe describes his life, his society, his knowledge of 2-D geometry – then he is granted a brief vision of the 3-dimensional world, which (he thinks) he understands, only to find afterward that his understanding slips away like one’s memory of a dream. Does OP intend to include this kind of concept or lack thereof?
I think the closest extant term to capture it might be the Semmelwies Reflex
I think even better would be to call it “Cognitive Blindness” or as Punoqllads states, a “Cognitive Blindspot” as those capture the flavor of this being the cognitive equal of trying to explain “red” to someone who is blind, but while I can find some use of those terms on the internet, none of the examples use it to mean this.
I don’t have a term to offer, but I do recall reading a science fiction novel based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that our perceptions are colored by our language. If you don’t have words for it, you can’t really cogitate on it. The book was called The Languages of Pao.
Still don’t have a jargon to offer, but I thought of this portrayal:
The 1998 animated movie “A Bug’s Life” featured this idea. The inventive ant Flik attempts to demonstrate one of his ideas to the other ants, using a visual aid. He picks up a grain of sand and says “Imagine this is a grain of wheat.”
The other ants say: But that’s just a grain of sand! They are utterly unable to get the idea of a metaphor, and Flik is utterly unable to move his demonstration beyond that point. The other ants just can’t get it. Similar incidents appears several times in the movie.
Hmm. Old thread but I remember something like maybe ‘environmental disassociation’ or something like that. Not really applying to conversation but physically moving someone into an environment they are totally unfamiliar with.
In politics there is the overton window. Ideas for governance run along a continuum of
Unthinkable
Radical
Acceptable
Sensible
Popular
Policy
It is helpful to have a more radical position or party than yourself, to make your own positions seem more mainstream. ie, the tea party makes the republicans of the 90s seem less partisan. Marxists make liberals seem less partisan.
I would say in the US though that Marxism is ‘radical’.
But if you go far enough out on the edges of either side, you get to ‘unthinkable’. I don’t know what would be considered unthinkable.
You seem to be contemplating people’s cognitive framework. Or whatever it is called, I forget. Something so outside their framework that it either doesn’t compute, or it brings the whole thing down. I don’t know the term for that.
I think you’re having a hard time finding a term for this phenomenon because it isn’t a real thing. These islanders probably wouldn’t understand how an airplane works (heck, I don’t really understand how an airplane works), but they’re not going to be skeptical as to the existence of something they’ve actually seen and touched themselves. And the concept of a man-made flying apparatus can’t be that hard to grasp, as it predates the airplane by thousands of years. (The mythical inventor Daedalus was said to have built functional wings for himself and his son Icarus.) When faced with something we can’t understand, humans have always been pretty good at just making something up based on what we already understand or believe. When all else fails, “A wizard did it” has traditionally been an acceptable explanation. Your hypothetical islanders might decide that an airplane is a magical flying boat. They could probably imagine a boat that sailed through the air the way a seagull sails across the sky even without seeing a real airplane, although they might not believe that such a thing actually existed without evidence.
To the best of my knowledge the psychological phenomenon that comes closest to a “cognitive blind spot” is inattentional blindness. There’s a famous experiment described in the Wiki article where participants are asked to watch a video of people playing with a basketball and count the number of passes. Someone in a gorilla costume walks through the scene, but about half of the test participants will fail to notice this. It’s not because a man in a gorilla suit is such a foreign idea that they can’t comprehend it though, it’s because their attention was focused on the basketball.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t well regarded these days in linguistic and scientific circles. Much of it has been debunked, and the bits that remain don’t really say much.
