I develop participatory models and role playing games to understand the drivers of change in tropical landscapes. These games offer players the opportunity to play the role of a logging company or a government department, making decisions that will shape the future landscape - with economic, environmental and social impacts.

In a recent workshop, one of the participants concluded :

"I've known all these things, you read them in the reports. But now, somehow, I understand them, I feel the weight of the economical interests, I understand the complexity of the decisions we face"

This got me thinking - I have known for a while that the models and games I develop tend not to generate new knowledge - colleagues working on the topic for 25 years say - "yes, I know all that". Yet through the process of playing, of embodying the stakeholders they have been studying for years, something seems to happen and the cognition of the participants is changed.

I went looking for explanations of this.

Spinoza defined three forms of Knowledge - opinion, reason and intuition. 

Knowledge of the first kind (Opinion or imagination) can be gained by random exposure or hearsay. But it fails to convey the essence of things, and is the source of confusion and errors.

Reason, or Knowledge of the second kind,  is derived from possessing common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things . 

Intuitive science, the third form of knowledge "advances

from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things"

We know that people tend to form "the illusion of explanatory depth", (Fernbach 2013), which seems to me strikingly similar to Spinoza's first form of knowledge.

Getting back to our games, I think when a layperson is exposed to the complexity of the system ( the game are not simple) they have the opportunity to "shatter their illusion of understanding" and move on to higher levels of understanding.

But what happens when an expert says "Oh, I get it now!'. Would it be that he himself moved from reason ( the knowledge was his already, the figures in the reports he already knew, the causality links he was aware of) to "intuitive science" - where the essence of things is "felt' rather than deduced?

But then, what are the links between these forms of cognitions and Daniel Kahneman's Systems 1&2?

Systems 1 and 2 seem to share common attributes with the third and second forms of Spinoza's knowledge respectively. 

Or is system 1 simply the "opinion and imagination" Spinoza refers to? System 2 seems closely related to Spinoza's reason. But then, what is Spinoza's third form of cognition in Kahneman's system? Is it part of  System1?

Comments, and suggestions for further reading are welcome!

Claude