But isn't that how humans do it too? They have a hunch, pursue it, and if it doesn't work out, they backtrack. Of course, some people have better hunches than others, but that doesn't change the global idea.
...well, quite. But that's not really the "move along, nothing to see here" it first sounds like.
"Hunch" is a label we use for "I don't know explicitly how I came up with this".
Generally, when we have a label for a concept the description of which starts with "I don't know...", some people try and follow up with questions: is that a thing it is possible, in principle, to know? How could we find out for certain? If it's knowable, how do we get to know what it is?
Sometimes, they succeed, and generations of such successes is how we end up with the modern world.
