What is self examination?

Self examination is a concept in personal epistemology: You can examine your own mental models and evaluate whether they serve you.

Example: You notice that every time a junior engineer proposes an unconventional architecture, your first reaction is skepticism. You pause and ask: what schema is driving that? You write it down: 'Unconventional approaches are risky and usually wrong.' Now you can evaluate it. Is that true? Sometimes. Is it always true? No — some of the best systems you've used started as unconventional proposals. The schema was invisible until you inspected it. Now it's an object you can refine.

This concept is part of Phase 11 (Schema Foundations) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema foundations.