A law of Commonsense Thinking

 A law of Commonsense Thinking -

If a feature repeats across experiences, then we attribute that feature to the repeating entity, if any, across those experiences.

Consider a father spraying perfume on his shirt in the presence of his kid. The kid gets the fascinating smell from his father's shirt. Then the father leaves the scene. The kid goes to the perfume bottle, takes it and starts exploring it. While doing that, he opens the lid and gets the smell of the perfume. It is the SAME smell. It immediately flashes in his mind - that smell on dad's shirt was due to the contents of this bottle.

Here, the repeating feature across the 2 experiences (dad spraying perfume on the shirt, and playing with the perfume bottle later) was the SAME smell that the kid got. The repeating entity to which the kid attributed that feature to was the perfume bottle.

We adults also use this kind of reasoning ubiquitously. Suppose there are 2 instances of robbery in the locality, and on both the occasions a particular person was found to be present at the scene, we develop some suspicion on him.

Note - This inference is not necessary, logically.