Hidden assumptions are the unstated beliefs or taken-for-granted logics that quietly drive a system — the premises people rarely question because they sit beneath conscious awareness. In narrative and framing work they form a layer between visible surface frames (facts, policies, messaging) and the deeper mythic ground a culture stands on: the working rules about who counts, who is left out, and what gets judged right or wrong.
The term is used by foresight researcher Thomas Klaffke in his Reframing Canvas (Creative Destruction), where surfacing hidden assumptions is one discrete step in a reframing practice — a diagnostic move, not a rhetorical one, aimed at exposing the logic a system runs on before anyone tries to change it. Klaffke frames the task as work to “surface the unstated beliefs or taken-for-granted logics that drive this system — things people rarely question,” extending it to assumptions about who counts, who’s left out, and what is “right” or “wrong.”
The idea overlaps with priors in cognitive science — enculturated, largely unconscious models of the world — and with the deeper strata of a worldview, though hidden assumptions are usually framed as more local: the operating logic of one institution, policy, or story rather than a whole cosmology. Naming them is a precondition for durable narrative change, since surface messaging rarely holds if the assumptions beneath it go unexamined.