To assume is to believe without proof, and, while many people like to think of themselves as if they do not merely assume things as they go about their lives, assumptions are unfortunately a common affliction. It is not as if they are inevitable blunders, of course: the entire point of rationalism is to discover truths while avoiding assumptions. However, I am not referring to the superficial, incomplete understanding that many people have of what it means to avoid assumptions. A basic example from ordinary life illustrates the difference.
Suppose that a child is looking for a shirt she owns, and she looks for it everywhere in her room except for her closet, because she assumed it was somewhere else. Since the shirt is hanging in her closet, she doesn't find it, and she tells her father that she doesn't know where it is. Her father asks if she looked in the closet and, when she explains why she did not search there, chides her for assuming, telling her to check.
Now, many people think that the young girl would have avoided making assumptions if she had simply checked her closet before consulting her dad, but there is far more to not making assumptions than that. Any being with human epistemological limitations that sees the shirt in the closet and believes that the shirt exists simply because it is perceived makes an enormous assumption! A person can derive their beliefs from the best evidence and still make a plethora of assumptions, as evidence is not proof. If even a single conclusion of theirs does not follow from its premises, or if even a single belief has been accepted short of logical proof, they have failed to pursue rationality.
When people realize what it actually means to forgo assumptions, they often erroneously come to believe that it is impossible to live without making assumptions on a philosophical or "practical" level (of course, "practicality" is still a philosophical matter). However, there is not a single assumption that a person must make to either construct a worldview or simply live; even if a person must dramatically restructure his or her worldview in order to purge assumptions, the objective is not unachievable. It is not only possible to never make a single assumption, but it is epistemologically necessary to never make assumptions if one wants genuine knowledge, for knowledge and assumptions are mutually exclusive.
The second major error people make with the topic of assumptions is concluding that the avoidance of all assumptions means that a person can only know one fact or a very small number of facts for sure. This belief, too, is false and a sign of intellectual ineptitude. Only very specific facts can be proven, but far more than just the existence/veracity of logical axioms and the existence of my consciousness can be known with absolute certainty [1].
The extent of absolute certainty aside, no human is fated to live as a slave to assumptions, yet even those who at least intend to seek the truth often fall short of doing the very thing necessary to pursue it accurately: at best, only a miniscule number of people are truly willing to submit the entirety of their lives and worldviews to reason. Without this whole and utter submission, a person will only ever know a small handul of selective, random facts at most. The process of rejecting assumptions might be a painful one, but it is absolutely necessary to do so in order to secure knowledge.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-extent-of-absolute-certainty.html
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