Philosophy: the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
If I ask you if people used a certain antibiotic in order to treat some bacterial disease, you’d tell me that they probably didn’t because they were not aware of the existence of bacteria because they hadn’t yet discovered the microscope.
You would have a general awareness of the chronology as to which critical events, such as the discovery of the microscope, led to paradigm shifts in the field of medicine and biology. This is of course within reason given that this is not a filed you practice professionally. Even then, you’d only have an abstract representation of the chronology as the filed has become too vast for you to hold in detail.
Thoughts work in very much the same way as in the case above. You see, it wasn’t as though we humans have always thought a certain way. The way we thought, our paradigms of reality, have changed over the millennia.