I am adopting Putnam’s term predicament for a problematic situation.

We could say a predicament is a situation that stimulates perplexity. Perplexity is failure of understanding due to nonavailability of adequate concepts. Because concepts produce both questions and answers, perplexity is inarticulate intellectual distress: one cannot say what the problem is, and this inability to state the problem compounds the distress.

The name of the feeling of distress (and even the intuitive anticipation of this distress) is anxiety.

The depth of a perplexity is a function of how many other concepts must be disrupted by the revision of concepts required to resolve the present perplexity. We can experience a shallow perplexity, which requires only the acquisition of a single concept where one is lacking. The deepest perplexities require unlearning and relearning our oldest and most basic concepts, from which others are derived.

Religious conversions are the outcome of deep perplexities, often stimulated by predicaments.