Conceptual Philosophy

PART 0

THREE STRANDS OF CONCEPTUAL PHILOSOPHY

This part formulates the concept of conceptual philosophy and identifies three strands.

{Ontics, Epistemics, Enactics}

Ontics is the strand that focuses on reality concepts.

Epistemics is the strand that focuses on the concept of understanding.

Enactics is the strand that focuses on the concept of personal action.

This part also introduces some of the main concepts in each of these strands.

Chapter 0 Introduction

Chapter 1 Ontics

Chapter 2 Epistemics

Chapter 3 Enactics

CHAPTER 0 INTRODUCTION

A Fundamental Experiential Dichotomy: Monday I placed a dozen eggs in the refrigerator. Tuesday I used one to make pancakes. Later I open the refrigerator and as expected, I see 11 eggs. The next afternoon there are only 5 eggs. I recall that Charmayne baked cookies and assume that she used 6 eggs. I do not consider alternatives such as the refrigerator decided to hide eggs from me or that eggs disappear at random. I think of my ordinary surroundings as stable, as usually changing in an ordinary orderly manner. I tend to think about these changes as having causes. What is happening may seem strange or even chaotic at times, but I usually feel this is due to my lack of understanding, rather than to factors that might introduce singularities in the flow of cause and effect.

My focal awareness is often directed outward, but even then, I am also implicitly aware of me, and I sense that the attitude I am taking toward me is radically different from the attitude I normally take towards my surroundings. I feel that my choices can influence my surroundings and that my choices originate partially in me. Most of the time this feeling is rather ordinary, and I do not articulate it explicitly, even in my thoughts. At other times, it is more pronounced. I seem to be a source of power, a creative disturbance in a largely stable environment, a potential of unlimited options, a singularity where causality is only partial. I feel that I have live options and that because of me the locality around me can become what it might not have become, that I can act in some ways as a causal origin.

The contrast between my feelings about me and my feelings about my surroundings is a ubiquitous feature of my experience. When engaged in activity or absorbed in thinking about my surroundings, this contrast is muted. Even when I deliberate on specific choices, this contrast is usually in the background. It is when I reflect on the fact that I choose, or when I severely question my choices at a deeper level, that I recognize this as the most basic theme running thru my experience. I think of me, I think of will, choice, doing, thinking, understanding, ideals, purposes, options. I also realize that I think of other persons in this way. This is not the theme when I think of the impersonal features of my surroundings. In order to live more effectively I want a deeper perspective on this dichotomy in my attitude. My purpose for conceptual philosophy is to provide tools for thinking about this dichotomy. While I can think about and do many things without having concepts for thinking about this dichotomy, I cannot gain a broader perspective on such matters without them. I need a conceptual philosophy in order to organize my thinking about what I am doing and to make what I am doing part of a quest to live effectively.

Altho these preceding reflections are not part of my conceptual philosophy, they play a significant role in formulating it. They are a prelude, setting the stage and helping me see which concepts I find crucial. I cannot think about a world in which nothing actually happens. I need a concept of action or activity. This concept is crucial. It is also fundamental in the sense that it cannot be reduced to concepts that are more basic.

Nets and Realms: A network of concepts and conceptual distinctions and relationships that can be used to think and communicate about at least one significant realm of interest will be called a net. The concept of a realm of interest is broad, including anything that any person might be interested in thinking about. Examples include your parents, my bicycle, last nights card game, the perfect number problem, dogs, bicycles, gin rummy, trigonometry, kinematics, card games, rain, war, transportation systems, the Roman empire, empires, shadows, mathematics, ghosts, socialism, heaven, history, etc. A realm may be close a hand, such as the basket of fruit on top of the bookcase next to my computer. This realm may of no interest to others and of only brief interest to me. Still it is of enough interest for me to note that it contains more apples than oranges. A realm may be extremely remote such as the universe. Some realms may be considered of little significance by most persons, while others may be considered highly significant by many persons.

Subnets: The net I use for playing Gin Rummy contains the concepts of a set and a run. So does my net for Liverpool Rummy, altho a run in Liverpool must have at least 4 cards. In talking this way, I am thinking of both Gin and Liverpool as subnets of a larger net, my net for thinking about rummy. This in turn is a subnet for an even larger net for playing cards. The concept of the ten of diamonds is not only a concept within my Gin and Liverpool nets; it is also a concept in this larger net. In my net for Casino, the ten of diamonds is also conceptualized as Big Casino, but it is still uses the same concept of suit and rank as I would use elsewhere. In general, most nets are not self-contained, since portions of them will have concepts shared among other nets, and it may be useful to think of them as subnets within larger nets containing these shared concepts.

A Person’s Master Net: P’s master net is net that contains all of P’s nets as subnets. It need not form a single coherent net. It may be a loose conglomerate, with some subnets closely interrelated and others at most tenuously related.

Essential concepts Some concepts in a net may be so basic that they support each other and all the other concepts in that net, altho often only implicitly. These concepts permeate P’s thinking about a realm, giving coherence to the way P regards many features of the net and many aspects of the realm. These are the essential concepts for that net and for acting within the realms of interest this net is intended to help P access.

Example: My master net has a subnet for thinking about family relationships. The concepts of parent and gender are essential in this subnet. They are important but not essential in my master net. Since they are supported there by other concepts, they are not subconcepts. The notion of support is between concepts and is not limited to subconcepts or to essential concepts. My aunt and uncle concepts are supported by my brother and sister concepts, and these are supported by my parent and gender concepts.

Crucial Concepts: Some concepts are essential not only for a particular net, but also for P’s master net. These are crucial concepts for P, because without them this net would lack coherence and P’s he could not understand most of P’s realms of interest. The preceding statement is a cognitive condition on the concept of a crucial concept. There is also a action on crucial concepts, namely Concepts that P needs them to act in most of P’s realms of interest. This does not mean that a crucial concept must be in explicit focus or that it must be static. This only provides conceptual criteria for crucial concepts. It is not intended as a definition.

Examples: To mention just a few, some of my crucial concepts are: remember, past-present-future, change, doing, causing, understanding, etc. More will be mentioed as they occur.

Crucial Nets: P’s crucial net is the subnet of P’s master net including P’s crucial concepts and the concepts they most directly support. The concepts in P’s crucial net are the intimately intertwined strands that mediate all of P’s experience and permeate P’s thinking. Its concepts will be essential (altho perhaps only implicitly) for all of P’s nets, but most such nets will also have other essential concepts. P’s crucial net is a net for conceptual philosophy to the extent that it is coherently organized.

Subconcepts: When a crucial concept or an essential often lie submerged and implicitly supports a significant part of the meaning of other concepts, I sometimes stress this by referring to it as a subconcept.

The Person Concept: Given a concept activity, and because my actions and the actions of other persons seems so different from other types of activity, I use the PNDP concept of a person and the kind of actions that characterizes being a person. Below I give a conceptual condition that is paradigmatically satisfied by the PNDP person concept, with a parenthetical addition to include babies as persons of a type that I call nascent persons. What is meant by deliberate action and by a dramaturgical pattern will be indicated shortly.

A person is an individual whose history is (or can reasonably be expected to be)
a history of deliberate action that fits in a dramaturgical pattern.

Note: This is essentially what Ossorio call a definition of person In What There Is and the Way Things Are in Advances 7. CPCS Person Concepts elaborates on what is discussed in this present book, relating this functional person concept to other versions of a person concept.

Behavior Descriptions: In order to indicate what is meant by deliberate action, I introduce the PNDP concept of a behavior description. The parameters below are used by Ossorio for a systematic behavior description. They are taken from things we might ordinarily say in talking about something an individual did. Of course, our ordinary descriptions are likely to be less systematic and indicate only those features of interest for the purposes at hand. They will be illustrated and discussed in Chapter 2 of this part. The paradigm case of a PNDP behavior description uses all of these parameters to describe an action or a course of action X by a person A called the actor. The person giving the description is called the observer. The observer and actor can be the same person.

¨ Identity (I) specifies the actor A for X.

¨ Wanting (W) indicates what A intends to achieve by X.

¨ Knowledge (K) has to do with what A knows and uses in relation to X.

¨ Know-How (KH) has to do with the competencies A displays relation to X.

¨ Performance (P) encompasses the processes that A is implementing.

¨ Achievement (A) is what X accomplishes, what difference it makes.

¨ Characteristics (C) includes some of A’s characteristics that are being expressed by doing X.

¨ Significance (S) includes what else is being done by doing X, what importance X has for A.

This behavior description concept provides a tool for bringing various feature of behavior into focus. The parameters used and the detail to which they are developed will depend on the observer’s purposes in giving the description. Understanding the refined versions of concepts in our ordinary net for understanding persons can provide tools anyone can use to enhance their behavior potential (as discussed in CPCS The Potential Impact of Descriptive Psychology). PNDP has refined and systematized concepts from our public ordinary net. In doing so, it uses and refines other concepts from that net. To adequately understand these, a person must already have competence in working with a number of ordinary concepts in addition to ordinary versions of person concepts.

Allowable Transformations: Some of the parameters may be omitted in some types of descriptions. A behavior description that uses at least the first five of these parameters is an intentional action description. A deliberate action description is an intentional action description in which the K parameter includes (reflexive) information about what action this action constitutes. An observer can give a behavior description in which there is more than one actor. Furthermore, an actor need not be a person. For instance, an actor could be an animal or a robot. The observer can be a team working together to give a behavior description.

Behavior: Altho a behavior description adds perspective on behavior, I do not take it as a conceptualization of the concept of behavior. The concept of behavior is presupposed and crucial. The behavior description concept merely provides a tool for bringing various features of behavior into focus. The parameters to use and the detail to which they are developed will depend on the observer’s purposes in giving the description. The behavior concept is broad. It includes everything P does as a person. Behavior is intentional action, even when P is not aware of these intentions. It does not include things done automatically like ordinary breathing, nor does it include things done accidentally like falling out of a tree.

Deliberate Action: Ossorio briefly characterizes deliberate action as behavior in which the actor knows what the actor is doing and is doing it on purpose. Deliberate action can be related to some of the parameters used by PNDP to describe behavior. The know parameter involves knowing both the action taken and knowing one or more alternatives. The want parameter includes varying degrees of wants in relation to the action taken in behavior. Deliberate action also involves knowing how to engage in the various alternatives and to distinguish between them. Moreover there are normally stronger reasons for wanting the achievement expected from the action taken than for wanting the achievement expected from the actions not taken. The term ‘deliberate’ should not be taken to mean that the actor must deliberate, altho this may happen. It merely means that on reflection the actor could see that the behavior could be described as indicated above.

Deliberate action is a ubiquitous feature of our experience as persons. By this I only mean that when we reflect on what we are doing, we usually imagine alternatives, even if the only alternative imagined is not to do what we are doing. It is easy to realize that a large amount of what we do doesn’t directly involve deliberate action. I put on my walking shoes, walk east on my road until I come to a side trail, turn on this trail and avoid stepping in a large puddle a short distance down this trail, etc. I do most of my walk without imaging doing otherwise. What I find hard to imagine is that I might do all of this and not even be able to imagine alternatives and to consider what it might be like to select from them. Furthermore, all of these actions occur as components in the larger behavior episode of taking a walk for exercise. This larger episode is a case of deliberate action, and it is one initiated with deliberation and often punctuated with deliberate choices.

Humans and Persons: All of the humans that I have known seem to be persons. I have never encountered a person who was not human, yet the PNDP person concept is logically distinct from the PNDP concept of a human. A human is a person who is a member of the Homo sapiens species. The concept of a human is both biological and functional. The concept of a person is purely functional, i.e. it involves what a person does. Many creatures from mythology have a history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern, so they would be classified as persons. The Greek gods would be classified as persons. It has been claimed that dolphins are persons, but even if this is false, we cannot exclude the possibility that some other life forms somewhere in the universe may have a history of deliberate action and satisfy other features of the person concept. So altho the PNDP concept of a person has been motivated by and mostly applied to persons who are human, it is not limited to persons who are human. Actually the PNDP person concept has been strongly influenced by the fact that the persons most familiar to us are socialized humans. Ossorio even makes this explicit, adding the following features to the person concept.

What makes an individual a person is, paradigmatically, to have mastered the person concept. This involves learning to act as a person in interaction with other persons, which results in knowing how to act as a person in interaction with other persons and results in coming simply to be a person. (Introduction to Place)

The primary function of the concept of a Person is to guide the behavior of one Person with respect to other persons. (Indicated several times in Persons)

There is even a maxim in Place that indicates that to engage in deliberate action is to participate in the social practices of a community. For some purposes, I had been using the terms ‘deliberate action’ and ‘person’ for concepts that were not limited to individuals who were socialized. In CPCS Person Concepts I discuss this in some detail. In this present book, I will limit my use of these terms to the concepts from PNDP.

Dramaturgical Patterns: An individual is acting in a dramaturgical pattern when it assigns objects and events into positions in a drama of its life. In Origins of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes (pages 59-65) there is a concept of consciousness that we could use when thinking about the dramaturgical pattern feature of the person concept. To avoid any confusion in relation to other meaning of the word ‘consciousness’, I use the term ‘subjective consciousness’ for this concept of consciousness. I will briefly sketch the six metaphorical features that Jaynes gives for this concept.

{spatialization, excerption, an analog-I, metaphor-me, narratization, conciliation}

Spatialization refers to our use of a metaphorical mind-space in which we separate the things we consider as if they were individual objects. Spatialization applies not only to things that have spatial qualities in the physical world. It applies to almost anything we consider as we think about our realms of interest. We use the metaphor of seeing for abstract objects, which we separate so that we can see how they are related. We see the strategy one of the candidates as brilliant. We contrast the massive turnout in the last election with the sparse one expected in this one and see which candidate is likely to benefit from this. Etc. We spatialize time, viewing events as laid out in succession, usually from left to right.

As we can only pay attention to part of a situation at any moment, we never see anything in its entirety. Excerption involves thinking of an aspect of a realm in terms of some of its limited features. Just now thinking of my garden, I see leaves covering part of it, weeds among the onions and garlic, some pepper plants. At another time, I might see other features. Of course, this seeing is in my mind-space, for I am not currently looking at my garden.

The central feature of subjective consciousness is the analog-I, a metaphor we have of ourselves. The analog-I moves about in our imagination doing things we are not actually doing. It forms excerptions of things we have done. Without an analog-I, we might have options, but we could not select among them using what we might imagine as alternative outcomes. Deliberating about what to do in terms of future consequences would not be possible. Shall I weed the garlic early this afternoon? It will be in the sun at that time, but if I only do one patch, I can go cool off in the creek before I get too uncomfortable. On the other hand, I can go to the creek first and get gravel to repair the road.

The analog-I looks out at some state of affairs and imagines acting within or upon it. I can also step back and think about what would be happening and its effect on me if I engage in some action. The metaphor-me is that version of me that I observe in my mind-space as being affected by the actions I imagined taking and by the events that I imagine following my actions. Altho the analog-I and the metaphor-me are the same person, they represent different perspective we take in thinking about ourselves. The analog-I is imagined as the actor weeding the garlic and going to the creek. Getting too hot and becoming cool in the creek happens to the metaphor-me.

Our analog-I sees itself as the main action figure in a story that takes place in our spatialized time. Narratization is the process of telling ourselves this story about what we are doing and about how the facts we notice fit in with this. Narratization explains why we did what we did or why we might select alternatives. It explains why various things happened to us or why certain things might happen. It provides a rationale for how we might act in novel situations as they arise.

Conciliation is the process of bringing perceptions together as conscious recognizable objects. It does so in a way that makes excerpts from these stimuli compatible with each other and our ongoing narratization. Conciliation does in the mind-space what narratization does in mind-time.

Transcendent Action and Persons as Origins: Roughly speaking, a transcendent act is an act that transcends causality and chance in the sense that it is neither predetermined nor a matter of chance. A transcendent act is called an origin act when the purpose is to focus attention more on the actor than on the act. Origin acts are not merely arbitrary, because a person P may have a variety of reasons for the options chosen. These reasons will relate to P’s values, as well as to any of P’s other characteristics. Origin acts may vary from minor to major significance. When a deliberate modification of a basic ideal is an origin act, it is a significant one, since it will influence all future acts. If choosing whether to add another log to the fire happened to be an origin act, it is likely to be one of very little significance. A person P is an origin (or more precisely has the origin trait) to the extent that P has a noteworthy history of significant origin activity. P is a radical origin to the extent that P acts as the ultimate grounding for P’s most basic values. This does not mean that P chooses these values without regard to external factors. In fact to be an effective radical origin, P is likely to need to belong to various communities and these will be a source these values. P will also have a cultural heritage and this will be a major source of these values. To be a radical origin, P must carefully think about P’s decision to have these values guide P’s actions. Moreover P must deliberately examined these values and perhaps replaced modified some of them or chose to shape additional values.

Having a transcendent act concept does not mean that such acts occur any more than having the concept of a unicorn implies its existence. Knowing that such acts occur is based on my competence in judging my personal experience of being me. Moreover there is a long tradition involving beliefs in transcendent acts, and whether or not any of these beliefs or correct, they cannot be understood without some form of this concept. God’s parting of the Red Sea would be classified as transcendent, whether or not one believes it that actually happened. Likewise, the original sin of Adam and Eve must be thought of as a transcendent act, or it cannot be called sin in the biblical sense.

Deliberate Action and Transcendent Action: These types of action are conceptualized in terms of different parameters. The concept of deliberate action only makes a demand on the K-parameter (and perhaps on the W-parameter). It is easy normally for the actor to check on whether one of his actions was deliberate (at least on reflection). Transcendent action makes a demand on the A-parameter. The outcome must be other than what would have happened had the action been predetermined or a matter of chance. A determinist knows that deliberate action occurs, but denies that transcendent action can occur (altho operationally he may believe that he is an origin. I take it as part of my vital knowledge that I have engaged in transcendent acts, altho with any specific act I am open to some doubt. I find it at least somewhat plausible that all deliberate acts are transcendent. I also find it some at least somewhat plausible that some deliberate acts are not transcendent. The transcendent act concept will more fully developed in Chapter 3.

Predetermination and Chance: Walking east along Ahern Avenue, I can turn either right or left where Ahern stops. I often have no reason to prefer either direction. One day I wonder what it would be like to think of my choice as predetermined. Being aware of this, it will be a deliberate act, but I decide it will not be an origin act. I will try to leave it to chance by taking the opposite direction from the next car that I see crossing Ahern. Does this really leave it to chance or are the factors involved predetermined by something in the broader scheme of things? To think of this act as predetermined and the complexity of predetermination, I also decide that if I turn left I will do something that might have a ripple effect on the course of history. I did turn left, but I suspect that the difference this later act made was insignificant. I picked up a can and recycled it earlier than it otherwise would have been. How can anyone know ripple effect this may have had? Altho a determinist D would claim that the effects were purely a matter of causality, it is hard to imagine any model that could predict that this object would be recycled at the time it was. The recycling and all ripple effects were partially caused by which car was crossing Ahern at a particular point in time.

Was chance involved, or was this predetermined? My plan about turning was also a partial cause of what followed, and while the choice of my plan does not feel predetermined, perhaps I am merely unable to account for it. More important my decision to choose a plan felt like an origin act. Of course, D would say that this feeling was an illusion. What D cannot do, even after the fact, is actually provide a deterministic account that is not highly oversimplified. In general, when it comes to events imbedded in the vast array of what actually happens, the deterministic claim is a matter of faith extrapolated from our minimal ability to account for a very limited part of our experience. Determinism is also contrary to the way in which most of us interprets the vast amount of our experience. Of course, none of this demonstrates that the deterministic claim is incorrect or that either chance or origin acts occur. It merely indicates the unmanageable complexity of giving a deterministic account of most events. For more thoughts about determinism, see CPCS Pull of Determinism and Reductionism.

Origin Claim: Altho I expressed a feeling that persons may sometimes transcend causality, the only claims made were about feelings and attitudes. I now make a competence claim. I claim that to some extent I can engage in transcendent action, i.e. that I can act as a causal origin, that I can act as a first cause. I once wanted to give a philosophical grounding for such a claim, but I now consider this claim as pre-philosophical, i.e. it is part of the basic reliable knowledge I have about me. I now find this debate an irrelevant exercise, remote from my ordinary active experience. There is simply no deterministic paradigm that I can coherently use to think deeply about my actions. Knowing that I sometimes act as an origin is ordinary rather than philosophical. To engage in deliberate action I must at least implicitly act as if I am competent to know what I am doing in relations to some real options. An origin claim is merely part of the ordinary understanding that any person implicitly has about being a person. The most philosophical analysis can do is to help me understand and use this claim. Its grounding is extremely personal, rooted in my decision to trust my competence to interpret the most fundamental theme of my experience. Vital knowledge is the knowledge that P cannot seriously doubt and still make sense of being a person in the real world. Knowing that I can act as an origin is at the core of my vital knowledge, because without this knowledge nothing makes sense to me.

My Origin Quest: I began this book as a tool in support of my quest to become a more viable origin. Originship is the art or skill involved in being or becoming a more effective origin. To do this and to support others who choose to enhance originship is what I mean by my origin quest. Deciding that I can transcend causality was not easy to implement. Debates about determinism had entangled me in nets that did not allow me to think coherently about being a deliberate causal origin. This was something I knew about me, but it did not mesh with the way I thought about what happens. I had to make a radical shift in my concepts and design my own network of concepts for philosophy. My main purpose in creating conceptual philosophy has been is to help me think about how to act as an origin. Deciding to take a personal approach to conceptual philosophy involved substantial confidence in my own personal competence. The problem was my reluctance to consider a personal grounding as adequate. I think this was primarily because I was nurtured in a philosophical climate that demanded a different grounding. I reject such demands, simply and without debate. I do not attempt to justify my origin claim. My personal grounding feels appropriate and adequate. Much of my work will not be relevant to those who cannot look within and make a similar decision about being a person.

My Origin Ideal: In living and doing, I become an integral part of various aspects of my world. I recreate me and I shape the aspects I encounter. I act as a resource for others. In this process I am guided by personal ideals, the most basic being my origin ideal. I am an origin to the extent that what I do is effectively directed towards what I would become and what I would have these aspects become. I experience me as an effective origin in some situations. This interests me because much of my life has been an experiment in enhancing originship.

My origin ideal is to become a more effective origin and to shape aspects that enhance resources for originship. Enhancing originship involves shaping stronger ideals, developing habits that integrate these ideals with my behavior, decreasing the influence of motives to react in ways that are not supportive of my ideals. It also involves having some extremely flexible conceptual nets. These nets must be neutral with respect to competing reality claims, but broad enough to help me understand them. They must allow a constructive approach to epistemics, and not prescribe or limit the ways of knowing or understanding. I need nets that are open to an evolving perspective on what I am, what I do, how I create what I am, how I become co-actors with other persons, how I become more integrated into the world. Writing concisely about my origin ideal is difficult, since my perspective on doing integrates everything in this book, and more. I often doubt that I can learn to communicate the most radical features of my perspective, but I have yet to find anyone who I felt needed to understand them fully enough to work with me on this communication problem.

This perspective on doing depends on a vast number of my characteristics, including attitudes and interests, as well as emotional and rational competencies. Because of my focus on origin concepts, the concept called an ideal is one of the most important concepts of my enactics. An ideal for a person P is a special kind of value V that consists of a vision for some aspect S. S may be some actual aspect that P wants preserved or S may be some imagined aspect that P wants to have created. To qualify as an ideal, V must persist over time, be applicable to numerous situations, be acknowledged as a high priority reason for action.

This concept of an ideal has no moral connotations, altho a person may have ideals regarding anything, including morals. An ideal merely serves as a potential guide for actions. This differs in several ways from the concept people may have in mind when using the word ideal. This word has connotations of laudability, or even perfection; and ordinary language allows us to express ideals as if they were like beliefs. This is inappropriate for the concept I am using. This concept of an ideal is presented in more detail in Part 3.

Example: When I started developing conceptual philosophy, one of my ideals was to have enough assets so I would not need to be employed. This provided a perspective on certain actions that was both idealistic and prudential. For instance, my decision to cultivate habits that allowed me to meet most of my transportation needs with a bicycle rather than an automobile was guided by these perspectives.

Concepts and Conceptual Distinctions: In order to contribute to any public conceptual net I must presuppose other persons have conceptual nets that are at least partially compatible with each other’s and with mine. That this is the case is part of what I take to be basic reliable knowledge, and like my concept of activity, my concepts of a concept and of a conceptual distinction are crucial. I now turn to a cluster of concepts that are directly supported by these.

Having a Concept: As I remarked earlier, Concepts are cognitive tools that have a place in some net. Altho concepts may seem to be dependent on language, perhaps this is largely due to the way we discuss-analyze-formulate them. This is not how a human usually acquires concepts. They are mainly acquired thru use rather than discussion and analysis, and we recognize that a person has a concept when that person can act on a distinction that the concept entails in at least one of the ways in which it makes sense to act. My mother said that when she was first playing bridge she led towards an ace and queen and played the queen. When told that she had just made a finesse she said she did not know what that meant. However she understood why this was a good strategy. Altho she did not know the word, she did have the essence of the concept. In line with this, I conceptualize having a concept in terms of acting on it rather than on articulating it. P may have a concept without having a name for it. Having a name for a concept is useful for other reasons.

Language allows us to refine concepts, relate them to other concepts, recognize nuances, see new distinctions, appreciate further applications, and of course, especially to communicate about them. The ability to use language in this fashion is another major component of conceptual competence.

Example: In a movie a woman is driving her car and the man beside her is an alien from another planet. He has never before seen an automobile or a traffic light. Conditions arise that make it difficult for her to continue driving. He assures her that he has observed her and can take over. On coming to a red light he stops. Saying that he has some concept of a traffic light and some concept of a brake seems reasonable, altho he does not know what either is called. He proceeds as expected, stopping on red continuing on green. She supposes he has her version of the traffic light concept. Of course, there may be other explanations for his actions. In fact as he approaches the next light, he speeds up rapidly and then stops suddenly. When quizzed he explains that yellow means speed up, but then it turned red. His version is not exactly the public version, altho it is reasonable version obtained by observing her behavior. Moreover, altho she had been speeding up when a light turned yellow, we would not conclude that her concept of a traffic light was not the public one. As most of us know, speeding up on yellow makes sense for another reason, altho making sense does not mean that it is prudent. In general, having a concept only means being able to act on it in at least one of the ways in which it makes sense to act. It does not mean there is only one way that makes sense to act. Nor does it mean that having a concept entails always acting on it in one of those ways. Moreover just responding to various signals in a way that makes sense does guarantee that a person has the concept of a traffic light. Our public concept includes not only what the signal tells us to do, but that the purpose of this is to regulate traffic. Perhaps he has gleaned this. To find the claim that he is acting on our concept plausible, we may need to determine more information about his behavior. In general, observing a person’s behavior gives us reasons to consider what concepts a person has, but our judgements are fallible. A woman who stops on green and looks both ways might seem not to have the public version of a traffic light, but there are other possible explanations of her behavior. For instance, suppose we know that she was recently hit by a truck that ran a red light, or suppose we know that that light is not working correctly.

Example: Ellie is 1½. She picks up a book, takes it to Angela, crawls up on her lap, and looks expectantly. This is followed by her attentive expression as Angela begins reading to her. Saying that Ellie has some concept of a book not only seems reasonable, no other account of her actions would seem even somewhat plausible to most of us. She could even have had the concept of a book without knowing what it is called. On the other hand, had she called it a book, but showed no inclination to treat it as one, we would have been justified in doubting that she had this concept. A short time later, she repeats this pattern of behavior with another book, indicating that her concept of a book is a type concept rather than being limited to a single item.

Versions of a Concept: Altho it is often reasonable to talk as if a person either has or does not have a concept this is an oversimplification. Different people will often have different versions of a concept, but these may be similar enough to think of them as versions of a public concept as used in some community. For a given person, we can consider to what extent the concept a person is using is a version of some public concept. In the books that Ellie brought to Angela, pictures predominate. There are some words, but Ellie only points to pictures when she says a word. Since she has no concept of written language, her version of the book concept is only a limited version of our concept of a book. Still it includes enough of that concept that we would generally say that she has a version of our book concept rather than that she a different book concept. Moreover we expect that her version will expand to our public one.

Language and Concepts: There is an area called philosophy of language. I once asked why there was not an area called philosophy of concepts. The response was that language is observable and thus available for study. On the other hand, concepts seem to be mental and thus suspect. I did not find this response useful. Altho I can regard individual instance of language, such as a printed copy of some text as physical, this is not its most important feature. As a purely physical object, a page of text is merely a conglomerate of black squiggles on a white background. To regard it as text is already to think of it from a functional perspective. This is the case with most elements of language. In thinking about language, I think in terms of function rather than form. The idea of a concept is crucial, and without it I could not even think about the function of language.

Altho language helps us understand our concepts, this is only one of its roles. Language also allows us to express feeling, give directions, convey information, etc. We can even use language to help disguise the fact that our understanding of some of our concepts is rather tenuous. The relation between the language we use and our concepts seems rather complex. Concepts are represented by words or phrases, but the same word or phrase may represent different concepts. The use of the word ‘bat’ to represent both a concept of a flying mammal and a concept of an item used in baseball is unlikely to cause confusion, since these concepts are so different. When the same word is used for related concepts there can be a blurring of conceptual distinctions, but such a practice allows a linguistic flexibility that enriches our ability to use concepts. The concepts represented by the verb ‘dust’ can be either to add dust or to remove dust. The statement ‘I don’t think, I know’ indicates confidence, while the statement ‘I don’t think I know’ indicates doubt. When spoken, it is not merely words that indicate the difference in meaning. Emphasis and context are needed. A word may be linked to closely related concepts, but not always. Puns, such as Rebecca Lobo holding a basketball and saying, “Come to the ball Cinderella”, indicate a playful use of the same words for very different concepts.

Conceptual clarification often uses language. Altho conceptual clarification may involve linguistic clarification, its major goal is to bring concepts into better focus or to create new concepts. Thus it is often necessary to modify or extend the use of language, or adopt specialized usage for certain purposes. Conceptual clarification takes an inventive and prescriptive attitude toward language, rather than merely analyzing current usage. The use of language to clarify concepts need not be systematic, and it need not use any specialized techniques. However at time a systematic use of such techniques may be useful.

Language plays a major role in shaping lasting concepts. We acquire concepts in the context of nets that are part of a long cultural heritage, and communication with others was a major factor in learning most of them. As we revise our nets, we obtain feedback from others, often using language. Even when working alone, language is a major tool for studying our concepts. Yet the use of language has severe limitations. Language encourages us focus to on a simplified version of our experience. This works fairly wel*l with analytic concepts or with impersonal concepts that have been abstracted from easily identifiable features of experience. It does not work so well with extremely remote concepts, and there is an additional problem when such concepts are personal.

Having the Concept of a Concept: Having the concept of a concept is also something we recognize from behavior, namely when a person can act in one of the ways in which it makes sense to act on the concept of a concept. The main way it makes sense to act on the concept of a concept is to think about making or being able to make distinctions. These are often linguistic ways of acting. In fact, Ossorio indicates that the ability to verbalize that one is making a distinction is tantamount to having the concept of a concept. I find this claim at least moderately plausible.

Without language, I can distinguish the red triangle from the blue square, but I can’t know that is what I am doing. I can’t know that what I am distinguishing is the red triangle from the blue square, and I also can’t know that what I’m doing is distinguishing something from something. (The Behavior of Persons, p124)

While I take this to be highly plausible, I do not have knowledge to judge his claim adequately. Altho there are other perspectives, I conceptualize a concept is as a type of tool, namely as a cognitive tool that a person can use for in relation to some realm of interest. I will suppose readers have some concept of a concept that is compatible with this, altho this is something they may seldom consider. For more on the concept of a concept see the appendix to CPCS Concept Parameters.

Note: For my use of the concept highly plausible, see CPCS Plausibility Concepts

Types of Nets and Concepts: P’s routine net contains the concepts that P can routinely use in any subnet of P’s master net. Altho concepts in P’s routine net may play a special role in a subnet, they are not used only in that subnet. For instance, my concept of walking plays a special role in my net for thinking about my exercise, but I also use it in routinely outside of that net.

Some subnets of a master net will be ordinary nets, i.e. they can be easily acquired thru ordinary social practices customarily engaged by members of the communities to which P actively belongs. My master net includes an ordinary subnet for Gin Rummy. Other subnets, such as my net for astronomy, may be more specialized in the sense that they involve specialized study. Being specialized or ordinary is a matter of degree rather than a dichotomy. My net for astronomy is much less specialized than the net for astronomy used by an astronomer. My net for mathematics is highly specialized. However it has a rather ordinary arithmetic subnet that I acquired as a child.

Conceptual & Paraceptual: Saying that first cousins share a pair of grandparents gives a relationship between concepts used in our public net for ordinary family relationships. This statement is usually conceptual, since it is independent of any state of affairs in the realm of families. Saying that Jill and Barb are first cousins uses this net, but tells about an aspect that this net is intended to help us think about. Such information is paraceptual. There is a subtly in these concepts that is further developed and illustrated in Chapter 2.

¨ Conceptual statements are about concepts and relationships between concepts in some net.

¨ Paraceptual statements presuppose some net. They are often used to propose information about something that the net is intended to help access.

The Concept of Conceptual Philosophy: As indicated earlier, a conceptual philosophy for P is an organized network of concepts that centers on those that P finds crucial along with those that these crucial concepts most directly support. The activity of doing conceptual philosophy involves presenting-clarifying-refining concepts and relations between concepts. Thus doing conceptual philosophy is to be engaged in the pure conceptual study of a crucial net. In pure conceptual study, only conceptual claims are made within the net being studied. Other types of study make paraceptual claims, i.e. claims that apply the net to something other than itself. In conceptual study, we also make paraceptual statements about matters that help us to better understand the net, but these are not claims within the net. For example, the claim that a crucial concept cannot be reduced to more basic concepts is a purely conceptual claim arising from the way that a crucial concept is conceptualized. On the other hand, my origin claim is a paraceptual claim that helps explain my attitude towards originship, and hence to deepen my understanding of this concept. I am convinced it is correct, but if it were not this would affect the utility of my net rather than its conceptual soundness. Since a conceptual philosophy cannot make noteworthy paraceptual claims, the only way it makes incorrect claims is due to conceptual errors. I would like to see a coherent public net for conceptual philosophy emerge whose goal would be to shape purely conceptual nets for the crucial concepts that almost all persons in all cultures have found important, and most of all to find ways to enhance our understanding of these nets. A narrower hope would be to see a community dedicated to shaping a widely used coherent public net for conceptual philosophy.

Three Strands of Conceptual Philosophy: Ontics is the strand of conceptual philosophy that focuses on a of reality concepts. Its main concern is on the categories that might be useful in thinking about reality. Epistemics is the strand for the study of understanding. Enactics is the strand for personal doing. Altho drafts of my conceptual philosophy were completed before I became aware of PNDP (Public Net for Descriptive Psychology), portions of PNDP can be used to enhance this net. PNDP already includes an extensive amount of what I would include in enactics. It also includes portions of ontics and epistemics. I have now integrated concepts from PNDP into each of these strands.

I consider the PNDP reality concepts as the core of ontics. Chapter 1 in this part of the book integrates them with other concepts to the extent that I am not inclined to go further in ontics. Altho this includes all the ontics that I have thought about, others might want to go further. More work can always be done on the concepts most directly supported by the concepts used for ontics. See What There Is and The Way Things Are by Ossorio in Vol 7 of Advances.

The epistemic strand relies heavily on conceptual clarification devices from PNDP. However the epistemic portion of PNDP is not extensive enough for my purposes. I have already indicated some of the epistemics I would add to PNDP. Another epistemic topic that I have considered is a parametric perspective on concepts. The concept of understanding is my most crucial epistemic concept.

The enactics strand is the one that relies most heavily on PNDP. For me, this is the most important strand, because the very concept of a person is centered on what a person does. The utility of PNDP for this purpose is due to the fact the person concept is crucial for PNDP, and this concept is linked to the concept of deliberate action. Some of this strand involves concerns that may be of very little interest to others. However one topic in this strand that could be of general interest is a net for Human Ethics.

The Significance of Conceptual Philosophy: I had to build my mathematical nets while trying to understand nets used by others. In doing this, it is useful to think of a net for mathematics used by mathematicians. Since this net is designed for much wider use, it is a public net. I denote it as PNCM (Public Net for Contemporary Mathematics). Altho the acquisition of a personal copy of PNCM is not possible, to be a mathematician is to have a copy of some significant parts PNCM and the ability to acquire a copy of other portions. PNCM enables mathematicians to communicate with others having similar interests. It gives us a legitimate confidence that our work is conceptually sound, allowing mathematics to evolve progressively from the work of persons with a variety of interests. PNCM enables mathematicians not familiar with a particular area of mathematics to quickly become familiar with its basic ideas and to see if that area might be of interest. PNCM provides wide applications in science and technology, as well as in many ordinary matters.

In doing mathematics I draw on PNCM, relating my math nets to this broader public net. Altho I seldom totally adopt a subnet of PNCM, all my math nets involve slight modifications of them. For example, I have used my net for Galois Theory with one student, and since he found it easier to understand than the standard net, I suspect that this could be a useful net for teaching Galois Theory. There is a major difference in my in mathematical work and my work in conceptual philosophy. I share many interest with other mathematician, but I do not seem to have interest in what seems important to most philosophers. There is one main problem that I have with most philosophy. Conceptual and paraceptual considerations seem so often intertwined that I can seldom tell which types of statements are being made. The questions that philosophers treat as paraceptual also seem extremely vague to me. I do not see why we cannot develop a public net for conceptual philosophy that is broad enough to be used by anyone interested in any philosophical considerations.

By PNCP, I mean a rather clear Public Net for conceptual philosophy, a net allowing us to agree on conceptual claims about reality-understanding-doing and providing common access to the facts affecting our paraceptual applications of this net. I think that such a net could allow us the kind of progressive evolution of our understanding of all our concerns, much as PNCM has enabled us an evolving understanding in areas that are susceptible to mathematical modeling. Unlike PNCM, PNCP has not yet been created. Instead we have a number of competing subnets for philosophy, all of which I find extremely vague. Even if an interest in developing PNCP were to arise, I do not know if this book has potential utility as part of it. My net for conceptual philosophy is in a primitive state of development, and my understanding of it is limited. I know that there are key concepts that I still find unsatisfactory, and I may not always use the concepts in a consistent manner. Perhaps I am primarily an explorer, and the maps I am making are mostly for my own purposes. Even if the net I am proposing may have little utility beyond what it has for me, I hope that it can at least suggest what some components of a PNCP might contain.

Altho my net for conceptual philosophy may have some conceptual errors, I have invested a large amount of effort on its most basic parts, and I suspect any conceptual errors are confined to parts infrequently examined. I make two main claims about this net, the conceptual claim that this net claims is fundamentally sound and the paraceptual claim that it serves my purposes better than any other that I have been able to understand. The claim of conceptual soundness I make is similar to one I would make for my Galois Theory net, altho this net can be more easily checked because its concepts are more precise. Also, my Galois Theory net is close to the one in PNCM and has been examined by several other persons. Still it is clearly possible that there could be an error in one of my proofs, altho I have reviewed them often enough that this seems unlikely.

Personal Competence: It has been said that anything we do is based on presuppositions. The main fundamental presupposition for doing conceptual philosophy is a minimal claim of personal competence. This claim also applies to being a person. It entails the competence to acquire a considerable amount of basic reliable knowledge. The concept of basic reliable knowledge will be developed later. For now, it is enough to say that P’s basic reliable knowledge is the information that it is reasonable for P to take for granted and that acts as a basis that P can rely on without question. For instance, I know that I understand many concepts, and this is part of my basic reliable knowledge. Such knowledge is acquired by living. It emerges from the experience accumulated by operating within the real world. It is grounded pragmatically by the experience that it can reasonably be relied upon. Altho P may occasionally be mistaken in this regard, part of the competence in being a person is the ability to recognize basic reliable knowledge. Otherwise deliberate action is conceptually impossible. I claim that various ordinary nets are useful and that many people are competent in using them. I also take this as part of my basic reliable knowledge. I make similar claims about more specialized nets, such as PNCM and PNDP, which will be discussed later.

The competence claims I make are minimal, allowing for considerable incompetence. They are also rather extensive. I take it for granted that any person P has some competence in living, and hence in wanting, choosing, knowing, understanding, doing, achieving, feeling, etc. I take it for granted that P often has broader competence as critic and observer of P as actor than other people have, altho there are exceptions. However unless there are reasons to believe otherwise, I assume that P is competent in judging P’s competence, interpreting P’s experience, determining P’s purposes and interests, determining what P finds plausible, etc. I take the following PNDP maxim from Place as not only as a description of what a person does, but also as an indication of a major way of being competent as a person.

Maxim A8: A person takes it that things are as they seem, unless he has reason enough to think otherwise.

Towards a Public Net for Conceptual Philosophy: Altho pure conceptual study flourishes in mathematics, it has not been widely used elsewhere. Ossorio used it to develop PNDP, but a wide appreciation of PNDP has not yet emerged. Nor have the many concepts from PNDP that could be used in formulating a clear unified public net for conceptual philosophy been used in this manner. Perhaps the interests various people have in philosophy are too divergent. Perhaps too many philosophers are more interested in convincing than in clarifying. Perhaps the notion of pure conceptual study has too narrow an appeal. Even physics, which draws heavily on mathematics, has done little to develop a net that does not mix conceptual and paraceptual concerns. The ability to understand and effectively use an adequate distinction between conceptual and paraceptual concerns is currently limited to a minority of humans.

As a conjecture, I surmise that almost everyone has the capacity to acquire this ability, but that most people have not had the appropriate history. At one time I would have found this conjecture highly plausible. I once thought that the feeling many people have that (^-1)·(^-1) = 1 makes no sense was rooted in paraceptual attitudes and that I could help them understand how this proposition is purely conceptual. However even many secondary school mathematics teachers have difficulty understanding this. They give explanations based on models, as if this validates it, rather than merely indicates the utility of the net being used. My experience in teaching, and even in teaching mathematics majors, has made me wonder about the extent of the capacity for pure conceptual thinking among humans. However I still treat the above conjecture as at least somewhat plausible, and I will tentatively assume that the primary barriers to pure conceptual study, and hence to the creation of a clear unified public net for conceptual philosophy, are rooted in attitudes rather than in capacity. After all, it would only take a small number of people to use conceptual study to formulate such a net

Attitude Barriers towards Pure Conceptual Study: Widely held epistemic attitudes form a major barrier to the study of a public net for conceptual philosophy. These are attitudes that act as if the primary goal of study is to acquire paraceptual knowledge. Below are four points suggested by Paul Zeiger that relate to the bias towards getting directly to paraceptual results. These apply to most forms of pure conceptual study. Thus I focus on barriers to doing pure conceptual study, altho my primary interest relates to barriers to the creation of PNCP and to an appreciation of PNDP.

(1) Once the distinction between the conceptual and the paraceptual is made, it ought to be obvious that here are two classes of useful artifacts for which the creation and refinement of one calls for very different methods than creation and refinement of the other. Yet, it has been uniformly difficult to get listeners to make the distinction in the first place.

(2) Motivation for separating the conceptual from the paraceptual seems to be in short supply. Persons exploring new realms have been very creative in inventing (presumably unconsciously) the conceptual and the paraceptual simultaneously, without distinguishing between them. Look at Relativity, Quantum Theory, Evolution, Freudian Psychology, etc. So there is a long history of not making the distinction and still doing pretty well (like getting famous).

(3) It appears that when creating a useful conceptual net, the effort goes up faster than linearly in relation to the increase in the power of the net. This is a vague conjecture about something that I first noticed in the design and construction of programming languages. Many such languages started as elegant means to program a restricted class of data structures and algorithms. They were then were added to bit by bit, in a quest for generality. Usually their creators were unpleasantly surprised by the mounting complexity of conceptual interpretation and machine implementation as the languages grew.

(4) Finally, there is the historical influence of Platonism. This could constitute a pervasive intellectual bias thruout western civilization.

Paul’s last point indicates a persistent epistemic attitude. It took until the 20^th century to overcome this attitude among mathematicians. Even now, most mathematicians still have platonistic attitudes, altho most of their mathematical behavior is pure conceptual study. In fact, altho Gödel’s work is pure conceptual study, he insisted that mathematics is true for some non-physical platonistic realm. He claimed that we can observe this realm using our intuition, rather than by the using our senses as we must do in order to observe the physical realm. Altho this attitude may persist, it does not prevent pure conceptual study. Platonists and formalist, as well as mathematicians with no particular philosophy of mathematics, form a community in which ontological believes or lack of them is not apparent in the mathematics they publish.

Since point 3 probably indicates an inherent feature of conceptual study, the number of people doing pure conceptual study for a major realm may always remain small. Altho this may retard a wide recognition and understanding of PNCP, it need not be a major barrier to PNCP having an important impact. Mathematics is poorly understood by most people, but it is still widely used. Physicists can even relay heavily on some remote mathematics with little understanding of PNCM. Even Einstein could not see the significance of the debate about formalism and intuitionism.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn indicates that an established paradigm does not merely give way to a better one. A paradigm shift only occurs in response to anomalies that the standard paradigm cannot handle. The saying ‘Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken’ is a mundane way to express the essence of point 2. Persons who might embrace conceptual philosophy are those who feel that something is broken. I suspect that most people do not even consider whether they have an epistemic paradigm, much less a broken one. They see no need to examine their routine net to see if they are using it a manner that is clear and coherent. Even people who have intellectual interests seldom consider whether something in their epistemic paradigm is broken.

Point 1 may be the greatest barrier, perhaps due largely to what is inherent in having a history of deliberate action. A person acquires concepts by experience in one or more of the social practices that use these concepts. Using these concepts to think about concepts is not the main social practice thru which they are acquired. Intentional action does not even depend on having a routine net. Having a history of deliberate action may depend on having concepts, but it does not depend on having any coherent nets. Why would evolution select for individuals persons with nets that were more coherent than is needed to deal with a multitude of ordinary manners? Even mathematics was able to evolve almost into the 20^th century without much pure conceptual study.

Not only is conceptual study unnecessary for deliberate action, conceptual study can even interfere with deliberate action. The extent to which a person may find clearer concepts useful depends on that person’s values and purposes. When a person’s purpose is to instill belief rather than to foster understanding, having a firm belief may outweigh the value of having clearer concepts that open the possibility of doubt. Altho behind at halftime, a coach may say that the momentum has shifted in our favor. This vague belief may inspire confidence that could actually turn the tide. A player asking the coach to clarify the concept of momentum and it application to this situation would be considered more than somewhat weird. The purpose of the coach’s statement was to inspire rather than to convey an understanding of the situation.

Point 1 may also be due to the nature and special role played by ordinary conceptual nets. Unlike specialized nets, these are permeated with concepts acquired by acting within realms in which we normally feel very comfortable. These nets are especially permeated with our subconcepts. These subconcepts are so entwined with each other that it is difficult to bring them into focus for conceptual study. Furthermore most people take them so much for granted that that feel no need to do so.

In relation to an appreciation of PNDP, these barriers may be especially potent. The area of study for PNDP includes our public routine net, but goes beyond to formulate a net that contains a sophisticated and refined routine net. Since this type of study involves matters about which we seldom have serious doubts, to many it will at best seem to be of limited utility. Moreover it potentially might bring into question some of our basic reliable knowledge. The creation of PNCP may seem even more superfluous. Why examine the crucial concepts that we must have in order to do the thing we already do in an adequate manner?

I do not know how many people need to have a functional ability to focus on purely conceptual distinctions in order for the creation of PNCP and for an appreciation of PNDP to have the potential impact I hope they will have. Even if the main barriers are attitudinal, I am uncertain about which strategies for undermining the attitude barrier will be effective. Nor do I know how much effort will be involved or how long it may take. If I had to make a guess, I would say that it will at least take the dedicated effort of a number of people and that the impact will not occur until late in the 21^st century.

Connotations of terminology can also be a barrier to an appreciation of some results of conceptual study seems implicit in what Ossorio said about the name ‘Descriptive Psychology’.

The overall concept is currently designated as the ‘Human Model’ or ‘Person Concept.’ (At various times I have referred to it as the ‘Behavioral Model,’ ‘Intentional Action System,’ ‘Reality System,’ and ‘Three-system System’. (There does not seem to be a really satisfactory term to use here.) The four major components are the concepts of Reality, Person, Behavior, and Language. The social enterprise of generating and using these and related formulations as technical resources in a behavioral science has been consistently designated as ‘Descriptive Psychology.’

When asked about my own work, I still hesitantly refer to it as conceptual philosophy. The word philosophy has ordinary connotations that do not apply, and the connotation it has for academics is even more misleading. In a discussion of my net for philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy professor said that it was interesting but he would not call what I was doing philosophy. He suggested psychology of mathematics, which I found even more misleading. While I am not averse to inventing terminology when I think the available terminology is misleading, I cannot think of any other satisfactory term for what I have called conceptual philosophy. I also hesitate when I tell people I am interested in Descriptive Psychology. Instead I say that I am interested in person concepts. The word ‘psychology’ suggests a limited scope to most people, and ‘descriptive’ does not have the appropriate conceptual connotation for them. Perhaps a different name could found. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but with some other name a person my not bother to smell it.

Some Decisions: Doing conceptual philosophy is a form of deliberate action, and hence it involves making decisions. These can involve any perspective a person takes on behavior and any of a person’s characteristics. Thus differences in the decisions by different person should be expected. Many that I make will be emerge later. For now, I indicate a few that are significant. Since I am shaping a net, these decisions are conceptual choices rather than claims. My main ontic decision is to focus on having an abundance of functional reality concepts, to downplay the use of Occum’s razor, to discard the concepts of mind and body as substances. My main epistemic decision is to take the concepts of understanding and conceptual competence as more basic than the concept of knowledge, altho I would not have made such a choice had I not been willing to make paraceptual claims about the utility of understanding and conceptual competence. The concept that is central to my enactics is the concept of a person as an individual having a noteworthy history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. Moreover, I have decided to develop enactics primarily for use in my origin quest.

Synopsis: I have introduced a few key concepts from the net I am shaping for conceptual philosophy. However this chapter is primarily a prelude. It indicates that the main reason I have chosen to create this net is to help me think about the dichotomy between my attitude towards persons as potential origins and my attitude towards everything else. This book develops or sketches concepts and conceptual relations for my crucial net, with the hope that my work can be useful to others who think that a better understanding of their crucial concepts might significantly enhance their options. Since understanding a net involves experience in one or more practices using this net, applications of these concepts and indications of why I find them useful are interspersed with their presentation. This is supplemented with commentary on some of the ways these concepts are personally useful. Part 0 focuses on the most basic concepts that I use in the three main strands indicated earlier, and which permeate all these strands. Part 1 indicates my personal perspective on these strands. Ontics is the least developed strand of my net for conceptual philosophy. All of it is presented in Chapter 1 of Part 0. Chapter 2 of Part 0 presents only the most basic concepts I recommend for epistemics. Epistemics is further developed in Part 2. Chapter 3 of Part 0 presents only the most basic concepts I recommend for enactics. Enactics is further developed in Part 3.

CHAPTER 1 ONTICS

Partitions of Reality: I often think in terms of me and everything else. The problem with this partition is my vague use of the word me. I think of an immediate-me, a crucial concept rooted in my most intimate personal awareness of me as being me. In public discourse, I use an extended concept of me, one related to an awareness of my interaction with everything else. This extended-me includes what other persons consider as me, along with immediate-me. Extended-me includes an evolving complex of characteristics. Immediate-me seems simple compared to extended-me. The vagueness in the way I use the word me gives rise to vagueness in my concept of everything else.

Altho I still tend to bipartition reality in this vague way, this does not provide the concepts I need for thinking about what I am doing. I prefer a tripartition, using {my will, my persona, my beyond}. My will is what I experience as immediate-me. My persona is that part of extended-me which does not include immediate-me. He is the rest of me. In contrast to these, I have a concept of a more remote other, which includes everything beyond extended-me, and which I call my beyond. My persona is an intermediate reality between my will and my beyond. This tri-partition of reality provides these three most crucial and ubiquitous reality concepts, which also play this role in my routine net, and which thus permeate all my nets.

This tripartition is a way to organize the core of ontics. Using it is a conceptual decision rather than a claim about reality. This tripartition is by function, not by substance. It provides two convenient bipartions. I can think in terms of me as contrasted to my other, where ‘me’ refers to immediate-me, and ‘my other’ refers to my persona and my beyond. When I think about how to become a more effective origin, this is the bipartition I find most useful. From this perspective I use ‘me’ to refer to immediate-me. It can also be useful to contrast the beyond me to extended-me, say when acting as an origin with my attention directed towards my beyond. From this perspective I often use ‘me’ in a vague manner, ranging between immediate-me and extended-me.

My Will: My immediate-me concept provides an orientation, a point of special identity in the world, a source of action and understanding. I think of me as a single identity persisting thru time, but also changing what I am. I think of me as deliberately acting to shape various states of affairs that I encounter. Using the term ‘me’ to refer to both immediate-me and extended-me can be ambiguous, so I also use the term ‘my will’ to refer to immediate-me. I use this term because I think of immediate-me as a will, in the sense that this describes the most significant thing I do, namely when I willingly act. Will is a functional concept, so saying that I am a will is an observation about what I do, rather than an ontological claim. It is like saying that I am a logician, except that being a logician is a much less significant part of what I do.

The concept of my will has always been my deepest and least remote concept. It is a stubbornly persistent concept, remaining intact thru a multitude of changes in my nets. It is a prerequisite for any net I can use. Since it provides the essential reference point I need for a sense of orientation, it is one of my most crucial concepts. All my nets are ultimately supported by this concept. I cannot even pretend to imagine the existence for my nets without me. When I try to imagine the world without me (say before I was born or if I cease to exist), I am still aware of me trying to imagine this world. Knowing that I exist is nothing more than an ordinary observation, one that is even more predominant than the observation that I sometimes act as an origin. Unlike Descartes, I feel no need to prove my existence, nor can I imagine what such a proof might entail.

My Persona: While the term ‘the rest of me’ has the connotation I want for this concept, it is awkward, so I use the term ‘my persona’ for it. My persona is the totality of my characteristics, the collection of tools my will can most directly draw on as I act. He is my only known channel for reaching into my beyond, but also the main channel thru which it impinges on my will. I used to think of my persona as part of me, partitioning reality into what I now think of as extended-me as contrasted with my beyond.

In ordinary conversation, I still refer to my persona as me, primarily because others tend to identify me with my persona. This is no longer my preferred way of thinking. In private, I am more likely to refer to my persona as he, and this is the locution used in this book. I want to emphasize the fact that I consider my persona to be more like my beyond than like me. His behavior often seems to be largely determined by what he is and by what he encounters out there. However it is also influenced by the choices I make.

My Beyond: This concept is open and fluid. It points out of me to the known and further out toward the unknown. It has no specific reference, for it points toward much that is beyond my ken. It has been synthesized from everything I encounter or imagine. My immediate-me concept reminds me of my experience of personal power. My beyond is beyond the direct control of my will. This concept is a reminder of my limited will. It is a call for humility. It reminds me to be skeptical about general claims I might be tempted to make. I am a will to act-experience-understand. My beyond is a challenge, a playing field for my actions and a testing ground for my understanding.

Reflections of My Deepest Crucial concepts: My immediate-me concept is directly experiential. It is clear enough for many of my purposes. However this concept transcends the now in ways that I find extremely fuzzy. It applies to at least one instance of me when I was 3 years old. It does not clearly apply to anything before this time. I do not even know if applies to anything having a continuous existence in the recent past. I seem to wax and wane as an active origin, and I sometimes wonder if in some of those instances I have ceased to exist. Perhaps it is only my sentiment of rationality that demands the continuity of my existence. Thinking about my experience still leaves me uncertain about such matters. Anyone with a more analytic bent might advise me to discard the concept of me because it is too fuzzy to be meaningful. I do not find this to be the case. My difficulties with this concept are minor in comparison to its personal utility.

My understanding of my will is limited by an inability to experience me in greater depth and to understand much of my past and present experience of me. My powers seem best suited to understanding my persona and my beyond. They are less suited to understanding how my will can act as a causal origin, or even in knowing to what extent I am a causal link or origin in most of the events in which I participate. Perhaps this is because the kinds of characteristics that allow for human cognitive competence evolved as a tool for coping with the other. It seems like there are two main ways that I use to understand my will. One is a contemplative and unstructured listening to my goals and ideals. An essential feature of my will is that I try to shape various aspects of the world. My main goal is to shape my will, but mainly by interacting thru my persona with my beyond. Another way is to examine my actions from the perspective of my purposes.

A General Concept of a Will: My concept of a will is an experiential extension of the concept of my will. The distinguishing feature of a will is the capacity to act deliberately and creatively as a causal origin. While I can imagine random origin acts, the concept of will does not include them. My experience of me differs radically from my experience of other persons. I experience my will directly. I experience other persons primarily by observing what they do, with only occasional glimpses at what seems to be their will. Thus the concept of a will is primarily an abstraction from the concept of me. Usually I merely imagine the will of another person by trying to understand what that person does. To forge a more powerful concept of will I need to learn how to make deeper contact with other persons.

Side Remark: In principle, I could act as if I was the only will, but this would violate my basic reliable knowledge about other persons. This knowledge, at least borders on being vital, and for all practical purposes, I act as if it was vital. Solipsism may be something we can imagine, but it is not something that we can consider even barely plausible. Furthermore, taking solipsism seriously would vastly undermine many of our reasons for actions.

A General Concept of a Beyond: My general concept of a beyond for any person is also an extension of the concept of my beyond. Of course, this concept is less directly experiential than the concept of my beyond. Still my experience convinces me that the persons that I have encountered all seem to feel that beyond them is that which they cannot directly control.

A General Concept of a Persona: I experience my persona from the perspective of my will. However my general persona concept has been abstracted at least as much from my experience of other persons I have encountered as from my experience of my own persona. A persona is that part of a person that can be known by observing that person and what that person does in an ordinary manner by others. The persons I have know all appear to have a will and a persona. The will has purposes that guide actions. The persona is a resource that is used to implement these actions.

My will and persona concepts may seem like the traditional Cartesian dualism, but the will & persona dualism is in terms of function rather than substance. These concepts were synthesized from experience, and they do not involve notions of mind or matter. The main reason I do not use mind and matter as reality categories is that they are part of a net involving reality concepts that I find too vague to be useful. The concepts of will and persona are independent. I can imagine a functioning will without a persona, such as the traditional Christian God. I can also imagine a functioning persona without a will, such as Julian Jaynes’ bicameral man. Cartesian dualism has been characterized as a ghost in a machine. I can think of better analogies for my dualism, such as {jockey & racehorse, coach & football team, president & executive branch}. Altho all such analogies are of limited utility, they at least suggest a differentiation based on an interaction that involves guidance and resources for implementing the actions to be guided.

Ontology & Ontics: The main concern of traditional ontology is about the nature of being and kinds of existence. Ontological discussions often use concepts such as mind, matter, substance. I find these concepts and this concern vague. However ontology suggests a query that helps me organize ontics, namely “What concepts do I find are useful in thinking about reality?” Ontics is the study of this query. Unlike ontology, ontics is not concerned with beliefs about the nature of reality. Ontics is the purely conceptual study of reality concepts. Its emphasis is on function rather than on substance. The use of a reality concept is an ontic decision, not involving any ontological claims. Reality does not present itself in fixed categories, any more than space presents itself with a fixed coordinate system. Like a coordinate systems, reality concepts are a matter of convenience. Reality may be such that some are more convenient than others are, but this is something I would discover by use, rather than by reasoning about the nature of reality. Altho reality concepts do not involve existential commitments, they are often suggested by existential claims or conjectures. Ontic concepts provide convenient ways to organize our thinking about aspects of the world we accept or reject for other reasons. They also provide concepts for thinking about aspects about which we are skeptical, but at least willing to consider, or which we find useful to imagine for some purpose.

Example: The mathematical class of all sets considered as a platonistic realm, is an example a category that I find extremely illusive. I doubt that it has ever been adequately imagined. Altho it may be merely a convenient fiction, it is a useful category for most mathematicians. I try to imagine this category primarily because it helps me understand an attitude that permeates contemporary mathematics.

Reductionism: As I indicated earlier, my main ontic decision was to focus on having an abundance of functional reality concepts and to downplay the use of Occum’s razor. In particular, I find the perspective of reductionism personally useless. Perhaps this is because it has never been formulated in way that I can understand. Consider physical reductionism. Whatever there may be this view, it seems clear that an actual conceptual physical reductionism is impractical and a descriptive physical reductionism is far beyond the scope of human capacities. We simply cannot describe all activity in physical terms. Biological activity is directed either the maintenance of life or towards reproduction. While reproduction may involve considerable physical activity, our concept of reproduction and our ability to observe and describe activity as reproductive involves understanding concepts not available in any physical network of concepts that we are likely to encounter. This is what I mean by classifying biological activity as distinct from physical activity. Likewise while schooling may involve biological activity, the concept of a school and the ability to observe and classify a school activity as educational involves understanding of concepts we do not currently reduce to biological concepts.

Formal Reductionism: The concept of a prime number can be analytically defined using only the concept of set theory, along with first order logic. This is a type of reduction that could be called a formal reduction. The usual claim of formal reductionism is that all mathematical concepts can be analytically defined in set theory. A weak version of this is true, since all mathematical concepts that we have yet imagined can be so defined. The stronger version, which would include all mathematical concepts that could be imagined, seems more dubious. In either case the significance of formal reductionism and how it relates to other types of reductionism seems rather complex. However one thing seems obvious. Most of the reduction could not be given without a prior intuitive understanding of the concepts to be reduced. For instance, a definition of a prime number stated in the language of set theory would be unrecognizable as defining this concept. Moreover the set theoretic reductions given for even the most basic numerical concepts are a matter of convenience rather than necessity. For instance, altho the number 0 is usually conceptualized as the empty set, this does not mean that 0 really is the empty set. Any other set could have been taken as 0, altho this choice for 0 is useful.

Ordinary Reality: I have no desire for a philosophy that reveals the ultimate nature of reality, whatever that might mean. The concepts of ultimate reality that have been suggested to me seem vague. I lack the sense that there is some ultimate reality hidden beneath appearance. My concept of reality has been synthesized from experience, so I think of reality as rather ordinary. I am confident in my competence to understand this ordinary reality, at least well enough to feel oriented in many situations. My problem is to understand reality better in order to be more effective. Obtaining a more realistic understanding many aspects of the world often seems difficult, but I feel that this is due to the vastness and complexity of the world, rather than to a basic inaccessibility. Perhaps I am supposed to feel that reality is inaccessible since I have not direct contact with the beyond, and thus all my information is based on mere signals. If so, I fail to appreciate the supposed advantages of direct contact, whatever that may mean. I have rather direct contact with me, but I have as much trouble understanding me as I do in understanding many aspects of my beyond.

Many philosophers seem to feel that we need to find a secure grounding for our competence in coping with reality. I adopt a naive attitude towards competence, trusting a person’s ability to understand, except when it seems that something is going wrong. This allows using an evolving pluralistic ontic net, but this is not intended as a claim that reality is essentially pluralistic. I merely find all the forms of monism or dualism that I have encountered unsuitable for my purposes. I find that kind of thinking too restrictive. I prefer a net, perhaps having a surplus of categories, rather than one that austerely applies Occum’s razor. This naive attitude toward competence also influences my use of epistemics.

Intertwined Concepts: Reality seems stable but not static. Features I encounter change. What I do now is influenced by past changes and by the potential for future changes. I think of me as a will because I do things to initiate and influence changes. I feel that I can cause things to change, that in the process, I change my persona, and I even change my will. Intertwined with my three most crucial concepts are the crucial concepts {now, change, doing, causing, understanding}. My ontics also includes a number of other concepts that are intertwined with these crucial reality concepts. The rest of this section describes a few main features of these concepts, but they are too broad to be adequately described. I understand them by living with them. The main way I communicate about them is to illustrate how I use them in relation to other concepts, and hope that other persons can imagine living with these or similar concepts.

My ontics uses variations of many concepts from PNDP, altho the term ontics is not used in PNDP. Those that are most relevant include are it reality categories and its person concept. My presentation of these is purely conceptual. These concepts are not being presented via analytic definitions, but in terms of conceptual conditions on their interrelationships with each other and with other concepts. My presentation here is rather abbreviated, but hopefully sufficient as an introduction. See PBW or the Concept Encyclopedia for a fuller development of these concepts.

The Person Concept: As indicate in earlier, a person is at a minimum an individual who has a noteworthy history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. This should not be taken as an analytic definition, but as a conceptual criterion for relating the crucial concept of a person to parameters that make up the crucial concept of action. Also as indicated earlier, another PNDP criterion for being a person is to have mastered the person concept, i.e. a person must be able to act on a distinction between person and a non-person, altho this does not mean a person could formulate this distinction. Ossorio also links the concept of deliberate action, and hence the concept of a person, to the concept of a social practice. This makes the person concept narrower than one I prefer.

In CPCS Person Concepts, I indicate some distinctions that differ from those in PNDP and that are designed to help me think about ideas involving supernatural beings, science fiction stories involving aliens, Julian Jaynes’ bicameral civilizations, pre-historic people, etc. It also develops some distinctions that can be used to compare and contrast individuals who we clearly consider as persons with those who engage in various person-like behaviors in ways that is far too limited for them to be classified as persons. Some of these clearly exist (such as domestic dogs), and perhaps thinking about the extent to which their behavior is person-like could be of interest to some people. One of reason in formulating person-like concepts is to consider how and why Homo sapiens became persons. In particular, this is related to Jaynes’ concept of bicameral man, altho I make no assumption that his account is correct

The Personal: Persons help create other persons thru biological reproduction, but more significantly thru education and conditioning. Persons create chairs, hammers, computers, nations, governments, garbage, music, tables, languages, information, theories, etc. They create concepts and nets. An ontic class is any class we use to organize our thinking about the world. The ontic type called ‘personal’ includes anything whose creation involves the action of persons. Anything personal may be classified as more or less artificial, depending on the amount of personal involvement in its creation. My bicycle is more artificial than my garden, yet both are highly personal objects. It is important to note that every net and every other imagined realm is a personally produced highly artificial object whose components include imagined objects called concepts.

Main Reality Concepts: My ontics uses the four main reality concepts from taken from PNDP. The

{Objects, Events, Processes, States of Affairs}

These reality concepts will be called aspect or aspects of the world, a locution introduced by Joe Jeffery in . Structures in Advances 9.To partially explain these aspects, I quote from PBW.

We are observing objects when we see a desk, hear a doorbell, touch the keys of a typewriter, smell an orange, taste its flavor, and feel its texture as we peel it. We are observing processes when we see a person walking across the room, hear the playing of a song, and feel the movement of our fingers on the typewriter keys. We are observing events when we see the light go on, hear the pen hit the floor when it falls off the desk, begin to taste the orange. We are observing states of affairs when we note that the desk has four drawers, hear that the telephone is ringing, taste that the orange is sweet, feel that there is a draft across our ankles, etc.

All these examples focus on physical aspects of our worlds. In What Actually Happens (p16), Ossorio indicates that they are not restricted to what we do think of in primarily physical terms.

One of the ways of formulating the claim that Z’s are real is to say that they are a certain kind of object (e.g. a mental object, a mathematical object, an invisible physical object) or a certain kind of process (e.g. a mental process, a submicroscopic process, a learning process) etc.

Using terms like ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ involves no substantial ontological commitment. It merely gives a way of focusing attention on what we are thinking about. Calling an object mental or physical indicates the kind of role it has as we are currently using it. Most of what we think of as physical is also thought about from a perspective that is not primarily physical. Falling off my roof is a physical event when thinking about the speed of my fall. It is a mental event when thinking about its impact of my life. Even objects that we call physical are more often thought of as functional. In most of what we do the functional aspects of our world is more significant than the physical. The sentences below indicate two aspects involving my bicycle.

My St Louis bicycle is an inexpensive mode of transportation.
My St Louis bicycle is an object that I enjoy riding.

While motion take place in the physical world, to recognize it as transportation, rather than mere motion, involves the idea of achieving a purpose. Likewise thinking of it as inexpensive is not something that I regard as a physical attribute. The second aspect is even less related to anything that I think of in physical terms, altho some of my enjoyment involves the feel of the wind on my face.

In order for these categories to be useful we need another main reality concept, namely the concept of a relationship. For instance, we are observing relationships when we note that we are sitting at the desk with pen in hand, and writing on the paper that lies on the desk. Since it is often convenient to focus on unary relations, the term ‘attribute’ refers to such relationships, and ‘relationship’ is reserved for those with more than one argument. In saying that my shirt is red, I classify this as asserting an attribute for my shirt rather than as saying my shirt has the relationship of belonging to the set of all red objects. This is merely a matter of taste, and nothing significant is at stake. Reality concepts are intended to enable us to talk about our experience in a way that we find convenient and coherent.

I next use the locution ‘aspects’ to sketch a modified version some rules and some special cases for these reality concepts. These rules specify are conceptual and involve no paraceptual claims. For a fuller account of these concepts, see PBW or The Behavior of Persons or What Actually Happens..

Rule 1: A state of affairs is a totality of related aspects.

Rule 2: An aspect can be a constituent of some other aspect.

Rule 3: An object is an aspect having other related objects as immediate constituents.

Rule 4: A process is a sequential change from one state of affairs to another.

Rule 5: A process is an aspect having other, related processes as immediate constituents. (A process divides into related sequential or parallel smaller processes.)

Rule 6: An event is a direct change from one state of affairs to another.

Rule 7: An event is an aspect having the two states before and after as constituents.

Rule 8: That a given aspect has a given relationship to another aspect is a state of affairs.

Rule 9: That a given aspect is of a given kind is a state of affairs.

Rule 10: That an object or process begins is an event and that it ends is a different event. That an object or process occurs (begins and ends) is a state of affairs having three states of affairs {before, during, after} as constituents.

Special Case I: The state of affairs that includes all other states states of affairs(i.e.the real world)

Special Case II: A type of object that has no constituents (an ultimate object or a basic building block)

Note: PNDP uses the term ‘the real world’ instead of ‘reality’. This is merely a linguistic difference, due to their having a different use for the term ‘reality’. PNDP uses ‘reality’ it in connection with boundary conditions for what actually happens, or for what I call ‘reality constraints’. The term ontics for the study of reality concepts is my invention. It is not a term used in PNDP and given some of what Ossorio has said about ontology, it may be a term that he would reject. See What There Is and The Way Things Are by Ossorio in Vol 7 of Advances.

Observable Aspects: In What Actually Happens Ossorio says that what we observe is our world. He also says that to observe something on a given occasion is to find out something about it without on that occasion having to find out something else first (observation contrasts with inference). In this sense, the aspects illustrated above are observable.

Types of Aspects: In order to organize our thinking we can classify aspects into various types. Types can be more or less comprehensive. Events and processes are extremely comprehensive types of aspects. The bicycle I ride in St Louis is my bicycle. So is the bicycle I ride in Jefferson County. The type ‘my bicycle’ is a narrow type of object. It is, included in the broader type bicycle, which is included in the broader type ‘objects with wheels’, etc. I find it useful to classify the types used to think about aspects as objects. Thus not only is the bicycle that I ride in St Louis an object, but the type bicycle is an object. It is not a physical object, altho objects of this type are physical. The type bicycle is not observable in the sense described by Ossorio, but any object of this type is observable. In general, types are imagined aspects rather than actual ones, and for the most part imagined aspects are not observable.

Imagined and Actual Aspects: Something is actual if it is directly involved in what actually happened. The walk W that I did not take last Monday is an imagined event in the sense that its place is in my imagination. Saying that my imagination involved thinking about W refers to an actual event. This event is directly connected to the choice I made to take a long walk last Tuesday. When talking about W to some others, I expect that they can also imagine W, and thus W will have a place in their imagination. It is convenient to think of public version of W, so that I can say we are thinking about the same event. I find the concept of a personally imagined event manifest. The concept of a public imagined event seems less manifest, but close enough to our ordinary experience to be used in a coherent fashion. After all, events in a novel can be reasonably discussed. While I feel like I understand both personal and public imagined aspects of a realm, I do have a problem with in compactly expressing what this entails. It seems misleading to merely say that reality includes imagined aspects without indicating the way in which they are included. However saying that reality includes imagined aspects need not involve any special existential commitment, such as having some shadow existence in some kind possible world. It merely means that we can think about such aspects. We may have difficulty expressing the way we have conceptualized imagined aspects, but this does not seem to prevent a coherent use of such terms in ordinary discourse.

Example: The highly public imagined physical-functional object called the Starship Enterprise belongs to a realm of interest for a number of persons, and the imagined aspects within this realm are not problematic in any significant sense. To omit them would render a great deal of what we think about to some unreal place or perhaps even to nonsense. However these are imagined rather than actual aspects. Types are also imagined aspects, but they differ from fictional ones in the way they relate to actual aspects. The type bicycle is directly related to a multitude of actual objects in a way that directly involves what happens to those objects. Fictional starships are not so related. To think of an object as a bicycle is useful for many purposes in dealing with it. Altho any set of aspects can be considered as a type, relationships in the world do not make all imaginable types equally useful. I could describe objects of type T as those belonging to the set {my bicycle, Mars, this book}. I would not expect T to be very useful.

Imagined Realms: A net is an imagined realm in the sense that it exists in the imagination of some person or persons, altho it is often used to think about actual realms. Moreover, that a person has some net is an actual state of affairs. Fiction also utilizes an elaborate imagined realm created by the author using concepts mainly from some of our public nets. Fiction is replete with statements that appear to be paraceptual, but are only conceptual. A reader must think from within this realm and allow that what is said is true because this is how the author conceptualized the realm. However the realm in which fiction is written and read is an actual realm, i.e. these activities actually happen. Readers make paraceptual judgments about a fictional realm, such as “The way this event happened seems implausible” or “The characters are poorly developed”.

Ontic Classes: Altho PNDP does not talk about ontics, its aspects are ontic classes. I also use other ontic classes that seem convenient. They indicate how I have chosen to think about reality, rather than beliefs I have about the nature of reality. They are mundane conceptual conveniences for ordinary thinking, and do not be have any deep meaning. Using an ontic class involves no existential commitments. There is a multitude of ontic classes that are useful for my purposes, such as communicating with individuals with a variety of existential commitments. Some of the main classes I use include the personal, the natural, the impersonal, the supernatural, the physical, the biological, the platonistic, etc. These can be conceptually related in various ways. The physical and biological are subclasses of the natural. I am classified as a physical system when I step on a scale, but as a person when I study concepts.

In PNDP, being a person is a personal state, while being a member of the Homo sapiens species is a biological state. Thus PNDP use the term ‘human’ for a classification that is both biological and personal. An entity that is both impersonal and supernatural is platonistic, a class I use primarily as a convenience for talking with people who think in terms of such entities. There seems to be no upper bound on the number of ontic distinctions persons may find useful. They include individuals, minds, logical principles, natural laws, abstract entities, etc. Some of these concepts seem imprecise and fluid in meaning, yet fairly easy to apply at times, at least for some purposes.

Appearance and Reality: A PNDP Maxim says that a person takes things as they seem, unless there is a reason to do otherwise. Some philosophers seem to focus on the ‘unless’. They feel a huge gap between appearance and reality. They have an iceberg concept of reality that assumes hidden inaccessible components more important than what can be known. My concept of reality is an ordinary maze-like one, altho it refers to a state of affairs having unlimited scope and complexity. To act, I act in a world that has reality constraints. So I must make contact with reality. The aspects of reality that interests me most often is appearance, for this is what I encounter. I may experience only small parts of a world, but I know these parts well enough for many purposes.

I like to think of the other as external reality and my will as internal reality. I classify my persona as an intermediate reality, partially because my persona is the only link I know between my will and the other. Furthermore I also shape my persona, but I am only a feeble point of will. My will uses my persona to influence the other, but the power the other shapes my persona and influences me. The distinction I make between will and persona is primarily perceptual. Conceptual study enables me to focus on it, but does not force it on me. I have had difficulty in communicating how I think about this distinction to others. I can describe my persona adequately enough for many purposes since he is deeply immersed in the other. He is a system of cells and organs. He is a system of beliefs, knowledge, ideas, feelings, wants, purposes, values.

The concept indicted by the word ‘will’ is not a precise abstraction. Yet this concept is the most crucial concept I use, as it pervades my experience. I do not know how to think coherently without some form of this concept. It is too broad to describe, but I can indicate one key feature. My will is what is left when I strip my persona away, a point rather than a composite, like the ideal point of geometry having no parts and no size. Perhaps such geometric points may have been conceptualized because of the experience of being a will.

Remote vs. Manifest: Something is manifest to a person P to the extent P can relate it to P’s ordinary experiences. It is remote to P to the extent that it is not manifest to P. To illustrate this, the pair of apples in my refrigerator is something I find highly manifest. A pair of apples is an imagined type that I find only slightly less manifest than a specific pair. I even find the type ‘two objects’ fairly manifest. The ordinary public concept of 2 when divorced from two of something is somewhat less manifest to me. The PNCM concept of 2 is related to the PNCM concept of the set of all natural numbers, a set far enough removed from my ordinary experience to seem somewhat remote to me, especially since this set is infinite. The set of real numbers as conceptualized in PNCM is an example of an object I think of as an extremely remote imagined object. Since it is cardinality is greater than that of the natural number, it includes more objects than there are finite names of objects. The way in which this and other remote imagined objects might be conceptualized as real but not platonistic is beyond the scope of this book.

CHAPTER 2 epIstemics

Epistemics vs. Epistemology: Traditional epistemology focuses on knowledge, and while it may classify know-how as knowledge, its focus is on propositional knowledge. This is too narrow for my purposes. Propositional knowledge without know-how does little to enhance effective living, and all types of knowledge are only a part of understanding. Since traditional epistemology also tries to answer questions about the nature of knowledge that are not purely conceptual, my interest in it is minimal. Instead, I am interested in shaping a net for understanding. Since this has some overlap with epistemology, I use the term epistemics for the purely conceptual study of understanding. Since the main task of epistemics is to help me think about various features of conceptual nets, the epistemics I use interacts with all my nets. It is crucial to the net I am proposing for conceptual philosophy since the core of epistemics is both a part this net and a tool for shaping it.

Academic epistemology asks about the nature of knowledge, often as a prelude to a theory of knowledge. I do not find a theory of knowledge useful. Most such theories consider verification or justification as the major problem, and they almost deify the idea of truth. They have an almost compulsive need to avoid false beliefs, and only allow knowledge that has been verified in some prescribed manner. Perhaps this is because their focus is on public rather than on personal knowledge.

P’s personal knowledge includes processes and information that P can effectively recognize or recall and use. The concept of public knowledge is more remote and will be developed later. Altho epistemics helps me think about public knowledge, it is more important for my purposes in this Chapter to use epistemics for thinking about personal knowledge. I feel little need to deliberately justify most of the knowledge I acquire. Much of it was acquired thru learning, and I trust my knowledge primarily because I trust my ability to learn. I expect my learning to be limited and fallible, and so some claims to know will be incorrect. I would prefer to make as few incorrect claims as possible, but many errors are too trivial to concern me. Altho at times using a prescribed methodology may be useful, mostly I expect errors to be eliminated thru feedback and further learning. The justification that I would give for any claims to know or understand ultimately rest on a claim of competence. Part of being a person involves the competence to find out about the world. This is a conceptual condition for being a person as indicated in the Maxim below.

Maxim A6: A person acquires knowledge of the world by observation and thought. (See Place).

Epistemic includes an examination of any concept involved in understanding. Epistemics is not intended to be a theory of knowledge or a theory of understanding. However, it does provide and organize concepts for thinking about knowledge and understanding. Moreover epistemics may also formulate conjectures about anything involving understanding. However epistemics is not limited to the study of such concepts. Epistemics also focuses on many features of cognitive competence and various personal abilities as described in the levels above knowledge in Bloom’s Taxonomy. While this taxonomy is incomplete, it at least takes account of the kind of cognitive abilities that persons exhibit over a broad range of human activities. Even at the knowledge level, it focuses on process knowledge as much as it focuses on informational knowledge. I conceptualize understanding to include all features of cognitive competence in this taxonomy, but even this is not broad enough for the epistemics I want.

Epistemics is only intended to provide a net to help me think about understanding. It cannot prescribe how I must understand, nor should it make any claims about the relationship between understanding and reality. That I can make my understanding realistic is an observational claim, a component of my origin claim. This claim is not a result of epistemics, but part of my basic reliable knowledge that I am a person. It is a prerequisite that has strongly influenced the epistemics that I am evolving.

Bottom-up Epistemics: I usually think of the more remote as a tentative extension of more manifest concepts. I understand most of the realms I encounter in terms of what I find most manifest, rather than in terms of remote concepts considered fundamental from some theoretic perspective. However I do use remote concepts to integrate my knowledge and broaden my understanding. The concept of the universities I have known does more to shape my university concept than this concept does to shape the concepts of specific universities. Yet the more general concept of a university helps me think from a broader perspective. In opting for a bottom-up epistemics I am not making a claim about the nature of understanding. I am only claiming that this approach to understanding is currently useful to me.

Believables & Worlds & Beliefs: P’s believables includes the information that P finds plausible enough to take account of when engaging in at least some type of action, including action that is merely verbal. Such information may or may not be correct. Believables, along with any aspect of the world that P is willing to act upon, is the actionable world for P. A world for P is any sub-world of P’s actionable world. A believable is a belief for P if P would claim that it is correct, altho on reflection P might be open to doubts. Altho P takes a belief as correct, it may have little impact on what P does. To the extent that a belief (or a believable) has an effect on what P does beyond merely verbalizing, it is said to be operational. A highly operational belief will have an effect on what P does in any situation in which the belief is relevant.

Information is often indicated by using a statement or series of statements. When a statement proposes information clearly enough for the purposes at hand it will be called a proposition

It is easy to see how a person can find contrary statements X and Y believable. Nor does his indicate that anything is anything wrong with either X or Y. For instance, consider any statement S that is taken as a reasonable conjecture. The negation of S would also be believable or S would not be called a conjecture. It is also easy to see how a person can believe contrary statements at two different times. This happens in many jury trials. It also possible to hold contrary beliefs at the same time, altho awareness of this can lead to cognitive dissonance. Holding contrary beliefs X an Y at the same time can also interfere with a person’s ability to engage in deliberate action, especially if both X and Y are highly operational.

Beliefs & Knowledge: To the extent that P’s beliefs are soundly based and correct, they are part of P’s actual knowledge about P’s worlds. I sometimes also use the term ‘knowledge’ for broader concept that could be designated as ‘alleged knowledge’. This concept of alleged knowledge does not demand correctness, as long as the reason for taking it as correct are soundly based. The term ‘knowledge’ will be used primarily for the concept of actual knowledge, unless context indicates otherwise. For instance, in talking about tentative knowledge or false knowledge it is the broader alleged knowledge concept that is being used. At times, the words ‘actual’ or ‘alleged’ to stress which concept is being used.

Example: Yesterday before taking a walk with Charmayne, I said that I knew X and Y below. Since I cannot even imagine that X was incorrect, even on reflection, I do not have the slightest inclination to say that my knowledge X was tentative. Since my belief in Y was reasonable and soundly based and turned out to be correct, it was actual knowledge. Since there was nothing tentative in my attitude towards Y, I did not even ask about it. However Y did come up incidentally when we were walking on the track in the community center commons. If I had been more reflective before talking with her then my knowledge of Y at that point would have been minimally tentative. I would have been amazed had she said that she would take an outside walk, but I would have been aware that perhaps I could have been mistaken about what she would be willing to do.

X: There is snow on the road. Y: She will not want to take an outside walk.

This example provided an additional perspective on one of the parameters used by PNDP in giving a behavior description, namely the know parameter. In describing my walking with Charmayne at the commons rather than outside, both X and Y could be given as value of this parameter. While X and Y were known by me, on reflection I realized that I could have been mistaken about Y. Had I been wrong about Y, my taking Y as correct would still be a factor in describing my behavior. In general, what a person actually knows and what a person takes as known can both be used as values for the know parameter. This distinction between actual knowledge and alleged knowledge is often irrelevant when indicating the K parameter in a behavior description. Of course, it could be relevant in describing the achievement parameter, since if something a person takes as known is incorrect, this might have an effect on the achievement.

Realm of Certainty: A person takes a great number of believables for granted. I take it for granted, that I can count to 100 in a reliable manner, that I have never been on Mars, that the computer I am using is not a mirage, that physical objects continue to exist when no one is observing these objects, etc. P’s total collection of such belief, whether explicit or implicit, is P’s realm of certainty. Elements in a P’s realm of certainty may be manifest and trivial. They may be remote and ubiquitous in scope. They may be anything between. This concept of a realm of certainty for a person can be extended in an obvious way to a realm of certainty for any community. It is what is common to most members’ realm of certainty.

Certainty is an attitude towards a believable. Attitudes can change. As a child, I did not have the realm of certainty that I now have. The realm of certainty for P evolves, altho for a normal adult in a stable environment it changes slowly. Altho the realm of certainty for a community can also change, for a viable cohesive community it will be extremely stable and will be included in the realms of certainty for its members.

Note: Altho the concept of a realm of certainty was suggested by Wittgenstein, due to a difference in our interests, I use different terminology. He uses ‘knowledge’ for information that needs to be validated. He uses ‘certainty’ for information that it would not make sense to validate.

Basic Reliable Knowledge: Basic reliable knowledge consists of the actual knowledge in P’s realm of certainty. This knowledge is a basis that P can rely on without question. The terminology is a reminder of the role such knowledge plays, i.e. the term ‘reliable’ is used to indicate the way a person uses such knowledge. Basic reliable knowledge is acquired by living. It emerges from the experience accumulated by operating within the world. It is grounded pragmatically by the experience that it can reasonably be relied upon.

P can challenge or consider challenges to parts of what P takes as basic reliable knowledge. P can look for ways to validate or ground these parts. For most purposes, there is no good reason to challenge or validate what one takes as basic reliable knowledge. Altho I could provide evidence beyond a reliance on memory that I had never been in Japan, I would need to have some unusual reasons to do so. I classify this as basic reliable knowledge, altho I might never need to rely on it. Much more useful is my basic reliable knowledge about the location of my house. This is so basic and so reliable that in dreams I am tremendously disturbed when it seems to be unreliable. When this happens, I may even realize that I am dreaming. Still I can imagine questioning this and providing additional evidence to validate it for anyone with doubts. One thing I cannot imagine doubting is that my location concept is meaningful enough to be useful. What would you think if someone claimed that all talk about location was meaningless? How would you make sense out of this claim? How would you validate your certainty that your concept of location was meaningful? Imaging talking with someone who replied that the concept of location is meaningless because spatial relationships do not exist.

Vital Knowledge: P’s vital knowledge is the basic reliable knowledge that P cannot seriously doubt and still make sense of being a person in the world. All of P’s other knowledge presupposes P’s vital knowledge (and usually some other certainties). For P to seriously challenge P’s vital knowledge, P must seriously challenge P’s ability to understand anything, to suppose that P’s crucial concepts are incoherent, to assume that P has the possibility of being completely incompetent. That P’s memory is at least somewhat reliable is vital knowledge for P. Even with amnesia, P could not function without the knowledge that the memories being accumulated will be somewhat reliable.

Knowing that I exist is vital, and I regard Descartes’ cogito not as an existence proof, but as a way to focus on recognizing that my knowledge of existing is vital. In a science fiction story, a character walks beyond a permissible point in a road and finds that the world suddenly ends in nothingness. He later discovers that he is a simulated person in a computer program that is still being written. Try to imagine being such a person. Consider “the brain in a vat” discussions that some philosophers find so interesting. Perhaps this is a way to bring some concept of vital knowledge into focus. I suspect not, because it is taken too seriously. Furthermore it seems to implicitly assume a physicalistic bias, for otherwise why not imagine being a thought in the mind of some metaphysical demon. Regardless, knowing that we exist and that our way of making sense of the world actually does make sense is vital knowledge.

Conceptual vs Paraceptual: The {conceptual, paraceptual} concept indicated earlier (and below) is one of the most basic concept pairs in my epistemics. The concept of paraceptual includes what is often called empirical, but I will use empirical in a narrower way that relates to verification. Specifically empirical information is paraceptual information that has been verified by careful systematic observation or study of some actual realm.

¨ Conceptual statements are about concepts and relationships between concepts in some net.

¨ Paraceptual statements presuppose some net and propose information about something that the net is intended to help access.

A conceptual statement can also be paraceptual if it is used to provide information about concepts in some net. The conceptual statement “A person is an individual with a history of deliberate action” is a conceptual statement that can be used a paraceptually to inform someone about how the person concept is used in Descriptive Psychology. However using this statement as a prelude to making a judgment about some behavior description, it would be a conceptual but not paraceptual. The difference is that in one case we are providing information about the net to someone who is not thinking from within the net. In the other case, we would be speaking from within that net to anyone who is also using that net, and this is usually the use of a conceptual statements.. In this book, I am thinking from within a net for conceptual philosophy, so I am using the bulleted statements above as purely conceptual. A reader who is not thinking from within this net may also read them as paraceptual, giving information about how I am using such concepts. In either case, the primary focus of these statements is on concepts.

Example: Gin Rummy provides a simple illustration of the conceptual-paraceptual distinction. To play this game you must understand concepts like suit, rank, value, suit color, same rank. The jack of clubs is a club with the rank Jack and with a value 10. A set is at least 3 cards of the same rank. Etc. Easy analysis reveals the conceptual fact that any set must contain at least one red card. This is true even if there were no decks of cards in the world and nobody played Gin. Conceptual analysis within a net for Gin cannot demonstrate that it is poor strategy to keep large cards too long. This is a paraceptual rather than a conceptual claim. It could be a conceptual claim in a more complex net involving probability, but even using such a net, the claim that this net is a good model for actual play against a particular opponent would be paraceptual. Using a conceptual claim always involve certain paraceptual believables, however doing conceptual philosophy involves keeping these as ordinary and manifest as possible, and only basic reliable knowledge should be crucial.

Mathematical Example: Let N be a net consisting intuitive number theory and a standard first order theory T whose intended interpretation is this intuitive number theory, along with mathematical logic excluding set theory. Since we can prove the consistency of T using set theory, the claim that T is consistent is conceptual in relation to PNCM. If our axiomatic version of set theory is a consistent partial formulation of our net for set theory and if this set theory is applicable to considerations about N then the conjecture that T is consistent is a correct paraceptual claim about N.

Comment: The {conceptual, paraceptual} concept pair was suggested by Kant’s {analytic, synthetic} concept pair, and even more by Quine’s paper The Two Dogmas of Empiricism. However I find the Kantian concepts unsuitable for my purposes, perhaps because even after reading Quine I am not sure whether being analytic or synthetic is an attribute of a statement or a relation between a statement and a net. Whether or not this is the case, I have decided that the Kantian terminology carries too much baggage, so I prefer to use terms that do not have this philosophical history. I need concepts that are relations rather than attributes. So I want to stress any claim is made using some net, and that to classify a claim as either conceptual or paraceptual one must know which net is being used.

Conceptual Study: Study is a type of intentional action in which P wants to enhance P’s understanding of some aspect of the world, and in which P’s performance is guided by that want. This concept differs from a widely used concept of study, since students are often said to be studying even when not so guided. Conceptual study (CS) is guided by a want to understand some portion of some net. Mature CS involves conceptual study of some realm that is a net. Since conceptual nets are crucial for so many feature of personal competence, mature CS is one of the main topics I recommend for epistemics.

Understanding: In saying that the purpose I envision for conceptual philosophy is to enhance our understanding, the concept of understanding I am using is crucial and extremely broad. Understanding can occur at a variety of levels. In teaching, we recognize that abilities, knowledge, values, attitudes, interests all affect learning. Altho I conceptualize understanding as cognitive, all powers and dispositions can affect understanding, and the non-cognitive components are often the key to the deepest type of understanding. Roy gives a correct derivation of the quadratic formula, but thinks of it as just one additional thing to remember. Kay is excited about the formula, realizing that completing the square solves all quadratic equations. Kay has a deeper understanding than Roy has.

Understanding Concepts: Understanding a concept usually involves understanding it in relation to other concepts within some net. Understanding tends to vary over time, so concepts and nets are dynamic rather than static. A person acquires an understanding of concepts by engaging in practices that provides experience in the using them in various ways. Much of this happens almost automatically by casually interacting with other people who use the concepts. A first time spectator may acquire the concept of a touchdown merely by watching a football game with some fans. Of course, an understanding of this and other football concepts may be acquired by asking questions, but asking questions is also a common social practice.

Conceptual study is one practice that focuses directly on understanding concepts. To help P study the PNCM function concept, P needs to be encouraged to correctly use this concept in a multitude of appropriate situations. To initially present this concept we might merely give the abstract definition of a function, and perhaps some examples. The most useful examples are those that illustrate the main features of the concept. We call any such an example a paradigm case. The presentation of concepts by definitions and by paradigm cases is discussed in Part 2. Parameters for concept mastery and the place concepts have in a person’s world are also formulated there. Amore recent formulation is given in the paper Concept Parameters.

Epistemics helps me think about two important features running thru all of my experience, namely cognitive competence and understanding. Cognitive competence involves the totality of emotional and intellectual resources P can use to represent and interact with whatever P confronts or imagines. Central to cognitive competence is the ability to learn, i.e. P’s skills in knowing, appreciating, comprehension, analyzing, synthesizing, judging etc. This can involve all of P’s characteristic. The concept of understanding involves a functional mastery of any result from the processes associated with cognitive competence.

Cognitive Competence: The term ‘cognitive competence’ is used in a broad sense, including both perceptual and intellectual competence. The most basic distinction is between conceptual and paraceptual competence. Conceptual competence involves knowing conventions, games, concepts, classification schemes, abstractions, principles, structures etc. It also involves skills like the ability to analyze and synthesize and evaluate. Paraceptual competence involves having information about various matters. It involves the ability to recognize the need for additional information and skill in obtaining such information. It involves understanding matters from both a remote and manifest perspective.

Altho conceptual abilities often lead to paraceptual knowledge, they can also be developed in isolation from the paraceptual. Most of my mathematical ability has developed in this manner. On the other hand, most paraceptual knowledge is dependent in some fashion on conceptual ability. Even immediate factual knowledge, such as knowing there are eggs in the refrigerator, would elude us if we did not know the concept of an egg. In order to develop my epistemics, I focus on the following tasks.

¨ Identify as many sources of learning as I can imagine.

¨ Give a systematic account of the various ways I use my concept of cognitive ability.

¨ Consider any methods I can imagine for testing the adequacy of my abilities.

Understanding is one of my most important crucial concepts. The various categories of knowledge and comprehensions indicated below are components of understanding. An extended taxonomy would include subcategories for each major category. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives would be a good place to start. See http://www.humboldt.edu/~tha1/bloomtax.html.

Knowledge: Knowledge is conceptualized broadly to include not only what is given in the knowledge level of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objective, but also in the levels above Bloom’s knowledge level. Thus knowledge includes the ability to use and make judgments about factual knowledge. It includes the mastery of and the competence to use concepts. Conceptual competence and linguistic abilities are included as knowledge. Various types of knowledge include propositional knowledge, informational knowledge, process knowledge, realm knowledge, relational understanding, operational understanding. These concepts are developed below. As usually having a concept make no ontological commitments, altho I find is highly plausible that all of these types of knowledge exist.

Propositional Knowledge: Information that can be expressed by statements that are clear enough for the purposes at hand is the least complex form of knowledge. It is the type I call propositional knowledge. It includes any correct information that P reasonably finds believable. It is operational if P is willing to use as a basis for some type of action. A major part of my most useful propositional knowledge includes basic reliable knowledge along with other closely related reliable knowledge. Another major part of my propositional knowledge is conceptual rather than paraceptual. I know terminology and language. I know conventions, concepts, classification schemes, abstractions, principles, theories, structures, etc. Much of this conceptual knowledge is intended to provide paraceptual knowledge, but the core of such knowledge is still conceptual.

A Broad Concept of Information: A vast amount of our information is not purely (or even primarily) linguistic. When P claims to know the way home from here, we do not normally demand that P must be able to formulate this information linguistically. In fact, much of the information P has is likely to be pictorial rather than purely verbal. Altho we could conceptualize information in a way that all information was propositional, usage like those just mentioned allows ‘information’ to be used more broadly. This includes information about states of affairs that are not essentially spatial. For instance, when I think about the proof of LaGrange’s Theorem the main thing I recall is a picture. A picture is also the main thing I recall when I think about a proof of the Quadratic Reciprocity Theorem. We also imagine time visually. We lay our life out as if it was a line, and thinking that I did X before Y often involves seeing myself at an earlier point on that line. I see myself living in Marissa before I lived in Glenville. I may formulate this as a proposition, but it is a part of my basic reliable knowledge that I recall it by seeing a variety of events in my life history. The event of falling from the pecan tree in Glenville is information I just recalled as an image and then formulated linguistically in order to communicate about it.

Informational Knowledge: P knows information X if X is soundly based and correct and if X is reliable and clear enough for P to act on X. Informational knowledge includes but goes beyond propositional knowledge. It includes information that P can act upon, even if P cannot formulate this linguistically. With this broader concept of knowing, knowledge may or may not involve the ability to use language. This also allows us to use the K parameter in giving a coherent intentional action description of animal behavior. Since there is considerable utility in this broader concept, I conceptualize informational knowing in terms of action capabilities. Of course, language plays an important role by bringing knowledge into focus, and especially by allowing us to reflect on and communicate about what we know.

Note: Altho informational knowledge has not been conceptualized as justified true belief, it bears some relationship to that well-known conceptualization. It involves belief not in the cognitive sense but in the active sense. I use the term ‘correct’ rather than ‘true’ only because true may have some extraneous connotations. I do not mention justification, partially because of my conceptual clarity concerns about this concept. Instead, I use a weaker related notion of being soundly based.

Example: Any propositional explanation of why I love somebody, may add to our knowlege of this state of affair, but the information I give will be incomplete In some basic manner.

Example: Many a basketball player will sometimes say that he knew the shot would go in the basket the moment the ball left his hand. This informational knowledge (when correct) may be expressed partially by a proposition, buts the proposition is only part of something he knows about the shot. Most of what he knows is more tactile, and any proposition about the feel is likely to be incomplete. Moreover if he gives more propositional knowledge about the feeling involved, the information he give is likely to raise more questions about what he feels than answers.

Example: Charmayne said that Caleb heard the vacuum cleaner in the other room and knew that it was Jennifer. Caleb was nine months old and clearly could not articulate this. It was by his reaction that Charmayne knew that Caleb knew, and she did not hesitate to say that he knew.

Example: While walking home and thinking about language and knowledge, I asked myself what knowledge I had about states of affairs that I had just encountered, but which were now behind me. Various things occurred to me, and I turned around to check. One very specific aspect that I recall was more than 5 U-haul rental trucks on my left. While formulating this linguistically, the essence of what I knew was not verbal. I examined this image in order to formulate it. Even the numerical content was recalled before I formulated it. I turned to count and saw 9 trucks, something I did not already know. Furthermore, altho my current account sounds like propositional knowledge, this is merely a way to bring it into focus. My recall involves a memory that seems to be sensory.

Process Knowledge: Process knowledge is the type of knowledge that is acquired thru practice and that helps an actor to implement various processes. The main component of process knowledge is the cognitive know-how that is normally acquired thru practice. Knowing a process means knowing how to do something, altho there may be reasons that a person cannot implement a process. Process knowledge includes only the cognitive features of P’s action capabilities, or the cognitive feature of P’s competence. Much of my process knowledge is more complex than informational knowledge, and altho it may involve information as a component it always includes more than mere information. It has perceptual and subceptual components. It is holistic rather than atomistic. I can use a lever in the process of moving a heavy object. This involves know-how as well as informational knowledge. Should I be unable to use a lever in this manner, this would be a limitation on my ability rather than on my process knowledge. I would still have a perspective on how I would implement this process. How I ride a bicycle is also process knowledge that is too complex to proposition.

Realm Knowledge: Realm knowledge is gestalt knowledge of a realm. Knowing a realm means being reasonably familiar with it. Realm knowledge is the knowledge of a realm that is obtained by living within that realm. It includes informational and process knowledge as components, but is much broader. P may have a high level of realm knowledge even if some of P’s information is incorrect. Realm knowledge cannot be reduced to a set of component parts. , altho attempts to do so may add to P’s realm knowledge. Statements like the following illustrate this kind of knowledge. “That reporter really knows city hall.” “She knows the fashion world.” “Gauss knew number theory.” Etc. Realm knowledge is necessary, but not sufficient, for operational understanding of a realm. Realm knowledge is the basis needed for powerful understanding of concepts for a realm. An important subcategory of realm knowledge is net knowledge.

Example: To illustrate that knowing a realm involves more than knowing information about the realm, I consider my knowledge of the geography of my neighborhood. This is realm knowledge that I cannot describe merely as a collection of information. It includes information such as there being a fire station two blocks from my house, but it also involves images of trees and buildings embedded in a larger map of the area. This knowledge is vast compared to any description or image of it. Some would argue that in principle knowledge of this realm could be reduced to items of information. I find this claim extremely vague. I have yet to encounter any usable total reduction of even simple realm knowledge. One of my uses for the concept of realm knowledge is illustrated in CPCS Historical Fiction and Realm Knowledge. Some comments by Paul Zeiger about the relationship between the concepts of competence and realm knowledge made me consider this relationship. Since he saw them as more closely related than I did, I wrote a paper on how they differ. This paper also provides an additional perspective on the concept of realm knowledge. See CPCS Competence and Realm Knowledge.

Knowledge Types: To add perspective on these types of knowledge, I give a sample of the kinds of things that I am willing to say I know. This sample, altho limited by being restricted to components of my knowledge that I can point to in a single phrase, is somewhat representative of my knowledge. To further clarify the concept of knowledge, imagine more complex and extended lists. From such lists we can abstract a tentative description, but this is only intended to point towards these lists and not to supersede them. Thus it is only a partial clarification of a broad concept of knowledge.

Informational Knowledge: force is mass times acceleration, the standard derivation of the quadratic formula is mathematically correct, the distance to the moon is about 400,000 km, most historians know that the Roman Empire existed, there are usually eggs in my refrigerator, I intend to make pancakes for breakfast this morning, the bowl I intend to mix my pancakes in is green, I could learn to program in Java, I do not know how to train our dogs, the law of the lever says….

Process Knowledge: to use Microsoft Word, to ride my bicycle, to ride a bicycle, to apply calculus to a variety of types of considerations, to thread a needle, to cultivate friendships, to make pumpkin pudding, to avoid guilt feelings, to recognize a mathematical proof, to apply the law of the lever…

Realm knowledge: the basket of fruit on the table, Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, the members of my family, elementary calculus, conceptual philosophy, the area around Barbin Hollow, when to do arithmetic, a route from my home to Washington University, my persona, derivation of the quadratic formula and the ideas motivating it, what a mathematical proof is, when to apply the law of the lever…

Remark: In giving such a list, I hope to emphasize the diversity of components to which I apply the concept of knowing. I also want to emphatically deny that I have any intent to use this concept in any special or restricted sense or purify it to represent a unified concept. I doubt that any list I could give would be entirely adequate to these purposes.

Relational Understanding: Relational understanding includes understanding relationships between concepts. It is essential to having well integrated concepts. Relational understanding also includes understanding relationships in various aspects of the world that are not purely conceptual, such as understanding the relationship between nutrition and health. Unlike propositional knowledge, which can often be expressed using simple propositions, relational understanding can vary from minimal to extremely sophisticated.

Operational Understanding: P has operational understanding of a realm to the extent that P understands P’s concepts and previously learned information well enough to apply them as needed in situations related to the realm, including situations not previously encountered. Operational understanding involves understanding the realm well enough to analyze and evaluate various situations. It also involves the ability to synthesize information about different states in the realm.

Purposes of Conceptual Study: A person P sometimes engages in CS in order to shape a net that will be useful, for ethical or prudential reasons. A net for understanding can help make CS more effective, both in acting for the good of others or in acting in ways that enhances P’s own wellbeing. In addition to prudential and ethical reasons for developing CS concepts, there can be both hedonic and esthetic reasons. P may enjoy such work and appreciate the elegance emerging from it. Mathematicians and descriptive psychologists engage extensively in mature CS. This may be part of a significant epistemic paradigm shift, which is spilling over to many other areas of study. Most other academic study mixes conceptual and other concerns so intimately that little effort has been made to isolate a pure net. Because of this, the distinction between concept and theory has often been hard to sort out. This both limits the sophistication of available nets and makes it difficult to study alternative ones.

My deepest reason for doing CS is a personal ideal, which I refer to my origin quest. Recall that this quest involves the creation of more supportive environments for persons who are enhancing their characteristics in ways that expand their competence and allow them more options. A significant factor in doing so would be a general public awareness of the distinction between conceptual and paraceptual claims. Many arguments about ordinary matters are said to hinge on semantic differences. In many of these cases, I think that the participants are bogged down in nets using a multitude of vague concepts that they lack the power to clarify. This is often complicated by strong emotional interests, so the participants behave as if winning was more important than negotiation. Where better to begin to become sensitive to the role of our concepts than thru some elementary CS.

Pure and Mixed Conceptual Study: Several types of systematic study differ from CS, by focusing on something other than nets. There are theoretic studies, experimental studies, applied studies, etc. While epistemics provides a perspective on all of these types of study, I make only a passing comment on them. In particular, I note that, while these types of activity may be done concurrently they are conceptually distinct, and may be done in a variety of mixtures, often with one as the primary type. We do mixed CS when this involves other types of study in a secondary way. Note that this classification refers to a type of activity rather than a subject matter. Thus one could be doing any combination of these activities in any realm of interest.

Version of a Realm: When P thinks about an aspect of some realm of interest that is not purely conceptual, P will normally use more than one net. P will also use paraceptual believables about various matters related to the realm. A version of the realm is the collection of all such believables. A version may focus on some fairly manifest believables about a particular aspect. It will also usually include believables that P assumes work fairly well in describing principles about how things work and what can be or happen in the realm. The realms for which a person has a version can vary from very narrow to very broad. A cosmic version is a unified way of thinking about the universe and the way that persons fit into the general scheme of things. This is the broadest type of version I can imagine. In decreasing order of breadth, I have my version of educational practices, my version of football, my firewood preparation version, my version of my potato peeler.

Example: To think about splitting the logs by my woodpile I use concepts from my firewood net such as {ax, maul, sledge hammer, wedge}. In thinking about how to split a particular log I also use my current firewood preparation version. This version includes principles and how to apply them to a specific log. This is an oak log cut from a tree that has been down for 2 years. It has a single small knot. My firewood version suggests that I should be able to split a section from such a log if I hit it with my ax about 2 inches from the edge opposite the knot. It also suggests that by continuing around each way toward the knot, I should be able to reduce this log sections that are easy to split, except a section containing the knot. This part could then be spilt using wedges and a sledgehammer. While I need my firewood net to think about this process, I need more that a net. I would never come up with this plan without a paraceptual version of a firewood preparation realm.

Observation: Much of contemporary philosophy talks as if all observation could be reduced to sense data about the physical feature of aspects of some realm. However ordinary observational language is more functional than sensory. It is hard for me to imagine many situations when it would be useful to try to reduce such observations to sense data, and I suspect that given a pure sense data description for almost any ordinary observation, I would probably not be able to recognize what was being observed. This is why I conceptualize observation as basically a personal process, as something a person does as they think about their environment primarily from a functional perspective. Noting that her car is going faster than his is an observation. The concept of a car is functional rather than sensory, altho sensory input clearly helps us recognize an object as being a car. To the extent that sense data is relevant to some personal interest, they are part of the observation.

Example: A statement like ‘The chair is broken’ is functional, because the ordinary concepts of chair and broken are functional rather than sensory. This does not mean that something that functions as a chair can be realized by something that is not a physical object. It merely means that we classify something as a broken chair because we cannot sit on it rather than by any exact set of its physical characteristics. Of course, it may be the observation of some features of these characteristics that led us to recognize that the chair was broken. Still the focus of this observation is functional.

Observational Knowledge and Basic Reliable Knowledge: Since I have decided for some time to focus my life on the expansion of my options, I need a net that can help me think about origin activity. Because of the way I articulate my knowledge, even highly observational knowledge is dependent on this net. Furthermore the net I use may expand or contract my observational power. However observational knowledge always goes beyond any net. Repeated experiences lead me to regard some of my observational claims as correct and I treat the results of these observations as basic reliable knowledge. Analysis that appears to be incompatible with basic reliable knowledge forces me to question the coherence of my nets. Except on the rare occasions, when it helps me achieve some insight which expands my knowledge, the only effect such analysis has on such knowledge is to change the way I talk or think about it. Since knowing that I can act as an origin arises from repeated functional observations, no amount of analysis prevents me from thinking and acting as an origin. I can err in judging this in particular situations, but then I also err in making other observations. My powers of observation are fallible, for they are rooted in my ability to interpret my experience. To live, I must trust that my ability to observe is adequate for many purposes. My experience of originship is deeply personal and repeatedly reinforced. Knowing that I can act as an origin is one of the most significant components of my vital knowledge. The only way I can effectively doubt this is by losing confidence in my cognitive competence. It is only self-doubt and apathy that prevents me from thinking and acting as an origin.

Analogies: I know that things can move. This is vital knowledge whose core remains unchanged by Zeno’s Paradoxes or any other form of analysis. Such analysis may motivate me to alter or refine the concepts for thinking about space and time, or it may convince me that the language I use to discuss such matters is fuzzy, but it is not going to convince me not to avoid speeding automobiles. Only my occasional indifference to my fate might make me slow to avoid such a collision.

Unusual Features of My Epistemics: All of these features are a matter of choice related to utility in regards to purposes, rather than a claim about the way things are.

¨ The concepts of truth and knowledge are given a reduced role, with a stronger role for utility and competence. This gives less emphasis on propositional knowledge, which is considered merely as a special case of informational knowledge.

¨ I do not try to reduce either process knowledge or realm knowledge to propositional knowledge or even to informational knowledge.

¨ All types of knowledge are considered as components of understanding, but understanding is not limited to what would be classified as one of these types of knowledge. What this entails is developed in Part 1 of this book.

¨ I place a greater emphasis on personal knowledge than on public knowledge.

¨ Emphasis is conceptual rather than linguistic.

¨ The personal is taken as more basic than the impersonal, and ordinary knowledge is taken as more basic than scientific knowledge. As a result the person concept is more fundamental than more general ontic or epistemic concepts.

¨ Observation is conceptualized as much broader than sensory.

¨ Claims are usually considered as more or less plausible, rather than true or false. Plausibility is considered as a changeable personal relation to claims rather than as an attribute of claims.

A Weakness in My Epistemics: Thru formal education I acquired an attitude that places a greater emphasis on knowledge than on other features of understanding. Altho I consider this a major weakness, I still focus on knowledge, if for no other reason than to clear out some of the debris from my previous epistemological conditioning. Furthermore, knowledge seems like the simplest feature of understanding to discuss, so I can partially excuse this emphasis by saying it is a prelude to understanding the more significant features of epistemics. Knowing is a highly personal process which provides me with knowledge, but what I take as my personal knowledge has always been a mixture of true and false components. Thru thinking and experiencing I try to expand and refine my knowledge. I trust my knowledge because I have found that it is often adequate for many of my purposes. Such a living trust is more important to me than any theoretic certification. Thus when asked ‘How do you know?’ I am likely to give a descriptive rather than a normative answer.

Internal Groundings: The greatest barrier in constructing my epistemics is my desire for an external grounding for my understanding of aspects of the world. This desire is fading, but I still feel its demands. It arises from needs that made my persona highly susceptible to that portion of his educational conditioning involving philosophy of science. When I reflect on how long it took to relax my demands for a grounding of my knowledge that was independent of me, I am amused. The only other grounding I once thought I was willing to trust was some rationalistic notion of pure reason, which I naively thought I could recognize without reliance on my own subjective judgment. I recall a dialogue from Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which Joan is being accused of pride and of not heeding the advice of those who are wiser than she is. Her response expresses my attitude about the grounding of my knowledge.

With what other judgment can I judge, but with my own?

I now distrust of my previous attitude that my knowledge could be safely grounded outside of me. It is partially grounded inter-subjectively, but I have no direct access to the knowledge of others. The knowledge I have is my own knowledge, and in spite of its apparent inter-subjective grounding, I must still judge to what extent this knowledge is similar to the knowledge of someone else. Both my interpretation and decision to integrate elements from public knowledge into my own cognitive resources is ultimately grounded in me. This is even true of my mathematical knowledge. I am willing to make fairly strong claims about the extent to which my personal mathematical knowledge is similar the knowledge of other mathematicians, but even this is a matter of my personal judgment.

I was conditioned to think of public scientific knowledge as objective and independent of personal grounding. Yet I know that such knowledge has evolved thru personal effort and that it is ultimately rooted in personal judgment. Its objectivity is probably due to the type of personal grounding rather than the lack of it, namely because it is repeatedly tested thru feedback in a variety of relevant situations. Interpretation of such feedback still relies on personal judgments. Furthermore my own scientific knowledge is only a feeble shadow of public scientific knowledge, and it is only this personal scientific knowledge that I can effectively use. I can hardly regard the objectivity of such knowledge as independent of me. Much of my knowledge has been acquired in the pursuit of my own purposes. Almost none of my paraceptual knowledge has been acquired with scientific detachment. It has been influenced by my attitudes and feelings. I no longer feel that this is makes it unreliable. My concern is how to judge it as trustworthy, not how it was acquired or what motivates it. I feel I must trust my most basic purposes, not naively, but only after careful testing by a process that I cannot fully describe and obviously can never ground with any finality.

The crucial concepts that I point towards with the terms ‘thinking’ and ‘experiencing’ are fairly broad. I use both terms in an ordinary pluralistic sense. While I might attempt to analytically conceptualize certain kinds of thinking or experiencing, I have yet to find analytic concepts that come close to the richness of these subconcepts. In particular I am unwilling to conceptualize thinking as some version of a scientific method, and I am unwilling to conceptualize experience as some concoction of sense data. The terms thinking and experience point towards features of my existence that I find immediate and pervasive. The terms ‘scientific method’ and ‘sense data’ represent more remote abstraction that I have been unable to make as precise as others seem to find them.

??CHAPTER 3 ENACTICS

A Net For Doing: When I told John Pais that I did not have a term for a net for doing, he coined the word ‘enactics’, because doing could also be referred to as engaging in action. Enactics provides the perspective that helps understand and integrate actions. Because I use enactics in a feedback relationship with everything I do, it is the most important strand of the net I need for conceptual philosophy. My use and study, and my creation of enactics, is one component in the major quest that has often been at the center of my life, namely my origin quest. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. This places the emphasis on understanding. To place the emphasis clearly on doing, we might use the epigram below.

The unlived life is not worth examining.

The basic crucial concept in my enactics is doing. The kind of doing on which I usually focus is behavior. The concept of behavior is broad, including everything P does with intent. Behavior is the kind of doing that can be described using a behavior description. Behavior is intentional action, even when P is not aware of these intentions. It does not include things done automatically like ordinary breathing, nor does it include things done accidentally like falling out of a tree. To further develop the concept of behavior I note that it is intertwined with concepts similar to those that PNDP calls behavior perspectives and behavior roles. However my purpose for these concepts relates directly to my origin quest, so my organization and use of these differs somewhat from PNDP. I only briefly summarize the concepts like those from PNDP, since they are well developed in PBW. I also introduce the basic subconcepts of enactics that are then developed in Part 3.

Behavior Roles: There are 3 major roles {actor, observer, critic} that an individual may take on in relation to behavior and aspects of the world. The Actor’s job is to do something that he has one or more reasons to do, and in this he is spontaneous and creative, responding to and acting on aspects of his wold that he finds relevant. The Observer’s job is to note what is happening and what is relevant to this. The observer may also describe this, in which case we may call the observer a describer. The Critic’s first job is to appraise how things are going and how this relates to future courses of action. If things seem satisfactory in that regard then the critic takes no present action, except perhaps to think about how to do even better in the future. If anything seems unsatisfactory then the critic prescribes corrective action.

Note: As used above the term ‘actor’ designates a role. Since being an actor is a primary role, this term will also be used to designate the individual playing that role. Thus a person engage in an action will often be called the actor.

The Concept of a Person: As indicated in Chapter 0, a person is an actor with a noteworthy history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. Recall that deliberate action is behavior in which the actor knows two or more actions. Furthermore the individual has varying degrees of wants in relation to these actions. This concept also includes having the competence to engage in the various options and to distinguish between them. The concept of deliberate action is essential in all strands of conceptual philosophy because of its relation to the crucial person concept. However the concept of deliberate action plays its most significant role in enactics. A further mastery of the person concept and the concept of deliberate action involves the behavior descriptions concept introduced in Chapter 0. It also involves the behavioral characteristics concept. These will be developed in this chapter.

Behavior Descriptions: Recall the PNDP behavior description concept uses eight parameters.

Identity (I), Wanting (W), Knowledge (K), Know-how (KH),
Performance (P), Achievement (A), Characteristics (C), Significance (S)

Action: Behavior can include either a single action or a sequence of actions. Either will be called an action. In fact, the distinction between what we think of as single action and a sequence of actions is a matter of perspective. For instance, I may think about cutting down a tree as a single action or as a sequence of actions. The sequence might include obtaining the tools, taking them to the tree, looking for obstructions, notching the tree, sawing the tree, testing to see if it was ready to fall, etc.

Characteristics: PNDP organizes characteristics into three categories, each of which includes several types. Because of my interest in concept construction and various epistemic concepts, I use the modification below of the power category with Understandings where PNDP uses Knowledge and I also add beliefs.

Dispositions: {Traits, Attitudes, Interests, Styles}

Powers: {Abilities, Understandings, Beliefs, Values}

Derivatives: {Embodiment, Capacities, States}

For the purposes of this book an ordinary understanding most of the characteristic concepts should be adequate. However both understanding and value concepts will be developed in detail. See Section 2 of Chapter 1 of Part 3 for value concepts. For a more refined understanding of the other characteristics see PBW or Concept Dictionary-Encyclopedia.

Illustration 1: It is Jill’s turn in a game of Gin Rummy. The face up card would improve her hand, but the card on top of the deck might be even more useful. For an illustrative purpose, we give a description in which the parameters are simple. Each could be expanded if we had reasons to give a more elaborate description. The I-parameter in our description is Jill. The W-parameter is her desire to improve her hand. By saying that Jill knows (K) that she is playing Gin Rummy and that this involves an option, we make this a deliberate action description. The K-parameter also includes knowing what is in her current hand and which cards that would improve this hand. The KH-parameter includes knowing how to count the points she would be caught with if her opponent goes down or gins. She takes the card from the deck, the P-parameter. Since the card drawn is useless, the A-parameter is the negative achievement of failing to enhance the hand to the extent the face up card would have done. One value of the S-parameter is that Jill is trying to win the game. One noteworthy instance of the C-parameter is Jill’s risk taking attitude while playing games. To see why this might be used as part of the behavior description, consider a person with the same values for the other parameters, but who usually avoids risks. For such a person taking the card that is face down would involve a different value of the C-parameter. Perhaps that person was in a state of frustration that overcame the aversion to risk taking.

??Illustration 2: This is an abbreviated description by me as observer of Charmayne studying the intentional action concept with me. More could be given for each parameter. The C-parameter could mention a large cluster of dispositions and powers. The one mentioned indicates that her study episode differs from, since my interest is more conceptual. The I‑parameter is Charmayne. W is hoping to understand of this concept. K is her knowing the distinctions suggested by the parameters, and knowing that ordinary concepts are not as precise as those being used in PNDP. KH is her knowing how to ask questions relating abstract concepts relate to specific examples. P is reading PBW, followed by a discussion of these concepts. A is obtaining an initial understanding of the intentional action concept, as illustrated by her ability to use it to discussing a variety of situations. C is her deep practical interest in understanding more about why people often persist in behavior they know is not in their own best interest. S is having an interesting experience that we can share.

Illustration 3: This illustration focuses on the course of action X of me cutting down a dead tree one afternoon. I am also the observer giving the description. This course of action is more involved than the act of drawing a card, and may thus add some additional perspective. I first indicate the primary values I used for the parameters, i.e. those not associated with what else is being done as indicated in the significance parameter.

The I-parameter is me. W is wanting the tree down. K is knowing that I could safely delay taking this tree down, knowing that it is dead and thus there could be a danger from falling limbs, knowing the relation between notching the tree and where it is likely to fall, knowing that there was an obstacle blocking the fall, etc. KH is knowing how to use tools, knowing where to cut with the saw once the tree was notched with the ax, etc. P is getting my tools at 2pm, cutting a notch with the ax and then using the saw on the opposite side to cut slightly above the bottom of the notch. A is the tree coming down where I wanted it to fall. C is my dislike of chain saws, the value I place on staying physically active, my habit of engaging in physical activity in the afternoon, etc. S is enhancing a resources ® making firewood easier to obtain ® potentially saving money on his fuel bill ® potentially having more security, getting exercise, preventing a hazard.

The first two items in C-parameter add an important perspective on what I did. This attitude and this value account for the fact that I used an ax and a crosscut saw and the timing of X.

Above, I indicated one significance chain that can be described as follows. In doing X, I am obtaining a usable firewood resource. Having this resource will make it easier to obtain more firewood. One reason for wanting this is that it could later save money on my fuel bill. Saving money would provide some extra security. This significance chain is part of the S-parameter for describing X. In doing X, I am also getting exercise and I am removing a potential hazard to the road. These parts of the S-parameter are not in that chain. Each value given in the S-parameter indicates what else I was doing in doing X. Thus we can think of the values of this parameter as intentional actions and use one or more of the parameters to bring them into focus. These values are included in the extended parameters for X. Values for the extended identity and performance parameters are the same as the primary ones for X.

Action X₁ is preventing a road hazard. The values for W₁ and A₁ should be apparent. K₁ includes knowing if this tree falls then it likely to fall across the road. C₁ includes the value I place on the safety and convenience of others.

X₂ is making firewood easier to obtain. A₁ includes achieving this, altho not to the degree I expected because I have not yet processed it and it is beginning to rot. K₂ includes a knowing that once a tree is down it can be converted into firewood in small stages. C₂ includes my more positive attitude toward processing firewood than to taking down dead trees.

X₃ is obtaining more security. A₁ includes the small increase in security due to having a fallen dead tree, but since I did not process it, this increase was not as large as expected. K₃ includes a comprehension the relationship between financial resources and security. C₃ includes my trait of frugality.

Terminology: Ossorio calls the characteristic parameter for behavior the person characteristic parameter. For the sake of brevity, I often use the term ‘characteristic’ instead of ‘person characteristics’. Another reason I use the term ‘characteristic’ is because the behavior concept in PNDP is not restricted to persons. When applied to non-persons we could refer to their person characteristics using this is a merely technical sense an ignoring any connotations of the word ‘person’. I see no good reason to do this and prefer terminology that carries a broader connotation. This does not prevent using ‘person characteristic’ to emphasize characteristics when the behavior is by a person and especially when it involves deliberate action.

Natural and Paranatural Activity: Natural activity is any activity that is physical or biological in the sense that it seems to be describable using either physical or biological concepts, whether ordinary or scientific. Paranatural activity is activity that does not lend itself to such a description and for which it makes sense to inquire about the significance what is being done has for the actor. The motion of the planets is an example of natural activity. So is the action of genetic material. The activity of creating an amendment to the constitution is paranatural. In fact, the vast majority of human activity is paranatural. Classifying an activity as paranatural does not entail thinking of it as unnatural nor as transcending causality. Such activity may very well be related to natural activity or it may be activity determined by circumstances and characteristics. My paranatural activity of teaching earned money that relates to my natural activity of eating, and for part of this activity I did not even consider options. More on these concepts, along with the related concept of supernatural activity, is presented in CPCP Supernatural and Paranatural and Natural.

Note: After formulating what I call paranatural activity, I noticed that it is essentially what PNDP calls symbolic behavior. See Behavior of Persons Pages 199-21) for a more detailed analysis, which discusses three cases of such behavior. Some brief excerpts are given below.

Case I - Human Behavior as Essentially Symbolic

From a common sense standpoint, human behavior is whatever, in particular, it is. Thus, we drive to the supermarket and buy food, we engage in trade, attend schools, go skiing, hold down jobs, raise families, watch TV, and, in general, participate in the social practices and institutions of the culture. Since we do what there is to do, there is nothing inherently problematic about human behavior or about the fact that human behavior is different from phenomena that are other than human behavior.

Case II -Conventional Gesture, Burlesque, Ritual, Affirmation, etc.

This range of symbolic behavior is perhaps best introduced by examples. Baptizing, saluting, breaking bread together, thumbing one’s nose, and voting the straight Liberal ticket provide a reasonably representative set. A person, P, performs the baptismal rite by sprinkling holy water on the recipient; P expresses respect and recognition by saluting; P expresses defiance by thumbing P’s nose; P expresses solidarity with Q by breaking bread together with Q; P affirms Liberal values by voting the straight Party ticket. And so on.

In examining such cases, we find that they are clear-cut cases of the significance/implementation relationships. The contrast with Case I is simply that in the former case the implementation was a performance whereas in Case II the implementation is a behavior (which itself has a performance aspect).

Case III - Symbolic Behavior as Substitution

The major difference between Case II and Case III is that in the latter instance a “substitution” formulation is plausible. Some examples include executing bearers of ill tidings, the Old World decor of a restaurant, washing one’s hands repeatedly after some transgression, and, of course, the case of the worker who is angry at his employer after a reprimand and comes home and kicks his dog.

Paranatural activity also includes most of the activity discussed in detail by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book entitled Flow. See book for this for an excellent account of both the concept of flow and its utility, and in particular of the relationship of flow to human wellbeing and happiness.

Transcendent Acts Revisited: Paranatural action relates to another action concept, one transcending causality and chance. I do not know to what extent most paranatural activity involves transcendent components, but if transcendent actions occur then they conceptually must take place in the realm of paranatural activity. It is the feeling that we engage in deliberate transcendent action that makes the concept of paranatural activity significant. However not all paranatural activity need be transcendent, such as the part that does not even consider options. To be transcendent, an action must not only involve options, it must involve what William James calls live options. A live option is not merely one we can imagine. It is an option that we might be likely to imagine and seriously consider selecting. To add more perspective on the transcendent action concept, we can contrast it with what I will call inertial action. Roughly speaking an inertial act for a person P is one in which P just goes with the flow. By this I mean that inertial actions just emerge from P’s circumstances and personal states and P’s other characteristics at the time. Transcendent action is action that transcends what would have happened if inertial action had occurred. It has an important achievement parameter. Something resulted that would not have resulted had P just gone with the flow. For a determinist, all human action would be inertial, since only what we did could have been done in those circumstances and with our characteristics. However, it is difficult for even a hard-core determinist to actually feel as if everything he did was predetermined. Otherwise, why does he ever feel that he should have tried harder to convince others to become determinist? His attitude towards behavior often differs from his beliefs about what was done. PNDP conceptualized ‘what is real for P’ as what P is willing to take account of when P is engaged in action. Most determinists claim that determinism is true, but they usually do not treat it as real.

I am interested in the extent our deliberate acts are transcendent. To recognize your own instances of deliberate action, merely ask whether at the time you knew of alternatives. However this does not conceptually entail that the alternative selected was not predetermined. For instance, faced with two alternatives you might flip a coin. The resulting action would seem to depend on chance, unless the result of the flip was predetermined. In either case your act would not be transcendent, altho your decision to flip a coin may have been. In general, you may be unsure which instances of your deliberate acts are transcendent. It is even harder to judge if another person has engaged in a transcendent act. Even with careful examination, it is possible to imagine how an action that appears to have been transcendent may have been inertial.

There is no conceptual reason that deliberate action cannot be inertial rather than transcendent, since we can imagine that P knows alternatives but is too passive to select any one other than what just emerged. This could also be the case even when there is an alternative that P recognizes as a live option. Choosing one other than the one that just emerged may have only been possible by being proactive. To engage in transcendent action P must engage in action that is not merely inertial, but which also involves live options. Transcendent action transcends P’s persona. This may entail taking extra initiative, attending more to creation than to maintenance; and most of all being guided by purposes and motives that P has deliberately ratified. Moreover altho knowing live options is not sufficient, transcendent action always involves having live options.

Example: When I awoke, I folded the covers and put them in the chest. I did the part of my stretching exercises that I do on my bed. I stripped the sheets from my bed and put them in the washing machine. This is only a sample of many mundane things I did in the hour before I started writing. After writing for a while, I ate an egg and cheese sandwich. Why did I do the things that I did? For some, but not with others, I was aware of live options. I considered leaving my sheets on for another day, but once removed I did not consider an alternative to washing them. How did I decide to remove the sheets? Was the action merely inertial? Perhaps, since I removed them because I was leaving for a week, and I might have forgotten to do them when I returned. Once removed, why did I not even think about an option to washing them? On reflection, I could easily imagine other alternatives, but I suspect this was merely inertial, merely a matter of habit. It is simple to give superficial reasons for what I do. I ate because I was hungry, but I often do not eat when hungry. Writing before eating is a habit, cultivated for reasons tedious to explain. What I ate after writing involved a prior thought about alternatives. I might have even changed my mind when I was ready to eat. Given any reason for behavior, it is possible to question this reason at a deeper level. Since the sheets did not look dirty, why wash them. I knew that they had not been washed for over a week, and I felt that I should have washed them before today. Why? It is good to have clean sheets. Etc. To the extent that doing involves live options, it is easy to question why we do what we do. The reasons we give relate to our paradigms. My health paradigm is involved in washing my sheets, my stretching exercises, what I eat, etc. Answers to why I do these things can only make sense to those who can understand a similar paradigm. For anyone who cannot think about a connection between stretching and flexible muscles, my reasons for these exercises would make no sense. However to the extent they do understand my characteristics, it would be easy to see how they might regard everything I did in this action episode as inertial. I cannot even be sure that any transcendent components were involved, altho I feel that there were. I even find it at least somewhat plausible that all deliberate action episodes have transcendent components, altho I have reservations about this because some deliberate acts seem to be inertial even when the alternatives a person knows are live options.

Example: One morning, while thinking about transcendent action, I considered making the first major activity of my day the creation of a minor net to help me think about classical physics. I also considered editing a conceptual paper, working in the garden, taking a bicycle ride, moving rocks in the creek, just lying around indefinitely. Since I could have found reasons for making other choices, my choice to lie around was clearly a deliberate act. It may not have been a transcendent act. Since I was feeling negative, perhaps my actions were just inertial. If it had been raining, I might have walked down to look at the creek and then spent several hours moving rocks. Again, this would have involved deliberate acts, but altho the achievement would have involved changing the water flow, perhaps none of these acts would have been transcendent. Given my condition that morning, it is just what would have happened had it been raining and I had gone with the flow. On the other hand, working on physics net seemed like a live option, but not one that I could choose without transcending my reluctance to be proactive. Moreover had I chosen to be proactive, I would have probably been more strongly pushed towards editing, since I had recently been working on a paper. Someday I may choose to work on a net for physics. The choice may be transcendent, but perhaps not. If anyone was strongly interested in seeing what I might create, this might supply the push that would get me started, and then inertia might favor continuing to work on it. As usual, it is possible to see how any episode of action can be thought of as inertial. What is hard to do is adopt attitude a totally deterministic attitude, but then why should we?

Pascal’s Wager: Using a version of Pascal’s wager, if all action is inertial, we have nothing to loose in adopting a transcendent attitude. After all, our adoption of this attitude would have been merely inertial. On the other hand, if transcendent action occurs, it would seem useful to act as if it occurs.

Personal Causation: The essence of the concept of personal causation is simple. Personal causation is the phenomena of persons effecting situations they encounter thru intentional action, even when the action is not deliberate. For instance, I may swat a mosquito as an intentional act, even if I do not consider any options. We often try to obtain or prevent results of various kinds, and to the extent we are effective, what happens is partially a result of personal causation. It is the {P, A, S} parameters are likely to be emphasized in a behavior description that focuses on personal causation. The concept of personal causation is developed in detail in Part 3. I then relate this to the concept of a transcendent action.

Behavior Perspectives: In addition to behavior description, various types of behavior perspectives can be used to further understand personal causation episodes by a person P. PNDP uses four types of behavior perspective, namely {hedonic, prudential, ethical, esthetic}. The esthetic is then subdivided into {conventional, artistic, intellectual}. I prefer thinking of six types, {hedonic, prudential, ethical, conventional, intellectual, esthetic}, using the term ‘esthetic’ in a more limited manner. Since these other concepts correspond closely to ordinary usage, I will not elaborate on them here. For details see Chapter 5 of PBW.

There are four behavior perspective pairs that are conceptually orthogonal to these six perspectives. They are {intrinsic, instrumental}, {public, personal}, {routine, idealistic}, {temporal, spiritual}. Altho conceptually independent, there are relational tendencies. For instance, taking a prudential perspective often involves taking an instrumental perspective, especially for a person who is not habitually prudential.

An action X is instrumental to the extent that it is done with some further end in mind. To take an instrumental perspective on X is to consider X as a way of doing something else. X is intrinsic to the extent that any further end is not considered by the actor. Altho taking an intrinsic perspective on an action is to think of it as done for its own sake, Of course, it may result in something else. My perspective on splitting logs can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. I may split a log because it is available and just waiting to be split. I may also split it to have firewood to burn. Often both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons apply to my splitting a log, with intrinsic reasons usually being more pronounced. On the other hand, when I ride my bicycle, this is mostly an instrumental activity. It takes me somewhere and it provides exercise. However, for some people, cycling is primarily an intrinsic activity.

P’s actions can be considered both from a public and from a personal perspective. P is taking a personal perspective to the extent that P is considering P’s own interests. P is taking a public perspective to the extent P is acting in order to relate to others or to affect the interests of others. Suppose I am splitting logs alone and intend to use them to reduce the amount of electricity needed to heat my cabin. If I am doing this because I want to save money on my electric bill then I am taking a personal perspective. If I am doing this to decrease the profits going to the electric company then I am taking a public perspective. Of course, I could be taking both a personal and a public perspective.

For P to take an idealistic perspective on X is for P to think of X in terms of its effect on P’s ideal or on some of P’s other fundamental values. To take a routine perspective is to ignore such considerations, altho what P does may have an effect on them. In using a bicycle for transportation I am usually taking a routine perspective, being concerned primarily with getting exercise and saving money. On some occasions I am taking an idealistic perspective, being concerned with global effects of oil dependency. The concept of an idealistic perspective is based on the concept of an ideal. As indicated earlier, an ideal is a personal state of affairs. It is a special kind of value. It consists primarily of a vision P has for shaping the world.

A perspective is spiritual to the extent that it relates to something beyond our mundane wants that wax and wane in relation to our immediate circumstances and current characteristics. It is temporal to the extent that these relate to something that is time dependent, and especially to a strong call for immediate action. These concepts are developed in CPCS Spiritual Life.

Communities: Much of human behavior occurs within some community or is at least is related to the world of some community. A community is a set of members who share some world and whose members consider having a place in the community. The world for a community may be a single limited one (such as the specialized community of billiard players), or it may be a more comprehensive world that includes various sub-worlds. A PNDP community description uses some or all of the seven parameters below to characterize a community and differentiate it from other communities. Below is a simplified account of these parameters. For more see Anthony Putnam, Communities in Advances Vol1

{members, statuses, concepts, locutions, social practices, choice principles, world}

To be a member of a community normally is to identify oneself as a member and to be recognizable as such by other members. The distinction between members and non-members will also normally be recognizable to non-members. Furthermore, this distinction behaviorally significant, i.e. members will be treated in some manners differently than outsiders. Membership may be awarded by a formal ceremony, such as an initiation in which an individual becomes a member of sorority. It may be recognized with specific criteria but without ceremony, such as being a member of the community of a bridge club. Both recognition and criteria may casual, as when an individual is merely recognized as belonging to the community of football fans.

Having a status is to have a certain set of relationships. P’s statuses refer to P’s place in some world in the broadest possible senses imaginable. An eligibility for X is being able to play certain role. Statuses determine what P is eligible to do within the community. For a community the most basic status is membership, however in number of other statuses will be available in any community. They may be explicitly recognized, such starting point guard for the Boston Celtics. A status may be more casual, such a person you can rely upon in a crunch.

To engage in deliberate action a person must be able to make conceptual distinctions. The concepts of a community are those that are essential for meaningful participation in its practices, and especially in its core practices. These concepts may or may not be recognized by non-members, and when recognized by non-members they may not be understood in the way they are understood by non-members. Members share these concepts in being able to act upon them in a similar manner. For instance, the community of boy scouts uses the concept of an Eagle Scout, and furthermore this concept is understood in terms of its merit badge requirements. An outsider may also be able to use this concept, but many will use it more vaguely and few outsiders to the scouting community will know the requirements.

The locutions of a community may include the language spoken, such as English or French. More important, they include the ways in which it is spoken and the concepts and conceptual distinctions this indicates. This involves the use of jargon and locutions that are intertwined with the social practices of the community. The distinction between locutions of members of a community and non-members can vary from being minor subtle to being highly pronounced. For pilots and bridge players the term ‘ace’ represents different concepts, but members of each community, as well as outsider to both communities, can normally understand the essence of the difference. Of course, an insider would use this term with greater sophistication. The community of mathematicians uses the terms ‘ring’ and ‘field’ in ways that have no apparent relation to their use in ordinary language. In fact the meaning use of these terms would be difficult to even explain to most non-mathematicians. However a mathematician who did not know English could easily acquire full use of these locutions, having similar locution in her own language.

A community is especially distinguished by the things members do as members of the community and the way in which they do these things. These are the social practice of the community, and the point of being a member is to be eligible to engage in these practices. There are optional social practices, in the sense that a member can be in good standing without engaging in the practice. There are also core social practices, i.e. those that a member must engage in to be considered a member of the community. For instance, planting wheat might be an optional social practice in a farming community. However planting some crop would be a core social practice, since a person who never planted a crop would not be considered a farmer.

The actions of members as they engage in its social practices are guided by choice principle. Choice principles include any of ways a community accepts the justification of the behavior of its members. For instance, a member may appeal to custom or principles. Choice principles are often expressed in the form of value statements, norms, policies, slogans, etc. They are often illustrated in stories or myths.

A world for a person P is a large interrelated set of such elements that P is willing to consider when acting. P will have a multitude of such worlds. For instance, P might have world W of cycling. That P’s bicycle tire has a nail would be a state of affairs W. P’s tire and tire gauge are objects in W. Having the tire go flat is an event in W. Repairing a flat tire is a process in W. There are other persons who have similar worlds. A cohesive set of such individuals sharing a common world forms a community of cyclists. In general, members of a community share some world. This means they react to this world by manifesting dispositions that are similar in a multitude of ways, that they make distinctions in a common manner, and that they share social practice and choice principles.

Causation: Since it is the desire to act more effectively that confronts me with a need for conceptual philosophy, enactics is the most important part of this net. I feel that I can influence my actions, but that they are strongly influenced by factors other than me. To focus on this I use a concept of causation. This concept relates to how we describe states. It can be used with or without any beliefs about the way in which the world functions. People routinely think of an event called an effect as happening at least partially because of some earlier events called causes for this later event.

Example: We might say that the bridge over the creek collapsed because a supporting timber had been weakened. If asked why it collapsed when it did rather that immediately after it had been weakened, we might add that Jim was pushing a heavy load across it. Combining these we can picture our causal account as the simple chain w ® h ® c; where these are the events of bridge weakening, heavy load, collapse. Of course, any causal account could be expanded, and we might give a more elaborate account if there were further concerns. When asked how the bridge had been weakened, Lou said that it had rained and that increasing water flow had smashed a large tree into that timber. We now have a longer chain for describing why the bridge collapsed. Note that these arrows only indicate priority in time, and altho most of these are considered as causal. However the arrow between w and h should not be, since having been weakened did not cause the heavy load.

r ® i ® s ® w ® h ® c; using r for the rain, i for increases flow, s for smashing into

Using a heavier arrow for causal connections, we picture the
causal relation in this account as a directed graph.

We could add an account why it rained that day, but this is unlikely to serve the purposes of our account. We might also try to account for why Jim pushed a heavy load onto the bridge, altho we are more likely to talk about his reasons or motives than about causes. Clearly we would not think of w as relevant to what he did. On the other hand, had he known of w then this very likely would have influenced what he did. It would add some minor perspective to our account if we said that Jim was pushing a heavy load because he wanted to avoid making two trips. This at least helps account for why the bridge collapsed at that time rather than later. Altho his avoidance attitude may have influenced his behavior, we are more likely to consider it as a reason for what he did than to say that it was a cause of what he did. In general, in ordinary discourse involving human behavior, we seldom think of the behavior as primarily an effect of some prior event. However we do think of prior events as having some influence on human behavior. Whether or not we consider such events as causes, we use them as somewhat cause-like factors in accounting for what a person does. Note that ‘cause’ is a root of the word ‘because’, which we often use in accounting for human behavior.

I use an arrow also for this type of causal relevance. I use the letter ‘a’ for his
attitude. This gives an expanded picture for a causal account of the bridge collapsing.

We also often refer certain concurrent states of affairs as causes. For instance, we might have said that the collapse was due to a weak timber. Likewise we might have referred to the heavy load on the bridge as a state of affairs concurrent with its collapse. However it was some event (or sequence of events) that weakened the timber and some event that resulted in the heavy load being on the bridge. For simplicity of expression, we will talk only in terms of events, even when an event might have been better indicated as a state of affairs or some sequence of events.

Simple Causal Accounts: A simple causal account of an event always presupposes some version of some realm in which the event happens and in which some other events have happened. For events involving persons, it is useful to consider events of the two types of causation indicted earlier. This does not preclude other types of events. As a model for representing some events that are being considered as being causally related to an event e, we use a set R of relevant events. The letters P and I represent those elements of R that are personal and impersonal events respectively. R is the disjoint union of I and P. The symbol < is called causal priority. It denotes a partial ordering relation of being prior in a sense that is relevant to thinking about what happened. When < is followed by an element of I the element preceding < is thought of as a cause. When < is followed by an element of P the element preceding < is thought of as at least relevant in accounting for that element of P.

The use of a more complex model distinguishing causes from other types of influence is considered in CPCS Causal Accounts.

Any finite subspace D of [E,<] with e as maximal in D qualifies as a simple causal account for e. This does not mean that D is a useful (or even reasonable) causal account for e. Giving a useful account depends on a person’s purpose for the account and the person’s competence. We can picture D using nodes for elements of R and arrows for causal priority. Nodes marked by a ‘p’ are elements of P, i.e. they represent events that consist of some person acting as a personal cause. Nodes marked by an ‘i’ represent impersonal causation events. If n₁ and n₂ are also adjacent and n₂ is an element of I then we call them an immediate cause-effect pair. A graph without branches is called a chain. All these concepts are relative in the sense that they relate to some account. We can give different causal accounts for different purposes. An immediate cause-effect pair in one account might not be one in a more detailed account. In the example below nodes are named, with subscripts in order to provide a way to identify them.

Example: E is the partially ordered set representing all events that I can imagine as being causally prior to the event e of a large tree limb broke my front fence some years ago.

Causal Chain G₁: To give a fairly simple causal account D₁ = {p₁, i₁, i₂, e} of this event, I focus three preceding events {p₁, i₁, i₂}. I sawed off the limb. The limb fell. It landed on my fence.

G₁: p₁ è i₁ è i₂ è e

Causal Chain G₂: An expanded causal account D₂ involves three more events. p₂is tying a rope near the end of the limb I was going to saw. p₃ is tying this rope to a limb higher in the tree. i₃ is the higher limb broke. The chain G₂ below indicated that altho the immediate cause of the fence breaking was the impact of the limb, this impact was not merely due to the limb falling, but to the fact that the intended support failed. Altho the first arrow does not indicate that indicate causality in the usual sense, it does indicate relevance. I would not have tied the rope to the higher limb if I had not first tied it to the limb I was going to saw. In fact, the relevance is not that simple. Altho tying the rope to the lower limb came first, it was influenced by my decision to tie it to the higher one. This decision and all my prior planning are ignored in this account. Likewise my planning and all of this tying also had relevance to my sawing the limb.

G₂: p₂ è p₃ è p₁ è i₁ è i₃ è i₂ è e

Causal Graph G₃: Often we discuss the cause of an event as if all the relevant events could be adequately described as a chain. While this can be useful, it is simplistic. I accounted for the support failure by the falling of the limb, but later discovered that someone had partially sawed the higher limb. This is indicated by p₄ in the graph below. I also denote my decision to take the limb down at that afternoon as p₀. The nodes not subscripted indicate a number of unspecified relevant events that I might give if I wanted to actually formulate this more detailed account.

Causation as a Crucial Concept: That causation concepts are crucial for any person is a conceptual proposition rather than a paraceptual claim about persons. Try to imagine being a person without the ability to act as if events could be causally connected. Intentional action would still be possible, as with an infant searching for its mother’s breast. Likewise we can answer the phone without even implicitly using the concept of causation. What we cannot do is deliberately answer the phone without this concept. To even consider the option of letting the answering machine take a call means that we expect this option to have a different outcome. Otherwise on what basis would we select one option over the other? Moreover we need a concept of personal causation to even consider that what we does can make a difference, and we need the concept of impersonal causation to consciously think that the answering machine will take the call. In general, having a history of deliberate action is conceptually impossible without being able to think that what is to be done has some influence on what happens. Without a concept of personal causation, we have no basis for deciding between options. Without a concept of impersonal causation, we have no reason to think that what we do will have any effect that is not immediate. Of course, it is the concepts, rather than locutions, that are needed. Without these causation concepts having a dramaturgical pattern of deliberate action cannot be understood.

PART 1
MY PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
ON CONCEPTUAL PHILOSOPHY

This part does not introduce any additional concepts that are used in Parts 2 and 3.

It can be read after these other parts or skipped entirely.

It is included because this book emerged as a personal tool serving a personal purpose.

Chapter 0 is especially personal and may seem
even more irrelevant than the other chapters.

Chapter 0 was written in 1974 and minimally revised in later editions.

Since then some of my attitudes have shifted,
but I have only edited this chapter for trivialities.

However my uncertainty about the effect of biological death
still mutes my satisfaction with life.

Chapter 0: Introduction and Cosmic Images

Chapter 1: Towards a Pluralistic Ontics

Chapter 2: Towards a Pluralistic Epistemics

Chapter 3: My Personal Use for Enactics

CHAPTER 0 INTRODUCTION AND COSMIC IMAGES

Cosmic images and Cosmic Versions: A cosmic image is a somewhat vague way of looking at the nature and origin of the universe and the way that persons fit into the general scheme of things. A cosmic version is also is a way of looking at the nature and origin of the universe and the way that persons fit into the general scheme of things. However it more unified and usually more detailed than a cosmic image. I am puzzled by the fact that most of the people I know and the authors I have read seem to have so little trouble in finding a plausible cosmic version that they do not consider vague. Do most people have an implicit preeminent substantive cosmic version? By substantive, I mean having a commitment to what there really is, as contrasted to a functional conceptual net for thinking about the way things seem to work. By preeminent I mean that while other versions might be acknowledged, no other version is a live option.

For many years, I have had no preeminent substantive cosmic version, no unified highly plausible way of looking at things. All I have are some functional cosmic images, all of which are vague, and any attempt on my part to bring them into a sharper focus runs into the limitations of my ability to obtain a satisfactory intuitive grasp of anything of cosmic scope. While the vagueness of my cosmic images makes knowledge relevant to them difficult to obtain, in principle this should not prevent me from obtaining some such knowledge. The major barrier is that my cosmic images are remote from most of my ordinary experience, with no almost direct feedback enabling me to test them. Furthermore the vast amount of indirect evidence I encounter seems to point strongly in incompatible directions. I have such a limited understanding of what I am, so how can I have a cosmic version?

The Problem: Because I do not know whether I may be able to survive my biological death, I tend to slip into a grim attitude toward my life, to regard it as a struggle in which I am extremely competent, but in which all the joy or satisfaction that arises from anything I do is muted. This is not literally true, but it states the essence of my attitude. My strategy for living in this grim fashion has been to accept it as inevitable, and then to develop the strength to endure and create. I told my persona that I must live this way because of my decision to experiment with originship, and because I do not know how to escape this quest. I told him that this quest is more important than being secure or happy, and that this quest makes this grim attitude necessary. I know this is not so. I know that I should be able to cultivate a balanced and reasonable attitude, to expect a balance between satisfaction and disappointment, between pain and joy. My origin quest should not involve an unbalanced attitude toward living. This attitude is rooted in a multitude of experiences thru which I have learned to live as if some worst-case scenario was almost inevitable. This is an inappropriate attitude, sapping my will to exist and contrary to my ideal of effective living.

I often feel that my lack of a preeminent substantive comic version tends to give me this grim attitude towards my existence, but perhaps it is because my life has been influenced too strongly by cosmic images that make various nightmare views of the universe feel too plausible. I have examined my attitudes towards these and several more positive cosmic images. I have tried to give them plausibility rankings from a neutral point of view. The nightmare views do not do as well in this ranking. Thus my attitude is totally at odds with this neutral ranking. While my grim attitude toward life and my cosmic nightmares grew together and reinforced each other, my basic experience is with ordinary living, so this is the main source of these linked attitudes. My cosmic nightmares are remote from most of my experience, with no direct feedback enabling me to test them. This makes them resistant to change. However they were learned, largely thru early cultural conditioning, and my emotional attitudes towards them were learned in conjunction with ordinary experiences.

My cosmic images come under two main headings, monotheistic and Natural Evolutionary Images. Both headings contain images that vary from extremely negative to very positive. I discuss those that have had a significant emotional impact on my life, in particular various monotheistic and natural evolutionary images. While there are other theistic and other non-theistic images, as well as some that fall under neither of these headings, I do not feel that these others have had much of an impact on me. For example, I do not consider any pantheistic images or animistic images. For more detail about how cosmic images might be expanded to cosmic versions, see CPCP Cosmic Versions.

Monotheistic Images: The dominant factor for this universe is a personal god, a god who engages in deliberate action. Both my worst nightmare and my most hopeful one are under this heading.

¨ God is harsh and judgmental. He has predestined most persons to eternal damnation. I am predestined to damnation, not because I deserve this, but because I cannot worship (or even like) a god who would allow anyone to be eternally damned. (harsh theism)

¨ God created the particular universe in which we live, altho he plays no continuing role in human affairs. He merely created the universe in such a way that persons would emerge and have the potential to shape and create their own destiny in this universe. However life in this universe can be a process in which a person may be able to shape a will capable of surviving beyond this universe. (deism)

¨ God is still creating the universe in which we live, but with other persons as junior partners in this task. God is supportive and loving. God plays a continuing role in human affairs, but does so primarily by acting as a source of spiritual power for persons. Ultimately, all persons who so choose will spend eternity with God, and for those who find the thought of eternity too dreadful, God will be merciful. (positive theism)

Natural Evolutionary Images: Before any human like species evolved, the physical universe was completely impersonal. The emergence of humans introduced a personal paranatural element. A subjectively conscience forward looking intelligence emerged as a major survival trait in human evolution. With this there occurred an unbounded capacity for imagination. This opened the possibility of hopes and fears of vast scope. It also made persons interdependent and vulnerable.

¨ To exist is to have a natural physical basis. Altho humans are paranatural, being a product of physical laws that lead to evolutionary natural selection, each person’s existence terminates with physical death. (physicalism or pure naturalism)

¨ Humans are paranatural persons resulting as an accidental product of evolutionary natural selection. We vary in terms of our ability to take a highly developed future orientation and in the extent to which this affects our daily existence. Many who have such an orientation are doomed to a grim existence, because capacity for fear ultimately outstrips capacity for courage. By accident I am one of those. Since I am paranatural, I may even survive physical death, and live on via reincarnation or in some other realm, without help from some higher spiritual power and without the courage to effectively confront these fears. (grim naturalism)

¨ Humans are paranatural persons resulting as a product of evolutionary natural selection, and this emergence is not merely accidental. Instead persons are the cutting edge of reality within this universe. We are the source of transcendent action, and with love and courage and wisdom, persons have an unlimited potential. Since we are paranatural, some of us may survive our physical death, bringing with us the useful person characteristics attained in this world. (hopeful naturalism)

Impact of These Images: The suspicion that God is harsh and judgmental in a traditional protestant fashion plagued me somewhat since I was about 15 year old. I recall reading Jefferson’s comment to the effect that if ever a man worshipped a demon it was Calvin. I found it easy to reject this on an intellectual level, and often I have felt that I was emotionally liberated from this image. By age 19 I thought I had replaced it by the positive deistic image. In 1975 I was convinced that altho I would never find a cosmic image to believe, at least traditional protestant theology was too implausible to ever return to haunt me. However it returned in force in 1989. Since then, I have not been able to totally purge my persona of its emotional plausibility. Assuming theism, the main evidence for many traditional forms of theism is the vast amount of personal suffering, which often seems a prelude to pathology rather than a prelude to growth.

My main problem with any positive theistic image is the problem of Evil. This is less of a problem with the deistic image than with the personal theistic one. The main reason I could not hold onto deism was that its only support was 18^th century rationalism. There is no strong cultural tradition supporting deism, and by its very nature there cannot be much personal experience supporting it. On the other hand, harsh theism has a long traditional support in our culture and has a potential to be supported by personal experience. However the few things in my personal experience making this alternative only barely plausible are more than countered by my emotional reaction to the problem of evil, especially natural evil. I cannot feel that any account of evil as resulting mostly from deliberate human action is plausible. I especially find a Calvinistic account of evil (as the result of rebellion against God) highly implausible. My concept of rebellion involves deliberate action against an acknowledged authority. My own personal experience of human evil is that it results more from the lack of will than the exercise of will. Also humans spend so much of their life in a state of vulnerability, so even when evil results from deliberate action; this seems to be rooted in fears that humans do not have much ability to control.

From 1952 to 1964 my deistic image was highly motivating. However I was also emotionally influenced by physicalism and harsh theism, and I never adopted any image as a cosmic version. From 1965 to 1974 these other images began taking their toll. Physicalism pulled me towards indifference, while harsh theism pulled me towards despair. During this time the emotional power of my deistic image slowly disintegrated. The power of deism came primarily from my exposure to the intellectual traditions beginning in the 18th century as a reaction against harsh forms of monotheism. However one of my reactions against harsh forms of monotheism was to be emotionally pulled towards a type of physicalism pervading academic philosophy that looked on any form of theism or supernaturalism as pure superstition.

In 1975 I decided I was paranatural, and that this knowledge was too directly a part of my experience to deny, especially based on a lot of abstract theorizing rooted in a need for some kind of deterministic certainty and conceptual closure. I decided that both physicalism and harsh theism were too contrary to my personal experience to be plausible. In particular I decided that harsh theism had plausibility primarily because I felt vulnerable and I had been raised in a tradition that felt an underlying need to placate a higher power. I also felt that there was no form of physicalism that I could even partially understand, since the versions I was expected to accept seemed dogmatic and vague. Moreover none of the other substantive cosmic versions I had studied seemed even moderately plausible. I decided to trust my own competence, integrating paranaturalism as into evolutionary images. From 1975 to 1989, it was hopeful paranaturalism that had a tendency to dominate my attitudes, altho I remained somewhat open to both deism and personal theism.

Since grim paranaturalism was a live option both intellectually and emotionally, and because of my phobias towards hospitals, its plausibility had a tendency to grow. March 10, 1989 I crushed a vertebra in my back. My initial reaction to the CAT scan in the hospital totally undermined my cutting-edge attitude, and the grim paranaturalism became emotionally preeminent. The third day in the hospital I experienced an intense sense of peace and joy. Suddenly I became emotionally open to the personal theism again. During all of 1989 I remained emotionally open to this image at least some of the time each day. However, this began to fade. By July I had again become susceptible to harsh theism and grim naturalism. Which one of these was preeminent depended on the level of despair that I was feeling, or perhaps it determined this level. During this time I tried, without success to replace my Calvinistic fears with a positive monotheistic image, much like the one used by most Quakers. I have a partial, but highly positive concept of a personal God. I wanted the emotional barriers to a hope for such a God to fade, and I want small positive experiences that might make the reality of such a God seem plausible to me.

CHAPTER 1 TOWARDS A PLURALisTIC ontics

Preliminary Remark: This section is intended to add perspective on my ontic concepts and on why a net for reality concepts is important to me. The only significant concept introduced is the concept of a cosmic image.

Ontics Rather than Ontology: Quine’s statement below, of the fundamental ontological question seems to be typical of western philosophy, altho his rhetorical attitude towards this question may not be typical.

Question: What Exists? Answer: Everything Exists.

In order to refocus my own emphasis, I would like to pose on a slightly different rhetorical question.

Question: What Happens? Answer: Every Event Happens.

With a pluralistic concept of things, including elements from all PNDP reality categories, my question and Quine’s may be related to the same set of queries. However I want my ontics to focus on the concepts I find most useful for thinking about reality. Altho I was conditioned to focus more on the existence of objects, my formulation focuses on the existence of events. Furthermore, instead of taking “what exists” as the fundamental ontic question, I ask about the kind of things am I willing to classify as existing and the schemes of existential classification that are useful. I also focus on processes and relationships, rather than just on objects. Conceptually, to be an object may require a world to be in, but more important it requires a world to participate in. A process is a related sequence of events, so I chose my most basic type of things to be events rather than objects. I focus on reality as a state with the ability to produce events, a dynamic state creating further component states. Thus reality is an evolving set of capacities for events, rather than as a kind of set whose main elements are objects. What I take as the most significant things in the world are it events, rather than its objects. Without the ability of the planets to act according to the laws of physics, I would not be able to think of them as planets. The epigrams below indicate some of my ontic attitudes.

Anything that does nothing can be conceptualized as nothing.

I can imagine a universe of events without objects, but not a universe of objects without action.

It could be useful to think of the universe as an evolving system of abilities,
but this is difficult so we try so substitute a less powerful conceptualization in terms of objects.

Newtonian mechanics pretends that objects are primary.
Quantum theory pretends that events are primary.

Mathematical Analogy: As a fanciful analogy for the first epigram, sets in ZF (the Zermelo-Fraenkel version of set theory) have the ability to use the ‘is a member of'’ relation. Only the empty set has no members, so all others sets have a job to do, namely to hold members. The empty set also has an important job to do. ZF uses it as a member of some very important sets. It is a member of every other ordinal. If ZF did not conceptualize the empty set so it could be a member of other sets, it would not exist in ZF. ZF does not even allow the class of all sets to exist, however a set theory with classes saves this class from nothingness by allowing it to have members, altho it cannot be a member.

Why a Primitive Ontics: The most submerged strands in my crucial net are its reality concepts. They are also the most naive and least systematic. Developing a powerful ontics would involve looking at existential statements, grouping them, abstracting reality concepts from them in a systematic way. I have not done this, so my ontics is loose and primitive. However, this is all I need for most purposes. Thinking about ontics does not present me with any apparent serious conceptual problems, except when I focus on my experience of persons as causal origins. I could not adequately think about this from my earlier ontic perspective.

The reality concepts I now use are more helpful, but this part of my crucial net is still primitive. Altho ontics makes no paraceptual ontological claims, I care about specific existential matters. I care about the existence or non-existence of specific types of things such as black holes, undecidable sentences in formal theories, mental telepathy, life on other planets, etc. I do not expect ontics to decide about the existence of anything specific, but I do except it to allow me to think about various possibilities. I make daily decisions about what things I am willing to consider as existing or as having existed. These are ordinary rather than philosophical decisions, often rooted in my basic reliable knowledge. They are made thru living, feeling, thinking, etc. The pencil I used earlier, the federal government, calculus, democracy, me, my crucial net, a plane crash I read about, infinite sets, red, molecules are all real. Currently trillionaires do not exist, but they might exist in the future. Goblins, giant insects, humans from Mars do not exist and I find it implausible that they ever will. Five sided squares cannot exist because this is conceptually impossible.

All the above existential statements are highly plausible to me in the context in which I imagined them. These and other existential propositions form a prelude to ontics. The purpose of ontics is to provide a broad enough perspective for thinking about existential propositions, while remaining neutral to the question of what exists. To do this, a pluralist finds it useful to have a variety of ontic distinctions. I use the category of spatial-temporal existence, but it is ordinary paraceptual knowing tell me that this category is not empty. My decision to utilize such a category is motivated by basic reliable knowledge about entities I want to think about as sharing a mode of existence that I can think about in this way. I also use the category of supernatural existence, but it is my ordinary knowledge that leads me to suspect that this category may be empty, or perhaps only contain humans. I want to stress again that ontics does not judge questions of existence and non-existence. I have absolutely no trust in the process of arguing things in or out of existence thru conceptual or linguistic analysis.

Ontics is a strand of conceptual philosophy, and so is conceptual rather than paraceptual. It suggests the kind of information I might find useful, but it cannot provide this information. Nor can it interpret or process the information I already have. This is a task for ordinary reasoning. The purpose of this section is to focus on some the features of ontics that I find useful in thinking about personal causation. In fact, my study of conceptual philosophy has been motivated primarily by my interest in personal causation and deliberate action

Pluralism: Reality appears to me as an interrelated plurality. I choose to emphasize the diversity of existence rather than its unity. This is a choice about how to think, not a claim about the nature of reality. By being pluralistic, I set up a feedback relation between what I say about reality and the way I think about existence. This provides me with a variety of existential distinctions. My pluralism is rooted in my purposes, and my objection to monism and dualism is that I find them vague and impoverished. I find it more useful to let ontic distinctions emerge as a matter of convenience. I use words like ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ in an open-ended fashion, because these words carry no extraordinary connotations for me. I have little inclination to use Occam’s razor on ontic types, except when they become excessive enough to obscure my perspective. I prefer an ontics that is a bit cluttered to one so meager that I must edit the way I talk or think.

Are all biological laws reducible to laws of physics? My response to this is indicative of my pluralistic attitude towards ontic categories. Altho it useful to consider living things as physical systems. Since most biological concepts have not been conceptualized in terms of concepts from physics, it seems strange to me to regard living things primarily as complex physical systems. To do so I would have to expand my concept of physics and its laws far beyond the concepts and laws currently understood to be included in physics. Are we moving towards a conceptualization of physics in which such biological concepts could be conceptualized? I doubt it, but even if we could formally model these concepts in a net for physics, I suspect that we would still be using an intuitive net that is not purely physicalistic. As an analogy, while we can formally model number theory in set theory, to do so one must have and retain an intuitive net for number theory.

Personal Existence: Descartes needed to prove his existence. I find this strange. He wanted a logical proof of a paraceptual claim. I like his insight, but only because it focuses on the fact that he found his knowledge of his own existence to be vital. Instead, I assert my existence and competence as vital knowledge, rather than as philosophical knowledge that needs to be derived or justified. As a person, I am a will to deliberate action. I act, therefore I am; and I need no ontology to account for my existence. I experience me. I interpret this experience. This helps me understand what I am and what I strive to become. Not only is my knowing that I exist vital, my concept of me is crucial. Deliberate action and being a person is a prelude to ontics. I experience me as part of something that includes both the other and me. So another crucial ontic concept is that of reality, the state that includes all states. I use reality as equivalent to whatever exists or whatever has existed. The words ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ merely provide grammatically different ways to point at a crucial concept too broad and too deeply submerged to isolate. The concepts indicated by ‘me’ and ‘reality’ are evolving subconcepts that I understand thru continual usage and contemplation.

Ontic Images: Images are intended to point to significant features of a net that too vague to be stated via propositions. They point to intuitive features of a net. Images can enhance our understanding of a net, if they are recognized as such. I prefer not to be encumbered by remote beliefs, so I use images that suggest rather than propose. Their main purpose is to accelerate my liberation from a predominant image of rationality. However I intend to retain my expectation that reality is not completely resistant to my attempts to understand via systematic thought. This attitude has been deeply reinforced by my experience. My image of rationality and this attitude evolved together and became interdependent. It can survive the loss of my belief that rationality was somehow immutable and binding. One major reason for imaginative speculation is to enable me to break these links by suggesting alternate conjectures for the pragmatic value of systematic thought. There is another component in my liberation from the image of rationality, one that I find difficult to articulate. It involves shifting my attitude so that I can largely view rationality as rising from within myself, rather than smiling on me from without. This shift has not been easy and I may fall back into attitudes rooted in previous subconcepts, but when this happens, my thinking tends to disintegrate. I cannot retreat to these older subconcepts, yet I have not learned to totally trust the newer ones. In this struggle, my greatest allies have been Michael Polanyi and William James. I especially appreciate the essay James wrote entitled The Sentiment of Rationality, and in particular, when he says:

As soon as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational. Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency produces the sentiment of rationality.

Image of Rationality: My previous image of rationality emerged from a way of thinking in which the existence of the supernatural was unquestioned. As a child, I did not even know that it was possible to think about the universe without a transcendent God who had created it and established its purpose. It was easy to believe that rational principles existed when I believed there was a mind to contain them. A mind, perfect and outside of nature, seemed like an adequate container for the type of rationality I wanted. That fact that my belief in rationality outlasted my belief in God may be a residual effect of the greater conceptual need I felt for a transcendent rationality than the conceptual need I felt for God. Having an image of rationality allowed me a vision of unlimited intellectual adventure and conquest, while at the same time providing what seemed like a safe base. It meshed with some of my strongest temperamental traits. Temperamentally, I work best when venturing from a secure and familiar retreat. I have always been interested in new ideas, but I have always had a deep desire to link them to a stable core.

This image considered reality as a complex rational state of affairs. It assumed that there were immutable principles of rationality, binding upon reality but existing independently, known thru reason, and expressible in a sufficiently precise language. These beliefs had a major impact on my life, but the net expressing them disintegrated. Altho they still have a residual effect, they seem too vague to be regarded as propositions. I now refer to them as an image of rationality. An image of rationality once served my needs. I mention it to recall that it once provided major strands holding my total net together. Why was I comfortable with this image? How was it useful to me? How did it fail me? To glimpse answers may help me in forging new images with more power for my purposes. One such glimpse is my concept of mathematical states. I conceptualize a mathematical state as any actual state that provides a basis for the utility of PNCM. This suggests concept of a rational state. To what extent does rational thought have a basis in some state beyond the human community? While I would find ontics highly suspect if it seemed to answer this, I would find it inadequate if it provided no perspective for thinking about it. Reality does not present itself to us as a total chaos, and we can use our reasoning in ways that help us achieve our purposes. Suppose we decided to take this at face value and imagine the world as being a complex state that contains rational sub-states that can be conceptually modeled. I conceptualize a rational state as any actual state that provides a basis for the utility of our net for reasoning. We might encounter these states, both in our own experience and indirectly thru our cultural and genetic inheritance. This influences our personal and cultural nets for reasoning. My image of rationality now imagines a vague conceptual universe that is purely a rational structure. The extent to which this is useful varies with my purposes.

An Image of Inertia: One strong appeal of my old image of rationality was that it prescribed a logical starting point. My new attitude towards philosophy liberates me from the need for this. It allows me to start where I find myself. The construction of my crucial net began long before I was born. It comes from my genetic makeup and my cultural heritage, as well as from the concepts I have deliberately forged from and intertwined with these raw materials. It took me a long time to make the trivial observation that I cannot effectively doubt the coherence and utility of the extensive net of subconcepts and vital knowledge that permeates my life. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to doubt most of it, but I also do not think this would be useful. I can only have such doubts about portions of it. I lost contact with my previous sense of rationality because of the influence of materialism and positivism. I might have retained it if I had internalized such modes of thinking, but they acted on my crucial net in a destructive rather than constructive fashion. If all is matter in motion then I cannot imagine where the natural laws are. Are they also matter in motion? Did genetics laws exist before genes existed? If so, then where? In the mind of God? In a platonic realm of ideas?

Something happened to my ability to think in terms of immutable principles. My experience suggests a state of flux, and since I no longer know how to think of principles as existing outside of relationships that actually hold, I can imagine them evolving along with reality. An alternative to the image of rationality is the image of inertia. Since this is an image, rather than a claim, it merely suggests vague conjectures and directions for forging a less restrictive ontic perspective. These conjectures are not the type I expect to find evidence for or against. Their purpose is to undermine current beliefs and act as a prelude to creating new working net.

Perhaps reality is like a slowly evolving society, with the so-called uniformity of nature a result of inertia. Laws about matter and energy seem immutable because long ago the universe evolved the internal relationships that led us to formulate such laws. Perhaps it was not predetermined that those relationships must have occurred. Were there laws governing the behavior of atoms before there were atoms, laws of economics before there were economic communities, laws of psychology held before there were persons? Perhaps the laws we now formulate about such matters are not immutable, regardless of how true they are to the underlying reality they attempt to reach. It is not only our fallibility that causes such mutability. Are the relationships that now hold the only ones that could have emerged? The current stability of a present law may suggest that it will hold forever, but this may be due to our limited perspective and our desire for permanence. Suppose we assume the relationships that give rise to the law of physics will hold for a billion years. Is that not sufficient to motivate a study of the laws of physics? This does not commit us to the view that they must hold forever. They may have to give way to new principles that emerge. In fact, the existence of persons may eventually reshape relationships that have previously evolved. Perhaps not, for we might be a mere passing phenomena.

Cosmic Images and Cosmic Versions: One purpose of ontics is to help think about cosmic images. A cosmic image is a unified way of looking at the nature of the universe and the way that persons fit into the general scheme of things. A cosmic image utilizes some of the subconcepts that are the deepest and the most ubiquitous. A cosmic image may be taken as a convenient perspective on the concepts used to think about the way things seem to work. However it may be taken more seriously, perhaps as an account of the way thing really are. When so considered, a cosmic image is a cosmic version.

Unlike many people, I do not feel that I understand cosmic versions. The essence of this is that my understanding of infinity is primarily formal. I can formally follow the proof that the continuum hypothesis is undecidable in the ZF version of set theory. In some sense, I feel that I understand the model theoretic concept of the true statements of number theory, but I do not understand any conceptualization of the true statements of set theory. So I do not understand why I still feel that the continuum hypothesis is either true or false, why I cannot regard it more as I regard the parallel postulate. Altho mathematically I can deal with transfinite set theory, I know that this understanding is extremely limited. Mathematically, I can work with euclidean or non-euclidean geometries. To understand cosmic versions I must go beyond my mathematical understanding and obtain an intuition how mathematics applies to the world of space-time or perhaps of something which is beyond space and time. However too much of what I would ask involves puzzlements rather than queries. The answers I imagine are vague statements that propose no information that I can grasp. A small sample of my limited comprehension of what would be involved in having more than vague cosmic images is indicated in the vague questions and unsatisfactory answers below. Since these questions are not queries, these answers should not be taken as propositions.

Does time extend infinitely back into the past? No, it originated when the physical universe began.

How did the physical universe begin? It began with the big bang.

What caused the big bang? It was either uncaused or its cause was non-physical or there was a something physical before this physical universe.

If uncaused, was there nothing before it? Time originated in the big bang, so talking about before the big bang is meaningless.

What if the big bang had a non-physical cause? Imagine it a being created by a will existing outside of space and time, a will we can call God.

What is the scope and limitation of such a will? The scope is infinite and without limitations.

How can I imagine such a will? Only vaguely.

Can God know the position of every fundamental particle in the physical universe both now and until the end of time? Yes, but if there is no God, this is still determined by the laws of physics.

Is there a correct set theory, known only to God? Yes, but if there is no God, there is still only one correct set theory.

My Main Cosmic Image: Altho I have no cosmic version, this does not seem like a problem. Other than providing an illusion of closure, what would be its utility? Cosmic images may not provide such an illusion, but I use a cosmic image that has a significant impact on my thoughts and actions. This one suggests nothing about the origin of the universe. It is a partial image. It merely orients me to the present and immediate future. I picture rather than describe this image.

I imagine the universe not as Laplace’s celestial clockwork (what William James derided as an iron block universe) in which novelties cannot emerge. Instead, I think of the universe as a huge bright finite organism immersed in an infinite dark wilderness. The organism has a complex internal structure. The organism evolves, but more like a society than an organism. The core of the organism is stable and tightly structured almost solid and unchanging. Humanity is one of the border regions of this organism. This region seems to be in constant turmoil. It feels threatened by the wilderness, by itself, even by the core. It does not know where or whether it really belongs. Even in this border region there is stability, for there are calm careful elements. They repair the damage and clear the paths that reach into the organism’s core. They examine the material that flows in from the wilderness, sometimes rejecting, sometimes making room. Sometimes they even tame parts of the wilderness, expanding the organism. The organism remains finite, the wilderness infinite.

The extreme outer boundary of the organism is will. There is creative chaos in this region. The boundary is fuzzy, not clearly defined. I also see individual spots of will that seem be out in the wilderness, outside of the organism. This may be an illusion. Perhaps the small tendrils connecting them to the organism indicates that even they are part of it. Some of these spots are bright, others almost dark. Some of these light spots of will almost touch. Some are almost completely isolated. Most appear to grow and fade.

When I sense the fading of such a spot, I feel sadness, relief, determination. At this stage in the development of the universe, I feel it must be a terrible thing to feel the pull to become an individual will, for I do not think many individuals obtain the power to become highly effective origins. It appears to me that most belong to an intermediate stage in the potential evolution of creative power. I often wonder if this is a dead-end process. How can a will ever become highly effective? How can it, having so recently emerged from a state of helplessness, reach forever-expanding understanding and courage? How can it go from a state in which all its purposes were given into a state in which it deliberately creates purpose? How can it go from a state of blind secure childish belonging to a state of acting as an origin; and then to a state where the whole organism is an extension of itself.

What is a personal will? I imagine a pawn in a game where the organism is blindly reaching for purpose and creative power. However these are strange pawns for some of them sense that perhaps there is no master mover and by default they tend to become the movers of the game. These pawns are also origins.

If the organism only had awareness, it might look upon individuality and feel a smug sense of satisfaction. What ideal pawns they make for the game of create and at the same time play it safe. They may destroy themselves individually, but then as individuals they are expendable, for they reproduce rapidly enough. Even if they destroy themselves they cannot affect the totality of the organism. They are partially programmed yet somewhat flexible. They are programmed with strong individual desires, but have little power as individuals to obtain these desires. These desires, while individual, are similar to the desires of others. This provides incentive for both cooperation and competition. In serving their own purposes they must serve broader ones. Because they are strongly programmed to preserve their individual existence they are both conservative and creative. Even the most conservative must react to the creative efforts of those who live in the wilderness. Those far out in the wilderness are also ideal pawns. They act as pawns even as they aspire to be masters of the game.

Where I Am: I live in a very good spot within the organism, for I am loved, respected admired, etc. Wait, this is not me. Only my persona lives so much within the organism. As a will I am split, partially directed from within and partially directed from without. Part of my will is in a spot at the end of a long tendril that reaches far out into the wilderness. I cannot tell if this spot is bright or dim. In some directions there are a few nearby spots, but in most directions I see nothing but wilderness. I am out here by a choice so fundamental that it cannot be explained. I can feel very cold and empty. It looks warmer and more comfortable inside. Inside there is structure and purpose, rules and principles. These reach out to my spot, but I do not feel bound by them. Yet they affect me. The wilderness nearby affects me more. I have chosen to explore the wilderness and I create something which is neither wilderness nor part of the organism, but which might influence the organism’s future. This may produce evil and I may be cut off. I feel that I am expendable. Regardless of what I, do the organism can probably disregard my creative efforts. I endorse this inertial capacity of the organism, altho I often feel frustrated by it.

I am judged by those within, mostly in ways they find positive. Being well loved, I also tend to judge my purposes and actions by their principles. Their principles of judgment are objective for they are rooted in the current nature of what is good. Yet I will not be bound by such judgment. Being admired tends to draw me into a world too conservative for my tastes. I search for ways to minimize its impact. To live where I live is to grope beyond good and evil. To act I must balance the judgment of good and evil against other factors. There are no fixed criteria to which I can appeal. I can appeal only to my created ideals, and these are grounded ultimately in me. My acts of will, while perhaps having little impact, are as objective as the principles of the universe.

Currently I have one basic ideal, my origin ideal. My basic purpose is to enhance and expand the power of persons as origins. This involves a personal struggle for freedom. It involves going beyond this whenever I encounter anyone else who I sense wants to act as an origin. This ideal functions almost as an absolute, for I am committed to it altho it may lead me again into chaos and agony. Yet it is not absolute, for I may be crushed by the chaos and agony of an impossible struggle, and I may renounce my quest.

I experience a vast emptiness when I ask the questions about what directions and for what purposes shall I expand my power of will. I have no answer to these questions. When I reflect on what I have just written I am mildly disturbed. I have tried to focus on the fact that I am outside the organism without judging myself as special, either in the sense of being inferior or superior. Conceptually, I cannot even make sense of such judgments. The fact that I am sensitive about this indicates that such judgments are still emotionally relevant. It has been said that my struggle to be an origin is wrong in some absolute sense, either being pathological or sinful. It may be, but even so, I wish I could merely acknowledge this, and then pursue it anyway. That I am still reluctant indicates the strength of my conditioning. I still desire criteria beyond me. I still tend to feel that to ground behavior ultimately in me is somehow insane. But when I examine other nets all I find is a kind of conceptual chaos that seems to be grounded in a cluster of subceptual certainties. I live with an awareness that I have rejected this type of certainty, that I have actually (not just intellectually) chosen to live on the edge of chaos, using nets, and that all too often I will journey into chaos.

Why? Why not?

Chapter 2 Towards A PLURALisTIC EPisTEMICS

Epistemics: Intellectual competence is only one power to enhance understanding. In addition, understanding depends on emotional and physical competence. Cognitive competence is an epistemic concept. The skill to choose and achieve what one wants when engaged in emotional behavior is know-how, and its cognitive component is a kind of knowledge that I find extremely important. In the past I conceptualized knowledge in a more restricted sense. I had a tendency to think about knowledge in terms of isolated units that could be expressed as propositions. My shift to a broader concept of knowledge with emphasis on its relation to understanding is indicative of deeper decisions about the role I choose for epistemics. I did not revise my knowledge concepts because they were incoherent, but because they were ill suited to my purpose. I wanted to focus on more central concepts in my study of epistemics. Instead of asking for a theory of knowledge, I prefer the following question about knowledge. Moreover concepts for thinking about knowledge form only a small part of the epistemics I need.

What net can I best use to help me think effectively about knowledge
and the acquisition of personal knowledge?

My attitude toward epistemics is naive and pluralistic, but unlike my ontics, I am more serious and systematic about epistemics. My epistemics is more developed in the realm of cognitive knowledge than in other forms, so my presentation is still influenced by my academic background. I hope my focus is not too narrow, and that the net emerging from this concern will be a basis for a broader epistemics, one that will provide a net for integrating a multitude of forms of understanding. For analytic reasons we can separate cognitive competence from physical competence and emotional competence, but in practice they are all intertwined with what we do and what we learn.

Choosing and Learning: Originship is the art of acting as an effective origin. Since I have chosen the ideal of enhancing originship as my main ideal, I need a net for thinking about me and my beyond. I have decided to think about existence in a loose open common sense manner. This gives me flexibility in thinking of my origin experience in a large complex reality, but it does not help me think systematically about the problems and concerns I have in this regard. Perhaps it would be useful for me to develop a systematic ontics, but I have not yet seen how this would be relevant to my main purposes. My crucial problems seem to be centered elsewhere. What I currently feel is a need for a more systematic net for thinking about choosing and learning. This is why I have cultivated epistemics and enactics rather than ontics. I think of choosing and learning as intimately related. Each choice I make both affects my understanding and uses my understanding as a resource. Altho deliberate learning is a form of choosing, it is not a form that I find problematic. My net for thinking about choosing is complex, so for analytical and expository purposes, I separate learning and understanding from other forms of doing and choosing.

Grounding Knowledge: Being naïve, I am comfortable with grounding objective knowledge in personal judgments. Moreover I see no other way to ground knowledge except in personal competence. I experience knowing as a complex process closely related to learning, and I experience both as personal processes. I choose a pluralistic perspective because my epistemics is evolving, and thus I have no use for fixed criteria to certify my knowledge. I endorse the fact that knowledge has a multitude of source and that it is influenced by emotions, purposes, observations, reasoning, intuition, tradition, etc. I try to view the processes used from as unrestricted a perspective as I can imagine. I want an enabling, rather than a restricting epistemic net, one that is open to new ways of learning and to acquiring competence in the broadest sense. I do not want an epistemics that prescribes or delineates how knowing and understanding must occur.

Since knowledge is one type of resource that a person is willing to take as a basis for action, it can have various degrees of adequacy. Propositional knowledge can more or less indicate the way things are. Process knowledge can vary from barely functional to high mastery. Realm knowledge can vary from minimal acquaintance to intimate immersion.

Some of my knowledge seems to be highly reliable, namely my philosophical knowledge, my mathematical knowledge, my useful ordinary knowledge. Altho fallible, they are secure enough for practical purposes. My philosophical and mathematical knowledge deserve their security largely because they are conceptual and because I have studied them carefully. My useful ordinary knowledge is grounded securely enough because it is tested by repeated feedback.

Methods of Knowing: That I obtain knowledge thru observation and reasoning is a pre-epistemic part of my basic reliable knowledge. It suggests the need for these epistemic concepts. Since I observe attitudes and thought processes, as well as other phenomena, which I cannot reduce to sense data, I conceptualize observation broadly. Likewise, I do not conceptualize reasoning as only thought that can be described by logical principles. I expect epistemics to help me think about observation and reasoning and the extent to which my trust in my knowledge is or needs to be justified. These concerns depend on a broader conceptual and paraceptual perspective, so I do not expect epistemics to contain some kind of theory that provides answers. I want epistemic to emerge from my other activities and to be mostly based on utility. Epistemics is a secondary component in a feedback relation in which competence is the primary component. It is shaped by the way I find myself learning and by observing others learning, but I also use epistemics to help me think about how to expand my power to learn. The only restrictive features I want in epistemics are those that provide warnings against more than a tentative acceptance of most knowledge claims about complex aspects of some realm. I insist on thinking of all my claims to knowledge that are not vital as somewhat fallible. However this does not mean that will have doubts about most of what I claim to know. A sample of some of my epistemic questions is given below.

¨ What are the various ways to use a concept of knowledge?

¨ What sources of learning can be imagined?

¨ What methods can be imagined for testing the adequacy of our knowledge?

To clarify epistemic concepts, we can do any of the following:

¨ Focus as on personal experiences, including both casual learning and focused study. Reflect on various ideas that seem useful in thinking about such experience.

¨ Examine the way other people seem to think about learning, especially in areas where they have achieved considerable competence.

¨ Try to describe the acquisition of competence from a broad pluralistic perspective, without undue emphasis on specialized areas, such as science.

¨ Look for differences as well as shared features.

¨ After thinking about various ways to describe learning, try various ways to organize such descriptions to make them easier to understand.

¨ Make alternatives supplement rather than compete with each other.

The Subject Matter of My Knowledge: Most contemporary epistemology seems to be dominated by a focus on knowledge such as that studied in the academic world, and especially for that portion the academic world considered as being scientific. There even seems to be a tendency to consider scientific knowledge as a model for all knowledge. While I find scientific knowledge interesting and useful, it is not as important to me as other types of knowledge. Scientific knowledge is extremely specialized and limited in its purposes. I do not think of it as somehow giving a truer picture of reality than ordinary knowledge. It provides an additional perspective, rather than an alternative one. Most of my paraceptual knowledge is ordinary, arising from the situations that I frequently encounter. It is this fact that is the most important for epistemics. My epistemics is more intimately intertwined with subconcepts than most academic knowledge. It is not organized in a systematic fashion nor is it acquired using some version of scientific method. It is often not explicit. I structure portions of it when the need arises, but according to situational considerations, rather than by remote classification schemes. Much of it was obtained without a deliberate effort to channel learning. This does not mean that it was acquired without thinking and reasoning. Considerable thought was involved, but the focus of this was on purposes other than knowing. Furthermore much of my knowledge has been refined by thinking about it after the fact, by years of manifest feedback, and sometimes by deliberate experimentation.

Example: I use a wheel barrel to collect dead wood for my wood burning stove. In the process I have acquired a considerable amount of basic reliable knowledge. I know how much wood I need on hand so I will not run out when various factors make it inconvenient to collect wood. I know which sources of wood I should acquire this year and which to leave for later. I can estimate how many trips it will take to collect the wood in a given location. I know there is a new pile in an area that I cleared several years ago. Most such knowledge is acquired without deliberate effort. Even information about the location of wood is obtained by casual observation while I am walking for some other purpose.

Sources of Knowledge: When I think about the sources of my knowledge I realize how much of it is like Topsy. It just grew, as I learned thru experience. I take the concept of experience in an ordinary naive subceptual sense that is too broad to be defined. In particular, experience is more than sense data, a concept that seems to represent only a limited component of experience. The concept of my experience includes everything that happens to me or that I take part in. It includes internal and external components. It includes thoughts and feelings. It includes intuitions. It includes vague contacts with my social environment. By no stretch of the imagination can I claim that most of my knowledge has been derived thru reason or thru a scientific method or any other method that was once such a major concern to me. One of my main current epistemic goals is to develop a net for thinking about the vast pool of non-deliberate knowledge in which my more deliberate knowledge is rooted.

A major source of non-deliberate knowledge is the accumulated knowledge of our cultural tradition. A large part of this was acquired thru indoctrination rather than experience of the situations from which this traditional knowledge emerged or towards which it was directed. Traditional knowledge is a vast complex interrelated mass, largely beyond my understanding and ability to judge as a person. I can only glimpse its origin, but this is enough to convince me that it has been created, has evolved, has been accepted, and has been judged pluralistically. Careful thought, practical experience, imaginative speculation, hope, fear, desire; all of these seem to play a part in the evolution of traditional knowledge. I sense much wisdom in this knowledge, and I am as willing to gamble on the wisdom of our collective feelings, as I am to gamble on our collective rationality.

I am willing to bet on our ability to learn from experience automatically and unconsciously, as well as thru controlled experiments. My trust in traditional knowledge is qualified. This does not prevent me from following my own judgment when it conflicts with traditional knowledge. In such cases, I try to use my own judgment firmly, but with humility and awareness that I may be cultivating unreliable beliefs. There is a variety of factors involved in my decision to give priority to my own personal knowledge, altho I know that in general my wisdom is small compared to that embodied in traditional knowledge. I discuss these factors in My Net for Education. For now I will only say that traditional knowledge is available to me only indirectly, that it is more important for me to evolve new knowledge than to have all my propositional knowledge claims to be correct.

Reasoning about experience and non-deliberate knowledge, helps me develop deliberate knowledge. This process may transform or eliminate portions of my non-deliberate beliefs, but non-deliberate knowledge remains vast in comparison to my deliberate knowledge. Deliberate knowledge, while rooted in experience, has been shaped and developed by reasoning. It becomes remote from ordinary experience. Creating deliberate knowledge goes beyond experience, shaping knowledge that takes a life of its own. In this sense I choose to be a rationalist.

Truth: I claim that most of my information about paths in the woods around my cabin is actual knowledge. This claim, altho somewhat vague, is true to the extent that this information indicates the way things are well enough for my purposes in making it. Moreover, this informational knowledge is part of my realm knowledge about the woods around my cabin. This realm knowledge is true to the extent it enables me to accurately represent or effectively interact with this realm. Truth is a crucial concept in my epistemics, but it is also seems too ordinary to merit much clarification. Shaping truer knowledge (or more accurately shaping alleged knowledge so that most of it is actual knowledge) is a process in which I have been engaged, with some partial success, for a long time. It often involves hard work and is easy to bungle, but it is not something I find mysterious. I am puzzled by the fact that truth is a concept that seems problematic to many philosophers. Perhaps it is because they are not interested in an ordinary concept of truth.

I am not disturbed by the fact that my knowledge is limited and some my alleged knowledge is not actual knowledge. I am only mildly disturbed, but mostly amused, when I discover items of my alleged knowledge that seem obviously false. My goal of understanding is long range. I devote only a limited amount of energy toward obtaining truer alleged knowledge. I have other purposes to attend to, some of which can be realized by drawing on the knowledge I already have. Even when a portion of my knowledge of what to act on is riddled with elements that I later find false, I muddle thru many situations with no obvious disasters. Furthermore it is the satisfaction or frustration of my immediate purposes that is crucial to my ideals. My most basic ideal, namely my origin ideal, depends more on experimenting and learning and on the attitudes I cultivate, than on specific successes or failures. In the words of William James, “It seems sensible to take a somewhat lighthearted attitude toward our errors, given their inevitable nature”.

Knowledge needs only to be adequate for the purposes at hand, even if one’s understanding may go well beyond these purposes. Consider the law of the lever. To know this law means understanding it as an abstract principle, knowing that it yields exact answers to idealized problems, knowing that this law yields paraceptual information about a number of states that are close enough to these problems for practical purposes. In using such a law, I do not need to claim that it is a precise immutable law about reality. A law may fit reality perfectly or only close enough so we have not yet seen a discrepancy. I would conjecture that the law of the lever may apply to masses and distances far beyond those for which it has been tested. It is idealized as if it applies both to distances and masses smaller than those associated with quarks and to distances and masses larger than those associated with the universe. I find this too vague to think of as a paraceptual claim. For most purposes, the extent to which it has been idealized is seldom acknowledged or relevant.

Verification: My attitude towards verification is probably related to my attitude towards truth. I suspect a large part of my discomfort with academic epistemology is rooted in my feeling that it is preoccupied with verification. I feel no great need to worry about whether my knowledge has been strongly verified. For many practical purposes it has been, but for other purposes it never will be. I am content to have my alleged knowledge verified by a combination of internal and external feedback that I only partially control. I cannot imagine an ultimate foundation for my knowledge.

An Analogy: If I try to stand in the air I know and believe that I will fall. I need support, grounded on the earth. What then supports the earth? Does it rest on a giant turtle? If so, on what does he stand? I can smile at a physics that demands such ultimate support for material objects, for I have been trained to believe the material universe is held together by internal supports. I have even the comfortable name ‘gravity’, which gives me the illusion that I understand how this is possible. I am bemused as I recall the time when I thought of knowledge as a colossal structure that must rest on some firm foundation.

Meaning: Another problem I have with verification in academic philosophy is my failure to really grasp the ideas of positivists. My encounter with logical positivism had a destructive impact on my epistemology. Thru my encounter with verification criteria for meaning, I absorbed the attitude that any claim that did not lend itself to either verification or falsification was highly suspect. At the time however, I was not convinced that any specific important claim I made fell into that category.

Eventually I decided that it was not useful for me to try to conceptualize the idea of meaning. To say that the meaning of a statement is somehow equivalent to the procedures used to justify it, did not do justice to the subceptual strands that I point at when I use the word meaning. Altho meaning seems like an important feature of verification, I no longer idealize isolated statements as units of meaning. The concept of an isolated statement is an abstraction, useful to me in the study of logical deduction, but of dubious utility if taken it too seriously. Even in deductive studies, it is dangerous to consider statements as units of meaning. The concept of a statement is abstracted from the utterances of individuals. These are always made in some context and except in trivial cases they only partially express the speakers meaning. The concept of a statement is an attempt to transcend the essentially personal and imprecise character of such utterances. This is useful, but it oversimplifies. If carried far enough it leads to the concept of a formal language. Within a formal language we remove all traces of subjectivism and imprecision, but only because we have also removed meaning.

I now know I can never articulate what I mean by meaning, nor when challenged about what I mean in some utterance, can I ever give an exhaustive account of my meaning. There is only one way that I ultimately have to judge the meaning of such an utterance, or even if it has meaning. This is thru personal contemplation. This shift in my attitude toward meaning has resulted in a shift in my attitude towards verification. I no longer feel that the primary purpose of verification is to establish individual statements.

In the broadest sense verification is an evolving subceptual process whose grounding is a series of decisions made as the process evolves. In a more limited sense verification can be any useful process to establish connections within a specific net. I cannot imagine a verification that does not use some already imagined net. Verification may help recognize truth, but it cannot guarantee truth. Verification depends on competence in being a person, rather than on some methodology. I can find no guarantee that what I allege is true is actually true. While such a guarantee might give me temporary comfort it is not reasonable for me to expect it, and I have no pragmatic need for it. All I really need to escape skepticism is the faith that while each specific judgment I make is fallible, I can progress to a truer understanding.

Objectivity: I have come to consider verification as primarily personal. The idea of an interpersonal verification is less manifest, but still useful. Even in mathematics, when someone communicates a proof to me, I might say that I accept the proof, but it would be more accurate to say that I use this experience to construct my own proof. I may take the exact symbolic formulation of a proof from someone else, but the proof itself I must construct for myself regardless of how much help I am given.

My view of verification as personal does not mean that I deny objectivity or that I think of truth as relative. The objectivity of my knowledge is grounded in my subjective judgment and in my personal competence in making contact with the real world. It is also supported by interpersonal considerations, but even then, it is grounded in my subjective judgment about the competence of others. I merely think that my ability is limited, communication is difficult, truth is often not easily accessible, and verification is often subtle. I am a relativist only in a sense that I am unwilling to look for a privileged frame of reference.

I suspect that one major reason academic epistemology focuses so much attention on verification is because of a concern with objectivity that I fail to grasp. I am aware of the personal nature of my knowledge, but this does not prevent me from knowing that it has objective significance. I am simply not puzzled by the fact that persons obtain knowledge about reality thru dealing with personal phenomena. This is merely a pre-philosophical fact rooted in my ordinary experience of personal competence. I may use epistemics to think about this fact, but not to explain it or try to explain it away. For a partial explanation of it, I turn to biology. This fact is fundamental to our success as a species. Also given my way of living, I cannot pretend to imagine what it would mean to deny it. The only alternative I can currently imagine to this fact is not some other notion of knowledge, but a kind of chaotic skepticism about vital knowledge that is a prelude to insanity.

Altho I have no reason to doubt the objectivity of much of my knowledge, I realize that some of it may make a pretense to objectivity that it does not deserve. I would correct this type, not thru the elimination of the subjective components, but thru more discriminating personal judgments. I do not intend to forget that my deliberate knowledge is rooted in me, but one way in which I can be more discriminating is to test it by comparing it to the knowledge of others or by culturally endorsed methods of verification. This inter-subjective focus is useful, but it spreads the subjectivity rather than eliminates it. Sometimes what all agree to is rooted in assumptions that no one questions and in biases that an individual person might more easily observe when removed from inter-subjective perspectives. Furthermore if I rely exclusively on inter-subjectivity I deny the advantage of special insights. If I am unwilling to claim that I know X until it can be verified inter-subjectively, I deny myself the advantages of my powers and my unique frame of reference. When I say that I want my knowledge to be objective, I merely mean I want it to be about its object, rather than about my experience of its object. The fact that I want the content of my knowledge to be objective is not to deny that I want its grounding and its purposes to be personal.

Pluralism: Most so-called schools of empiricism in western philosophy establish criteria for what can constitute experience on limited subceptual grounds. According to William James, this is an easy trap to enter and he says that the greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection; left to their instincts they dogmatize like infallible popes. I call what James aspires to be a pluralist. A pluralist is anyone who takes account of a broad concept of experience in his/her everyday epistemics. Being a pluralist involves the willingness to revise almost anything in the face of new experience. It also involves leaving open the possible forms that experience can take.

I call my epistemics pluralistic because the diversity I sense regarding its crucial concepts is more significant to me than the unity I sense. My abilities have a variety of purposes and sources. My epistemics has a variety of structurally different components, which I develop using an even wider variety of methods. Being an epistemic pluralist is a matter of personal choice, involving attitudes rather than beliefs. It is a decision about how to organize epistemics. It is not a claim about our public epistemic net. Nor is it a claim about the nature of understanding. I could choose to organize epistemics in terms of some fundamental unity, but this would force me to deal with a net that I would have difficulty in using effectively, not because the net would be flawed, but because it would not mesh with my characteristics. I find power in a pluralistic outlook, but I only recommend such an outlook to others who have the temperament for it.

My knowledge serves a multitude of purposes. I endorse this fact, but I would also strive to integrate my knowledge so that whatever other purposes it served, its primary purpose would be to provide me with a greater understanding of reality and greater originship powers. I would develop paraceptual knowledge that gives me a truer feeling for reality, abstract conceptual knowledge that helps me formulate truer models of reality, subceptual knowledge that gives me truer images of reality. This primary purpose is mine, while most of the other purposes of my knowledge are largely purposes of my persona. I endorse the fact that my knowledge is his knowledge and that it serves his purposes. This endorsement is qualified by the fact that most of his purposes are rooted in his biological and cultural heritage, and thus may not always mesh with my purposes. In cases of a conflict I would try to give precedence to my purposes, and especially to my origin quest.

The fact that I would have my knowledge help me understand reality does not imply that it can or will serve this purpose. My judgment that it does is a fundamental living judgment, which is a precondition to the kind of philosophy and epistemics I choose. It is not the kind of judgment that I can challenge by philosophical analysis or by any other philosophical methodology. If my net for conceptual philosophy could not accommodate this judgment, I would begin to develop a new one. However I do not find this judgment strange or mysterious, and it causes me no philosophical problems. I would probably not even mention this, except for the fact that there are people who see knowledge of external reality as a philosophical problem. This puzzles me, but I have no idea about how to bridge the gap between my subceptual net and theirs.

CHAPTER 3 My Personal Use for ENactics

The Importance of Enactics: My most basic subceptual distinction is between me and everything else. This has both features of a dichotomy and poles of a continuum. I am aware of others who seem to be like me. This suggests the PNDP person and human concepts. The person concept is volitional rather than biological, that is it involves not only intentional action, but deliberate action. The concept of a human is both volitional and biological, since a human is a person who is a biological organism of a specific species. I find this feature of PNDP useful, since I have a strong interest in the distinction between my actions as a biological organism and me acting as a person. I distinguish between these ways of acting as two roles I can play. This conceptual distinction is functional. It is devoid of paraceptual claims, and especially paraceptual claims of an ontological nature. The biological role is engaging in a course of action. The personal role is deliberately choosing a course of action. I conceptualize me as if I had two basic parts, a will and a persona, with these conceptualized as me playing the choice role or the implementation role. My persona has all the PNDP characteristic types. He is the totality of resources my will uses, and my only recognized contact with the other. My will is a point of power, from which emerge the choices involved in deliberate action. My will role sets priorities among the various reasons for the behavior. Without some such a role, I cannot imagine the concept of deliberate action, and I hence would not have a person concept. The related reality and behavior concepts are as deeply subceptual as my person concept, which is why the concepts in this cluster cannot be defined, but must be presented by partially expressing their relationships within PNDP. This is why PNDP is at the core of my enactics.

Often my originship abilities seem minimal. It is only in relation to origin acts that I observe my originship, and such acts are seldom in focal awareness. Origin acts are only indirectly linked to most actions of my persona. The problem of will is how to decide on the purposes that I would use to guide my origin quest. The main strands of enactics provide the net I use for thinking about my will and the myriad of other factors influencing my actions. For this, I need the pluralistic enactics that is developed in detail in Part 3. This present chapter merely sketches some of the main concerns that give rise to the net developed there. Since enactics focuses on the reasons for acting, ethics is a part of enactics, but only a small part. Action is motivated by a variety of purposes. My understanding of will is primarily perceptual and subceptual. While this understanding affects the use and creation of my conceptual knowledge, most nets I use have been abstracted in a way that ignores will. Currently, I see no reason to utilize origin concepts in mathematics, and for most scientific purposes, it seems simpler to utilize deterministic models or models involving chance. Even in ordinary living, major origin acts intrude rarely enough that I find it useful to think of most behavior as being strongly influenced by factors other than will. It is only when I want a more refined perspective on personal action that I it seems useful to draw directly on the subconcept of will.

My will is conceptualized as being me rather than as belonging to or being part of me. I refer to me as my will whenever I want to emphasize originship. Will is a personal and purposive cause rather than an arbitrary or chance cause. Altho my will acts as an origin, my acts are influenced by the context in which they emerge, and they can be partially explained by reference to situational factor preceding these acts. For a more complete explanation of these acts, I also refer to their internal relationships and to the purposes that they create, but I would never believe any total explanation of these acts. The main thing I would understand is how I make contact with my beyond. This is the reason that I use my persona concept as me in the role of actor. In my choosing this role, I am also an observer or appraiser reflecting on my actor role, so I often conceptualize my will in the first person and my persona in the third person.

I think of my persona as a complex state of affairs system that I use to understand and influence external reality, but I also think of him as a tool that I use to expand and recreate internal reality. My understanding and control of him is limited, and I must reach for more understanding of what influences his behavior if I hope to use him more effectively. Most of my net for doing is designed to provide a net for thinking about the understanding I have and would have of his behavior; alto I do not expect it to provide such an understanding. To obtain such understanding I must reflect on a vast amount of experience and carefully observe my behavior.

When I reflect on behavior, I often find myself thinking in terms of purposes, so one of the major goals of enactics is to structure and clarify my concept of purpose and the language I use to talk about purposes. Closely related to my concept of purpose is my concept of good, for whenever I think of anything as good I am thinking of it as good in relation to some cluster of purposes.

I find my persona having a multitude of purposes that wax and wane both as he and I change and as the situations that he encounters change. I find it convenient to categorize my purposes into a variety of types, namely the same types I use to classify behavior perspectives. These types are not meant to be either independent or disjoint. I have decided to imbue my idealistic purposes with enough power that they will take priority over all my other purposes. A major barrier to implementing this is the fact that other purposes have a tendency to interfere with my origin ideal. Many of my other purposes do not cause much of this kind of problem. My prudential purposes tend to be supportive of this ideal. Moreover customary purposes are too weak to significantly interfere with them except when linked to ethical purposes. Since one of my major goals is to liberate my persona from the unquestioned priority of ethical purposes, a major portion of my doing net is devoted to shaping a net for ethics. An even more important portion is devoted to the creation a net for ideals.

Human Ethics: In general, I use the term ‘ethics’ for concerns a person has about the wellbeing of any aspect of the world. Thus concerns about the environment can be ethical concerns. This book deals only with more narrow ethical concerns, namely concerns that humans have with the wellbeing of other humans. I use the term ‘human ethics’ or such concerns. A central concept of human ethics is that of an ethical system. I call the ethical system that I use CEH (common ethical humanism). The central ethical guide for CEH is to value the good for each human equally, regardless of any other status that individual may have. CEH roots it ethical values in the consensus of those that share this guide about what constitutes the wellbeing of a humans. I consider this as an extremely loose system.

When I am speaking from perspective of CEH, a claim that X is good involves making complex paraceptual judgments about the relationship between X and a massive cluster of human purposes and ideals. My knowledge of what is good from the perspective of CEH is usually either trivial or extremely tentative. I have only a nebulous idea about what constitutes a shared core of human purposes and ideals, a notion that I find somewhat problematic. Even when I feel that I have some insight into a common core of human purposes and ideals, the complexity of knowing whether a given X tends to support this core often seems overwhelming. In complex situations I may make what seems like reasonable conjectures about what is ethically good according to CEH, but if pressed I am usually willing to admit that my ethical knowledge is tentative. My ethical knowledge in relation to other ethical systems is even more tentative.

A major component in my net for human ethics is a net for thinking about how to obtain ethical knowledge. In the past, I tried to use it as a standard for my behavior. Now I would use it to help understand my behavior and the behavior of others. Ethical knowledge can help me liberate my persona from his ethical conditioning. It helps me establish the priority of my own ideals, especially when they are in conflict with what I judge to be ethical behavior. Furthermore ethical knowledge helps me avoid certain pitfalls in my search for idealistic allies. Even if I expand my idea of good, I still expect my broader ideals and values to retain priority over considerations that are only ethical. This is a matter of choice on my part, rather than a reality judgment.

Altho ethical considerations could be extended to persons other than humans, complications arise. For instance, it is possible to imagine a species whose members have a history of deliberate action but who are incapable of taking an ethical perspective on behavior. Whatever else may be of a broader ethical concern, the impact of human behavior on humans is complex enough to be a major area of study. Altho cruelty to animals goes against some of my values, concepts from what I develop in Human Ethics are not applicable. Human Ethics and any of its concepts should be implicitly understood as applying only to humans. Developing a broader net for all types of ethical considerations is beyond the scope of what I have called Human Ethics.

Ideals: I want enactics to help me think about how I evolve ideals and imbue them with power. My ideals are mine because I deliberately continue to endorse them and revise them, and because in spite of the external origins of many of their components, I seek no external authority for them. Until I learn to operate with a higher level of originship, it will be difficult for me to imbue my ideals with a power significant to make them the dominant factors in my behavior, and when they are relevant giving them precedence over ethical concerns. For instance, even if I thought that helping a person increase his live options was likely to have overall negative ethical results, my origin ideal would take precedence. Specifically, altho helping a con artist enhance his conceptual competence might influence him to develop a better ethical perspective, it might merely make him a more effective con artist. Altho I might justify helping him in this manner on the grounds that I was laying a foundation for his reform, I find this a dubious ethical rationale. Instead, I would merely say that my ideal of helping him takes precedence over ethical concerns. Of course, the ideal of helping others enhance their live options does not take precedence over all ethical considerations. My considerations about helping a con artist expand his conceptual competence would differ from considerations about helping a terrorist in this regard.

A Paradigm Shift: My attitude towards ethics and ideals is rooted in my own radical shift away from comprehensive paradigms. I hope that this may relate to a potential comprehensive paradigm shift for an emerging world culture. Prior to the 17th century the dominant comprehensive paradigm used in western culture for thinking about human action were a theistic, involving beliefs about and attitudes towards the supernatural. As the rise of science challenged this paradigm, some people adopted naturalistic paradigms. I suspect that both types have been breaking down during much of the 20^th century. Developing a pluralistic enactics is my response to my dissatisfaction with comprehensive paradigms. What I hope is that a radically new attitude towards doing could emerge as part of a major paradigm shift affecting all features of a developing world culture. Origin activity is the only way I can imagine transforming reality that is both purposeful and non-deterministic. I hope that a radically local-personal-tentative attitude towards doing will emerge. Persons can look beyond themselves to find criteria for judging what they do. They can also look within for these criteria, and choose not have any final or ultimate grounding for what they do. They can embrace an attitude that questions all ideas about how to evaluate their actions, an attitude that welcomes a radical incompleteness in the criteria for choosing what to do, what to become, what to create. This concept of a comprehensive paradigm and my speculations about them are developed in CPCS Comprehensive Paradigms and in CPCS Comprehensive Paradigms Shifts.

Regardless of the future of comprehensive paradigms, I want to embrace uncertainty and incompleteness, but not only because of my limited knowledge and perspective. This is also because I entertain the conjecture that evolution may not proceed according to fixed laws or principles, and that even these may evolve. For me this attitude is so fundamental that I feel I must cultivate it by a lifetime of actions. I try to adopt a cutting-edge attitude towards that part of reality that is close to me. Thus I resolved that one of my major lifelong goals is to shape portions of a net for doing that I can use in conjunction with such an attitude. I would like to also make at least a small contribution to the development of the most powerful and revolutionary enactics ever created by humans, but I doubt that this is likely to happen.

How shall I think about enhancing originship? My earlier quest involved an attempt to become liberated from all my other purposes. I still want to become liberated from any automatic priority given to ethical purposes, but the relationship between the competence I would create and liberty is complicated. I conceptualize liberty merely as the absence of constraints. However some of the constraints keep me up rather than down.

The destruction of my purposes tended to liberate me, but it did not always enhance originship. Originship involves creating live options, and while purposes can blind me to options, they can also help me imagine new ones. I no longer try to destroy my non-idealistic purposes. Instead I try to reshape and integrate them with my originship quest. This endeavor has been somewhat successful regarding my biological purposes, altho my purpose of avoiding physical pain often still demands more priority than ideally I would assign it. I have also been successful regarding my ethical purposes, altho they are more difficult to integrate than my biological ones because they have a subtle hidden strength rather than a direct demanding power.

The major gap between my other purposes and my idealistic ones is orientation. Biological purposes tend to be persona oriented. Ethical purposes tend to be both persona and other oriented. Neither of these clusters stresses the orientation towards personal competence that forms the central core of my idealistic purposes. My idealistic purposes reach out to my persona and my beyond, because they involve dreams and partial blueprints for shaping reality, and it is being a creator, rather than the form of my creation, which is most crucial to these ideals. I create primarily because in creating I expand the options that are available to me and other persons. This involves infinite aspirations that are alien to the purposes I have been able to find in my persona. It is these infinite aspirations that enable me to decide that I would give priority to my idealistic purposes, and allow no grounding for these purposes beyond the will that I am. This tends to isolate me from my persona and my beyond, but it also plunges me into a creative interaction with them. What net will I use to think about a decision that I have made to explore higher and higher levels of originship?

There is one major difficulty in thinking about exploring originship. I cannot adequately account for any origin act. I can merely explain the background which limits the options, and without which, no choice could have emerged. Thus my will does not appear rational to me at its source. However it may appear extremely rational in its consequence, since after the choice has emerged, I can attempt a rational account of what follows. I do not need to explain the source of will. Instead I merely acknowledge will as a brute fact, something directly experienced, but not subject to a reductionistic explanation. When I acknowledge will, I admit a limit beyond which explanation seems pointless. I cannot have total explanation. Given principles, I can always ask why these principles? Why not others? In the face of any mystery, i.e. some state that I cannot even imagine explaining in a way that satisfies my sentiment of rationality; there are at least two options. I can reduce my sense of mystery by emphasizing experience and de-emphasizing interpretation, or I can make interpretations that push the mystery away from me. It is comforting to do the latter when the mystery, like my experience will, is very close. Yet my experience is stubborn. I cannot shove this mystery conveniently into the past or out into the mysterious cosmos. My will remains a mystery that lives with me always, close and very uncomfortable. I sense that in essence I am a will. To deny will, to decrease my options and narrow the related inner resource, is to decrease my existence. So reluctantly I face the duality of my experience. I cannot deny that I choose. I struggle to believe that I have such a power. I resist my desire for security and total explanation. I resist my feelings of inadequacy.

My concept of will is experiential, rather that philosophical. It is one of the main concepts that I use to think about originship, and my sense of originship is the most significant feature of my experience. Yet neither my concept of will nor many of my other concepts relating to originship can be closely approached via analytic concepts. This used to bother me, since I had a very narrow way of thinking about concepts.

My enactics has grown directly thru my experience and contemplation of me. This contemplation has been highly intuitive. To answer the question of what is will, I point to me as a person who creates and understands. I contrast me as a person with me as an organism and me as an object. Will is what is left when I strip away my body, my emotions, my desires, my intellect, etc. Will is what I find, when in quiet contemplation I turn deeply inward. Will is a single point of potential power, tending to zero, tending to infinity. Will is an identity persisting in time as a pure individual, yet not static. Will is a pre-theoretical personal fact, and to experience will I must trust in me.

Some Decisions about Doing: The shift in my attitude toward doing began to emerge in 1974 from a decision to make personal causation a core concept of my net for thinking about the actions of persons. This was an orientation choice, rather than a cognitive change. It did not even involve a change in belief. It involved a major shift in my attitude toward persons, a minor change in my attitude towards reality, and a deeper understanding of such attitudes. Prior to that time my most fundamental concern was to know why persons should ground their actions in ethical principles. Wanting to prove that persons had free will and immortal souls was closely related to that concern. I felt defensive and insecure about my concern with free will, and even more defensive about my concern with immortality. Neither concern seemed respectable from the perspective of contemporary philosophy. I decided that the nets I was being conditioned to use were not suitable to my concerns. I decided to rely on me to choose my concerns. In particular, I made the following decisions.

¨ to shape a net in which the concept of an ideal was orthogonal to the concept of good-evil, and in particular to strip my origin ideal of any laudatory connotations

¨ to use my personal ideals as the integrating device for my actions, and to use me as the ultimate foundation for shaping my ideals

¨ to merely accept as personal knowledge my judgment that I could act as an origin, and in general to give precedence to my personal competence in understanding my experience

¨ to create a positive attitude toward risking mistakes about matters that concern me deeply, and to acknowledge that I might spend a lifetime in an futile quest to become a more effective origin

¨ to adopt the attitude that it was appropriate to let my concern with my personal immortality play a central role in my life as a potentiality conjecture rather than as a questionable belief

The perspective and attitude I am cultivating has been synthesized from many situations, some only imagined, some actually occurring. I have been remiss in recording my thoughts about specific situations, being primarily content to distill an abstract version of my attitude. It was from my attitude towards doing and originship that a formulation of my origin quest emerged.

The adoption of this quest was a tentative decision, more about what to do than about values. This quest was chosen at a level below considerations of right and wrong, both in an ethical and an epistemic sense. The tentative features of my origin quest is not due only to the tentativeness of my information, since even if I were omniscient, I do not see why this would be sufficient to determine my ideals. My origin ideal is tentative because I keep slowly changing what I am. When pushed as far as I can go to decide how to shape me, I choose what I will do rather than ask what I ought to do. The question of what I ought to do, when asked at this level, has no meaning for me. There are decisions about becoming that do not involve opinion or belief, since no informational component is decisive. My decision to enhance originship is such decision, altho the strategies I use depend heavily on the information I can discover. When I first begin this book I formulated a resolution as a way to keep this decision in focus.

Resolution: I will focus my doing on shaping myself and shaping the states that I encounter. I will do so according to my current ideals. I will use my ideals as a temporary criteria for doing; look to what I am currently doing as a criteria for my ideals; regard nothing beyond me as a necessary grounding for my actions or my ideals; remember that nothing beyond me would currently suffice. I will guide the evolution of my ideals by the decisions I make, endorse the personal-local-tentative features of these ideals, choose to reshape them by my most creative origin activity. I will cultivate my individuality in a way that integrates me into all that is beyond me. I will act in concert with other persons, both thru friendships and by listening to my cultural heritage, but I will also welcome an irreducible personal contribution from me in everything I do. I will forge the power to become the ultimate judge of my actions. Not only will I judge their effect and their worth, I will select or invent the criteria for this judgment. I will do this with humility, listening to the values of others. In confrontation with actions or attitudes that threaten my most cherished ideals, I will cultivate my awareness that I may later endorse ideals that would guide me to act that way, but I will not let this awareness mute the strength of my current ideals to guide what I do.

Note from 2006: Altho I was experiencing power and joy in 1974 when I first formulated the above resolution, I had doubts about whether I could sustain it. I was strongly aware of my aversion to medical procedures. I was afraid that I might acquire some physical condition that would require hospitalization, and that I would not have the personal powers to endure it. As part of my origin quest, I de-conditioned myself from my fear of blood tests. Such fears had been the major factor in my doubts about my ability to sustain this resolution, and in a sense I was waiting for some disaster that would test it. My fall from the roof in 1989 was a test of this resolution. For hours I was in extreme pain, but the resolution held. It broke in the CAT scan. For three days I was sure that my origin quest was over, but then I was able to revitalize it, and for the rest of my stay in the hospital I could act as an origin. This sense continued during my physical recuperation. Then it collapsed. Since then my ability and desire to sustain this resolution has been considerably diminished. I cannot predict the future role of this resolution.

PART 2 EPISTEMICS

A NET FOR UNDERSTANDING

This part focuses on the epistemic and depends only on Part 0,
altho Part 1 provides a perspective on the kind of epistemic that I find useful.

The epistemics developed here is primitive but I think it has a substantial core.
It contains only a part of the concepts I would like to see developed
and those developed need to be revised and developed further.

Part 3 does not depend on anything in Part 2.
Furthermore it makes almost no use of concepts from PNDP,
altho some the conceptual clarification devices are taken from PNDP.

Chapter 0 Nature and Purpose of Conceptual Study

Chapter 1 Some Concepts and Devices

Chapter 2 Language and Reasoning Concepts

Chapter 3 Plausibility Concepts

Chapter 4 The Study of Conceptual Philosophy

Chapter 5 Mathematics as Pure Conceptual Study

CHAPTER 0 NATURE AND PURPOSE OF CONCEPTUAL STUDY

SECTION 0: INTRODUCTION

Perspective: Study is a type of activity during which P wants to enhance an understanding of some aspect of some realm of interest. A similar thread running thru PNCM and PNDP suggests a type of study that I call conceptual study or CS. Concepts relating to CS form a major part of the epistemics I am formulating. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest fragments of these and explain why CS could be important to some people. Some concepts are my creations, but my primary work was to observe various partial concepts and articulate a perspective that integrates them into a net for understanding. This is still a primitive partial net. Game rules tend to be purely conceptual, so some concepts will be illustrated by example from some well-known games. Concepts will also be illustrated by mathematical examples.

Study and Study Episodes: To say that Jo studied history last night normally suggests that she did more than look up a historical fact. Usually, when we talk about study we are thinking of a study episode rather than a single act, altho study can be a brief casual act. Even watching a game of chess and asking how a pawn is allowed to move qualifies as fleeting study. It is the want parameter and its relationship to the performance parameter that makes an activity study. The achievement parameter is not relevant. Moreover, much of a person’s understanding is achieved without study. Study is directed to the acquisition of understanding that does not just accrue by living. A study episode for P is a sequence of events involving P and that are related by a theme of understanding some realm. This means that not only is the want parameter for much of P’s noteworthy action a desire to understand, but the significance parameter for much of the other thematic action also relates to understanding. P takes a few deep breaths because P wants to relieve tension. This particular act is not study, but the significance parameter involves the study theme if P is doing this to help focus on where some mistake might have occurred.

Types of Study: In CS the study is directed towards some realm that is a net. The activity focuses on presenting-clarifying-refining concepts. This involves relations between concepts within the net, either to clarify or refine it or to create a new or alternative net. The goal is to obtain better competence in regards to the net being considered, i.e. the want parameter for CS is guided by a desire to understand some portion of a net, and often a desire to modify it. CS also involves a special condition on the performance parameter. In doing CS, the principal claims are conceptual, i.e. they are made from within the net being studied (or at least from an understanding of this net). Of course, CS presupposes some paraceptual knowledge, but to qualify as CS this must only be basic reliable knowledge. Without some such knowledge, P would not even know what P was studying. CS also uses the concepts being studied to make paraceptual claims or conjectures, as long as it is understood that this is done merely to add perspective on concepts. CS does not give paraceptual knowledge about any intended application realm, altho it may form a foundation for organizing and obtaining such knowledge.

Most types of study are directly concerned about paraceptual matters, i.e. concepts are used to talk about some state other than the net. Many study episodes are a mixture of paraceptual and conceptual study. An axiomatic study of boolean algebra with a secondary emphasis on circuit design is an example of CS, with a secondary emphasis on applied study, as is true of much of applied mathematics. However in most mixed study the emphasis is on the paraceptual components. Contemporary mathematics is the most prevalent exception in the academic world, with most of the study being purely conceptual. CS is also a central focus of Descriptive Psychology. PNDP does not propose any paraceptual theory for psychology. Instead it provides a net to think about persons and the world. However study in PNDP is often motivated by paraceptual concerns that it helps us access.

An Emotional Concepts Net: I used CS to formulate some concepts from an early version of my emotional concepts net. Altho this was pure CS, it was motivated by personal considerations indicated in the comment following it. These concepts are further developed in CPCS Fearfulness Concepts. CPCS
Self-esteem & Worth Concepts is another paper developing my emotional concepts net.

¨ A distressing state for P is one that causes P to experience a high level of discomfort.

¨ Anguish is an emotional state in which P appraises something as distressing and is motivated to alleviate the distress.

¨ A dangerous state for P is one that threatens P’s wellbeing in a major way. Danger can vary from being immediately present to remote.

¨ Fearfulness is an emotional state in which P appraises some danger and is motivated to escape.

By a major threat to P’s wellbeing means that this state has a significant potential to inflict on P distress beyond that which P can tolerate and still function effectively. An extreme threat is one that potentially could result in a pathological state for P. I use the PNDP concept of a pathological state as one in which P’s ability to engage in deliberate action is severely limited. A pathological state may be temporary, such as a broken leg that heals. However a state that interferes with normal activity for a short time, such as being unable to tolerate normal sunlight for a few hours after having ones eyes dilated, is not pathological. A pathological state may be emotional, such extended grief. It can be spiritual as in being plagued by a sense of sin.

Fearfulness is of 2 main types, fear and anxiety. Both relate to danger, but differ in terms of how the danger is identified. Fear is an emotional state in which P feels like something specific is dangerous and P could describe the danger if asked to do so. Anxiety is an emotional state in which P feels like something is dangerous and P is unable to bring the danger into focus. The problem with anxiety is that it is akin to fear in the feeling of danger, but unlike fear, the danger cannot be clearly identified.

Personal Remark (written in 1998): During 1990 and 1991, I regularly attended a self-help group called Recovery. During this period, I was plagued each morning by a state S of physical tension. My main reaction to S was anxiety. When giving an example at meetings, I usually received one of the standard sayings intended to help me work down my reaction. These included saying that S was distressing but not dangerous, that I could have the will to bear the discomfort, that I was fearful of having a permanent disability, etc. At the time, these sayings had negative utility. I already regarded my reaction as due to distress rather than danger, but I felt that chronic distress was a danger, since it could result in a permanent pathological state. When I now confront S it is useful to remind myself that this is distressing but not dangerous and that I have the will to bear this discomfort. My current type of reaction to S is a quiet sadness, with a determination to move beyond S. The most important factor in making this change involved doing rather than understanding, but a bit of CS involving some emotional concepts also helped. Looking back at my reactions, I see that altho I did not regard S as dangerous, I did regard it as a symptom of some unspecified danger D. Thus my problem was anxiety rather than fear. Not being able to identify D, my need to escape D seemed overwhelming. Thus I could not consider D as distressing but not dangerous. While D was the possibility of having a permanent disability, this was too vague to be helpful. It was not a danger that I could bring into sharp enough focus to confront. During 1992, I spent many weeks in a psych ward. By the end of 1992, I understood that the danger I feared was being locked away forever and losing all my relationships. During each hospital stay, I would begin in a state of despair and sit in a corner crying softly. After a few days, I would begin to exercise. Then I would begin to communicate with other patients, and some of them would always need support from me. I went into the hospital with a fear of a danger D, and discovered that I could survive and even be productive. I was finally able to transform my anxiety over waking with tension to a fear of a specific danger and then to realize that this was a danger that I could confront. Furthermore understanding D gave me the ability to see that without anxiety about S, D was unlikely to occur. I now find the same Recovery sayings useful when I feel this tension. While my emotional response is anguish, this is much easier to deal with than anxiety.

Areas of Study: Names for broad areas of study include physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, mathematics, etc. Specialized areas of study may have there own names, such as botany. Names of areas may also directly indicate their relation to a more general area, such as molecular biology, altho the name Descriptive Psychology does not indicate a specialized area within the area usually called psychology. For most areas of study, such as the ones just mentioned, the type of study used can be conceptual or paraceptual or mixed. For most of them, paraceptual study is predominant, with conceptual study episodes occasionally mixed in. The exception would be any area in which the realm of interest was a net. For such a realm, the study would be mostly conceptual.

Examples of Conceptual Study: The use of CS for in physics can be illustrated by Basri’s deductive theory of space and time and by Vadarajon’s lattice based work for quantum mechanics. Such studies may be done either as pure or mixed CS. The conceptual part of Basri’s work can be taken as a paradigm case of mixed CS in the subject area of physics. A simpler case of CS is the formulation and discussion of the rules for almost any game. Personal study of any feature of ordinary experience uses some net, and thus CS could be applied in any such study. It can also be done in conjunction with more specialized study such as paraceptual science. Contemporary philosophy does CS, but the emphasis is usually on debate or discussion of philosophical problems, rather than on creating a net for philosophy. I would like to see higher stages of CS in a variety of areas. I would like to see CS used extensively in developing conceptual nets for learning, and especially in learning for effective living. In particular, I would like to see CS used in developing a net for volitional competence and in developing a net for emotional competence.

Evolution of Conceptual Study for a Realm: The division into the following stages from C0 to C3 is a rough attempt to give some linear order to sophisticated use of CS in relation to a realm R.

C0: CS episodes are brief and not recognized as such. There is little or no attempt to focus directly on concepts apart from paraceptual applications.

C1: Concepts are examined in their own right, with an attempt to clarify them by definition. Conceptual considerations are subordinated to paraceptual ones, with concepts recognized as legitimate only if they represent something considered as existing in R. Basic law or axioms may be formulated for R, but are regarded as true of R, rather than as a means of concept clarification.

C2: There is an attempt to formulate all concepts for R, using definitions or other conceptual methods. Altho paraceptual restrictions are not placed on the concepts in the net, the net is judged by paraceptual considerations outside the net. This is done using various abstract concepts that are intertwined with certain paraceptual beliefs.

C3: At this level, there are extended episodes of CS. Nets are formulated with or without regard to any particular realm of application. Deliberate effort is made to not favor paraceptual beliefs about any intended realm of application, except perhaps a belief that the net might be useful for thinking about this realm. This level will be referred to as mature CS.

Pure Conceptual Study & Pre-Paraceptual Conceptual Study: CS study is pure if the significance parameter relates mainly to conceptual concerns. CS is pre-paraceptual if a noteworthy part of the significance parameter involves becoming better prepared to apply the concepts being studied to paraceptual concerns. The study of the metric system in American elementary schools is seldom pre-paraceptual, altho similar study would be in many countries. Altho pre-paraceptual and pure CS differ in the significance parameter, when successful their achievement parameters share a very important feature. Achievement involves shaping tools that are theory neutral.

To ask about chess moves merely because you want to understand the rules is pure CS. However pure CS may also be a prelude to using the concepts in a variety of ways, as long as one of these intended uses did not involve obtaining paraceptual information. To ask about chess rules as a prelude to playing chess is also pure CS, unless there is more than this in mind. For instance, it could be pre-paraceptual if the intent was to study chess strategies after learning to play.

Pre-Empirical Study: Pre-paraceptual study is pre-empirical if a noteworthy part of the significance parameter involves becoming better prepared to apply concepts to empirical concerns, i.e. concerns about knowledge that will be or has been explicitly checked and reasonably verified by observation. My learning backgammon rules was pre-paraceptual study (I intended to casually learn strategies), but it was not pre-empirical study. The rules are too simple to be challenging and I mastered them rather casually. Likewise, learning the concepts in our ordinary net for family relationships would be a form of pre-paraceptual study that is usually not pre-empirical, altho it could be pre-empirical if a noteworthy part of the significance parameter was to make systematic observations about family interactions. There is no sharp boundary between pre-empirical study and pre-paraceptual study that is not pre-empirical, altho there are clear-cut cases of each. I would classify the study of football concepts by a defensive coordinator as pre-empirical if he intends to use this to help formulate strategic and tactical principles and to check these by systematic observation.

The conceptual part of Men and Women: Partners and Lovers by Mary Kathleen Roberts in Advances Vol 2 is an excellent example of pre-empirical study. This paper is systematic and well organized. It uses concepts from PNDP to develop other specialized concepts. The conceptual part is a prelude to the empirical part and is clearly separated from the empirical conjectures. Similar remarks could be made about other papers from Advances, many of which have conceptual parts that are pre-empirical study. In fact, Descriptive Psychology goes beyond what most people think of as psychology. Rather than being area of study within Psychology, a major portion of Descriptive Psychology is the pre-empirical study of the concepts that are important for the realm of behavioral science.

Mature Conceptual Study PNCM is the most widely known net involving mature conceptual study. Most of this study is not pre-paraceptual, since even when it provides concepts for paraceptual applications; this is not part of the significance parameter for this type of study. Work in PNCM may be suggested by any human activity but it takes a life of its own that is independent of paraceptual theories or any attempt to mirror our other forms of experience. The tongue-in-cheek toast “Here is to pure mathematics, may it never be of use to anyone” and the quip “There can be no dispute between pure and applied mathematicians, they cannot talk to each other” are indicative of the purely conceptual attitude prevalent among pure mathematicians.

Closely related instances of mature conceptual study that are pre-empirical would be works in an axiomatic study of mathematical structures that are intended to model something that is not merely conceptual. Mathematical features of computer science would be included, especially in automata theory. There are also some non-mathematical examples of mature pre-empirical study. I would classify Larry Wright’s practical reasoning text as mature pre-empirical study in relation to informal reasoning. However, I am only aware of one extensive non-mathematical area of study that makes use of mature pre-empirical study, namely the area of Descriptive Psychology.

Study within PNDP has primarily been mature pre-empirical study. This is a matter of the significance parameter for those doing Descriptive Psychology. In fact, much of the work has been intended as a basis for empirical investigation in the behavioral sciences. Given the dominant paradigms in the behavioral science, this is not surprising. Lacking a net like PNDP, there is little recognition of the restrictive nature of the underlying epistemological presuppositions of most of the work being done. Nor is there an understanding of the role that ordinary basic reliable knowledge could play in clarifying or broadening these paradigms.

A Paradigm Shift in Mathematics: Even in mathematics, study has not always been pure CS. Pre‑Greek mathematics was at stage C0. The Greek perspective considered geometry as the study of an ideal space that was more basic than physical space. It was mixed study, with CS as a major unrecognized component at about level C1. The realm was imagined as platonistic rather than personal or natural. Understanding this provides a perspective on what they were attempting, but does not mean that their platonistic realm of ideal space is necessary for geometry. Hilbert’s work in euclidean geometry was mature CS, and he even describes it as such. He used definitions and axioms without any commitments to this being a theory of either an ideal or a physical space. Mathematical study from then on is mature CS, altho most mathematicians may still have platonistic leanings. Earlier, in the late 19th century, we were mostly at level C2. I base this estimate on some of the prevalent attitudes. Hamilton argues that it is legitimate to study a non-commutative number system. This seems strange from the perspective of PNCM, which considers anything that can be axiomatized in first order logic as suitable for mathematical study. In Section 2, I indicate the conceptual perspective taken by contemporary mathematicians by summarizing and commenting on some of their remarks. As a prelude, I note that Paul Halmos focuses on a type of activity. He says that mathematics is abstract thought, pure logic, a creative art. He also says that all these claims are wrong, but they are a little bit right, and nearer the mark than saying that mathematics is the study of numbers or geometric shapes. In Mathematics Form and Function, MacLane indicates an origin for mathematical thought.

Mathematics starts from a variety of human activities, disentangles from them a number of notions which are generic and not arbitrary, then formalizes these notions and their interrelations; hence mathematics studies formal structures by deductive methods which, because of the formal character, require a standard of precision and rigor.

A change in emphasis has emerged in Contemporary Mathematics so significant that I consider it a major paradigm shift. PNCM is not restricted to any particular subject matter. Instead, it is a type of activity, an activity having a special approach and focusing on concepts and their relationships. Mathematical study may be suggested by any human activity but it takes a life of its own, which is independent of paraceptual theories or any attempt to mirror our other forms of experience. Which math nets a person chooses to acquire and use depends on a variety of personal factors, and individual differences are to be expected in such matters. For differential calculus, I prefer a net for hyper-real numbers. For integral calculus, I still prefer a net involving only real numbers. With more experience or with different purposes my preferences might change. Similar comments apply to non-mathematical nets. I hope epistemics might provide a primitive basis for constructing a variety of nets for persons whose purposes are similar to mine and who favor a fairly comprehensive paradigm shift involving some of the main features I am about to sketch. The epistemics I propose is not expected to be useful for anyone whose purposes differ radically from my own, except perhaps as food for thought.

Conceptual Study and a General Paradigm Shift: I act from the conjecture that the paradigm shift in mathematics may be a prelude to one of the most significant general paradigm shifts in human history. I believe it has already prepared the way for the emergence of pure CS in the creation of PNDP. While not widely known PNDP could provide a radical new way of thinking thru all of behavioral science. It could provide a neutral net for such any paraceptual theory and research, as mathematics does for the physical sciences. The difference between physics before and after Newton depends heavily on the net supplied by mathematics, and contemporary physics could not be adequately formulated without the net provided by some very modern mathematics. I suspect a similar comment may be made some day about the relationship between other paraceptual studies and some pure net for persons such as the one being created by Ossorio.

While I find academic knowledge of interest, it is rather specialized, and except for mathematics, much of it is important to me only when I can relate it to ordinary knowledge. Thus the main use I see for CS is in many ordinary nets. Section 1 focuses on CS of various egg concepts. The main purpose is to illustrate the potential for complexity even in simple ordinary nets that center on concepts that relate directly to perceptual experience. These concepts formed a more complex cluster than I expected, even though the development I use is rather superficial. This has enhanced my appreciation of the complexity of simple clusters of concepts and the extensive task involved in clarification of a conceptual net. However we often think and communicate well enough for our purposes by reliance on context, so except as an exercise in learning how to think in terms of CS, doing this with most ordinary concepts would probably serve little if any practical purpose. Details in Section 1 can be considered an optional sideshow, but I recommend them because they give a fairly rich specific illustration of the observations about CS given below. Section 2 indicates the role of CS in Descriptive Psychology, primarily by using some excerpts from PBW and Ossorio. Section 3 focuses on the evolution of and use of CS in mathematics. This section largely ignores the attitude that treats mathematics as a paraceptual account of some platonistic realm. Consideration of this is postponed to Chapter 5. Sections 1 thru 3 of this present chapter do not develop any concepts that are used elsewhere in this book. They merely add perspective on how CS has been and can be used. They can be skipped or read in any order.

Some General Observations about Conceptual Study

¨ A net that is primarily a part of an ordinary net can be a stepping-stone to a more specialized net, and even ordinary perceptual nets are somewhat remote.

¨ Almost any net T that is part of an ordinary net O will contain other components of O that were acquired prior to the acquisition of T.

¨ The amount of clarity needed in a net depends on the purposes for which the net is being used.

¨ Nets tend to be dynamic rather than static, but they also tend to evolve slowly and remain stable enough for conceptual clarification. An evolving net can be regarded as a series of distinct nets, but unless the change is radical it is often more convenient to regard it as a single dynamic net.

¨ The distinction between conceptual and paraceptual is less sharp in some versions of an ordinary net than in others. Knowing the extent to which a claim is conceptual or paraceptual depends on knowing it within the context of the nets used to understand the claim.

SECTION 1: VARIOUS EGG CONCEPTS AND ORDINARY NETS

Remark: This section focuses a fictional account of my acquisition of various egg concepts. I also briefly discuss some other ordinary nets. One reason for focusing on egg concepts is to illustrate the potential for complexity, and even confusion, in a simple ordinary net even when the concepts are not emotionally laden. It is also intended to illustrate why I find conceptual study useful for thinking about such nets, and in particular the paraceptual-conceptual distinction recalled below.

¨ Conceptual information is about concepts and relationships between concepts within some net.

¨ Paraceptual information presupposes some net, but is about some realm that the net is intended to help access.

Since I assume that the reader already knows various ways of thinking about eggs, my account is simplistic in several ways. I pretend that concepts are more precise than would be expected under the conditions described and that new egg concepts or nets emerged sharply in discrete jumps, rather than as a continuing expansion and revision of an evolving net. I talk as these distinctions are in sharp focus and some versions are labeled numerically to distinguish between them. This is an artificial device, since I would have seldom been explicitly aware of which egg concept or egg net I was using, and I would shift back and forth among them. In most situations, this would not lead to confusion, since I would be implicitly guided by shifting contexts.

As with any net, these egg nets freely use a variety of components from my routine net. The concepts it draws on are those acquired early and that are extremely standard versions of commonly used concepts from our public routine net. For example, they use concepts from an ordinary perceptual net for color, shape, size, etc. They also use concepts from an ordinary net for numbers.

EN0: I acquired Egg Net 0 as a child in a small town. My first egg concept was primarily perceptual, using a narrow range of attributes. An egg is white and sort of round. It barely fits in my hand. It is smooth and hard, but with a shell that can be cracked open. It is liquid inside, with a clear part and yellow part that has a certain smell. EN0 also contained a perceptual concept of an egg carton as a cardboard container with 2 rows each with spaces for 6 eggs.

This presentation should be adequate for anyone having similar experiences with eggs, but it is a feeble and indirect way to present this early egg concept. To bring this perceptual egg concept into focus I selected an egg, felt it, looked at it, broke it open, etc. This would be part of any activity I would use in presenting this concept to a novice with eggs. This concept was not acquired from a single experience with a particular egg, but from a number of such experiences. I implicitly expected that I could use it with eggs I had not yet encountered. Thus this perceptual egg concept in EN0, while highly manifest, was more remote than my concept of any particular eggs that I had examined.

I told my mother that eggs always came in cartons that contained 12 eggs. She told me that Mr. Barns had chickens that laid eggs, and that he had sold her a bag with 18 eggs. Learning that eggs didn’t need to come in cartons didn’t modify my concept. It merely involved expanding my paraceptual information about eggs. When she also told me that there were egg cartons with 18 eggs, I knew she was mistaken. In saying that an egg carton had room for exactly 12 eggs I was implicitly making a conceptual claim. Since 6+6=12 and given my egg carton concept, this claim was correct. Of course, I did not think in terms of the conceptual-paraceptual distinction. So we could not focus on the fact that she thought I was making an incorrect paraceptual claim and was correcting my information rather than acknowledging the correctness of my conceptual claim and showing me that my egg carton concept was limited. In spite of this, I learned a more flexible egg carton concept in which the claim that an egg carton could contain 18 eggs was conceptually correct.

Remark: Persons often tend to mix paraceptual and conceptual claims. This can result in confusion and in more conceptual vagueness than would have occurred had this distinction is kept in focus, especially when dealing with remote concepts. However it is seldom more than a passing problem with highly manifest concepts. For most of the ordinary use of basic reliable information, whether it is conceptual or paraceptual is often of little or no concern.

EN1: Learning that eggs could be cooked in various ways began as paraceptual information, but evolved into an expanded net having distinct concepts of raw and cooked eggs. My cooked egg concept had perceptual components, such as taste and appearance, and had my egg experience only been with them, the first egg net I acquired would have had a very different perceptual egg concept. EN1 also involved ideas of relationships into which eggs can enter. Knowing that raw eggs could become cooked eggs my concept of a perceptual egg vacillated between its original version and a kind of food egg version including these perceptual and utilitarian components. A cooked egg concept easily gives rise to concepts such as fried eggs, hard-boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, etc. With egg concepts with such vague boundaries the claim that eggs can be cooked and eaten was neither clearly conceptual nor paraceptual. My egg concept was too vague to bring any consistent sharp distinction between paraceptual and conceptual claims about eggs into focus.

Remarks: The change from a narrow precise concept to a more complex and less precise is typical of the way concepts evolve. Having clear versions would help classify a variety of claims about eggs as conceptual or paraceptual. While we would seldom made sharp distinctions about such matters, the claim that all fried eggs are cooked eggs would be purely conceptual in a usual fried egg version. Eggs can be cooked with various other ingredients, as in making pancakes. I never acquired a pancake egg concept, altho a person with more concern about cooking pancakes might have. Statements that were conceptual from within his net might seem paraceptual from within mine. In practice this might be difficult to determine, but not for any deep reason. It is merely easier for me to use a less refined egg net, since this is integrated into my thinking about eggs in certain contexts, but not in others. Since ways of thinking changes, there is no sharp division between what is merely additional information and what is part of a particular version of a concept, nor does there need to be. Yet it is clear that using EN1, the fact that eggs can be used in pancake batter is paraceptual information.

EN2: As EN1 expanded, it not only it not only contained various cooked egg concept, it also included concepts of store eggs, farm eggs, etc. I also saw eggs being laid and hatched. The resulting chicken egg concept extended my earlier perceptual egg concept in a way that my cooking egg concept did not, and so I will classify this as a new egg net. This chicken egg concept was more remote than cooking egg, since my knowledge of cooking was more immediate than my knowledge of chickens. EN2 related eggs to chickens in a special way, that has nothing to do with how eggs are used. The fact that chicken eggs and cooking eggs are related was paraceptual information rather than part of either egg concept. My chicken egg concept also expanded my perceptual egg concept in terms of color. In principle, I could have formed an egg concept that is the union of cooking and chicken eggs, but in practice I did not. EN2 merely allowed for both concepts. Maybe if I had lived on a farm and collected eggs for breakfast, I would have used the union concept, rather than thinking of the connection between chicken eggs and cooking eggs as paraceptual information.

EN3: My experience of eggs expanded to include observation of those laid by ducks and small birds, and I saw pictures of ostrich and turkey eggs. This gave a slight perceptual extension of my egg concept that allowed for differences in size and color. This changed my use of language. When not clear from context I used chicken egg rather than egg for this earlier concept. More significantly, it resulted in extending EN2 to EN3 by extending the chicken egg concept to a biological egg concept applicable to eggs of all animals that reproduce sexually.

Remark: My biological egg concept is certainly not a perceptual concept. If you showed me a biological egg selected at random, I would probably not even recognize it as an egg. EN3 is as remote as I ever went with an egg net. It became part of a much broader net used for thinking about biology.

Perceptual Egg Concepts: Seeing eggs from various birds suggests possible extensions of a perceptual egg concept, focusing on shape, and allowing for various colors and sizes. Such a concept might even include eggs made of wood or plastic. However part of our perceptual experience involves cracking eggs open so these are considered as rather specialized types of eggs, or as egg-shaped, or even as fake eggs. Furthermore we would not confuse this with our biological egg concept.

Utility of Conceptual Study for Egg Concepts: Bob has my early perceptual egg concept. His cousin Jan grew up on a farm, and thru experience acquired a different perceptual egg concept. She has just seen her first Easter egg.

Jan: Eggs are not blue.

Bob: Of course, not, that egg has been dyed. Everyone knows that. Eggs are white.

Jan: You must be teasing. Our chickens never lay white eggs.

Jan’s first statement proposes a correct conceptual claim in her egg net. The information Bob receives is correct for his egg net. While they agree to this shared statement, the word egg in this statement refers to a somewhat different concept for Bob than it does for Jan. I call the information proposed by a statement a proposition. Thus while they use the same statement, each is using it for a different proposition.

It is easy to see why they agree on this statement but disagree when Bob says eggs are white. Jan’s statement makes a true conceptual claim from within her net. The proposition Bob imagines when he hears this statement is a true conceptual claim within his net. This is not the case for Bob’s statement. The proposition he sent was conceptually true, but the proposition she received was conceptually false. They argue ineffectively.

I use this situation to introduce them to the conceptual-paraceptual distinction, as well as the concepts of information sent and information received. Since their egg concepts are both perceptual, I exhibit both brown and white eggs and break them open. They see that their limited paraceptual information had limited their egg concepts. They agree to use a shared egg net. Bob no longer says that eggs are white, but he does say that some eggs are white. Jan agrees.

There is a one outcome of this situation that some may consider unfortunate. Jan now finds it difficult to communicate with her teacher. Her teacher does not enjoy playing with concepts. She is indifferent to the conceptual-paraceptual distinction that Jan wants to talk about. Nor does her teacher see the utility of making a distinction between information sent and received.

Seemingly Superfluous Concepts: A good-looking egg is one that looks and smells okay when cracked open. Let good-looking eggs be classified as follows. A good egg is good-looking egg that is edible. A deceptive egg is a good-looking egg that is not edible.

Suppose that all good-looking eggs are good eggs. This does not mean that the deceptive egg concept is false, since concepts cannot be true or false. It does not even imply that all claims about them are false. In fact the claim that there are no deceptive eggs would be is a correct paraceptual claim about them. The deceptive egg concept may be of little practical utility, and anyone with a highly paraceptual orientation this concept might seem superfluous. However the deceptive egg concept could be of minor utility. For example it is slightly more concise to say that someday we may find a deceptive egg than to say that we may someday find a good-looking egg which is not a good egg.

In general, we do not need something to exist in order to have a concept for it. Nor is its existence a necessary condition for its utility. It is not the existence of unicorns that make this concept useful, but because we might want to read a certain story. In order to prove that Ö2 is irrational, we first conceptualize the rational number whose square is 2. It is not the concept that is false, for concepts can be neither true nor false, altho a concept can fail by being incoherent. It is the proposition “There is a rational number that squared gives 2” that is conceptually false. Not only is our conceptualization of such a number coherent, it was useful in establishing a conceptual limitation of the rational number system. Nor is this an exception in the historical development of mathematics.

Utility of Conceptual Study for Ordinary Realms: In discussing utility, I assumed that Bob and Jan wanted to understand each other. CS (conceptual study) was at most mildly useful for this purpose, since they would have probably come to a shared egg concept in the ordinary course of interaction. For her teacher, who believes that students merely needed to listen carefully in order to learn, Jan’s distinction between information sent and received seemed silly or even impudent. While Jan found this somewhat disturbing, she also revised her perspective on adult authority. Whether this is good for her or not is difficult to tell. This may help her cultivate confidence in her own powers, but it may do so in a way that places her outside of the norm. In general using a conceptual distinction that others do not make may be useful in some ways, but it is also likely to cause communication problems. Even being aware of making unusual distinctions might make Jan hesitate in responding in the expected manner to a variety of questions that the sender implicitly regards as a clear informational request.

I find CS useful for all my nets because I value the potential for clarity enough to compensate for the difficulties in communication. I also find that with this clarity and some extra effort I can sometimes communicate at a more sophisticated level. Altho ignorance may be bliss, when acting on important options, I value correct information that is contrary to bliss over incorrect information that enhances it. Altho I might have been happier had I believed that my students understood much more than they actually did, I doubt that this would have made me better able to help them cultivate personal powers.

Recall that an ordinary realm is any realm that a person may think about in a competent way without using highly specialized concepts and information. The game of bridge is an ordinary realm but the theory of bridge playing at a life masters level is not. There are also ordinary realms of law, medicine, music, etc.; as well as such specialized realms. The difference between an ordinary realm and a specialized realm is primarily a matter of more refined distinctions. It can also be a matter of highly incompatible perspectives, as is the ordinary realm of taxes as opposed to the realm of taxes for an accountant. The extent to which a person may find CS useful depends on that person’s values and purposes. It is easy for a tax accountant to see how concept clarification might help their clients. For a client who merely wants to leave it to the expert, an understanding of these concepts may seem irrelevant.

Ordinary Mathematics: One of my conjectures as a teacher is that CS can be used to transform the way people think about their ordinary of mathematical concepts, since this is at least a necessary condition in making these concepts more suitable for mathematical study. For a student who merely wants to pass a required math course with as little effort as possible the use of CS for this purpose may even have negative utility. I make no claim that CS is necessary or sufficient for dealing effectively with matter concerning most ordinary realms. P may deal effectively with balancing a checkbook using a math net that I find incoherent. However P would be able to deal effectively with more quantitative situations if P had a better math net. To obtain a better math net CS could be useful, but better nets can be obtained without its explicit use. Most mathematicians had somewhat paraceptual attitudes towards mathematics when they were children, but their ordinary childhood math nets were more coherent than most adult nets and were more an asset than a liability in obtaining access to PNCM.

Understanding and Belief: If P is interested in being elected to a political office CS may help P understand that his 30-second sound bites are blatant propaganda. This may make it easier for him to make them more effective. On the other hand, belief that they are not primarily propaganda, but truths that make P the better candidate, may make P seem more sincere. This might satisfy P’s purposes better than seeing how to improve his propaganda. In general, when P’s purpose is to instill a belief B rather than foster understanding, not using CS has at least one advantage of allowing an unchallenged firm belief in B. This may or may not be outweighed by having a better understanding that opens the possibility of doubt. A politician may say that my opponent’s policies are unpatriotic. Without a clarification of this term, this vague statement may help garner the support of the faithful and even increase his support among some other groups of voters. Asking him to clarify this concept in order to bring policy distinctions into better focus is unlikely to be welcomed. The purpose of his statement was to influence attitudes rather than to convey any clear understanding of the differences.

Ordinary Legal Nets: Using an ordinary net for legal concepts, it is against the law to run a red light. In particular, to most adults in our society the concept of running a red light involves the concept of a traffic light and a motor vehicle. It does not include a person running around the block with a red light in his hand. Our ordinary legal net is flexible enough for us to acknowledge that it is not against the law for a fire engine bound for a fire to go thru an intersection against a red light. To analyze this, we can keep our ordinary concept of running a red light and specify a number of cases in which this was legal. On the other hand, we could narrow this concept so that running a red light does not include all instances of going thru an intersection when the light is red. For example, we can specify that an ambulance in duty going thru a red light is running a red light in a legal manner or we can conceptualize such cases of going thru a red light as not running it.

For most purposes, whether we handle such issues by conceptualizing or by listing exceptions makes little difference, as long as we can recognize how to apply the law. In general, our ordinary legal net serves us well enough for many purposes, and not having it conceptualized more precisely causes no problems for the purposes at hand. What bothers many people are laws that affect them and that are drafted in such a way that only legal experts using a special legal net can understand. In such cases, they may be more likely to feel outrage than to endorse the net lawyers use for what may seem as finding legal loopholes. Many people wish that the net used by lawyers could be closer to the ordinary net they use for thinking about laws. However while many adults share parts of a public ordinary legal net, this net is fairly vague and there are many matters in which different people use personal legal nets that are not compatible. One application of CS could be to refine and clarify our ordinary legal net. Since this could be a formidable task, I will focus only on one concept, namely the concept of a legal right. I will also relate the concept of a legal right to other concepts of a right. I examine this in the light of my values and purposes, so the utility of CS for me seems obvious. This example involves a situation that is emotionally charged for many people, and for some of their purposes and values CS might have negative utility.

Our public ordinary legal net involves a rights concept, such as the right to remain silent. At its core, this concept has much the same meaning as the rights concept in the more elaborate net of the legal profession. T is a legal right for P means that T may be properly claimed as due and this claim is backed by the legal system. There are other similar rights. A club may guarantee its members a hearing when facing expulsion. To focus on these kinds of rights, and to contrast them to other types anyone might imagine, I refer to them as institutional rights. Institutional rights are normally fairly well understood by person with institutional status, as are the processes that are intended to support them. They tend to be either explicitly formulated or implicit in traditions for which there is a high degree of consensus in interpreting.

There has also been some concept of rights that are broader than that of an institutional right. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. These were clearly not institutional rights at that time, altho there was some attempt to claim them as rights of Englishmen. However the main appeal went beyond this. Jefferson claimed that the purpose of governments was to insure such rights. He thought of them as natural rights. What is this concept of a natural right? While legal rights are backed by the legal system, it seems dubious that nature provides a similar protection for natural rights. From Jefferson’s statement, one would suppose instead that they were rooted in the will of God, but how they are backed is not clear. Perhaps they are backed by God because rebellion against a government that violates these rights is justified in the sight of God, and perhaps God will support such a rebellion.

Finding the concept of a natural right too vague for my purposes, I will ask a different question. Is there some coherent way to conceptualize a rights concept that involves the idea that P may properly claim T as due and this is backed by something other than some human institution? Whatever the 18th century concept of a natural right might have been, we live in a time in which conceptualizing rights in relation to the will of God is not broad enough to help us understand many of the disputes involving persons with different cosmic versions, at least when they are using a rights concept not backed by some human institution. The kinds of rights that seem to be involved have moral connotations. Since I do not have a good way to conceptualize a non-institutional right, I am reluctant to use such a concept. However others talk as if there were such rights, and I would like some way to think about such discussions. The strategy I use can be illustrated by my application of CS to a discussion about rights in relation to the issue of abortion.

Debates over abortion involve the phrases ‘the right to life’ and ‘the right to choose’. Clearly, there are laws designed to punish murder or manslaughter, so there are some legal rights to life. There is also a multitude of legal rights to choose, such as the right to make a will. To say that abortion is murder or even manslaughter in the United States is clearly false in the legal sense of the term. Roe vs Wade narrowed the legal right to life and expanded the legal right to choose. Likewise, there was talk about the right to choose an abortion before there was a legal right to have an abortion. Of course, all of this is irrelevant to the debate over abortion. This debate is not about what legal rights are. It is about what they should be. The concept of a right involved in this debate is what we can call a moral right. A net using a shared moral rights concept will not settle this dispute, but it might lead to less vague interchanges. Of course, some persons may not feel that clarification of issues is the best way to achieve their purposes. I do not know how to clearly formulate the moral rights concept that is being used, but I shall try an initial approximation.

This moral right concept would seem to depend on a moral should concept. My formulation of this concept is even more tentative than my formulation of a moral right concept. One-way to conceptualize a ‘moral should’ is in relation to basic values, namely to say we morally should do what supports basic values. There are various ways to use the concept of basic values, including those below. Of course, given any such conceptualizations there is likely to be paraceptual difference about which values are basic.

(A) Basic values are given by the will of a monotheistic God.

(B) Basic values are those that best support the wellbeing of humanity.

(D) Basic values are those that support the long-term wellbeing of something considered higher than humanity, For instance, those that support the wellbeing of the universe.

For a person P to have a moral right T means that P has a proper claim that T is due to P. Moreover this should morally be backed in this by some human institution having the power to enforce this right.

Unlike a legal right, a moral right as conceptualized in (B) may not be backed by anything. It merely morally should be backed by some institution. It is perfectly consistent to claim that T is a moral right but to oppose it for amoral reasons. This is also the case for moral rights as conceptualized in (A). It is perfectly consistent to believe that God’s will is suggestive for humans but not prescriptive. In general, any way I have imagined conceptualizing moral rights allows for the possibility that they may not be backed by anything. They might be, but this is a paraceptual matter.

Many persons advocating the pro-life position do so from a theistic perspective, and I suspect the concept of a moral right is linked to the basic values concept in (A). While abortion is not legally murder, they believe it is morally murder. This might mean that God will hold a person who kills an unborn child morally responsible, and that a society that does not protect this right will fail to prosper in some significant way. This would be a backing for the right, but it does not enforce the right. A theist taking a pro-choice position can use the same concept of a moral right. The difference is about the will of God. Whether they can make progress in their debate depends on how they handle disagreements about God’s will. To the extent that they have the same concept of God’s will, any disagreements will be about paraceptual claims and about how to know God’s will.

Many non-theists may be implicitly using the concept of basic values like that suggested by (B), altho others may be using a broader concept like (D). Using (B) allows for a different type of discussion among them, perhaps about what is in the long-term wellbeing of humans. Such debate may seem to focus on paraceptual matters, but unless a shared concept of the wellbeing of humanity is being used, there may be more misunderstanding than actual paraceptual disagreement. In particular, does the concept of wellbeing of humanity mean the greatest wellbeing for the most, altho this may involve the sacrifice of some, and most important for discussing abortion how does the wellbeing of unborn humans compare with the wellbeing of the mother? Without some serious CS, I do not see how I could understand what is being claimed by either proponents or opponents of abortion.

When the discussion about abortion involves both theists and non-theists, more is involved. An atheistic using (A) would merely make the paraceptual claim that there are no moral rights. An agnostic using (A) would not know whether or not there were moral rights, but would certainly not know how to determine them. For both, moral rights would be irrelevant. A theist is likely to believe that it is paraceptually true that the will of God includes the wellbeing of humanity. However a theist may think that the will of God entails additional basic values. It is for this reason that I propose the more awkward concept of basic values as suggested by (C), altho I have not indicated how this concept would apply if God’s will does not include the wellbeing of humanity. Discussion among theists who believe it does can go on as if they were using (A). Discussion among non-theists can go on as if they were using (B). Theists could believe that following God’s will is what contribute to the wellbeing of humanity, but to make progress with non-theists they would need to find other evidence about what supports the wellbeing of humanity. For example, they might argue that societies not supporting certain rights seem to be on the wrong side of history. Discussions involving both theists and non-theist can also focus on the existence of God and on how the will of God can be known, but more to bring out paraceptual differences than to settle them.

Altho using something broader than (C) might make little difference in discussions about abortion, it could be of use in discussion with persons having a broader notion of basic values. For instance, some persons who advocate animal rights may be using something broader than (C). An adequate net that includes rights that are not institutional would seem to call for a lot more conceptual study.

SECTION 2: DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Overview: In developing PNDP, Ossorio used conceptual methods that significantly broaden the kinds of nets that can be somewhat rigorously developed. This section consists primarily of excerpts from PBW and Ossorio that indicate why a large part of the study of Descriptive Psychology is mature CS. For more discussion of my perspective, see The Potential Impact of Descriptive Psychology on the Descriptive Psychology section of my website.

The Person Concept: The person concept is crucial in PNDP. Its presentation is conceptual. That a person is an individual with a history of deliberate action that fits in a dramaturgical pattern is true in the same trivial sense that an axiom is true for some mathematical net. This proposition is about how the person concept is used, and could only be false if the PNDP did not use the concept in this manner. This presentation of the person concept is only a partial specification of the concept. To be able to use this concept, Ossorio in Place gives a number of maxims that relate it to behavior and various parameters of behavior. The person concept uses, the concept of deliberate action, which presupposes the concept of intentional action, which is interrelated with eight concepts used to give a parametric analysis of the concept of a behavior description. All of this is conceptual rather than paraceptual. Even more important, to acquire a version of PNDP, a person must use its concepts. Because of its intent, PNDP both uses and refines concepts from our public routine net. To understand PNDP it is necessary to already have competence in working with a number of ordinary concepts. For example, the reality concepts of PNDP given earlier would make no sense without an awareness of a number of specific objects, events, processes, states, relationships. The maxim given below may seem trivial. However its role is merely to indicate one thing that a behavior description must adhere to if it is to be adequately conceptualized. CPCS Maxims and Axioms for Conceptual Nets further indicate the role of maxims. For an extensive list of PNDP maxims with commentary, see Place by Ossorio.

Maxim: If a situation calls for a person to do something he cannot do, he will do something he can do, if he does anything at all.

The Conceptual Stance of Descriptive Psychology: PNDP started with an explicit attempt to begin with a net rather than with paraceptual theories. Thus from the beginning PNDP used mature CS. The summary below of pages 2-5 of the introduction in PBW indicates that PNDP is CS of a net rather than study of a paraceptual theory. This is followed by an extended excerpt from Ossorio that I think indicates his intent that Descriptive Psychology’s central focus is to be on conceptual study.

Descriptive Psychology is a conceptual system. Its central concept is the person concept. This is a set of systematically related distinctions designed to provide access to all facts about persons and behavior, and therefore to everything else as well. A set of distinctions cannot have a truth-value. Making distinctions and making statements are not the same, and a creature that has no verbal language can yet act on distinctions. Distinctions can be more or less useful for a given purpose, may be used skillfully or clumsily, but the distinctions themselves, the concepts, cannot be true or false. The concepts of Descriptive Psychology are designed to systematize possible answers and the possibilities of answering, but not to provide answers. This is a way of looking at the world, rather than a specification of what to see.

Excerpt From Ossorio: Sometimes it is better to make a fresh start. Just as a building may be so ram-shackled that it can neither bear the weight it must nor be refurbished or enlarged effectively, so also may a social or intellectual structure be so deficient and self-defeating that any procedure which involved accepting it in general in order to correct some deficiencies in particular would be as hopeful and productive as slapping Uncle Remus’s Tar Baby around. In such circumstances one naturally tries to salvage what one can, but a fresh start is indicated.

I take this to be evidently the case with the social and intellectual institutions which have come to be self-characterized as “behavioral science” and further, with the more general social-intellectual structure within which “behavioral science” is carried on. Under the former heading I include at least (1) a miscellaneous collection of behavioral theories and models, including the psychoanalytic, phenomenological, cognitive-developmental, S-R, physiological, “systems” and “miniature theory” genres, and (2) a miscellaneous body of customs and practices, one among which is to give some of the others such honorific designations as “methodology,” “metatheory,” “experimental design,” and so on. Under the latter heading I would include at least the disciplines of philosophy of science, semantic theory, moral philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

I report these as observations, not as a bill of particulars, for I do not intend to come to cuffs with that Tar Baby. Part of what is involved in making a fresh start is that I shall not survey or critically examine the most nearly related work in behavioral science or philosophy as it now exists, except occasionally, and then for heuristic purposes, not scholarly ones. The work of introducing an alternative intellectual climate and conceptual idiom must precede any work of comparison and appraisal. Moreover, it may be advisable to leave these later tasks to others.

The Tar Baby problem may be put in this form: Any present critical survey or critical analysis of theories or theses within the traditional intellectual structure could be accomplished only by recourse to theories, disciplines, vocabularies, customs, or norms within the same general structure and would therefore be vitiated by the deficiencies of the structure as a whole and at these points. And any attempt to clear up these difficulties would face the same problem. And so on. The more we struggle with the deformities and deficiencies of our traditional intellectual framework, the more we are stuck with it. Since there appears to be no way out, the prudential course is not to get in. If there is an alternative, we do not have to get in.

It is a general feature of traditions and ways of thinking that in-house technical criticism will be provided for, and even encouraged, whereas fundamental criticism will appear to be wrongheaded, incomprehensible, naive, or blindly antagonistic, except within an alternative outlook. It is not merely that to a tic-tac-toe player the world consists of noughts and crosses. It is also that his ultimate standard of criticism and the ultimate form of his reality testing is “But will it get me three in a row?”. The way to avoid this particular form of self-validation is to do something else instead.

By a “fresh start” I do not mean anything very dramatic. The reference is essentially to a procedure and only consequently to a product. The procedure is simply to be directly responsive to the fact of persons and behavior and to our intellectual, practical, and scientific needs in respect to them and to give these concerns complete priority over any concern for preserving traditional or current scientific or philosophical theories, methodologies, vocabularies, customs, practices, or social norms. I do not, therefore, in any way wish to suggest that the alternative outlook I shall present has no connection and no resemblance to anything at all in our intellectual and scientific history or that it could not be categorized within any of the traditional taxonomies. At most, I should want to suggest that to understand it primarily in such terms is to miss the point entirely.

I shall be concerned primarily with the presentation of an alternative outlook. I take it that most of those who can see or sense that there is something fundamentally defective in the way we have gone about our efforts at a behavioral science are properly more concerned with an alternative that is not hopeless than they are with an impeccable demonstration of what it is that has gone wrong.

Formally, the alternative is a single complex concept, or conceptual system, in which we can distinguish four major, logically interrelated components. The overall concept is currently designated as the “Human Model” or “Person Concept.” (At various times I have referred to it as the “Behavioral Model,” “Intentional Action System,” “Reality System,” and “Three-system System.” (There does not seem to be a really satisfactory term to use here.) The four major components are the concepts of Reality, Person, Behavior, and Language. The social enterprise of generating and using these and related formulations as technical resources in a behavioral science has been consistently designated as “Descriptive Psychology.”

One of the novel features of the presentation of the Person Concept is that, altho it involves many declarative sentences, it does not involve making statements or assertions. Instead, what I shall be doing with those verbal performances is (a) delineating concepts, i.e., constructing or exhibiting forms of representation (corresponding to articulated concepts), or else (b) illustrating the use of these concepts in behavioral science both as pre-empirical foundations and workaday technical resources for empirical and explanatory efforts. (Note that doing the first of these is a way of doing the latter and that frequently the reverse is the case.) Thus, unlike the usual technical exposition, the presentation is one for which questions of truth cannot arise (logically cannot arise, since concepts cannot be true or false and neither can behaviors). Rather, questions about the truth of any statement presuppose the Person Concept or some equivalent thereof, since it is only within such a framework that any such question can be formulated, understood, reacted to, or acted upon.

A Further Excerpt Shideler: Here ends the first part of the book, in which we considered the basic structures of the Descriptive Psychology conceptual system and one particularly important application. To a considerable extent, it is a codification of what we commonly do, and what people have been doing for millennia even though they did not describe what they were doing in these terms.

The value of this codification is demonstrated not in a recondite laboratory, or in experiments hemmed in with artificial stipulations, but in the rough-and-tumble and nuances of actual living. Indeed, it belongs to the wisdom of the ages that to understand a person’s behavior, another’s or our own, we look not only to the movements that he makes, but also to what he wants, the range of his knowledge, his values, whether he acted cold-bloodedly or feelingly. We have recognized all along, as well, that we need to take account of where we stand in relation to him. These considerations have been exhibited from time immemorial in our laws, ethical systems, and customs. Such ancient wisdom about persons, and about what needs to be accounted for in understanding them, has perhaps been best portrayed by artists: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and their like. And descriptions of the world-more or less extensive world-views-are reflected not only in philosophies but also in religions.

As a pre-empirical conceptual system, Descriptive Psychology provides us with the resources to bring together science and art, religion and the behavioral sciences, history and law, fairy tales and everyday living, in a way that preserves the uniqueness of every domain and individual yet does not leave them isolated from one another. Because it is reflexive and recursive, it is unlimited in its scope and precision. Because it is content-free, it is not culture-bound in the usual sense, and is non-committal with respect to anything empirical: to repeat, it does not “preempt the answers to any questions that could be settled empirically”. It is a resource designed to increase our behavior potential, not a way to limit it by imposing a set of theories or a sequence of behaviors, like answers at the back of the book.

SECTION 3: THE DEVELOPMENT OF CS IN MATHEMATICS

The Nature of Contemporary Mathematics: Sciences are commonly characterized by identification with some special subject matter. Biology studies organisms, economics the production and distribution of goods and services, physics matter and energy. Such characterizations are in dictionaries, textbooks, ordinary discourse, etc. Experts in these sciences tend to find such statements satisfactory as an initial simplistic way to identify their sciences. It is common practice to identify mathematics by a subject matter, say quantitative and spatial relationship. I have yet to find a mathematician who would accept this. Furthermore they find such statements misleading rather than merely simplistic. How do mathematicians characterize mathematics? Why is their perspective so divergent from the common one, and does this divergence matter?

Contemporary mathematics is primarily a way of thinking, rather than a specific subject matter. This type of experience in mathematics is seldom encountered by anyone who does not go beyond calculus. Furthermore few mathematicians seem to be able to briefly characterize mathematics in a way that helps the non-mathematician understand what mathematicians are doing. The characterization below is also too concise, but I hope it will not be misleading. I attempt only to characterize mathematics as a human activity rather than give a deep insight into its nature.

Mathematics is mature CS that applies logical methods and
uses ideographic language to create and explore structures for math nets.

While this agrees in spirit with the perspective on mathematics adopted by most other mathematicians, they might describe mathematics in a different manner. Below are some of the brief descriptions I found, and some comments on why I think they agree in spirit with the one I have given.

· Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.—Benjamin Pierce

Charles Sanders Pierce was the first prominent logician in the United States. He quotes from his father who was the first prominent mathematician in this country. Their characterization agrees with mine, stressing even more radically that mathematics is a logical method rather than subject matter.

· Mathematics is a precise and subtle language designed to express certain kinds of ideas more briefly, more accurately and more usefully than ordinary language.—Paul Halmos

Altho Halmos seems to characterize mathematics as a language, when he explains what he means by mathematics as a language, he also focuses on the same themes mentioned earlier, but with emphasis on the beauty of mathematical reasoning. Halmos also discusses the discrepancy between the view of mathematics held by mathematicians and non-mathematicians.

· Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. --Courant and Robbins

Courant and Robbins indicate an aesthetic feature of mathematics as well as the way of thinking.

· Mathematics consists in the discovery of successive stages of the formal structures underlying the world and human activities in the world with an emphasis on those structures of broad applicability and those reflecting deeper features of the world.—Saunders MacLane

MacLane provides a perspective for choices made in creating formal structures, which I neglected in an attempt to be concise. I refer to remote structures instead of formal structures because this has some of the connotations he makes explicit in his definition.

Russell and Whitehead: Bertrand Russell said that mathematics might be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. Altho non-mathematicians might seem to agree with Russell’s characterization, the agreement is apparent rather than real. Russell is stressing the fact that mathematics is logical reasoning that is independent of content. In their monumental work entitled Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead claimed to reduce mathematics to logic.

The Use of Axioms in Mathematics: Logical reasoning is one feature of CS and the essence of PNCM is its use of pure CS. This is most apparent in our focus on using axioms as conceptual specifications. This contrasts with the older perspective of regarding axioms as self-evident truths. We still regard axioms as true, but only in the trivial sense that they truly specify the way we decide to use and relate various concepts. We select primitive relations, whose properties we specify using axioms. We construct further relations by definitions that represent intuitive ideas by precise abstractions. We formulate and prove statements involving these abstractions, using rigorous reasoning that is purely deductive. This results in an actual and potential collection of definitions and theorems. Problem solving is an important feature of mathematical reasoning, but the final solution of such problem solving is a deduction, and the results of problem solving are theorems, often considered too specific to be explicitly acknowledged. The symbols used for mathematics are ideograms, rather than phonograms. That is they represent ideas, rather than sounds. Many people think of manipulating such symbols when they think of mathematics. This is an important part of mathematics, but primarily because elaborate logical analysis would be extremely tedious without using this type of language. Use of ideograms also helps the novice to avoid extraneous connotation from ordinary language. However ideograms are mathematical tools rather than the core of mathematics.

Mathematics mentions theories, but these differ in essence from the theories of empirical sciences. They are theories in the sense of trying to indicate a somewhat formal model of some intuitive net. Mathematical theories are conceptual, and the concept of a mathematical theory cannot be understood apart from PNCM. A mathematical theory is exemplified primarily by a set of theorems that can be deduced. Such theorems are not paraceptual, and cannot be either refuted or verified paraceptually. They can be judged intuitively by power and elegance. The resulting net may be used by some science as part of its own net and can thus be judged by its utility; however mathematical nets are often developed long before any applications are imagined.

The Evolution CS in Mathematics: The preceding discussion is intended only to suggest an initial perspective on Contemporary Mathematics as CS. To add additional perspective, I sketch the evolution of CS in mathematics.

Babylonian and Egyptian Mathematics: Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics focused primarily on using mathematical concepts to obtain paraceptual information. Their mathematics consisted of formulas collected thru ages of experience. This did Of course, involve CS, but probably at stage C0. Consider the Egyptian attitude towards numbers. They invented names for numbers but stopped at about a million. However it is not so much that they stopped but the reason indicated by one account, namely that no one would ever need numbers larger than this. If this account is correct then it shows a paraceptual attitude unlike the attitude to emerge with the Greeks who would place no upper limit on the sizes that number could take. According to Morris Kline, the Egyptian thought of a plane as merely a flat piece of land, and thus many of their formula form volumes of grain and areas of land were arrived at by trial and error. Furthermore many of the formulas were faulty. For example they found the area of a circle by squaring the radius and multiplying by 3.16. While this is good enough for many paraceptual purposes, it indicates a very primitive level of conceptualization in comparison to Archimedes who had a method to calculate p to any desired degree of accuracy.

For more details illustrating the paraceptual attitude of Pre-Greek mathematics and its contrast with the more conceptual Greek attitude towards mathematics see some of the books on history of mathematics. I especially recommend Morris Kline’s Mathematics in Western Culture.

Greek Mathematics: With the Greeks something radically new emerged, geometry as abstract deductive science. Their concept of point and line may have been suggested by physical experience, but these concepts had properties unlike any such experience. For any pair of point A and B there is a unique line containing them. There are an unlimited number of points on this line between A and B. This is possible because a point has a position, but since it has no size it does not take up any space. A line has length but no breadth. It also does not take up any space. Thus for any pair of parallel line, we can insert an unlimited number of lines between them.

The Greeks also studied number theory as pure mathematics. They observed that the number 6 has {1,2,3} as proper factors and that 6 is also the sum of {1,2,3}. Likewise they note that the proper factors of 28 have 28 as their sum. From this, they formulated the concept of a perfect number and found the next two such numbers. The invented the concept of a prime number and proved that there were an infinite number of primes. Etc.

The Greek attitude was still paraceptual, since they regarded mathematics as important because it gave access to paraceptual truth about a realm having an impersonal existence beyond or beneath the physical. They also considered their postulates as true for this realm. Even Euclid did not use the postulates to conceptualize the concepts of point and line, but tried to define these concepts in terms of more basic concepts not used in his geometry. Euclid also made implicit use of concepts that are neither defined nor mentioned in his postulates, so the conceptualization was inadequately axiomatized. Greek mathematics is conceptual study at a stage of about C1. Altho geometry became more metric with the invention of calculus and related subjects, much of the Greek attitude towards geometry prevailed thru the 18^th century.

The 19^th Century: Here begins a major shift in attitude towards mathematics. Preparation for this can be found in Euler’s work on trigonometric and hyperbolic functions, along with 2000 years of dissatisfaction with Euclid’s parallel postulate. Early in the 19^th century, Lobachevski and Bolyai applied hyperbolic functions to the creation of what they both regarded as alternatives to Euclidean geometry, however both regarded the determination of the truth of alternate geometries as a paraceptual matter. It was about 40 years later that Riemann and Beltrami provide a perspective using differential geometry showing that from the perspective of consistency there was no way to choose between several alternative geometries. For a more detailed account of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, (see the article by Jeremy Gray in MAA Studies in Mathematics, Volume 26, Studies In The History Of Mathematics).

The 19^th century also saw changes in the attitude towards algebraic ideas and ideas about the infinite. The concept of non-abelian groups appears early in this century, but even so Hamilton felt he must argue in the introduction to quaternions that it is legitimate to have a number system in which multiplication is not commutative. In the middle of the century Dedekind accepts and uses infinite sets as legitimate mathematical entities. He does this both with constructive ideals for number theory and with the non-constructive cuts for explicating the concept of a real number. Later Cantor goes even further with the admission of transfinite set theory. By the early part of the twentieth century Hilbert’s program for the formalization of mathematics was under way. At this time I would estimate that mathematics was at about the C2 stage in its evolution towards becoming mature CS.

Contemporary Mathematics: Evolution towards stage C3 proceeded with Gödel’s incompleteness results for any recursive axiom system for number theory. PNCM contains an intuitive concept of a universal class containing all sets. The most popular net for set theory is called ZF, because it uses axioms given early in this century by Zermelo and Fraenkel. ZF (augmented by an additional axiom called the axiom of choice) provides one possible unifying axiomatic basis for all mathematics. By this we mean that essentially all mathematical concepts that have ever been used can be rigorously modeled in ZF, and that all theorems which have ever been proved can be deduced from its axioms. Gödel’s incompleteness results also apply to ZF. This was further complicated by independence results in ZF theory. We can prove that if ZF is consistent then there must be alternatives consistent extensions of ZF. In spite of this, and unlike the pluralistic attitude towards geometry, monistic attitudes still prevail towards set theory and number theory. In particular Gödel believed there was only one true set theory. Furthermore this platonistic attitude is taken by most working mathematicians. This fact about contemporary mathematics might seem to conflict with the notion that pure mathematics is mature CS. However I think that a platonistic attitude merely obscures the extent to which Contemporary Mathematics can be so regarded. I discuss this in Section 2 of Chapter 5.

Side Remark: Consider a statement C saying that first-order number theory is consistent. Suppose C is taken as a claim that a certain formula in ZF set theory is provable. Then C is a correct conceptual claim, since the existence of this proof has been demonstrated. Of course, if ZF happens to be inconsistent, then the utility of taking C as a claim about a formula in ZF is questionable. After all it is a conceptual fact that the consistency of ZF is more problematic than the consistency of number theory. Due to this fact, I am not inclined to think of C as a claim within set theory. Instead I think of C as a conceptual claim within PNCM. As such it is a clear claim which I find highly plausible, but my evidence for this claim is far from purely analytic.

Conceptual vs Paraceptual Claims: Let T be some part of PNCM that is adequate for thinking about ZF set theory. For any such T, (1) below is conceptual. If T is my net for mathematics, then (2) is conceptual. If T is a platonistic net then (2) is paraceptual.

(1) The continuum hypothesis is provable. (2) The continuum hypothesis is true.

The classification of a statement as conceptual or paraceptual depends on intent rather than on either its clarity or its truth or plausibility. The negation of (1) is also conceptual and both (1) and its negation were clear and intended as conceptual even before (1) was shown to be incorrect. From the perspective of my net for mathematics, the statement I am currently making with sentence (2) is conceptual, but too vague to propose information. Thus this current statement is neither true nor false. The preceding claims in this comment are all conceptual. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. When the preceding sentence was first written, I was using it to make a paraceptual promise. This promise was clear enough to me for my purposes at that time. To make it clearer I would need to reflect a little on the concept I intended by the phrase ‘will be discussed in more detail’.

Note: In earlier editions, the next chapter involved an extended discussion of contemporary mathematics as pure CS. However while this was useful in developing my personal understanding epistemics, I realized most of my epistemic concepts can be adequately presented with little reference to CS in mathematics. Thus I have written a separate and expanded booklet A Net for Understanding Mathematics. I have included a condensed version of one chapter in this present book, placing it as Chapter 5 of Part 2. Some readers may want to skip ahead at this point.

CHAPTER 1 SOME CONCEPTS AND DEVICES

SECTION 0: INTRODUCTION

Overview: This chapter introduces and illustrates concepts that I find useful for my net for understanding. The epistemics that I am using is still primitive, even for my limited purposes. Perhaps others may see some utility in developing such a net, and provide feedback for refining it. Section 0 recalls a few remarks about nets and then sketches some parameters for thinking about concepts in a net. This is followed by a sketch of some devices for presenting concepts within a net. I find these parameters and these techniques useful because they help me understand various features of nets. The other sections develop these and other ideas in more detail.

Nets and Concepts: Recall that a net is a network of relationships involving concepts and conceptual distinctions that can be used to think and communicate about some realm of interest. Since my concepts of a concept and of conceptual distinctions are crucial, they cannot be explained in terms of concepts that are more basic. To understand this crucial concept I recognize how I am using it. I realize that concepts are the components of a net. However they are more like interwoven strands than blocks. Concepts usually do not exist as independent entities. They support each other and some net, which also supports them. Understanding of a concept almost always occurs in relation to its place within some net.

Personal and Public Nets: Ron is a football fan. Peg is not. Altho their football nets have some similar features, clearly they have different nets. These nets are personal in the sense that she alone has direct access to her net and he alone have direct access to his. It is convenient to imagine some public net that they are using. A public football net can be conceptualized as a state of affairs for the community of football fans. His personal football net is a rather faithful copy of that public net. Hers is a copy of a small part of that net, but one sufficient for her purposes. Unlike a coin, a net cannot be directly transferred from one person to another. Ron may tell Peg what is meant by a safety blitz in a way that any football fan would understand, yet she may not be able to integrate this concept into her football net.

Having a particular personal net is a characteristic of the power type for a person. It involves a type of understanding that is integrated with a person’s competence and can be highly manifest only to the person having that net. However others can recognize that a person not only has concepts, bu