{"id":2195,"date":"2013-03-09T12:40:56","date_gmt":"2013-03-09T16:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=2195"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:45:56","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:45:56","slug":"your-ontology-getting-lost-in-epistemology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/your-ontology-getting-lost-in-epistemology\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Ontology getting lost in Epistemology??"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>First <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><em>(V.<\/em><em>) <\/em><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">is <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Helene&#8217;s response, to (IV.) <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">my <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">observations on the dilemma of &#8220;defining reality&#8221;, that doing so presents &#8220;reality&#8221; is represented as decided in our brains! Natural reality is precisely the opposite, of course, everything NOT defined in our brains. \u00a0Yet&#8230; the epistemologists keep winning the dumb argument anyway&#8230; even though the true answer is so clear. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em>A way to\u00a0<strong>extend the idea of &#8220;empathy&#8221;\u00a0<em><strong>termed &#8220;holpathy&#8221;<\/strong><\/em><\/strong> is used, referring to our ability to recognized thing as &#8220;wholes&#8221; to then later to be more defined, like &#8220;a dog&#8221; seen as a whole while lacking information to describe it in defined terms. <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> Seeing environmental systems as wholes, also from the extent of their parts acting together perhaps,\u00a0<strong>allows whole parts <\/strong><\/em><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><em>of nature to first <\/em><\/strong><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><em>be <\/em><\/strong><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><em>recognized intuitively, to THEN be defined by information gathered and made sense of later<\/em><\/strong><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Having empathy for other people is very helpful that way, giving you a tangible feeling and impression for them as a whole first, without any hard information on what&#8217;s happening inside. \u00a0It&#8217;s similar for recognizing other whole systems in nature. \u00a0You draw on your ability to listen and watch intently and create an image that fits holistically, used for the appearances of other <em>whole <\/em>cultures, shifting relationships in business or personal live, for the ineffable characteristics of \u00a0&#8220;places&#8221; too. \u00a0Those holistic impressions become <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">highly useful later for connecting or fitting in later arriving facts<\/span>. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">After that is our first exchange on the subject\u00a0<em>(III., II., I.) <\/em><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">III. discusses the question <\/span><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Helene asks, in II., <\/span><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><strong>whether holistic recognition addresses what some call &#8220;humanity&#8217;s original logic error&#8221;<\/strong>; mistaking logical states for natural forms, <strong>and the interesting approach of Barry Kort<\/strong>.<\/span><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><em> I. first <\/em>introduces the idea of &#8220;holpathy&#8221; for helping relieve our general cultural blindness to natural systems. <\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> <\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">My scientific method for whole systems, developed in the early 80&#8217;s, also follows this &#8220;seeing the whole helps make sense of the parts&#8221; approach\u00a0<em>(fig 2)<\/em>. \u00a0I commonly start with data on continuities of change, like growth curves, that convey a holistic character of the system behaving as a <\/span><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">whole to <\/span><\/em><em style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">produce it, and of its current changes of state. \u00a0It offers a &#8220;home base&#8221; in one&#8217;s reasoning and a way to refer to the same whole system in nature for others to look at, as well as a central location for putting together all the information on a subject associated with it, to unify holistic and analytic information, like a replacement for equations to use with complex natural systems. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> <\/em><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 231px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><em><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"God's Cookie Jar - Paul Check\" src=\"https:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/Gods-Cookie-Jar.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"231\" \/><\/em><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">1. God&#39;s Cookie Jar - contains all the parts in wholes!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Whole systems have character you can intuit but not define, to then use as a mental framework to help fit bits of disconnected information you collect together<\/em><\/h3>\n<p><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">V. From:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> Helene <\/span>Finidori\u00a0<strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">To:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> &#8216;JL <\/span>Henshaw<span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">&#8216; <\/span><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Sent:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> Tuesday, March 5, 2013<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Subject:<\/strong> RE: Meeting with High Level Forum for those in NYC last Friday &#8211; a little holpathy please?<\/p>\n<p>Jessie,<\/p>\n<p>I think you put your finger on the problem. And from what you wrote and the reading of these recent articles I think the problem is double. First it seems that as soon as someone starts talking of reality or nature and what is observed, or ontology, they place themselves in the realm of rhetoric and epistemology, and that&#8217;s where hard core &#8216;epistemologists&#8217; get a win&#8230;<!--more--><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Second, it seems that there&#8217;s some form of confrontation between natural scientists and social scientists that may &#8216;obscure&#8217; the conversations, to which the layperson is stranger&#8230; Hence someone like me who comes from neither of these backgrounds gets lost because the distinction between the two is not actually that clear cut, and these notions are difficult to understand&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">&#8220;treating nature as more authoritative on \u201cwhat reality is\u201d than our own concepts and theories&#8221; and &#8220;suspending your own judgment and \u201cfall back on\u201d studying the objects of nature in their own natural forms, and see if that turns out to be more satisfying in the end than just deciding what reality is in our imaginations for ourselves&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>are ideas quite difficult to grasp, especially when you consider that observation is generally followed by some form of inference that happens in our minds that necessarily involves some form of judgment\/evaluation, cognitive processing, conclusion and decision. So one can argue that <em>&#8220;mind is more authoritative than nature&#8221;<\/em> in the sense that it forms a subjective understanding of what has been observed, which interferes in behavior, decision and action however &#8216;rational\/constructed&#8217; or &#8216;natural&#8217; it may be&#8230; this indeed is rhetoric that I think is counter productive to the ideas that you would like to bring forward.<\/p>\n<p>What is key as you mentioned is to keep &#8216;aware&#8217; and in observing\/experiential mode so as to discover the hidden inner workings both of natural and social phenomena and sense new elements as they become visible. I like the analogy with empathy, and why not talk of empathy with natural processes? It&#8217;s like attuning ourselves with nature and increasing the acuity of our senses and intuition, just like indigenous people have been enjoying for millenia&#8230;.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">So I like your idea of thinking both ways, in a back and forth between natural and social, sense and intuition, perception and reasoning; combining ontological and epistemological approach without expressing it as such so as to avoid bringing about an artificial duality.<\/h3>\n<p>And resolving conflict by walking each other through what is observed and discovered and through our respective subjective ladders of inference, questioning our assumptions&#8230; to make our subjective understanding as objective as possible, and to widen the intersection between our various subjective understandings. (you asked for some references to Argyris&#8217; work on ladder of inference , here&#8217;s an interesting one: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K9nFhs5W8o8\">http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K9nFhs5W8o8<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Helene<\/p>\n<div>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>IV. From:<\/strong> JL Henshaw\u00a0<strong>To:<\/strong> &#8216;Helene Finidori&#8217;\u00a0<strong>Sent:<\/strong> Monday, March 4, 2013<br \/>\n<strong>Subject:<\/strong> RE: Meeting with High Level Forum for those in NYC last Friday &#8211; a little holpathy please?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Helene,<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Another good suggestion.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, it would be great to be able to address the issue in terms of the classical philosophical discussions, like you introduce.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0I have been unable to get that to work, though.\u00a0\u00a0 For the epistemology\/ontology debates I seem to always end up floundering around, with what amounts to \u201cthe epistemology of ontology\u201d discussions that lose track of nature and convert every question into rhetoric, making the question moot it seems.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t get people in those debates to treat nature as more authoritative on \u201cwhat reality is\u201d than our own concepts and theories.\u00a0\u00a0 You\u2019d need to suspend your own judgment and \u201cfall back on\u201d studying the objects of nature in their own natural forms, and see if that turns out to be more satisfying in the end than just deciding what reality is in our imaginations for ourselves.\u00a0 \u00a0In the course of the debates I find myself in anyway, the apparent reason I always lose that battle is that the group consensus becomes that nature is whatever concept the group decides on (hooray!), treating the mind as more authoritative than nature!\u00a0 \u00a0That always appears to be what the groups of \u201cpeople who like to decide stuff\u201d put their trust in.<\/p>\n<p>Nevil Spencer does point to places where \u201cjust deciding what things are\u201d is inadequate, like when he says \u201c\u00a0There remain ontological questions about society since much of society lies outside the realm of thought itself (e.g. social relations or even just solid socially produced objects).\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0But he doesn\u2019t then go on and demonstrate it, that what you find if you yield to nature for authority for what nature is, you find pervasive patterns of very concentrated \u201cmissing information\u201d in a great many places.\u00a0\u00a0 Much of it is for the visibly most highly complex kinds of organization in nature, working by means deeply hidden from human view, located right where the highly organized behaviors of individual natural systems seems to originate.<\/p>\n<p>I find that a quite convincing way to end the inconclusive philosophical arguments for me\u2026, seeming to say it\u2019s apparently nature\u2019s job to decide what nature is, not mine.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0It fails to end the debates, as others just become dismissive, and treat the serious problem of natural behavior as if an intellectual parlor trick.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At their most polite, the responses I get from them are versions of \u201cwe don\u2019t think like that\u201d, followed by my being dismissed as unqualified for that reason.\u00a0\u00a0 So the old deterministic paradigm that all causation is external,\u2026 is still holding fast it seems.<\/p>\n<p>So, starting with \u201cempathy\u201d as the work of acknowledging the hidden organization and internal causes of others, lets you talk to a people who already work with behavior that emerges from within systems that are hidden from external view.\u00a0\u00a0 The thought is maybe it\u2019ll be easier to introduce a similar idea, as \u201cholpathy\u201d, a work of acknowledging hidden organization and internal causes of other kinds of natural systems that behave by themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0At least that might be talking to right group of people, maybe, people who \u201cthink that other way instead\u201d already.<\/p>\n<p>The object in the end is for people to become comfortable thinking both ways, of course, and make it a practice of going back and forth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After intuiting a form of hidden organization, say by empathizing with another person who does something unexpected, you\u2019d generally switch thought processes anyway.\u00a0 The usual thing is then to look more closely at the information you have, to see if it helps inform the vague intuitive image you get thinking empathically, \u00a0and helps you ask the right questions to clarify what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s more or less my suggestion, for a general practice of learning about how the world works, going back and forth between intuitive and analytic approaches.\u00a0 You first recognize whole system behaviors to help you find information for understanding what they mean, trusting nature as the only authority for what reality is. \u00a0\u00a0So it\u2019s a combined ontological and epistemological approach.\u00a0\u00a0 You might be first tipped off by unexpected information (a conflict between stakeholders that wasn\u2019t there before) and then develop an intuition for how the environment has changed behavior to help you look for the information that tests the intuition and clarifies the picture.\u00a0\u00a0 Then people can address the actual problem as a need to be creative about something rather than let a conflict spread, maybe.<\/p>\n<p>Jessie<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">__________<\/p>\n<p><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">III. From:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> JL Henshaw <\/span><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">To:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> &#8216;Helene Finidori&#8217; <\/span><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Sent:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> Monday, Mar 3, 2013<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Subject:<\/strong> RE: Meeting with High Level Forum &#8211; a little holpathy please?<\/p>\n<p>Helene,\u00a0\u00a0 Great question.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As usual, this grew a little long, but I think may help bring this to closure.<\/p>\n<p>I used the prefix \u201chol\u201d as in \u201cholism\u201d in constructing the word \u201cholpathy\u201d, referring to an awareness like \u201cempathy\u201d for systems that behave by themselves, but yes, you might write it \u201cholepathy\u201d too, to mean \u201cthinking about what\u2019s in the holes in our thinking\u201d .\u00a0\u00a0 Empathy does mean that, for thinking about the hole in our thinking for what\u2019s going on inside someone else, invisible to us.<\/p>\n<p>With empathy we go beyond logic and intuit and test our awareness of the internal feelings and perceptions that other people have, characterizing their internal mental and emotional organization. \u00a0Holpathy refers to going beyond logic to intuit an awareness of the internal organization of natural systems of any kind, that we observe behaving as individual wholes.<\/p>\n<p>Like for our own bodies, how we \u00a0behave as a whole is by how we are organized as a whole internally, but largely hidden from view and in many ways not reducible to logic.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The same is the case for how human cultures, businesses and languages work, working by their own internal organization to work as a whole.\u00a0 Each is an individual organism-like system, working by a self-defining internal network of relationships that serves as a shared commons for its parts, like a business is an organized commons for its employees.<\/p>\n<p>If you can identify a boundary for a system and see that it behaves as a whole, like for storms, families, species, plants, animals, ecosystems, etc..\u00a0 It implies they also have an internal organization by which they behave as a whole, serving as commons for their parts, that one might develop some greater intuitive as well as logical awareness of as a whole.\u00a0\u00a0 Extremely different individually behaving systems would still have similarities, but you wouldn\u2019t expect, say, a forest fire considered as a whole system to have many properties like an economy or an ecology.\u00a0\u00a0 They all do consume energy, change by developmental processes, and have parts and internal organizations that do respond to limits and affect the organization by which they work.<\/p>\n<p>That we don\u2019t yet have familiar terms for discussing natural systems as \u201corganisms\u201d of a sort, could be seen as a \u201chole\u201d in our language from our natural lack of information about what happens inside other things.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0To fill that hole in our terms of discussion I have been using terms of natural language generally, like \u201cculture\u201d to refer to both our customary meaning and the hidden organization within them, that allows them to be identified.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Natural words already identify lots of natural phenomena that way, and already contain complex meaning for the systems they directly refer to.\u00a0\u00a0 Coining a new word like \u201cholpathy\u201d was to reach for a rare chance that I might use the natural meaning of \u201cempathy\u201d as \u201cawareness of what\u2019s inside another person\u201d to suggest the same sort of thing for \u201cawareness of what\u2019s inside another system\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>I think there is a fairly simple connection with \u201c<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/moultonlava.blogspot.com.es\/search?q=HOLE+Story\">the HOLE story<\/a><\/span>\u201d according to Mr Lava(?)(or maybe it\u2019s Barry Kort) on his blog\u2026 \u201cMolton Lava\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Lava\u2019s idea is that \u201cthe original sin\u201d and \u201ccurse of knowledge\u201d is the pervasive common error in our reasoning of reducing nature to logic, and so representing the difference between things like \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019 as absolute separations, instead of as a continuity of gradations like seen in an \u201cS\u201d curve: .<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 252px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"&quot;S&quot; curve has 2 parts\" src=\"https:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/gr+.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"252\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">&quot;S&quot; curves are often thought as a single equation, as if nature followed the rules we find useful for predicting things, a self-validated assumption, then<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I think that idea is a great lead to going a little further.\u00a0\u00a0 A weakness is that it still defines nature as being in our logic, and not as complex systems, just advancing our logic from jumps to continuities.\u00a0 Clearly such dichotomies are much more complex than a simple equations is the limitation of it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think the greater difference between our ideal concepts like \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d and reality, of course, is to be found *<strong>in the environment<\/strong>* and not in either logical definitions of fuzzy ethical theories in our heads, no matter how we enrich them.\u00a0\u00a0 The information world in our minds is just no match, (is of inherently inadequate \u2018variety\u2019) compared to the complex organization of differences we find in experience, especially for systems that work as wholes and behave by themselves.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s that \u201chole\u201d in our thinking, for the hole in our information on how things work inside, I\u2019m pointing to with the idea of \u201cholpathy\u201d for acknowledging what is going on inside whole systems in our environment.\u00a0\u00a0 It would seem kind of obvious that *<strong>something<\/strong>* must be happening inside things that behave by themselves, so you wonder how we might have \u201cmissed it\u201d, really.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The evidence we really seem to have \u201cmissed it\u201d is partly that throughout the sciences we do indeed persistently describe things that operate from the inside as being controlled by influences that are outside\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I think it\u2019s possible \u201cwe just prefer it\u201d, as a way to represent nature as the logic in our heads.\u00a0\u00a0 In trying to explain how things with interior organization work by themselves I can certainly confirm that people both have much difficulty even understanding the idea, and also most often seem to find it distasteful.\u00a0 Being that\u2019s my experience, maybe we should use Lava\u2019s definition where possible, that the \u201chole in our heads\u201d is not recognizing gradations of differences.<\/p>\n<p>I also talk a lot about \u201cS\u201d curve gradations, for gradations in how change starts and ends .\u00a0\u00a0 I often focus on the turning point in the middle (*).\u00a0 That\u2019s where the curve changes direction, separating the whole change into two phases.\u00a0 First the change has \u201cstart-up type of organization\u201d of starting small and taking successively bigger steps for \u201cbreaking away from the past\u201d, then at the (*) the process changes to have an \u201cend-up type of organization\u201d that proceeds by successively smaller steps for \u201choming in on the future\u201d, to make the whole transition a continuous.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 262px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"&quot;S&quot; Curve succession\" src=\"https:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/gr+.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"262\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">systems emerge with growth and stabilize with maturation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">On either side of the turning point, you might have a mix or alternating \u201ccolors of change\u201d as Nicolas was sketching, I think.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0But to understand much more you still need to develop some \u201cholpathy\u201d or \u201cempathy\u201d to have a holistic appreciation for what\u2019s happening to attach your bits of information to, to hole them together.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s what helps make real sense of what triggered, developed and was resolved as the whole process of change you\u2019re considering happened.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Jessie<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________<\/p>\n<p><strong>II. From: <\/strong>Helene Finidori\u00a0<strong>To:<\/strong> &#8216;JL Henshaw&#8217;\u00a0<strong>Sent:<\/strong> Monday, Feb 27, 2013<\/p>\n<p><strong>Subject:<\/strong> RE: Meeting with High Level Forum &#8211; a little holpathy please?<\/p>\n<p>Jessie, is the holepathy you are talking about related to humankind&#8217;s original logic errors?<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/moultonlava.blogspot.com.es\/search?q=HOLE+Story\">http:\/\/moultonlava.blogspot.com.es\/search?q=HOLE+Story<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">H<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">____________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">I. From:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> JL Henshaw <\/span><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">To:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> &#8216;Helene Finidori&#8217; <\/span><strong style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\">Sent:<\/strong><span style=\"line-height: 1.3em;\"> Monday, Feb 27, 2013<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Subject:<\/strong> RE: Meeting with High Level Forum &#8211; a little holpathy please?<\/p>\n<p>Helene,<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s fairly common for socially sensitive minority stakeholder issues to end up being marginalized, then discredited, and then forgotten.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s the case for those scientific questions I keep raising, about popular social policies that clearly seem to have the opposite of the intended effect.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The indigenous peoples have felt that sting too, of course, as well as innumerable other minority groups and innovators as they attempt to assert their identity.\u00a0 \u00a0The exclusion of \u201cscience\u201d, considered as \u201clearning about what actually happens\u201d, relegated to a tiny minority without any political constituency or ability to get a word in edgewise is more consequential than most.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The professional science community is itself a source of the problem, having social taboos against the new findings its social groups find unpleasant too.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately there\u2019s no way to defend against that sort of asymmetrical social treatment of valid stakeholder views, except to stay on high alert to their power to mislead and watching for the signs of the social exclusions that result.\u00a0 History has just not yet taught us to have societies not obsessed with avoiding learning and change.<\/p>\n<p>For social values we can use empathy, to avoid excluding the emotional issues of others, but what do we do for our blindness to the whole world of changing natural systems, the workings of the world that are not located in the social sphere at all? \u00a0\u00a0If we have \u201cempathy\u201d for recognizing the emotions of others, maybe the equivalent for acknowledging the organisms of nature and their ways is \u201cholpathy\u201d (?).<\/p>\n<p>We really need an awareness of the living systems of nature that develop and behave as wholes, you know, that whole litany of kinds of cultures that individually behave in richly complex ways as environmental organisms, which everything we do depends on.\u00a0\u00a0 Our usual social dialectic just ignores them as having their own existence, treating them as contained abstractly in the meanings for our words instead.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s the big blind spot I keep running into.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not sure what to do about that, but believe I can readily demonstrate this blind spot is quite central to all our difficulty with getting along with each other as well as with the earth, that we don\u2019t acknowledge nature\u2019s working parts\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m certainly not against sketching out strategies for \u201ccooperation at multiple levels and scales\u201d, thought I struggle to find how to use the <a href=\"http:\/\/debategraph.org\/Stream.aspx?nid=252619&amp;vt=bubble&amp;dc=focus\">debategraph tool<\/a> you like for yourself.\u00a0 \u00a0I don\u2019t see nature as a word map, at all, so I\u2019m more inclined to thinking of \u201cmultiple levels\u201d in ecological terms, of communities of individuals that need to work together as a whole on one scale, and as a community act as an individual finding a role in a larger environment working as a whole too.\u00a0 It takes a lot of \u201cholpathy\u201d to even know what is referred to by that, however.<\/p>\n<p>Reserving a place in the discussion for \u201cwhat actually happens\u201d is part of it, and to not having that reduced to a co-equal social convention to be determined by popular acceptance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s just <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">not<\/span> equivalent to say that a word like \u201cefficiency\u201d can be used in lots of different ways, which is quite true, but then conclude we need not have a way to check whether the effect claimed occurs or not.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Sure, language is quite free-form in conversational use, but if we are asking people to invest scarce resources to achieve a certain effect, it\u2019s fair to ask if it\u2019ll actually happen or not.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, that seems to take more \u201cholpathy\u201d than people are willing to consider\u2026 as yet, in this case leading to the need to explain why the world as a whole displays the exact opposite of the effect for efficiency generally claimed.\u00a0 \u00a0The further step of understanding a better choice then keeps getting cut off, as the discomfort with facing the problem has been (for many decades actually) shutting off the discussion of the puzzle prematurely: Why do we believe in the opposite of what is visibly happening?<\/p>\n<p>How would \u201cChris Argyris&#8217; action science work that focuses on misunderstandings due to frames of reference and assumptions of the position of others\u201d apply here?\u00a0\u00a0 Could you offer a link or two to what you are referring to in his work?\u00a0\u00a0 Was he the originator of the \u201cladder of inference\u201d discussion or just a recent contributor to it. \u00a0\u00a0I happen to see some misunderstanding due to the frame of reference used for that discussion too\u2026 but his learning method might be very helpful to learn from.<\/p>\n<p>So, then, we quite agree that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So the &#8220;game of \u201cKnow Me\u201d, with the individual working parts of the natural world&#8221; could include the working parts of the social and political world as well, helping distinguish what is internal\/external at various levels, and showing how the parts can work together and produce positive externalities while reducing the negative ones, which is basically the systemic framework for commons action that we have laid out in the PST draft&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think they\u2019re just unstated, but needs to include two provisos.\u00a0 One is that such \u201cworking parts\u201d are recognized as environmental organisms of the natural kind we observe working as whole behavioral units in our environment (and are not the abstract terms we use for discussing our information on them).\u00a0\u00a0 The other is that \u201cpositive\u201d and \u201cnegative\u201d values may fluidly change either in nature or in our views, calling on people to *pay attention* to not lose track of what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n<p>Does that sound OK?<\/p>\n<p>Jessie<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_____________<\/p>\n<p>2) figure from \u00a0the 1985 paper on a scientific method for investigating independently behaving\u00a0whole systems.\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/DirOpp.pdf\">Directed Opportunity, Directed Impetus: <strong>New tools for investigating autonomous causation<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 330px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"SGSR 1985 &quot;New tools for investigating autonomous causation&quot;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/issues\/images\/DirOpp-2.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"330\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">2. Relating multiple kinds of data to narratives and impressions of a recognized system behaving as a whole<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>JLH<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First (V.) is Helene&#8217;s response, to (IV.) my observations on the dilemma of &#8220;defining reality&#8221;, that doing so presents &#8220;reality&#8221; is represented as decided in our brains! Natural reality is precisely the opposite, of course, everything NOT defined in our brains. \u00a0Yet&#8230; the epistemologists keep winning the dumb argument anyway&#8230; even though the true answer &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/your-ontology-getting-lost-in-epistemology\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Your Ontology getting lost in Epistemology??<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,7,8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-among-best-2","category-mail","category-econn","category-theory","category-scitheory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2417,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions\/2417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}