Chapter 5 Sociology

Logically, purpose is independent of conditions and therefore control is needed to mediate between them. Ultimate human purposes are related to affectual needs, in other words, predetermined requirements upon which our survival and development depend. Since affectual needs are absolute, controls can only be applied to conditions, an instrumental means to satisfying affectual needs.

Actions are the means to satisfaction of needs, where the ultimate standard is that these means be rational. The relationship between needs and actions can be expressed in explicit literal terms. However, even when the relationship is implicit, not articulated, or rationalized, rational action is still analytically separable into just these terms. Terms of purpose and controlling action within a particular context are non-reducible, fundamental elements of rationality, and must apply equally to a functional description of inquiry.

That a rational ideal structure is a necessary basis for action provides a purpose for inquiry. Inquiry comprises the rationale and the actions that create and maintain rational structure needed in action. Ideal structures, and their development, are means to satisfying both instrumental and affectual needs.

Theory of inquiry has two purposes: 1) it describes the system that constitutes inquiry, and 2) it provides standards for using energy to control aspects of the system essential to rational action. Having a theory of inquiry is crucial to the study of living organisms engaged in the mundane events of their lives. Theory of inquiry informs our study by suggesting that we specify the individual and collective actions of those organisms as based on an ideal structure that makes it possible for them to survive and develop. It is theory of inquiry that assumes the preexistence of an ideal structure that guides all rational action. Theory of inquiry also assumes that these structures that guide action do not necessarily provide survival and development, but that only certain configurations provide this possibility. An instrumental need of all living organisms must be to discover these functional, rational structures. Having what we may label "power," organisms have the ability to control available energy to the actions needed to survive and develop.

Note that, so far, consciousness is not one of the conditions required to produce and use ideal rational structure. The evidence we have of plant life is that these organisms carry their ideal structures exclusively in their genetic makeup. Whatever form living organisms take, we cannot separate a theory of inquiry from a theory of action in describing and explaining their behavior. Theory of evolution, for plants, is a complete theory of inquiry.

The present discussion shows, I believe, that the theory of inquiry used here is a rational structure that transcends any and all theories of action. Rational structures are not simply descriptive. Description has a purpose for which a normative function is a systemic part. A functional system proceeds from description, to explanation, to prediction, to control. Functional relatedness means that any descriptive statement implies the normative, and vice versa. When we say something can be understood as a system, an implication exists that we should understand that thing as a system.

Purpose

To make whole (negentropic).

Process

Descriptive

The entire universe can be described in two ways: 1) as the product of conscious processes, and 2) as an evolving system of entities and their relationships. A holistic description of the universe must encompass both of these perspectives. Both perspectives are linked by a unified intentionality that can be expressed as a purpose and a set of constraints necessary to achieve the purpose, in other words, manifest the intentions of the system.

Predictive

Describes variable aspects of process that can prevent the system from achieving its purpose if constraints are not imposed.

Normative

Describes necessary constraints on process for a system to achieve its purpose. Diachronic/synchronic expansion involves the entire universe. Rationality mediates between materiality and spirituality in a balance of perception, reason, and intuition (awareness, determination, and transcendence). These realms coevolve from potential to manifest, implicate to explicate.

Energy applied to intent yields action. Energy is continuously exchanged between self and other. Open, organic systems are negentropic; closed, mechanical systems are entropic. Natural selection works to bring organisms to higher negentropic levels. Order and complexity increase by cycles of creation and replication. Consciousness comprises progressive levels of intentionality. The intention/action cycle comprises phases of both entropy and negentropy. Organic process is continual translation and transcendence, intentionally negentropic. Only the most inclusive forms are replicated.

Organic systems comprise reciprocal relations of individuals and collectives. Hierarchical interaction between different levels of the individual and collective produce distinct realms of consciousness. Arbitrary boundaries raised by self against other create the concentrated consciousness of reality. Inclusion of other in self produces increasing order and complexity. All processes are interconnected and all boundaries provisional. Cycles of translation and transcendence appear as punctuated equilibrium. Individual selves are collectively ordered similarities isolated from chaotic differences. Cooperation occurs within self that competes with other. Similarities combine in self to form necessities; differences are excluded as mere possibilities. Similarity/difference and necessary/possible are perspectives of self in isolation from other. All selves are essentially local structures bound to perceived global structures from the perspective of self, unique to self. Unique properties emerge from collectives at the level of self. Every self is contained in larger selves.

Inclusive is negentropic, exclusive is entropic. Inclusivity intends to be universal; exclusivity intends to be particular. Transformation unites all disparate elements; translation creates new, unique elements.

Intuition unites with perception in reason to produce substance. Intentionality is expressed in purpose and value. Cycles of intuition/substantiation under the influence of intention produce reality. Application of meaning to perception creates dualities (differentiation). Application of meaning to intuition creates unities (integration). Reality is intended to be a universal hierarchy of open systems. Atomism refers to isolated, closed mechanical systems.

Meaning can be assigned only to order, the permanent and universal. Order emerges as a product of rationality; successful patterns of order are implicated. Realities are local, not universal, and therefore conflict with regard to meaning. Reality is the ground for action (rationally applied energy). The word "reality" can be used unambiguously only when a particular actor is specified (see Schumacher, 1989, p.127). Because order is instrumental, it cannot be absolute.

Implicate potential continuously transforms individuals into more complex, more highly organized collectives. Rationality is the ability to represent and to express an implicate order within chaos through explicitly ordered symbolic structures, or reality.

Content

The dimensions of consciousness are the spiritual, the mental, and the physical. Rationality, the mental, endows the metaphysical (spiritual) and the physical with meaning. Consciousness extends from sub-conscious to supra-conscious. Consciousness is aware of self and other as objects and events in a context of time/space, cause/effect, and unity/multiplicity.

All objects (wholes or parts) can be conceived as systems. Systems are provisional structures of intentionality, logical portions of reality, where provisional means instrumentally absolute. Systems represent an organic balance between the physical, the rational, and the metaphysical. Mechanical systems intentionally exclude factors not subject to control by a particular self, emphasizing objectification and excluding the metaphysical.

Realities define and become dominant for a particular collective self/level of consciousness. Specific realities create limitations on inclusive behavior, thereby becoming unbalanced. Ultimate sources/causes are rationally indefinable. Consciousness is embedded in actuality but only aware of reality. All conscious structure is anchored in the subconscious. The rational order of reality is dualistic, mutually defining opposites. [Completeness and consistency are both rational goals but are mutually exclusive.] Wholeness transcends objectification. Real events are concrete only in terms of probability. The metaphysical includes the non-local and the acausal. Reality is local, not universal. All objects are ambiguous, all realities provisional and all paradigms equivocal. Every reality has an esoteric, reflective face and an exoteric, projective face. Exoteric reality can intentionally misrepresent an esoteric reality.

Wholeness is a conscious uniting of all realities where order is not physical but metaphysical. Wholeness is an organic, multi-leveled, all-inclusive, hierarchy of being. Wholeness is an awareness of the unity of dualism that includes all differences and affirms all distinctions. Organic entities choose a boundary between themselves and the world that effects a balance between self and other, negentropic and entropic.

Control

Whether we are aware of it or not, epistemology is a central issue in our lives. Much contemporary thinking is involved with this issue as we struggle to comprehend our increasingly complicated existence. Justification of knowledge, the basis for our understanding of how the world works, has become, in postmodern analysis of the human condition, almost an obsession. Quentin Skinner, in his 1985 investigation of The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, reviews the work of nine important social theorists of the postmodern era. This section will show that all these critics address the question of contemporary postmodern reality, specifically from the perspective of evolution of the justifications that are deemed acceptable in establishing knowledge. I will show that Skinner's "grand theory" is identifiable by its core concepts as epistemology.

After I have analyzed the contributions of each of these writers for the concepts that are at the core of their respective theories, I will summarize the relevant comments Skinner has about their work and then offer my own synthesis. Finally, I will draw conclusions about the summaries in general and describe what research I think should follow these conclusions.

The structure chosen to guide this analysis, the meta-model, was described in Part I. In the course of this analysis I will use this structure as an analytic/heuristic model to represent the material under analysis as a system. I make no claim that these representations are "real." I have found them useful in organizing information about this topic into an understandable system. Neither do I claim any absolute finality to these representations. They are a means for presentation of my perceptions and interpretations. As such they provide a basis for further study and subsequent evolution of thought and discussion.

Grand theory and epistemology

Analysis for foundational content

Gadamer (Outhwaite)*: Understanding as Basis of Action

Purpose: A framework of understanding that can be commonly accepted as a basis for action, committed to by all involved through fusion of horizons, is a product of "interpretative communities," and encompasses all psychological/social/cultural reality.

Content: The framework of understanding gives significance to individual phenomena in a dialectic between text and totality, grounding interpretations existentially in language.

Process: A coordinated, cooperative group effort accepts an actionable framework. Interpretation is holistic and sympathetic, not methodical, but part of a dynamic encounter and response cycle. Discrete elements are absorbed into the collective conscious.

Control: Discourage domination by individual viewpoints. Mediate by abandoning objectivity. Encourage individual personal readings based on preconceptions and prejudice. Have faith in human nature. Participants incorporate the resulting frameworks into their lives. They see horizons as artificial, having a separate description from the thing in itself.

Derrida (Hoy): Depiction of Reality

Purpose: A unified coherent whole that creates an accessible external reality in the form of a useful fiction.

Content: Limited metaphorical, metaphysical models describe reality. No perspective, especially humanism, is privileged. The structure is biological/ psychological/cultural, partly voluntaristic, partly deterministic.

Process: The text acted on is always the present text. Interpret it to explicitly produce fiction. Create a whole by dwelling-in the parts. Deciding the undecidable is the problem of process. Deconstruct interpretations endlessly.

Control: Eliminate parochialism and reification. The product must be useful. Espouse paradox. Encourage proliferation. Preclude relativism by founding models biologically. Abandon representation of independent objects. Encourage voluntaristic impulse and intuitive direction.

Foucault (Philp): Creation of Order Through Power

Purpose: A model of the use of power in political order showing control over mores and community life. An explanation of the basis of discourse in fiction and the basis of knowledge in power. An explanation of domination by the state and distribution of the power base.

Content: A neutral, metaphysical, highly abstract structure affected by power relations. A way of thinking of and understanding power relationships. An irrational, incoherent, dynamic model of human existence. A description of the illusion and fiction that governs action, showing a system that enables possibility of knowledge.

Process: A cycle of discourse that produces knowledge and power described as a recursive dialectic between claims and challenges, the exercise of power and the struggle against exercise of power. An unending struggle to dominate and avoid domination.

Control: Give free play to difference, to local and specific knowledge. Use rules to govern the construction of valid statements. Natural reasoning divulges truth. Organize the structure of the discursive formation logically. Liberate individual voices. Persuade rather than coerce. Abandon omniscience and the concept of human nature as a constant.

Kuhn (Barnes): Development of Knowledge

Purpose: A systematic description of the development of scientific knowledge that is applicable to all knowledge. A structure of the knowledge that serves as a basis for organization of social and individual action showing knowledge as a public possession having the same form for all users.

Content: A description of paradigms and the accumulation of anomaly. Paradigm is defined as the base for development of applicable knowledge as systems of statements of theory. Anomaly is an exception to paradigm.

Process: Paradigm expands until anomaly accumulates to unacceptable levels in the broader community. Unacceptable paradigms are replaced with a new paradigm that absorbs the anomalies. A decision by the community selects paradigm and theory on different levels.

Control: A structural form that is acceptable to all users is presented for a consensus decision in a community. Suppress the impulse to see things in rationalistic terms. Accept the development of truth as a social product. Abandon objectivity. The knowledge structure must support communication and cooperative interaction. Make decisions by communal consensus.

Rawls (Ryan): Social Control

Purpose: Provide the widest range of civil and economic opportunity through a systematic means of producing just political and economic institutions. Guarantee freedom from tyranny and coercion by providing positive political rights for all.

Content: A hierarchy of rights from practical reason to the formation of institutions including a description of contract logic and negotiation.

Process: Develop social contract in a hierarchical manner from base principles. Negotiate from a logical strategy. Build structure logically and democratically on base. Produce political and economic institutions collectively. Establish base principles and build structure of justice on it.

Control: Hold political leaders accountable to the collective. Insure fundamental equalities and the fairness of institutions according to the logic of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged. Allow unequal distribution as long as structure is maintained and the least advantaged are protected. People may not be coerced. Accept civil disobedience as protest.

Habermas (Giddens): Development of Knowledge

Purpose: Describe the ideal means of producing legitimate political, moral, and material structure of knowledge.

Content: A relativistic structure representing material environment, symbolic interaction, and use of power. A combination of determinism and voluntarism. It describes collective decision making as mediated by participation of all interests. It incorporates moral values.

Process: Epistemological process combines hermeneutic interpretation with positivism. Reflective dispute and argument results in rational consensus in a dialectic of individual and collective power. Mob rule is mediated by debate among individuals.

Control: Avoid reification and absolutism (universal paradigms become distorted). Make sure all validity claims are defensible. Evaluate cognitive adequacy. Insure focus of interest moves from individual to collective. Avoid focus on material aspects.

Althusser (James): Socio-political Structure

Purpose: A holistic picture of the structure and development of society as if it was a system.

Content: A structure with an implicit superstructure. Will functions as a result, not a cause, of social practices. A system of interconnected wholes: economy, ideology, legal-political showing contradiction/non-contradiction relations between practices. A metaphorical construction and explanation of history.

Process: A polemic strategy with ideological structure constituting individual subjects.

Control: Reject subject/object function and determinism. Accept the metaphorical. Create interconnected structure to form a whole. Legitimate each practice. Precede explanation with historical description. Insure interrelation of practices so one does not dominate the whole.

Levi-Strauss (Boon): Knowledge and its Development

Purpose: A system of knowledge involving universal laws of mind.

Content: Includes necessary illusions, universal effects, and systems of signification. There is no absolute explicative structure, just being and communicating.

Process: An empirical mediation of contrasting others.

Control: Avoid centralization and standardization. Exult in differences.

Annales Historians (Clark): Structure of Reality

Purpose: Describe reality as a whole, not just anthropocentric reality, including a holistic description of society as infrastructure. Create a multi-dimensional view of history and a pluralistic view of time.

Content: An interdisciplinary hierarchical framework. "Landscape" provides the basis for human affairs, emphasizing the deterministic behind the voluntaristic, especially the biological/geophysical/climatic influences. Each level in temporal hierarchy expresses a different reality. An overall cosmic perspective results in frameworks with no means of escape.

Process: Classify times relative to the conditions inherent in them: long-term to short-term. Analyze the conditions peculiar to a dimension of time. Show the interaction between hierarchical layers. Move from background to foreground; short-term in terms of long-term. Understanding comes after the entire system is specified.

Control: Speculate on the nature of time. Attempt to bring a holistic perspective into history, specifically the deterministic influences. Avoid events as descriptions because they are just illusions of its agents. Mistrust the voluntaristic illusion. Seek a relativist, holistic perspective.

Summary of Foundational Content

Skinner: Human Reality and Knowledge

Purpose: A systematic theory of the nature of man and society as restructured by postmodern thought. A model for the good life and just society.

Content: A whole made up of interrelated parts. An abstract, normative, descriptive, utilitarian explanation of values and practices. An integrated perspective, where all science is human science. Uses the holistic approach to understanding as a model, not reality. Voluntaristic perspectives are unified by deterministic influences.

Process: Deconstruction, interpretation, structuring, integrating, and relating create coherent, independent perspectives. Interpolate to the normative model, not from social explanation, but from deterministic structures and influences.

Control: Avoid absolutist/deterministic approaches and broad expository explanations. Recognize the limits of science and positivism. Deny reification ability and parochial views. Recognize the validity of subjective viewpoints and historical biases. Put voluntarism in a deterministic perspective.

Synthesis of Foundational Model

System for Producing Systems of Knowledge

Purpose: A comprehensive representation of universal reality as a system, relating mankind and consciousness to the natural universe and to each other as individuals, and establishing the fundamentally ideal conditions of human existence and human relations.

Content: An evolving model with a hierarchical structure of levels from the universal to the specific that represents a historically human way of thinking. Empirically validated metaphors of the environmental and human condition, classify each individual in a way that is meaningful to the history of human enterprise over time. Specific emphasis is placed on the deterministic and the voluntaristic.

Process: A dialectic but cooperative discourse that progresses recursively and reflectively without end, guided by individual and collective power and producing by consensus successive determinate interpretations of reality.

Readers may reasonably be incredulous over my statement that epistemology is important to their lives. Most left such esoteric issues behind when they finished school. However, it is precisely the postmodern project to place in doubt all modern conceptions of knowledge, where worldviews come in neat little compartments, some of which are "right" while others are "wrong." In the postmodern view, the "intellectual situation is profoundly complex and ambiguous," (Tarnas, 1991, p.395) and a systemic understanding of the collective consciousness is necessary to moral and responsible thinking, both for the individual and for society.

If it is possible to catalog the epistemological elements of postmodern thought, we might consider the structure proposed by Tarnas:

1. All knowledge is relative and fallible; versions of reality are ultimately unwarrantable and irreconcilable (of course this denies the modern definition of knowledge as certain).

2. Reality is a biological/psychological/social/cultural product generated by the actions of individuals (this denies the modern model of reality as representing a fixed external materiality).

3. Distribution of common (privileged) versions of reality is determined by power (denies the modern view of the individual as responsible independent agent).

Since this structure addresses the origin and justification of knowledge, I believe it satisfies the Rosenau definition for epistemological theory. Skinner's grand theory as analyzed above is consistent with Tarnas description of postmodern consciousness. Therefore, it, too, satisfies the definition for epistemological theory.

Compare the Tarnas structure with the themes that emerge from the Skinner contributors:

Avoidance of reification.

Impossibility of objectivity.

Priority of descriptive over normative.

Priority of deterministic over voluntaristic.

Models of reality as metaphorical hierarchical systems.

Consensus and power as determinants of reality.

I have identified the core concepts of grand theory and compared them with the core concepts of postmodern thought and found them conceptually parallel. Since postmodern thought deals explicitly and almost exclusively with epistemological concerns (per Tarnas and Rosenau), we can conclude that Skinner's Grand Theorists are also addressing the epistemological problem. Both Tarnas and Rosenau cite the Skinner text as well as several of the same writers that Skinner's contributors review. Tarnas and Rosenau both comment on the seeming paradox of theorists who both reject and propose broad general theory that ventures into the metaphysical. That is precisely Skinner's major theme.

I suggest four areas for further study of this phenomenon:

1. Articulation of the relationship between descriptive and normative theory.

2. Representation of varying levels of objectivity and subjectivity in discourse.

3. Change in the focus for justification of knowledge from the content to the process.

4. Symbolic tools and methodologies that make epistemological questions and answers explicit in discourse.

Postmodern consciousness offers freedom from the positivistic forms of justification for proposed models of reality. Not that justification of validity claims is unimportant, but the means of such justification becomes an explicit part of the problem. Also, postmodern speculative models are not constrained by conventional structures of thought, allowing interdisciplinary approaches and creative constructions. Perhaps the greatest opportunities lie with mediums of representation that allow quicker discursive cycles and better collective control of holistic results that are not so susceptible to hidden political manipulation.

Purpose

Find a place for yourself in the future. Propose possible futures and test them against everyone else's dreams. Make many uncoordinated independent decisions. Create a dynamic vision of the world that results in a kinder, gentler tomorrow.

Process

Connect yesterday, redrawn from long-ago visions and rebuilt from the classics, and tomorrow, a future that must be continually reimagined.

Opportunity comes with turbulence and uncertainty. Always learning and continuously evolving, adapting through trial and error. Continuous improvement through new ideas and changes. Individuals create their own stable universe within dynamic systems. A process of ongoing improvement is pursued through learning and self-correction.

Change is driven by the artificial, by individual attempts to fashion realms of personal control. Change is a search, an embrace, a valuing, an avoiding, and always a questioning. Individual changes affect the larger system. Opposition to change stifles creativity.

We want the good things to stay the same and the bad things to get better. We want our own worldviews to stay the same without changing those of others. These needs cause a deep polemic divide between forces to change and forces to stay the same: stasis and dynamism. Do we plan to reach a specified goal or allow unbounded exploration and discovery? Deciding on the best action requires us to examine the clash between stasists and dynamists and explore their contrasting views.

Content

We live in a world of our own making, full of potential, infused with intelligence, and offering opportunity and adventure. Society is an emergent cultural coalition, springing from many different interests and experiences.

The future is alive, natural and beyond control, encompassing the futures of many individuals and their associations. The future, dynamic and inherently unstable, cannot be contained in the vision of a single person or organization. The emergent, complex messiness of the future is not disorder but an order with an unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting pattern.

An open-ended future can be fearful and the turmoil it creates painful. New ideas sometimes generate panic and hysterical reactions. Anxiety about the future causes people to resist new ideas, inventions, or institutions. Reactionary ideals, technocratic administration, and monopoly power converge to enforce stability at the cost of stagnation. Those who are self-sufficient have no use for convergence of worldviews. The quest for stability can make society inflexible and vulnerable to disaster through disrespect of important viewpoints of others and intolerance. A dynamic rather than a static view of the future defends against these weaknesses.

The political, cultural, and intellectual landscape can be divided, and boundary lines drawn, many different ways. Practical policy differences do not define clear ideological camps. There are no detailed, technocratic blueprints of the future or the possibility of a return to an idealized, stable past. Stasists and dynamists are in fundamental disagreement about the way the world works. Nature and artifice, wildness and control, spontaneity and planning take on very different meanings in dynamist and stasist thought.

Stasists

Purpose: Our only purpose is to accept our lives for what they are through knowing how we live, and how we may come to live.

Process: Progress, goal directed and progressive, is brought under central control, managed and planned by experts to achieve more opportunity and ever more control. Structure is imposed on the world. Progress operates as a machine, unaffected by human intellect and agency. Technocracy organizes and coordinates the scientific knowledge, the technical talent, and the practical skill of the entire community. Technology progresses from the extensive stage to the intensive stage.

Popularity and cultural anomalies are the crucial substance of society. Control is an objective political strategy that depends on absolute and explicit knowledge. Knowledge must be easily articulated and shared. Change must be dictated to evolve rationally, maintaining existing uniformity. A system of status determines connections and obligations by birth. Self-appointed activists are given the power to veto other people's experiments and new ideas before they disrupt stability.

Content: The world is relentlessly hostile, distorted, and dangerous. Natural society is increasingly pointless and its true meaning difficult to find. Visions hide the connections between disparate aspects of life. Visions of the ideal future are varied and incompatible. Alliances are fragile and temporary. No one can agree on which one static, finite world should replace the open-ended future.

Civilization is an eternal state. Civilized society is a self-conscious group united by a single identity and set of values. Absolute differences among groups preclude combination, dictating either segregation or homogeneity, either fiercely guarded enclaves or sterile sameness. Goodness, morality, ethics, and peace are attributes of the unchanging past and top-down authority. Political power is the ability to guarantee one's own security and end other people's experimentation.

Stasists are divided into reactionaries, whose central value is stability, and technocrats, whose central value is control. Characterized by technological determinism, in-your-face attitude, and hyperbolic rhetoric, they hate not knowing the future. Powerful central authority determines the patterns of social life. Those who are in charge have the best perspective from which to make decisions. Leaders manipulate human resources to do the necessary work.

Technocracy is the ideology of the "one best way." By design, technocrats pick the best way, establish standards, and impose a single set of values on the future. A central organizing principle is at the heart of all prescriptions. Construction requires big budgets, teams of experts, careful planning, and blueprints. Science can discover all the natural laws recognizing only significant entities. Vital knowledge is the possession of a cutting-edge elite. Omniscient forces claim absolute knowledge of everything important. Based on this knowledge, they predict how people will act, and prescribe how people must act. Predictions presume both behavior and knowledge are essentially fixed. Science gives certain individuals final authority. Rules are unpredictable.

Control: A good future must be static. Be afraid of the future and evolution. Order, and certainty of order are essential. Loss of structure creates chaos. Uncontrolled process is wasteful. Freeze the status quo. Treat any change as suspect. Love established technology. Prevent experiments that may lead to risky changes. Unite in opposition to dynamic forces.

The world has gone wrong, and someone must seize control and make things right. Specifics govern each new situation and keep things under control. Criticism is impossibly vague and apocalyptic. Free evolution must be avoided. Lack of control destroys the possibility of progress. You need to find the best experts.

Control by the proper authorities will make everything turn out right. Without leadership, civilization would collapse due to inherent contradictions. Someone must be in charge and produce predictable results. Someone in charge can assimilate all relevant information. Someone in charge enforces a rationalized homogenous model of humanity. Political elites must enforce collective decisions. Professional wise men must maintain control by eliminating the unpredictable. Control is established through bigness, stability and planning. All order emanates from centralized design. Central control is located in public groups and the necessary result of democratic participation. Planning is the only means to progress. Technology implies a steady, teleological, restrained pace of improvement, and efficiency implies securely proceeding change.

Ignore the past and its evolution, discount the future, and encourage contentment. Trial and error is a refusal to learn from experience. Established ideas and enterprises are sheltered from innovation. No one should act except in accordance with a higher authority. People must give good reasons for any action that depends on hard-to-articulate knowledge. Innovators must ask permission to create in advance and then must support the best way to do anything. A static condition is more important than being humane.

Industry seeks to eliminate risk by avoiding change. The legal force of government blocks criticism. Shift power to those who block alien ideas. Regard creative innovators as deviants and rebels. Bad taste, a taste different from one's own, is a public problem, demanding immediate action. The world will be safe and predictable if only we will give leaders the power to design the future and impose their uniform plans.

Dynamists

Purpose: The purposes of nature are many and complex. Learning, creating, and adapting to the world fulfill human nature. Free growth and evolution through the release of protean energy. Everyone flourishes through individual responsibility. People want to be happy and find more opportunity. Continual striving, not simply to survive, but to adapt, improve, and make the world a little better. The deepest need is a home, a network of common practices and inherited traditions that confers a settled identity. Civilization is the inventing and cultivating of new patterns of life-enhancing moral sentiments.

Process: There is no absolute basis for rationality. Uncontrolled evolution is natural. Science studies the finite natural world. Action not only controls nature but also recreates the self. Cultivation is the human reordering of wilderness material. Progress is neither random nor teleologically inevitable. Advance creates opportunities. The procession of imperfections, and the opportunities they present, never ends. Ordering is evolutionary, analogous to the creation of niches. Evolution brings about a proliferation of niches, which fill up, generating new niches.

The world changes to be the way we choose it to be, as a result of our choices. Change occurs through variation, observation, and adaptation. Create change over time, evolving through variation, selection, and reproduction. We not only adjust to changes, we create them as individuals. Individuals contribute to a larger encompassing system that evolves as an ecology. Experiment and observation shape the evolution of culture. Observation and response generate order without control.

Learn by doing, by trying things, and even by failing. We learn by choice, innovation, and criticism. Systemic processes involving the incessant search by many minds generate knowledge. Proof is retrospective, not prospective, emerging from the interaction of many individuals. Past and future are inextricably connected, process is incremental, and knowledge is cumulative. Critical and discriminating use of experience refines and improves existing ideas. Progress is the product of parallel individual searches toward many different, personally directed and incremental goals. Crucial detailed data is not easily ordered, moved, or collected into knowledge.

People do not crave settled identity but tend to seek novelty. They do not jettison the inherited or familiar but try to improve on it. Improvement and novelty do not eliminate nature, they recreate it and alter its path. Innovation becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when intellect breaks down cosmic determinism. Demand brings innovation and improvement by trial-and-error.

Meaning and purpose arise from the bonds they create and adapt through bottom-up building. They seek bonds with those who complete their world and allow them a place to fully realize themselves. The bonds of life create compounds, not mixtures. Boundaries disappear in converging realities to create new realities.

Work together without agreeing on a specific future. You don't have to plan, the solution emerges as evolution. Support the open society and instinctively oppose those who would close it to new ideas. In the present we become dissatisfied with the past and search for improvements in an infinite open-ended, but imperfect, future. The open-ended future evolves on its own without political direction. The market discovers and shares knowledge, trades and expresses values, and holds people together without anyone having to govern. Forced change results in complete resistance.

Content: Everyone is just an ordinary individual with a particular identity. No absolute differences exist. Distinctions enrich each other and create opportunity. Pattern emerges naturally from individual behavior. Humanity occupies a place between static order and wild nature. We discern patterns and test that pattern against others. The patterns of social life are determined by the repetitive and independent decisions of separate individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Many different orders emerge without prior design.

Everyone contributes who solves problems, adopts new ideas, or combines familiar things in unfamiliar ways. The present is the basis of all prediction. An opportunity is a problem no one has solved, addressed, or even considered. Imagination includes both creating new ideas and criticizing them. No creation is completely controlled by its creator. Change is part of creation, even in the interaction between humans and nature.

Civilization is an ongoing process. All culture is manifestation of the same interactive, experimental, and creative impulse, permitting many visions and accepting competing dreams. Shared goals are the most fundamental principles of shared purpose and provide the necessary control. Contracts incur reciprocal responsibilities, reliable promises, and reasonable future expectations. Contract allows planning and cooperation that merge talents, resources, knowledge, and ideas. The rules permit understandable, enduring, and enforceable commitments.

The contemporary economy is competitive, global, and self-consciously entrepreneurial. Systemic, process oriented approaches evolve as knowledge. Simple units and rules form complex orders and countless combinations. Decentralized free agents create order without design. The future is created by the demand for progress and supply. Nothing is gained by fighting over competing technocratic schemes. Property no one owns will be exploited and overused. An interconnected world offers the promise of creativity without the danger of stagnation.

How to think about knowledge is a central, organizing question. Learning is produced by decentralized, undirected experiment and observation. Knowledge includes values, tastes, and individual expression. New ideas and criticism are part of trial-and-error learning. Evolution of learning is eliminating past errors by trying new approaches. Knowledge is expensive to transfer and share, usually from master to student. Only a master may be able to recognize or reconstruct critical knowledge.

The world is full of unarticulated and unrealized knowledge that can be elicited only by experience and experimentation. Knowledge specific to the individual is frequently tacit but intimately related to emerging reality. We take our intimate knowledge for granted. Much of knowledge, shared or not shared, is tacit and remains unarticulated. Vital knowledge is something we all have, each according to our particular surroundings and circumstances. This essential form of knowledge cannot be centralized. Tacit knowledge may be elicited or intuited but requires an investment to turn into a useful product. Once in useful form it can be easily duplicated.

Science is the source of material achievements and the model of cumulative self-perpetuating inquiry. Science is the process of checking hypotheses through decentralized, rigorous, free discussion. Humanity and science act as a single natural system, composed of diverse individuals, without central control.

Phenomena are artificial only in the sense of being molded by human purpose. Artifice implies design, goals, external purposes, and partial control. The artificial and natural are bound together to serve the creator's purpose within the limits of nature. Artifice is continually creating nature, generating new patterns and systems beyond control. Nature and artifice are complementary.

Nature is what humans make it as a result of their choices. Nature does not determine human needs; it is too diverse and too dynamic to be absolutely determined. Natural human traits are a product of our genetic physical makeup. Nature and biology are morally neutral. Biology is the origin of the self that can intentionally improve. Reason controls the passions. Our minds and selves are not separate from our bodies as natural systems.

People are happiest when completely absorbed by some activity that challenges their skills, provides experiences, and gives them a sense of control. They have a knack for creating interesting challenges. Facing continual challenge accumulates new experiences and makes more alternatives familiar and possible. Extraordinary new ideas and possibilities emerge from tastelessness and excess. Goodness, morality, ethics, and peace are attributes of the evolving future and out-of-control innovation.

Control: A natural system is beyond anyone's control. Possibilities are unleashed by choice and innovation. What is best depends on the individual. Sharing trusts in the imagination and intelligence of individuals.

The central organizing principle is not a specific outcome but an open-ended process. Protect the processes that allow an open-ended future to unfold. Discount claims of global knowledge and recognize the limits of conscious planning. Comprehensive systems of theory giving absolute certainty and coherence are impossible. Decentralized experiment and observation allow collective wisdom to form. Create order without control: parallel, decentralized decision making accomplished through shared goals. Control is a matter of setting boundaries.

Organization must allow experimental combinations. Permit long term commitments based on consensus. Treat individuals equally as generic units. Society depends on preserving fluidity and permitting permanence. To learn, we must experiment, which requires commitment. Security is essential to individual happiness through growth, learning and progress.

We need to recognize the human condition and the limits of potential. Prediction can only be based on evolving understanding, admitting ignorance. We must understand a perspective before we can criticize it. Analyze present anomalies and established truths. Maximize the production and use of knowledge by admitting ignorance. Let people develop, extend, and act on their own particular knowledge. Appreciate, protect, and nurture specialized, dispersed, and often unarticulated knowledge. The value of articulated information generates the benefit in creating it from data. Allow individuals and groups to act on their own knowledge, respecting the limits of knowledge.

We have learned from experience that the human condition is improved by tolerating diverse goals, recognizing the limits of centralized knowledge, avoiding harm of others, and respecting the bonds of life. Appreciate dispersed, often tacit, knowledge. Encourage unpredictable growth and change through variety, experiment, observation and adaptation. Extraordinary freedom emerges from syncretism and the unconstrained experimentation associated with it. A balance is needed between stability and novelty, between enabling structure and uncontrolled creation, avoiding chaos. Nimble intellectuality encourages syncretism and serendipity, creating the combinations on which progress and opportunity depend. Supporting decentralized, trial-and-error processes causes legal institutions to change accordingly.

The ideal of self-sufficiency is a non-rational strategy that is deluded by abundance and arrogant about individual accomplishment. Risk and courage are essential to innovation and progress because they make new observations possible. Mitigation of risk requires anticipation and resilience. Innovation of unprotected interests provides continuous experimentation. Encourage decentralized experiments and opportunistic trial-and-error. People must be encouraged to invest time. We need to be able to influence many people rapidly. People need to be encouraged to find productive ways to do things. This promotes creativity and makes society resilient. Shift power to those who want to experiment. Innovators must be protected from the tyranny of the status quo. Take uncritically whatever ideas are good and use them. Harmonize policies to maintain openness and innovation. Avoid harmonization that eliminates innovation.

Eschew fear; espouse courage and confidence. Discourse needs to comprehend alternatives, experiment, and observe the results. Within the constraints of well established rules, let trial-and-error work. Options are constrained by decisions made and actions taken. Progress is judged by comparisons with the past. Every advance must be subject to supersession. Failure to function properly is responded to by change over time. Protect criticism, innovation, and expression. Criticism requires that its author be able to compete with established ideas in the search for quality. What makes a condition undesirable is that it interferes with human purposes. Criticism is an absolutely essential part of the dynamic process. Accept being wrong, you can improve. Do not expect everyone to be the same. Be suspicious of overly simple explanations.

Just obey the rules. Limit universal rule making to broadly applicable and rarely changed principles. Rules are required, but they must encourage change and development. Dispersing knowledge and control allows creativity and discovery. Rules provide living bonds. They allow innovation and best use of discoveries. Rules change slowly and predictably, respecting the limits of knowledge. Establish nested frameworks of rules that allow for adaptation, change and experimentation. Nested frameworks of rules permit rules to flourish without becoming rigid and inflexible. Nested rules accommodate diversity. Regulatory discretion can become a powerful force for reactionary stagnation. The same people who must abide by rules must make them. They protect the process by which new rules are peacefully developed. Rules must compete for adherents to enjoy legitimacy and the incorporation of local knowledge. Rules permit complexity and opportunity, even of rules.

Although science is the preferred model for influencing evolutionary change, technology is destructive. The ways of combining objects or ideas are constrained only by our imagination and time. Change must be the result of consenting diffused expertise. Trying to reinvent the world is foolish, but understanding how biological processes work, we can turn them to human ends [creating order is the prerequisite to turning anything to our ends]. Use heuristic models to evaluate situations. Achieving artificial goals requires careful data collection, sophisticated and subtle models, and significant local knowledge. Molding of nature can be either intentional or unintentional; it can be either desirable or undesirable. Nature does not need protecting from human interference; it is preserved by human action. Human needs are the test of what should be done with nature. Respecting nature means compromising the purposes of humans to preserve nature as given. Respecting individual natural rights means allowing them equal personal autonomy. We cannot see ourselves as completely determined by nature but understanding our biological origins makes it easier to change. Because central control of science makes the world artificial, humans must control science.

Control

A human-centered world must include all living things. It must encompass many different visions, both historical and contemporary. It must encourage dreaming about a stimulating, enjoyable future. Connections must be created to the past and to the natural world.

Normal evolution proceeds by success and kept promises. Control and mastery of the world are achieved through open-ended-ness. Knowledge and experience of the past are the foundation for understanding how dynamic systems work. Technology is an expression of human creativity. Creative interaction unites the work of different perspectives and produces group satisfaction.

A common language is a universal solvent that permits fusion and exchange of the conditions of existence without requiring changes in perspective. Interpersonal connections create a bond of life where individuals converge. Convergence is bound by mutual respect, appreciation, and dependence. Convergence draws power from celebrating the present as well as envisioning more opportunity in the future. Community validates the individual, and contribution generates calm confidence. Community is the best way to cope with turbulence and provide stability.

Restraint is a virtue of tolerance, toughness, patience, and good humor. Restraint means not imposing by power one idea of the best way to preclude innovation. Tolerance permits peaceful differences. Discomfort must be met with the courage of restraint. Fear no abyss in the unfolding future.

Public virtue consists of behaviors and habits of mind that allow dynamic societies to flourish. Free to innovate and learn, people create security for themselves. The government must support innovation by encouraging the support of private enterprise.

How we feel about the future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization. Stasists and dynamists have different beliefs about good institutions and rules. Do we want stasis, a regulated, engineered world, or do we want dynamism, a world of constant creation, discovery and innovation? Is progress destructive and nihilistic or the highest human quality?

Before considering a second group of authors whose texts represent the idealistic perspective, I will summarize the progress of the evidence I have presented to this point.

Specific terms are significant to this discussion. One extreme position in these terms I am calling realism, the hypostatization of an independent objective reality, which assumes the irrelevance of the subject and subjective perspective. What makes the realistic position so important is its emphasis on cause and effect in describing systems of real phenomena. Cause and effect becomes a strategic point at which to begin a historical description of the evolution of metaphorical structure into the means/end form common to functionality. This change is crucial to the emergence of primacy of consciousness.

A related starting point, associated with realism, is empiricism. The long dominant theoretical tendency is to think of real objects and ideal subjects as two necessarily separate types of entities. This logical separation has led to the conclusion that radically different methods of inquiry had to be applied in these separate realms. The hypotheses offered here, and the author's interpretations in support of these hypotheses, indicate the possibility of a different conclusion and the emergence of a new structure of theory.

The central feature of the new interpretation is the common purpose that influences collective action. In the case of a single organism, a wide variety of actions can be understood as all contributing to obtaining a single purpose. These are not random acts that coincidentally result in the organism's survival or development. These are intentional, purposive acts coordinated to a single end. Likewise, the variety of acts in collective behavior does not necessarily indicate randomness, but may also be coordinated to a common end. Within either an individual organism or a collective, coordinated action toward a common purpose defines behavior belonging to a single organic entity.

Once inquiry (including science) is recognized to be a form of individual and collective behavior in this sense, it is impossible to return to a purely realistic perspective of human experience. There are only two directions theory of inquiry can take from this point:

1) Inquiry must be conceived as those actions contributing to an efficacious understanding of purposive behavior in a real world. Theory of inquiry describes the domains of conscious experience and how they interact to produce this understanding. This leads to an understanding of inquiry as a whole, all encompassing, project of consciousness, within which all of the real phenomena of consciousness have a place. The result of this evolution of perspective renders irrelevant any understanding of inquiry as dealing with an objective world independent from consciousness.

2) The other path that theory of inquiry can take is the abstract study of the domains of conscious experience leading to the description of those domains as a general frame of reference applicable to all human experience. That is the goal of this study.

My study of the reality-oriented authors cited in Chapters 4 and 5 has served to show that common purpose is a real phenomenon, even for the reality oriented. Without it, functionality, the necessary components of rationality, would be inconceivable. It has also shown that interpretation of literal expression is the only means to achieving such understanding. Beyond that, we may understand that literal interpretation is the only means to achieve understanding of organic behavior. We may therefore seek a universal frame of reference that guides our organization of these interpretations and helps to achieve better understanding. The above considerations lead directly to describing inquiry in functional terms that are systemically related to descriptions of conscious experience. That is the intended end product of the present effort.