I’m contemplating creating a thought-structure library. It could actually take the form of a practical philosophy pattern language.

I can see it dividing into several strata, corresponding to the theoretical (the objective, atomistic, systematizable realm of knowledge, around which most of us draw the line delimiting truth), the practical (the purely intuitive or instinctive sphere of inarticulate know-how, which is rarely as firmly linked to the theoretical as most of us think * , or rather is linked to it very weirdly ** ) and the meaningful (the “subjective”, holistic, gestalt realm of meaningful totalities in which our moral/aesthetic values and our symbol-systems are rooted.

A lot of it will be diagrams, especially in the stratum of the meaningful. It is going to look very cool. (I’m going to have to find my old visual tantrum, the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide”, which I created in response to an epidemic of depicting every triadic relationship as facets of a cube. The cube has semantic value which should not be ignored for the sake of finding a less boring way to depict a generic aggregate-of-three. Use three apples or something to depict that, ok? A cube represents either three dimensions (which also means something specific: co-presence of attributes) or three aspects of something (that is, you can view an identical entity multiple ways). Really, you don’t need an image to depict an aggregate. We all understand aggregates. The difficulty is in depicting anything other than an aggregate. But I digress into the same tantrum that induced the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide” in the first place…

—-

* Thus the need for field research. If people actually had a clear theoretical understanding of what they do we could just conduct interviews and user research would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Fact is, the gulf between theory and practice, which is so widely recognized in application of theory (expressed in sarcastic remarks to the tune of “that sounds great in theory”) is just as bad running the opposite direction. We rarely reflect on our actions theoretically unless something goes wrong, and theory is asked to assist.

** What we are trying to accomplish has a lot to do with how we schematize our world. Fact is, the theoretical is founded on the practical more than the reverse. And the practical is largely founded on the meaningful. If we saw no value in science, there would be no science. This is a gross simplification, offered in the spirit of provocation.