To call an unexpected fact (or worse, an expected fact) an insight is the kind of crude leveling-down that deprives subtler thinkers of distinctions.

An insight is only an insight if it effects a perspectival shift in how one sees a situation.

Of course, now I have to explain that a perspective is not merely an opinion. To call a mere disagreement of opinion a different perspective, is yet another leveling-down of language. A perspective is how one approaches a question — what relevance is seen in what features of a problem — and this is what gives rise to opinions.

One’s perspective is directly related to vision, another term that suffers from leveling-down. A vision is not figments of an executives imagination (whether this figment is an ambition or a goal or an offering of some kind). A vision is that way of seeing that makes fresh imaginative images possible.

And vision drives strategy — which is not merely a plan of action for meeting a goal…

And so on.

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There’s a pattern in all these levelings-down. They’re the product of minds that conceive the world as an aggregate of objects which one acts upon — and cannot conceive the world as an environing and participatory whole. It’s precisely the distortion fundamentalist religion inflicts on the host religions it infects.

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Reading Ingold’s Being Alive, I’m excited to see that Ingold made the same observation as I did about transitive and intransitive verbs and what they imply about one’s conceptions of reality.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of verbal reductionism, but I’m considering changing it to transitive reductionism.