In my book, I make a distinction between concepts and syntheses. Concepts are spontaneously experienced as givens, where syntheses require effort and explicit thought.

The line dividing concept and synthesis is not absolute or even sharp, and the blurry boundary differs considerably between individuals.

Some (but not all!) syntheses can, with practice, be internalized and become concepts that we simply conceive in our experiences. Metaphors that indicate or isolate conceptual likeness can become so immediate that the metaphor can be bypassed or forgotten, freeing the concept to operate autonomously, even wordlessly, like a perception.

This distinction matters to me because I am terrible at synthesis. My memory is poor and my skill in manipulating complex knowledge structures is limited.

To compensate, I work hard to make syntheses conceivable — most of all in my professional life as a designer. In the workplace, if I cannot think quickly and speak fluently and persuasively I will be deprived the conditions I need to function. So instead of doing what most designers do, accumulating technical and theoretical knowledge and manually managing it all, I approach it philosophically. Whatever synthetic knowledge I acquire, I interrogate. I take it apart and put it back together in various ways. I turn it, walk around it, and examine it from multiple angles. I search for simple animating concepts that can be integrated with the rest of what I can conceive. I don’t just want to know about my craft — I want to master it,  internalize it and make it second-natural.

But what has given me the most challenge and the greatest rewards has been understanding the implications of pluralism in design work. Here, I was assisted by both philosophical reflection and constant practice confronting subjective difference. For me, pluralism is no longer an epistemological principle that I hold true, or a means to explain or legitimize reasonable differences of opinion.

I conceive pluralism directly in my experience of reality. The world for me is not an objective reality that different people see differently. For me, it is self-evidently a confluence of objectivities belonging to a plurality of subjects. When I experience the world with others I can feel the reinforcing and canceling interference patterns of overlapping fields of objectivity.

I write this because I suspect pluralism is still synthetic for the majority of people. Most people I meet still seem to conceive the world objectively even if they use objectivist conceptions to synthesize a pluralistic belief system. Our journey to liberalism has still only started.