Laura E. Weed
The Structure of Thinking
A Process-Oriented Account of the Mind
Imprint Academic 2003

Overview and Conclusion

To conclude, I will briefly summarize what the picture of knowledge and reality that I have been presenting looks like overall. I will begin with a short summary of what knowledge looks like, as acquired through the x and y thinking processes, then discuss the relationship of the x to the y, in knowledge. I will wrap up with a discussion of what reality will look like overall under this analysis of knowledge and reality.

Knowledge
Knowledge in my analysis, as in Hume's and Aristotle's accounts, will consist of two types of known products.

From the x-type thinking processes, people acquire knowledge by acquaintance, de re knowledge of sensory, intellectual, or other experiential data. This type of data can be imagistic, auditory, conceptual, kinesthetic, or in other ways immediately experienced. It gives people direct, immediate contact with reality. But it is always intentional, in several senses. One, if someone isn't paying attention to it, they will miss it. Two, via the naming process, people can project their own, antecedent expectations on it, if they have any, and three, their ability to understand what they are experiencing is limited by what they do or do not know about it. Further, this type of data is always kausal. The kause may be a mouse, a stomach rumble, a dream, a burst of intellectual insight or a tidal wave. In each case, the experiential bit of data is having a direct, intentional impact on someone on the world-to-mind side of the x-type thinking process, and the person is responding with attention and a name on the mind-to-world side of the process.

What a person gets as a result of this contact with the world is a polyglot collection of experiences. A person may, at times, attempt to attach all of his or her many experiences to a single, unitary, concept of what the world is, overall, but, some people may not ever try to conceptually unify their disparate experiences. Quite possibly, people who are not particularly philosophical don't try to synthesize all of their experience into a unitary world view. Objects are any­thing that a person intentionally indexes and names in his or her experience.

From the y-type thinking processes, people get concepts, or relationships between ideas; de dicto knowledge of what their concepts can or must entail. The concepts may be learned from other people, books, or other y-type reasoning processes, through logical thinking, reading, conversations, or other forms of intellectual or social discourse.
Y-type reasoning processes give people the ability to generalize their experience and draw inferences from it, as well as the ability to invent logically consistent possible worlds for themselves. Thus, y-type thinking processes enable people to speculate about what could be and invent what they would like to see, even if the possibilities imagined have never been experienced in reality.

What people get from y-type reasoning processes are scenarios about what the world could be like, but little or no information about what it is like. There are no objects in the y realm, only structures and relationships. These can be used to sort, organize, categorize, or structure experiences. But in the absence of experiences that will fill them in they are only elegant fantasies.
People are inclined to generate cosmologies and grand all-encompassing schemes about experience out of their y-type reasoning processes. But the measure of the value of these schemes will always be how adequate they are to explain experience. In the history of philosophy, all too often philosophers have slaughtered the experiential data to force them to fit an abstract scheme, rather than adjusting the scheme to make it fit the data.

Propositions encoding knowledge reside in the 'middle' of the relationship between x and y type thinking processes. Ideally, they encode an x-type experience in a y-type syntactical format. It could be that someone could learn a proposition without any experience to which to index it. This person will subsequently learn to understand the proposition only if he or she develops a context, or point of view, in which it fits, either by further learning or further experience. Until the context is developed, the proposition, though repeatable, will remain vacant words for the person. Objects enter propositions through the mechanics of the existential quantifier, or constants. The 'same object' is maintained through syntactic transformations if at the end of an inference the same person can still use the context to index his or her initially named experience.

Thus, the overall picture of knowledge that I am presenting does not have a 'higher' and 'lower' or'internal' and 'external' division. I believe that these ways of dividing up the various types of knowledge misrepresent its character. Rather, knowledge should be thought of as shading from inarticulately experiential at one end to fantastically structural at the other extreme end, with most practical, scientific, or communicable discourse in the middle, as a balance of syntactical and semantical elements.
The picture should be seen as dynamic, and evolving, both individually, for each knower, and collectively for the whole human race. It has no monolithic, unitary structure or organization, but rather can be variously structured and interpreted depending on human needs or perspectives at a given time. Thus, overall, the collected sum of all human knowledge is both kausal and intentional, as well as structured in various appropriately logical and structural ways. This means that no unitary cosmology exhaustively describing all of human knowledge can ever be constructed. But, that is what we would expect from our examination of the limitations on the y-type reasoning processes.

The Relationship of The X and Y Type Thinking Processes to Each Other

In a technical and mechanical sense, the x and y type reasoning processes work together to form propositions. But the propositions are always in a sense hypothetical. Both new structural thinking from the y-end and new experiences from the x-end continually press for development of new concepts, revised structures, increased understanding and revised interpretations of whatever propositions the knowers, collectively or individually hold. And the interaction of the two processes must be seen as dynamic and evolving.

Truth must be understood pragmatically. The hypotheses that do the best job of explaining our experience to us are the true ones. If truth is to be understood ideally, rather than pragmatically, as some ultimate, transcendental, universal, adequate account of all reality, both human and non-human, as known by some omniscient being, then it is a y-type idea, projecting a possibility whose actuality humans cannot attain. I have no objection to philosophers postulating such a possibility as an article of religious faith. But, for human knowledge, it is quite pointless. The only response that any human could appropriately muster to a comparison of what he or she knows, or of what all humans collectively know, to omniscience would be silent awe at our ignorance.

Reality

Reality is experience. Individually, it is what each person experiences, in a first person singular lived life. Collectively, it is what all people experience or have experienced. Some people have access to a greater variety of types of experience than others, and some seem to have special talents or sensitivities for certain areas of experience for which others seem to be 'blind' or precluded from access. Perhaps atheists are people who fail to have religious experiences, while religious mystics are masters in this area, as composers hear symphonies 'in their heads' while tone-deaf people can't keep a beat, and as mathematicians 'see' how quadratics must go, while I see nothing but a jumble of meaningless numbers and letters there.

I think that we humans have good reason to admit that other humans have experiences that we, individually don't, and so to credit 'reality' to the recorded and communicated points of view of others, at least as far as we have the capacity to understand them. I think that we have very little reason to attribote reality to Kantian 'noumena', viewed as reality existing independently of and beyond the knowledgeable reach of any human point of view ever conceived. But again, if someone wants to hypothesize such a possibility as a y-type religious or scientific act of faith, I suppose I have no particular objection. I would simply respond that I have little or no understanding of why they think they need this hypothesis, contentless and devoid of experiential reality as it must remain.