Higher Abstracts ….

Philo: You’re back and I’m ready now that I know you "get it" somewhat.

Estudia: Yes, but it's hard.

Philo: Sure it is. You really have to work to achieve integration. Just going with the flow will mean that your ideas remain unconnected and floating.

Estudia: “Out of context,” you said.

Philo: Right, and a good philosopher should teach how to grasp cognitive relationships. How to work with your mind and how important that is. But no, most philosophy has been concerned with non-integration, and in fact, philosophy is disintegrated itself.

Estudia: What has philosophy got to do with it?

Philo: Remember that philosophy is dealing with the widest abstractions, and as a science it should be the highest and best integrator of human knowledge. Philosophy should have a satellite view of an earth populated by areas of the special sciences and interests that can not see each other from the ground. The philosopher can relate these areas of special interest to one another and communicate their relationship. If one area is ready to clash with another, the view from on high will remind the areas of the proper metaphysics and epistemology and so forth. A good philosopher will remind others of what is proper and what is not in accordance with reality.

Estudia: Well, there is so much knowledge and it seems that the more I learn, the more confusing everything becomes, and the more I realize how little I know.

Philo: It shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, today any new idea seems to raise the chance of a contradiction occurring in some other field. If you have a rational epistemology, you would not fear new knowledge or the results of some novel experiment. New ideas, when integrated into your existing knowledge will just be more facts supporting what you already know. You’ll be more certain of what you have concluded. The more you learn correctly, the clearer it will become and the more you will know.

Estudia: That would be really nice. I will strive to integrate everything I learn from now on, and this material will be where I start.

Philo: Good. But you are not finished learning about knowledge.

Estudia: What’s next?

Philo: You need to be aware of the hierarchical nature of knowledge.

Estudia: I thought we started with perceptual data and integrated it.

Philo: Yes, but remember that we perceived things, entities in reality. We formed first-level concepts directly from what your senses perceive. You identified “table”, “chair”, “stool”, “couch”, etc in this way and you didn’t need any prior concepts to do this.

Estudia: Sure. And then we processed these “first-level” concepts to form higher level ones like furniture, household items, and manmade objects.

Philo: That’s true, and you can see that there are levels of concepts. This becomes really clear when you begin to combine existential concepts with some concept of consciousness.

Estudia: Like what?

Philo: How ‘bout the concept of Science as in “The realm of Science”.

Estudia: Hmmm. I see that. Science includes all sorts of fields like Chemistry, Biology, Geology and many more. Each of those concepts includes things like Inorganic and Organic, Mineralogy, Astrogeology, Paleontology and more. Each of those concepts includes existential things like fossils, element, compound, cell and many, many more.

Philo: A concept like Science is an integration of concretes. The concept of Science can not be understood directly from the many concretes included. This very high level concept assumes that all the included lower-level concepts have been conceptualized earlier with levels of their own just like you explained. The concepts have a definite order of formation which runs from abstractions just above the perceptual stage to higher and higher abstractions.

Estudia: That makes sense. I can see how that idea applies to every field of knowledge. After all I had to learn to count before I could take up geometry and that helped with algebra and that was necessary for calculus which was required for differential equations and so on. You can’t go from kindergarten to college first and then do high school after all.

Philo: That’s why it really helps to understand a subject by following the historical development of the knowledge in any field. That is why human knowledge has accelerated as layers and layers of complex material are added to a tower of information. But any area rests on a foundation of ideas that began by someone perceiving with their senses something in reality. So you can see that knowledge is hierarchical in nature.

Estudia: Got it. What now?

Philo: We need to relate the issues of context and hierarchy?

Estudia: Oh, boy! Let’s do that later, okay?

Philo: Sure. See you around.