REALISM – TOLERANCE – PRAGMATISM
Conventional wisdom in philosophy and most other scholastic subjects, raises a number of objections to any attempt to create a new architectonic for post-modern thought. I disagree.
1. There is no methodology (or even guidelines) for such an endeavor. Throughout this project’s conceptualization, research, writing, and final formatting, I “made up” the methodology as I went along (performing as an epistemological constructivist). Only after I had completed everything except the final editing did I read the book PHENOMONOGY AND THE THEORY OF SCIENCE by Aron Gurwitsch. At one point Gurwitsch considers the possibility of undertaking a project like mine, and recommends the following: Abiding by the plurality of life-worlds entails endorsing a sociohistorical relativism. For that relativism to be overcome, the question may, and must, be raised of whether there is a world common to all human beings and all sociohistorical groups, a world invariantly the same over and against the diversities of the multiple life-worlds and in that sense “beyond” the latter. To attain that world, an abstractive [i.e., conceptualizing] procedure is required. Starting from any concrete life-world, one disregards specific interpretation and comprehension it receives in the corresponding sociohistorical group and retains only the remainder which is left after the abstraction has been performed (Gurwitswch, 1974, pgs. 144-145). That was exactly how I developed the MindMap.
2. Other cultures, especially those from the “EAST” have a very different philosophy of life, and their categories of experience are so distinct from “WESTERN” ones, that the two traditions are simply “incommensurable” and not amenable to being mapped one to the other. As it turns out however, these discrepancies are usually overstated. In their book EASTERN PHILOSOPHY FOR BEGINNERS, Jim Powell and Joe Lee give an overview from which it can be ascertained that both eastern and western philosophy confront the same phenomena but each sorts experience into somewhat different categories. Dealing with all such differences and negotiating commensurability between them are covered by Edward De Bono in his book THE USES OF LATERAL THINKING. My approach concurs with these latter views.
3. There is no comprehensive, coherent, or consistent basis for thinking since the rise of Complexity and Chaos Theories. Such claims confuse granularity with generalizability. The details of experience have ALWAYS tended to be overwhelming and unintelligible when taken in their particularity. It is the role of concepts to provide a basis to prioritize certain features, aspects or characteristics and then group the instances into categories enabling consistence, coherence, comprehension and creativity. John Wilson explains THINKING WITH CONCEPTS, and in CREATIVE COGNITION Finke, Ward & Smith show that "although the content of creative ideas may indeed reflect a society's values and concerns to some extent, the cognitive processes that give rise to those ideas should still apply to any society." Hence, Concepts in the MindMap.
Realism is an attitude, the attitude of assessing a situation accurately rather than on the basis of delusions or denial. Pragmatism is an attitude, the attitude of appraising one’s prospects on the basis of feasibility rather than wishful thinking. Tolerance is an attitude of forbearance towards ideas and practices one disapproves of, within the limits of reason - the reasonable limit being "no consequential harm". On the charge of deliberately harboring these three attitudes, I plead guilty!