ARRANGE
What to Arrange?
To arrange is to configure or to organize. Decide what it is you want to arrange – what do you want to set into a pattern: facts, concepts, theories, plants, people, or whatever variety of population you are looking at? Different kinds of phenomena lend themselves to different types of arrangements – the scale, granularity, and context will vary both qualitatively and quantitatively between animals and atoms, of course – remember this to keep your arranging ambitions realistic.
Why to Arrange?
Is the purpose for your arranging attempt, the why, part of the “naturalistic fallacy”? The prominent paradigm in current arranging is the “systems approach”, which many take to be merely a reflection of reality. Alas, it is not so – the concept of a system is a human contrivance, NOT a natural occurrence, and although such a schema can be useful in helping to organize one’s thinking, other systems, or no system at all, can be just as valid.
When to Arrange?
Premature closure of an arranging exercise is the penchant to rush to completion before enough data are available to set a pattern which reflects all of the important variability. On the other hand, delayed closure during an arranging exercise is the equally unhelpful habit of putting off a decision beyond the point where significant data have all likely been gathered. But there is no rule for choosing the point of patterning – it takes experience.
Where to Arrange?
In terms of the content of the patterning, it is important to know where boundaries should be drawn. Casting the net wider may bring in crucial data that will clarify otherwise obscure findings – or such new data may simply muddy what could have been a good formation. The same dilemma applies to narrowing the field – excluding some of the data may remove minor variations, or it may reduce the measure of significance.
How to Arrange?
Spreadsheet software can take any data set and have a variety of patterns imposed upon it by instructing the software logic to find a different best fit for each type of curve that the spreadsheet can analyze for - the facts do not “speak” a pattern for themselves. So, try a variety of best fits, using both more and less data, and different analytical curves, until the most coherent and useful arrangement for the task at hand can be identified.
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