Ways of attending
Frameworks
Each framework brings some features of the world into focus and leaves others in the background. I keep them together for the different things they help me notice, question, and understand.
They do not add up to a single picture, and their disagreements do not disappear. These notes describe what looking through each lens makes available to me.
Bayesian Epistemology
It makes the strength of a belief something I can examine. I ask what I was expecting, how surprising the evidence would be under different accounts, and how much it should change my confidence. Disagreement becomes a reason to look for different starting assumptions as well as different evidence.
Computationalism
It makes me ask how something is represented and what operations can be performed on that representation. A change in notation can make a problem easier without changing the problem itself. I look for rules, intermediate steps, and combinations that could generate a complex performance, while keeping open whether a rule-based account captures what is happening.
Critical Realism
I look for the structures and conditions that make an event possible, including those that never become directly observable. It helps me distinguish what happens from what I happen to experience, and to notice when an explanation at one level leaves another level untouched. My account can be situated and fallible without making its subject any less real.
Embodied Cognition
It draws my attention to how understanding depends on bodily capacities, habits, and ways of engaging with the world. I start noticing what a posture, a practiced movement, or an arrangement of space lets someone perceive and do. What appears to be an individual mental ability may depend on a whole situation that usually stays in the background.
Explanatory Depth
I ask which details make a difference to the outcome I am trying to understand. More detail does not automatically give a deeper explanation; sometimes it obscures the dependence that matters. This lens helps me judge what belongs in an account, what can be left out, and whether the chosen level of abstraction answers the question.
Extended Mind
I ask where the work of remembering, reasoning, and deciding actually happens. A notebook, a diagram, or a familiar arrangement of tools may participate in that work so reliably that treating the person in isolation misses how they think. It makes the boundary of the thinking system a question to investigate rather than something settled by the skin.
Functionalism
I look at what something does within a network of relations: what brings it about, what it changes, and what depends on it. This helps me see similarities beneath differences in material or appearance. It also raises a useful question about substitution: could something else fill this role, and what would be lost if it did?
Hard to Vary Explanation
It makes me test how much freedom an explanation gives itself. Could its details be changed at will and still accommodate the result? I look for the parts that genuinely constrain the account, and become wary when every possible outcome can be made to fit. An explanation earns weight when its details have work to do.
Immersion Abstraction Loop
I notice how quickly a familiar theory can turn an encounter into confirmation. I ask whether my account could have been written before I met the material. Staying with variation and awkward details gives an abstraction something to answer to; returning with that abstraction then changes what I can notice next.
Intentionality
It keeps the relation between a representation and what it is about in view. The same thing can be understood in different ways, and an experience can be directed toward something absent or imagined. I ask what gives a sign, a thought, or a description its particular reference, and what would count as misunderstanding it.
Inventor's Paradox
When I am stuck, it makes me question the boundaries of the problem. A more general version can reveal a structure hidden by the particulars and show which constraints actually matter. I use that change of scale to loosen a fixed approach, while watching for the point where generalizing becomes a way of avoiding the difficult case.
Methodological Holism
It brings relations and arrangements into view that an inventory of individuals can miss. I look at how roles, institutions, and shared histories shape the possibilities available to their participants, and how patterns persist as people come and go. It cautions me against treating the properties of a whole as merely the sum of its members.
Methodological Individualism
When an account says that an institution, a culture, or a market did something, I ask how that happened through particular people. Whose choices, understandings, and constraints carried the process? This lens makes me trace the passage from circumstances to actions to collective outcomes, while asking how those circumstances shaped the actors in the first place.
Neurath's Boat
I notice the things being held steady so that other things can change. Revising a belief, a practice, or an institution always depends on resources that are already in use and may themselves need revision. The question becomes where repair is possible now, and what must keep working while it happens.
OODA Loop
I attend to the interval between noticing a change and responding to it. What has happened while I was deciding, and how has my own action altered the situation? The emphasis on orientation makes me examine the habits and assumptions through which observations become meaningful, rather than treating more information as sufficient for better action.
Pólya's Problem-Solving
It turns my attention to the work around a solution: stating the question, identifying what is given, choosing a route, and looking back. I notice when I am executing a procedure before understanding the problem, or moving on before learning from what worked. A finished answer can become a reusable way of thinking if I take time to examine it.
Predictive Processing
It makes expectation visible inside experience. I notice how familiarity, uncertainty, and surprise shape what seems obvious, what attracts attention, and what gets missed. When something does not fit, I ask whether an expectation changes, the evidence is discounted, or action changes the situation. I use this as a question about experience, not an explanation of everything.
Residual Reality
Every account leaves something outside its frame. This makes me ask what a model captures, what it leaves out, and whether those omissions matter for the purpose at hand. It loosens my demand for a complete picture before I begin: an account can tell me something true and still leave much of the world unaccounted for.
Strange Loop
I notice when a description becomes part of what it describes: a person responding to their own self-image, or an account that changes the activity it tries to capture. It draws my attention to crossings between levels, where observing and being observed become entangled. I keep the question of self-reference separate from assuming that every feedback loop explains a self.
Thick Description
It makes me hesitate before deciding what an action is. Similar movements or words can carry very different meanings in different situations. I attend to local distinctions, shared expectations, and competing interpretations, including my own. Description becomes an effort to understand what people are doing in their terms, not just to record what was visible.
Social Facts
I notice the expectations that are already there when someone enters a setting: what counts as proper, credible, valuable, or even possible. Their force often becomes clearest when someone violates them. It helps me see how a shared convention can confront an individual as a durable constraint, even though people continually sustain or contest it.