Ralph Potter was confronted by his mentor Talcott Parsons with the following question: What makes people think the way they do?
Parsons identified 5 (later 7) clusters in a large inductive study and wondered what makes a person end up in one cluster over another.
He broke it down to what he considers The Four most fundamental Questions:
- Cosmology: How did we get here? Where did it all come form?
- Teleology: Is there any discernible principle by which the Universe unfolds, and what are our means to anticipate and predict the future?
- Ontology: What do you fundamentally postulate to exist? And what is derived?
- Epistemology: How do we know what we know?
People my answer these questions vastly differently, yet if you want to Be a Clear Thinker you need to be able to think systemically.
Systemic Thinking requires us to be internally consistent and self-referentially complete.
Systemic Thinking doesn’t implicitly result in a correct opinion or conclusion, yet in a debate a non-systemic thinker will be defeated every single time, as the Systemic Thinker only has to push his opponent around until her runs into internal contradictions, due to which his original argument then collapses.
If you require the set of answers to The Four most fundamental Questions to be internally consistent you will discover that they actually share a common principle.
We call this Principle of Epistemological Reasoning which gives rise to a Spectrum of World Views, consistent with traditions of the east, such as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and its Chakra System
See Karl Friston on Minimizing Prediction Error and the Free Energy Principle
See also Tim Maudlin on Ontological Clarity and Topology