What Ideonomy Can Do

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What is it that ideonomy will be able to do, once it exists or has developed sufficiently as a pure and applied science? What will it help or enable people to do who make use of its methods, instruments, materials, perspectives, findings, institutions, and professionals?

There are many reasons why these things should be indicated in advance. First of all, they can initially and continuously steer the genesis and evolution ' of the field. Those who would advance ideonomy can foreknow the directions in which they should labor and the abilities of the human race which they should specifically seek to enhance.

Secondly, initial support for ideonomy can justify and regulate itself by reference to the explicit promise of the creatable discipline.

Finally, a prior listing of the would-be future capabilities of ideonomy can later serve as a test of what the field can actually do, as well as provide a basis for evaluating the degree of success and accomplishment of those who undertook to found, establish, and exploit ideonomy.
The following discussion enlarges upon Figure '39 "A Table of 186 'Things ldeonomy Can Do"', which the reader should glance at in advance. Most but not all of the table's entries correspond to all or part of ideonomy's 320 named Concerns.

Heighten Aesthetic Appreciation

Simply indicating the idea that lies behind, defines, or pertains to a thing can often give some sense as to why it is or may be beautiful. Making the essence, function, or mechanism of a thing apparent can have this effect; indeed, there is something innately beautiful about ideas.

When a thing, phenomenon, process, or possibility is encompassed in a particularly complete, circumscribed, or multifold way, aesthetic pleasure can result. And ideonomy seeks to achieve these things in an unprecedented measure.

New ways of thinking and perceiving things should follow upon the use of ideonomy, and a general growth of human intelligence and sensibility. This sort of innovation is commonly both cause and effect of beauty Is apprehension. In fact, ideonomy should eventually lead to the development of additional forms, styles, themes, and purposes of art.

A philosophical principle in ideonomy asserts that everything is infinitely complex and beautiful, and one of the major reasons why the field was originally conceived was that it might provide some of the necessary means for recognizing and mastering Nature's fundamental infinitude.

Show How Things Are Alike

Beauty frequently derives from analogies constructed, explored, or celebrated in works of art. Such analogies may be purely artificial or they may naturally reside in things as they are, in the interrelations of those things, in man's relations thereto, or in human nature itself.

But analogies transcend beauty in their interest and importance. They also have to do with truth, utility, obligations, and human destiny; and whatever serves these things, they can serve.

A primary concern of ideonomy is to provide man with a tool kit for reaching far deeper into the infinite analogical foundations of physical reality, of his own mind, and of the spiritual fabric of civilization than h has ever gone before or had the power to go-with a particle accelerator, in effect, capable of shattering the apparent atoms of our being into their hidden component similarities and dissimilarities.
ldeonomy can be used to discover how like or superficially unrelated things are similar-on many different levels, in many different dimensions, and in very different manners. It can indicate the extent of analogies, and the causes and effects or corollaries of analogies. It can suggest which things resemble which other things, or the clusters of general and partial likeness of things, It can point not only to analogies between things but to analogies between analogies, in ascending and descending hierarchies-and inductive and deductive series. It can specify chains of analogies that transform via discrete decrements and increments, that diverge, converge, and anastomose, even in cyclic groups,, and that interconnect all things in a surprisingly continuous and unified way.

Suggest Alternatives

Life is lived and human business is conducted for the most part in blithe unawareness of the spectrums and arrays of alternative possibilities, choices, interpretations. forms, methods, goals, and values that open out on all sides.

Yet the kinds of alternatives, their bases, and their elements recur again and again in a way that is almost indifferent to-the field, the phenomenon, or the general problem or circumstance.
ideonomy has the power to illuminate alternatives in all of these cases and to make the treatment of alternatives much more methodic, efficient, and straightforward.

Improve Analysis of Situations

The way in which people ordinarily analyze things and situations is extraordinarily inefficient. Analysis tends to be superficial , clumsy, crude, irrational, and nearly purposeless. There is little planning, method, strategy, or structure. The same mistakes are made, the same things are forgotten, the same opportunities are missed-almost endlessly.

ldeonomy can help to rectify these problems and to rationalize the analytic process universally.

Uncover Anomalies

Anomalies exist everywhere and yet for some reason are almost everywhere avoided. They should be sought out and embraced as important clues and opportunities and as indicators of problems, yet normally they are feared, ignored, dismissed, or completely overlooked.

ldeonomy can correct this unenlightened outlook and simultaneously provide the necessary means for the systematic discovery, . analysis, explanation, and exploitation of anomalies in every department of human knowledge and experience.

It can suggest some of the larger implications of the existence of anomalies, classify anomalies into types, and predict where, when, and why anomalies will occur.

Help Answer Questions

Just as certain questions have certain answers, certain genera of questions have certain genera of answers. The genera of both are apt to be poorly remembered and poorly known, and ideonomy can function mnemonically to make the matching of question to answer easy, fast, precise, reliable, comprehensive, diverse, mechanical and yet also intelligent, conscious, and creative, logical and scientific, universalistic or standardized and yet also evolutionary, explicit, and modelable to a much greater degree than ever before.

More generally, examples, types, and types of questions can be correlated respectively with examples, types, and types of answers-for predictive, evaluative, educational, expository, and other purposes. This can indicate errors and non-.sequiturs, make for more consistent arguments and more logical conclusions, free attention to concentrate on novel or creative question-answer elements or relationships by separating them from others that have already been decided or are automatic or trivial, promote the automation of question-asking and -answering, lead to the computerized discovery and exploration of complex, massive, and growing arrays, matrices, spaces, series, networks, hierarchies, vergences, and other ordered and dynamic structures of finite and infinite sets of question-answer interrelationships, further the generalization of questions and answers both and mutually, and so on.
Ideonomy can show inter alia the logical, grammatic, syntactic, stylistic, vocabular, tactical, strategic, quantitative or qualitative, and semantic ways in which an arbitrary, general, or specific question or answer-either given or potential-can be varied, permuted, transformed -modulated, used,-or advanced. It can suggest the reasons for-and implications, corollary.requirements, problems. positive features, developmental possibilities, etc of-these ways; or for or of all genera and other types of questions and answers.

The empirical and logical series of sub- and super-questions and sub- and super-answers that pertain to questions and answers are indicable by ideonomy.

Structure Argument

Most argumentation and most arguments are little and badly structured, and one has the impression that what structure there is almost accidental. The loss is not just the arguer's but everyone's, for defective and absent argumentation can vitiate-or reduce the value or interest of-such counter argumentation as the argumentation might respond to, inspire, or interact and interweave with dialectically, and the totality of arguments over space and history contribute to the growth, consolidation, perfection, and further differentiation of a single, integral, invisible but all-pervasive mental structure or to the general architecture of the human mind. One could think of this structure in its aspect of a chain, every successive and antecedent link of which is necessary for the progress and perpetual integrity of the whole; as a concatenation of arguments that can have no greater strength than that of its least or weakest link, and that must fail when any of its billions of links fail for any reason. Or one could think of the same structure in its multiplicative or exponential aspects: the rapid expansion of powers that a series of arguments can produce is simultaneously and equally an expansion of potential weaknesses and failures, and of demands upon the system overall and at each of its points, or co-arguments.

Ideonomy can be used to survey the entire range of arguments that are to be found everywhere and in all fields, that concern the most varied matters, that make use of the most varied means, that exhibit the most diverse structure, and that serve the most encyclopedic ends and needs.

It can then be used to characterize, distinguish, distill, classify, systematize, formalize, and index these arguments, to specify their basic elements and laws, to show how they can be combined, controlled, transformed, generalized, perfected, and answered, and to indicate which should apply where, when, why, and how.

It can cull the best arguments of each standard type, and make them efficiently accessible on a computer as a library of exemplars and guides. Logical, generic, and expedient transitions between different arguments can be shown.

ldeonomy can be used to explore the : structure, progression, subthemes axioms, assumptions, style, levels, tactics, fallacies, errors, omissions, argumentative links and nodes, set structure, hierarchic and network structure, chains and series, options and capacities. alternative forms and courses, conceptual dimensions, correspondences and coherences or lack thereof, successes and failures, excellences and weaknesses, data, deceptions, and analogical transformations : of one's own or others' arguments.
It can help one to construct or refine an argument.

It can be combined with artificial intelligence to program a computer to automatically rebut one's arguments or statements, to debate one, or to argue for certain positions or to required or desirable goals.
Various types of ideonomic diagrams, or so-called ideograms, can be constructed to plan, enhance, analyze, monitor-, critique, administer. stimulate, transform, unify, expedite, teach, illustrate, proceduralize, compare, record or aid memory of, amplify, communicate, simplify, or edit arguments, or to interrelate them with the entirety of ideonomy.

The types of answers and solutions that naturally pertain to various types of questions and problems can be indicated.

Ideonomy can also train one to structure one's arguments by exposing one repeatedly to all of the various possible permutations of different arguments.

Explore Assumptions

It is important to know what one's assumptions ate, or what assumption are being made when something is proposed. The most impeccable scientific papers are inevitably riddled with assumptions, and few of these assumptions are explicitly referred to. Yet evaluating the paper may require one to at least be cognizant of its underlying fabric of assumptions, and perhaps the rank-order, interconnections. equivalences justifications, meanings, senses, families, circularities. roles, names, problems, relationships, boundaries, analogs. groupings, dynamics, risks, classes, hierarchies, sequences, and transformations of some of the assumptions.

There are universal typos of assumptions-and universal taxons and systems of classification thereof-to which all assumptions whatever belong. These things tan be discovered, researched, taught, and exploited.

There are also both tendential and necessary clusters of assumptions. Certain assumptions tend to be made together and some types of assumptions are absolutely inseparable and unisolable.
When certain pairs or sets of assumptions occur together, or occur together in certain ways or measures, other assumptions are implied that would otherwise be improbable. The tendency of sets of assumptions to imply the existence and nonexistence of other sets of assumptions, that in turn imply existence and nonexistence of still other sets (or hyper-sets) of assumptions, and so on ad infinitum, justifies a search for the total structure of all possible assumptions, and for rules, tests, and criteria that would enable us to exploit that structure efficiently.

Unconscious assumptions are often made that one would' not consciously wish to make or find acceptable. Ideonomy can help one to ferret out such insidious or automatic assumptions.
One can explore in advance what the consequences might be if one were to make certain assumptions, since generic assumptions have generic consequences and chains of consequences, and various models and scenarios can be constructed from standard rules and elements.

Through ideonomy one can survey the important forms and examples of ignorance,- unsolved problems, unanswered questions, peculiar difficulties, complexities, paradoxes, ambiguities, prejudices, controversies, etc : and then ponder the world of mere or dubious assumptions that such things would also imply to exist and be important, either in general or in specific cases

Characterize Behavior

If one is observing the behavior of a gerbil a language is necessary to codify the behavior or to translate it into a form in which one can remember, analyze, understand, integrate, reimagine, mentally experiment upon or predict, systematize, quantify, follow, communicate, or simply perceive it in the first place. One common way of doing this is to anthropomorphize the observed or presumptive behavior of such an animal, which in the present case would mean imagining the gerbil as oneself or oneself as the gerbil.

The example could be taken to suggest a general need and opportunity for the development of a vocabulary and grammar able to characterize the behavior of any phenomenon or entity. Science and human language, in their present form, are notably deficient in the ability to describe the behavior of most things, or to relate the behavior of one thing to the behavior of another, and so our world's manifestly diverse and complex behavior remains largely opaque and uncomprehended. This is tragic, given the importance of behavior to fathoming the full and authentic nature of things- ' or ' to the very being of things, if you will.

Where there is a certain form of behavior, ideonomy can suggest through its scope and generalization-the purposes, causes, effects, laws, needs, capacities, potentials, goals, mechanisms, dimensions, elements, interests, limitations, courses, variants, quantities, and evolution of that behavior, as well as its combinations and interactions with various other forms of behavior or the behavior of other things. deonomy can suggest how to find analogies between seemingly disparate and unrelated examples of behavior, and such analogies can in turn lead to the systematic discovery of unsuspected behavioral differences.