There are a variety of reasons why scientific laws may have exceptions: the laws may be imprecise or ambiguous; they may be approximate rather than absolute; they may apply to a limited range of phenomena or to a restricted domain; they may contain hidden assumptions; they may be in error; some phenomena may be mistakable for the other kinds of phenomena to which they do indeed apply; certain conditions or regimes may nullify, weaken, or alter them; inconsistencies among different laws, or inconsiliences, may exist; all laws may fail at extremes, or in the vicinity--or case--of certain anomalous phenomena; etc.
Ignorance of such exceptions may entail. many costs and risks: the flourishing of unbreakable dogmatic traditions; hubris; simplistic thought and conduct; existence of unsuspected frailties; missing of opportunities-, an exaggerated concept of the nature and importance of scientific laws; failure to recognize that different laws have varying degrees of validity, and that laws per se intergrade with mere rules, habits, principles, tendencies, postulates, generalizations, etc; and so forth.
Ideonomy can compile, systematize, and study as many laws, in as many fields and about as many phenomena, as possible; seek to anticipate laws of the future that have not yet been formulated or discovered; and then seek all known or possible exceptions to such laws.
On the basis of such thoughtful research it can suggest: methods, rules, and principles for finding exceptions to arbitrary laws or laws in arbitrary cases; signs and clues indicating existence or nonexistence of exceptions; ways of creating exceptions to laws; generic causes and effects of exceptions to laws; different possible levels of exceptions to laws; the individual elements, aspects, and dimensions of laws that are apt to permit exceptions; ways of defining, describing, and bounding exceptions to laws; simultaneous exceptions to certain laws; questions to ask and answer when looking for or investigating exceptions to laws; the kinds of environments, conditions, and circumstances that are apt to give rise to exceptions to laws; conditions that are apt to mask the existence of exceptions; etc.
Excuses are of interest in part because of how commonly they are given in human life. Some fault, omission, neglect, or failure occurs but a justifying explanation is offered, or an extenuating circumstance is cited, for it.
If centuries of effort are devoted to the development of such a thing or activity as the making of excuses, its cumulative evolution and resulting sophistication can be considerable, and a fortiori if the thing happens to be central to civilization or mental life or if great motivation or rich opportunities exist for the thing's development. For these reasons the development of excuses has been extreme and casuistry has evolved into a high art. Ideonomy would push this evolution a step further and transform casuistry into a science.
Civilization can be viewed as a vast complexus of diverse and diversely interwoven, interconnected, interdependent, distinguished, and interactive excuses for countless like and unlike things.
The excusatory complexus needs to be put under the ideonomic microscope so that its components and processes can be isolated, identified, compared, classified, interrelated, and explained, so that its chains, series, and hierarchies of excuses can be noted and explored, so that the whole structure can be critiqued and improved, so that where appropriate the structure can either be retrenched or amplified, so that the functioning, use, and importance of the complexus in various fields or in connection with different phenomena or human concerns can be explicated, so that the operation or use of the excusatory machinery can one day be automated, so that the full meaning of excuses for human being can be investigated or anticipated, etc.
How do individual excuses, or excuses for individual things: emerge, progress, metamorphose, pass away, supersede one another, oscillate, branch, converge, constrain or reinforce one another, define one another, combine, substitute for one another, cluster, contradict one another, get confused with one another, parallel one another, etc?
For individual excuses, or excuses for or regarding particular things, what are the: types and taxons, causes, justifications, uses, roles, functions, purposes, interests, corollaries, implications, logics, theories, dimensions, elements, rules, definitions, levels, networks, cybernetics, goods, bads, defects, nuances, alternatives, degrees, interrelationships, trees, extensions, generalizations, analogies, complexities, conservations, symmetries, asymmetries, fundamentals, adaptations, exemplifications, distributions, ranges, scales, extremes, ambiguities, capacities, circumstances, combinatorics, constructions, conditions, commonalities, controversies, knowns, unknowns, states, governments, criteria, degrees of freedom, equilibria and disequilibria, informations and entropies, redundancies and irredundancies, dynamics, domains, ecologies, economics ('costs and prices'), probabilities and co-probabilities, epistemology, equalities, characteristic errors, equivalences, tests, games, gedankenexperiments, gestalten and wholes, transformation "groups", representations and representational mappings, illusions, inversions, kaleidoscopic invariants, languages and linguistic elements, sets, spaces, manifolds, stories, measurements, myriontology, needs, opposites, networks of consequences, nonexistences, noology and thoughts, operations, opportunities, desirable organons, paradigms, paradoxes, pathoses, paths, patterns, perfections, plans, tactics, strategies, possibilities, useful principles, problems and solutions, illuminating questions and appropriate answers, differentials, integrals, reciprocities, rings, simplifications, systems, topologies, transcendences, transvaluations, unifications, world views, etc?
What are all possible excuses for or regarding a single random, or a particular, thing?
What are all possible aspects of a single random, or a particular, excuse?
There may be species and genera of excuses for (or what species and genera of excuses may there be for): doing too much; doing nothing or too little; doing the wrong thing or doing something improperly; making certain uses of things; causes; effects (e.g. interferences); ignorances; answers; solutions; bads; defects or limitations; errors (e.g. misperceptions, misconceptions, misrepresentations, misactions, etc); behaviors, acts, or practices (e.g. traditions, 'irrational' rituals, some murders, etc); pathoses; nonexistences; methods, tactics, or strategies; needs or wants; beliefs, prejudices, attitudes, or policies; alternatives; speculations; decisions; problems; elements or parts; assumptions; interpretations; economics or costs; relaxations, simplifications, or shortcuts; failures or disasters; etc.
Some examples of specific things for which there may be excuses are: instances of mistrust; an aleatory element in one's behavior; white lies; the fictions used in mathematical physics; casual upbringing of children or methods of teaching; diseases (since these may actually have unrecognized beneficial aspects); retention of old ways of doing things; "wrong" answers on intelligence tests; eccentricities of personal conduct; "vestigial" organs of the body; "malapropisms"; sloppy work; retrogressions or reversions; approximations; extravagant behavior; waste; inefficiencies; hybrids; importation of alien things; creative destruction; disloyalty or broken promises; arbitrary assumptions; oversimplifications; intentionally ambiguous or vague statements; deliberate leaks of political or military information to journalists; fevers; "disasters" in human affairs; economic recessions; human strife and contention; mutations and even biological "monsters"; socioeconomic inequalities; disinformation spread internationally by intelligence agencies; brutal competition among corporations; natural miscarriages; historical wars; medical placebos; favoritistic triage; eminent domain; slang expressions; caricatures; democratic "chaos"; genomic "inefficiencies"; life's difficulties; homosexuality; prostitution; gray markets; juvenile and adult play; token acts; compromises; 'benign neglect' in politics or elsewhere; "illogical" intuitions; "excessive" caution or precautions; etc.
What excuses are excessive or insufficient?
Is an excuse still relevant or passé?
What obviates a given excuse?
What things are and are not covered by an excuse?
What excuses should have their worth or assumptions tested?
What is inexcusable? What are the thresholds for the validity of excuses?
Ideonomy can help to answer these and other questions.
New types of experiments are always being thought of, as well as new ways of testing things, and ideonomy can expedite this process.
Innumerable ingenious permutations, combinations, and transformations of scientific experiments can be suggested.
Ideonomy can help to systematize experiments': design, conduct, evaluation, modification, specialization, refinement, diversification, universalization, substitution, augmentation or abridgement, codification, comparison, exploitation, criticism, self-testing, automation, etc.
Ideonomy can assist with the answering of such questions about experiments as:
What experiments can and cannot answer certain questions, examine certain problems, validate procedures, add missing pieces to a picture, circumscribe a problem, suggest other experiments, advance a science as a whole, have useful negative results, quantify things, compare one thing with another, eliminate some undesirable ambiguity, provide maximal data with minimal means, supply the highest-quality or most certain or absolute data, detect subtle features of a phenomenon, maximize the diversity of scientific inquiry, answer the most questions at once, penetrate most deeply into the heart of a question, settle old issues, etc?
What is wrong with existing experiments?
What 'obvious' or necessary experiments have somehow never been performed?
What experiments have failed and why have they failed? What could make them work?
What experiments should be performed in parallel--or seriatim?
What decisions can and should be made in the very course of an experiment?
What would be the consequences of all possible modifications of an experiment?
How are different experiments analogous and how do they differ?
What experiments can address different dimensions, elements, and levels of the same problem?
What experiments can be expected to bring the quickest results?
What errors are different types of experiments prone to and in what ways can they be avoided or rendered innocuous?
What are the current limits of scientific experimentation and how can they be surpassed?
What are the total interrelationships of the totality of scientific experiments that are being performed around the world today?
What canonical experiments recur in science after science or in connection with phenomenon after phenomenon?
What experiments can be designed to explore diverse ideonomic issues?
How can various experiments be consolidated?
How do different, and what different, experiments supplement and complement one another?
What are the longest individual or types of experiments that should be run, or what experiments should be run in perpetuum?
What are all of the experiments that can or should be performed upon a single, random or particular, thing? What might be the totality of results produced by these experiments?
How can a given experiment be endlessly varied or varied in the most diverse and complex way?
What is the most efficient or proper scheme for the comprehensive future evolution of all scientific experiments?
What criteria exist or can be devised for deciding what experiments should be performed in arbitrary cases?
What current experiments are redundant and irredundant, and what are all of the redundancies and irredundancies of contemporary experiments?
What types of experiments in one subject could be transferred, either directly or in an adapted form, to another subject so as to fill an unmet need in the latter?
What series or sets of experiments could or can be expected to produce certain types of results?
What are all actual and possible reasons for experiments in general or specific experiments? What are the actual, appropriate, and infinite combinations of these reasons? What meta-structures do these reasons form or involve: e.g. hierarchies, networks, rings, trees, useful lattices, dynamic matrices, etc?
What specific and generic infinite series of experiments 'are there' and in what directions do they go?
What are the total epistemological, noological, logical, mathematical, and even axiological bases and possibilities of experiments?
What are the recurrent or universal types of surprises that tend to occur when experiments in general or types of experiments are performed?
What types of: premature, fallacious, simplistic, misleading, exaggerated, backwards, unjustified, nugatory, presumptuous, etc conclusions can be or are being drawn from an experiment?
How can the many divisible or elementary results of an experiment be ranked: unidimensionally and multidimensionally?
What are the infinitely-many independent, dependent, and interdependent statistical methods, tests, measures, and parameters that are applicable to the analysis, manipulation, synthesis, and representation of the data that experiments produce?
How can and should experiments whose design, methods, and course have traditionally been a priori and rigid be transformed by the introduction of feedback and other cybernetic principles and processes that will make them plastic, pluripotent, intelligent, creative, and self-evolving, or enable them to respond to, adapt to, and grow out of the ongoing course or emerging results of the actual and individual experiment?
What are the systematic and infinitely many and diverse analogies and differences between a single, particular or random, pair of supposedly related or unrelated experiments?
How can certain results or implications of an experiment be obscured by other--more obvious or first-noticed--results or implications of that experiment?
How do different experiments tend to imitate one another, in either good or bad ways?
How have certain types of experiments evolved historically, and how could their future evolution be extrapolated or augmented?
What are all of the ways in which the choice, performance, or apparatus of an experiment may paradoxically perturb, distort, or transform the phenomenon experimented upon, the conduct of the experiment, or the results or data of the experiment? Which such problems are and are not remediable, and how can they be avoided, minimized, or coped with?
What are the most unusual known or unknown ways and means of experimenting upon things, or types of experiments?
What opposite or complementary types of experiments can be performed, should they both be performed, and how do they or their results meet antisyzygially?
What experiments or experimental methods are and are not equivalent and what are their : various and complex : modes and degrees of equivalence and nonequivalence?
What experiments, or genera of experiments, are the most important or critical to conduct or that might be conducted?
Types, analogs, or bases of experiments include: trials, tests, demonstrations, simple observations or measurements, acts, attempts, exercises, simulations, gedankenexperiments, manipulations, perturbations, additions or introductions, subtractions or omissions, repetitions or replications, reconceptualizations, constructions, disassembly followed by reconstructions, rearrangements, recombinations, substitutions or transpositions, restrictions, isolations, accelerations or decelerations, augmentations or diminutions, alterations, concentrations, protocol changes, resequencings, 'controlled' or double-blind experiments, attempts to prevent or exclude things, threshold-modifications, one-variable manipulation, many- variable manipulation, all-variables manipulation, reversals, inversions, manipulation of initial conditions, environmental manipulations, recyclings, forcings, creation of opportunities, introduction of types of dynamic feedback, catalyzations, relaxations, destabilizations., interventional guidance, destructions, interlinkages, interpositions, samplings, displacements, prolongations or postponements, improvements, transcendences, 'virtualizations', equalizations, etc.
Illustrative examples of specific things that might be experimentally investigated are: growth, health, and changes of organisms in zero gravity; neuronal plasticity and excitability in vitro or sans glial cells; whether bacteria learn or operant conditioning can modify their behavior; galaxy-galaxy collisions (simulated on a computer); effects upon the reactivity of a molecule caused by the addition of single atoms with different atomic numbers; effects of introducing foreign genes (transgenes) in organisms; interadjustments of the phenes of the phenotype of an organism caused by artificial discrete and systematic interadjustments of the genes of that organism's genome; simulated cosmogonies with various quantitative or qualitative alterations of the universe's initial conditions or 'constants'; consequences of introducing "free-enterprise zones" inside Communist countries; capacity of the U.S. general population to decide through referenda the sort of sophisticated questions that are now adjudged by the Supreme Court; equivalence of difference equations to differential equations in solving various problems in mathematical physics; the simulated course of world history had the Axis Powers and not the Allied Powers won World War Two; amount of laughter caused by showing various cartoons to different ethnic groups; effects of "streaming" schoolchildren per type of personality; effects upon the way people perceive and evaluate a famous painting such as da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" when a computer is used to selectively alter various discrete aspects of the painting (e.g. the identity or arrangement of certain background objects or scenery, textures, colors, lighting, contrasts, facial characteristics, etc); whether ethical nuances (or anlagen) exist in the social interactions of laboratory animals (using special tests and situations designed to detect them); the absolute or differential detectability by ordinary listeners of various types and degrees of discrete changes in the sounds present in the fabric of a symphony; etc.
Often what applies in one place also applies, or can be applied, elsewhere or to another thing.
Methods, procedures, tactics, strategies, philosophies, criteria, assumptions, logic, representations, knowledge, classificatory schemes, theories, hypotheses, concepts, definitions, criticisms, mathematics, thought experiments, coordinate systems, categories of discovery, doctrines, proofs, inventions, techniques for evaluating things, principles, laws, generalizations, specializations, purposes, uses, instruments, language, manifolds, metaphors, analogies, mechanisms, models, paradigms, perspectives, plans, practices, predictions, decisions, probabilities, questions, categories of answers, relations, resources, organons, series, hierarchies, simulations, solutions, spaces, stories, systems, technologies, things, transformations, syntheses, wisdoms, etc. : found in, characteristic of, created in or for, or related, applicable, or referable to : one : science, topic, profession, realm, domain, world, undertaking, place, phenomenon, time, context, etc : may naturally or artificially extend or be extendible to one or more others.
Such extension may occur with or without some degree of modification of the extended thing and/or of the thing to which it is extended.
Such acts, processes, or states of extension differ in ideonomy from what is ordinarily meant by generalization in that subject. For ideonomy a thing's extension is like a word's static or increased denotation (or extension), whereas a thing's generalization is like a word's static or increased connotation (or intension); the former refer to application, the latter to meaning or essence.
Extension may have a discontinuous, occasional, voluntary, singular, narrow, or punctiform aspect: whereas generalization may have per contra a continuous, eternal, necessary, plural, or broad aspect.
Perhaps extension should be understood as the reference or application of a thing to what lies on the same or a lower level of meaning or generality: whereas generalization should indicate the reference or application of a thing to what lies on a higher level of meaning or generality.
At this point it must be confessed that at the present time the relative and absolute meaning of the words and concepts under discussion remains uncertain or undecided--a situation that should not be too surprising, in view of ideonomy's incunabular status.
Among the many reasons why a thing's extension may be important to perform or consider are: the thing may have other aspects, elements, or dimensions that are not illustrated or are but poorly illustrated by those that are known, conventionally or situationally referred to, or understood; novel or improved uses and functions of the thing may be possible; the extension of a thing may change or be different in certain situations or cases; the meaning or structure of a thing's extension may not be simple but instead complex, subtle, multilevel, etc; understanding a thing's extension can be critical to understanding the thing's meaning or essence; exploring the actual or hypothetical extensions of things in general can help to exercise, train, or evolve the mind's manifold powers--both rational and creative; extension of a thing to one place or in one direction may imply or allow a fact or process of reciprocal extension (that is, if a thing is extended to another thing, the other thing may therefore extend or be extendible backwards, to the original thing); simple extensions may enable or be necessary for the discovery, occurrence, or creation of compound extensions or of finite or infinite chains, series, networks, trees, hierarchies, rings, manifolds, and other meta-structures of extensions; etc.
For generic or specific things, ideonomy can help one to : define, clarify, describe, treat, exploit, develop, interconnect, unify, etc. : generic or specific : extensions': causes, needs, elements, mechanisms, laws, boundaries, interactions, interdependences, ranges, extremes, excellences and defects, effects, analogies and differences, alternatives, opposites and antisyzygies, clusters, corollaries and implications, conditions, capacities, possibilities, geneses, origins, transformations, goals, combinations, synergisms, contradictions, stoichiometries, cybernetics, cycles, probabilities, co-probabilities, evidences, states, distributions, controveries, convergences, divergences, vergences, disjunctions, emergents, equivalences, errors, examples, paths and flows, histories, problems and difficulties, nonexistences, logics, matrices, motions, opportunities, paradoxes, patterns, planning and management, psychology, self-effects and recursions, topologies, sets, etc.
Ideonomy can be used to suggest or investigate all of the extensions of a single, random or particular, thing to another--random or particular--thing, to many such things, or to all things; or conversely, all of the extensions to a single thing of another thing, other things, or all other things. It can do these things for illustrative, educational, scientific, technological, philosophical, or recreational reasons.
Examples of how things might be extended to other things, with or without ideonomic help: the definition of a thing in one language might be reused to define the same thing in some other or one's-own language (which could, i.a., import a new sense of the thing or of the possibilities of the thing); similarly, the definition of a phenomenon in one science might be extended to the definition of the same, or of a different, phenomenon in another science; knowledge about the behavior of squirrels in deciduous forests might be 'extended' to squirrels in tropical or coniferous forests; the discovery that the human organism takes literally several months to detect a certain class of odors might be automatically or evidentially extended to the temporal limits of vision, taste, or even hearing; an industrial innovation in the United States might be extended to the Brazilian economy; the ratios of isotopes in Earth's crustal rocks have been extended to Lunar rocks to suggest what to look for and to check agreement and disagreement; the laws of thermodynamics might be extended to the mass behavior of entire societies; the general phenomena and functions of the plasmalemma might be extended--heuristically or analogically--to the capsular membrane of the mitochondrion; the techniques of chemical kinetics might be' extended to the flow of coded pulse trains through sets of neurons; etc.
Point To Extreme Possibilities
Things often change or behave differently at extremes or in extreme regimes. Also, the extreme forms of things may be radically different from the normal, average, or moderate examples of same. Extreme possibilities in general can be instructive.
The kinds of changes that occur at extremes are characteristic and to some unknown extent universal. Knowledge of extremes can have predictive, heuristic, and descriptive value. It can suggest what changes to expect or how to create, prevent, modify, research, or exploit such changes.
Extremes or extremal phenomena that occur in one science or in connection with one phenomenon can be used to predict the occurrence, nature, and larger possibilities of extremes and their phenomena in another science or everywhere in science.
Given extremes are often relative rather than absolute--current rather than final--and yet can be used to anticipate the greater extremes, or entire series of extremes, that are or may be ulterior to them.
The types of things that may happen at extremes are multitudinous, and include: inversions; reversals; retrogressions; weakening or failure of laws, constants, and principles; division of a phenomenon (perhaps previously considered indivisible) into two or more distinct and novel phenomena; coalescence of a phenomenon with one or more other phenomena (that may have been viewed as incompatible, disparate, or unrelated); dissipation or extinction of normal phenomena and their replacement by new, novel, or revolutionary phenomena; emergence or relevance of new laws, constants, or principles; clarification and reconstruction of the foundations of things; advent of new regimes; mutual interactions and interferences of formerly isolated or compatible things; modifications of the accustomed probabilities, frequencies, numbers, ratios, and other relationships of things; antisyzygies; novel combinations of phenomena, entities, types of behavior, systems, processes, causes, effects, abilities, levels of things, forces, etc; destruction of equilibria, symmetries, equalities, equivalences, conservation laws, etc; appearance or proliferation of exceptions, anomalies, pathoses, defects, problems, stresses, strains, errors, paradoxes, etc; accelerations and decelerations; excitations and relaxations; complications and simplifications; transcendence of former limits and impossibilities; remaking of boundaries; the formerly impossible completion, culmination, perfection, or transformation of certain things; interactions of wholes and parts, and holistic changes; circumplexes; singularities; chaos; supersedure or usurpation of local by universal--or of universal by local--phenomena; diversification or homogenization; oscillations or random behavior; loss or invalidation of familiar perspectives; new general patterns of things; etc.
The interest of extremes, or importance of their study, also includes: that they are able to demonstrate or define the limits of one's or mankind's knowledge, understanding, techniques, powers, means, or theories--or the illusoriness of omniscience and omnipotence; that they exercise, challenge, develop, and liberate the mind; that they establish boundary conditions; that they provide tests of the fundamentality, absoluteness, universality, comprehensiveness, rigor, robustness, exactness, finality, uniqueness, etc of one's theory and knowledge of normal phenomena or of the familiar world; that they supply a larger framework for thought; that they clarify the fundamental dimensions and structure of nature; that they diminish the arbitrary element in human perception and experience; that they point the way to the general advancement of the dimensions of human existence now and in the future; etc.
Ideonomy could help to determine or treat the most extreme degrees of or possibilities for such things as: volcanic eruptions or episodic volcanism in Earth's history, social fads and fashions, political ideas, human good or evil, storms or climatic changes, renderings of musical or other artistic ideas, chess strategies or styles, human poisons or diseases, statements of certain ideas, illusions (as of safety, absence, or necessity), Solar fluctuations (as of luminosity, volume, or spherical asymmetry), energies of elementary particles, performances in sport, oscillations of the global economy, types of chemical reactions or forms of molecules, rates of bioevolutionary innovation or change, fluctuations of the level or volume of the ocean over Earth's history, algorithmic shortcuts or powers, drugs, cellular automata, or engineering materials.
Illustrative general or universal dimensions of extremes, whose singular or plural maximums and minimums might be worth investigating, include: pressure, density, purity, velocity, rate, duration, energy, mass, temperature, frequency, size, population, accuracy of measurement, stability, complexity, orderedness, correlation, information, probability, control, disturbance, isolation, feedback, linearity, activity, reactivity, uniformity, integration, excitation, growth, reliability, symmetry, identity, universality, efficiency, violence, work, freedom or independence, synchrony, flux, potential, perfection, convergence, divergence, oscillation, creation, disappearance, redundancy, tolerance, importance, transformation, youth (or age), etc.
Human reason, frankly, is monstrously defective, more a caricature of the Logos than a hint of the real thing. But at least for the moment, it is all that we have, and per se sacred.
Yet look anywhere and you will find errors of thought: meagerly logic, excruciating non sequiturs, stark contradictions, moronic deductions, labyrinthine paralogism, institutionalized sophistry, beliefs arbitrary and almost random, Bacon's idola in unreduced rampancy ...
So severe are the constraints imposed upon man's intellect by his habitual fallacies that they define the architecture of the mind. Transcend these fallacies in general, with whatever means, and you will transcend intelligence as we know or understand it.
And so the stage is set for ideonomy.
Though individual fallacies are innumerable, their essential diversity is not. The same types of fallacies occur everywhere and all the time; only their manifestations and treacheries are limitless. Fallacies combine, permute, and transform, and yet always are the same.
They encourage, serve, perpetuate, multiply with, and exponentiate one another. They unite and procreate in vicious rings and cycles, towering hierarchies, endless chains, inescapable and engulfing networks, etc.
They are a universal madness and the ultimate weed.
Here are some specific examples of known or possible fallacies to illlustrate what in general is meant by a fallacy:
Should a tingling sensation be felt in the knee, it would be a fallacy to assume that the actual source of the tingling had to be there, since on the contrary the cause might be a focus of irritation in the nerves leading up to the brain or in the brain itself.
Of course the concern of ideonomy is to take excessively specific things like this and maximally abstract, generalize, and re-apply them. Generalized fallacies here might include that: Things must be located where they are perceived to be located; Things must be what they are perceived to be; Perception is a direct or unmediated act; Appearances of things are immanent in, or all or part of the essence of, those things; Consciousness and the mind generally are incapable of fundamental error; etc.
Often falling in love is stupid, but it would certainly be a fallacy to assume that it is always or even usually stupid. The generic fallacy is of course overgeneralization; there are myriad species of it.
Earth has been around for 4.6-billion years, and during that time the Sun has been sufficiently stable to permit life to evolve and our own species to originate. It might be a fallacy, however, to conclude from this that in the future the Sun wiII be equally stable or that the continuity of civilization is assured. Although the logic of the situation is exceedingly complex and somewhat uncertain, it is possible that the historical constancy of our star has largely been a product of chance, of a type, say, that guarantees that a few of the 10 exp 21±2 stars in our cosmos will be stable long enough to give rise to so-called intelligent organisms such as ourselves, but that does not especially make continued constancy--beyond the epoch of complacent reflection--very likely. The fallacies in this case would be in disregarding the possible selectivity or self-selectivity of observers, and transience of special situations.
One of the most famous fallacies is the deduction that two analogous biological species must also be homologous, or closely related in an evolutionary sense. Bats and birds both fly, but not because they are or were in the past continuously linked by other flying animals. Like environments re- originate like forms, the universal self-similarity of the Earth as a whole re-originates given forms, and the universal or general self-similarity of the phenes and genes of the whole bios--or its unrecognized underdifferentiation--insures the endless re-invention of familiar organismal forms and functions.
Given fallacies should have all of their known and possible variants worked out, compared, and distinguished; they should be stated and restated in every possible or meaningful way.
Take the fallacy, that if a thing precedes another thing it must cause it. This couId be caIIed the faIIacy of precursor as cause. Some of the related distinctions deserving to be made here would include: A precursor on but one occasion, a repeated precursor, or an invariant precursor. An immediate or distant precursor. A precursor connected or unconnected with the thing. Must, is apt to, must be able to. By itself cause, cause with help, help to cause, or is presupposed by occurrence of.
Hitherto only a relatively few fallacies have been isolated, named, defined, and discussed; few variations upon a given fallacy have been systematically distinguished; defects and inconsistencies in the language used to treat fallacies currently abound, having never been remedied or even really addressed; the diverse meanings of fallacies vis-à-vis the world's range of subjects and phenomena have gone unsurveyed; systematic solutions to fallacies have not been proposed; the universal logical and cognitive bases of fallacies have not been found and characterized; etc.
Fallacies have serial, clusteral, network-like, dendriform, and other relationships to one another, in a variety of senses and ways. For example, if one type of fallacy about a thing is corrected, certain other fallacies will naturally tend to take its place, and these in turn will lead on to other fallacies, depending on the circumstances and the set, order, and logic of decisions made.
About various types of problems and matters there will be canonical sets of co-alternative fallacies. There will also be standard tests for the existence, nature, interrelationship, and importance of relevant fallacies.
Ideonomy in general can help indicate, discover, or treat:
Which fallacies are identical and which are merely analogous.
Criteria and clues for identifying and distinguishing types of fallacies.
Different levels of fallacies that independently exist or that interact and cooperate in a given case.
Opposite fallacies that may exist or cooperate in different cases.
Fallacies that are apt to be confused with or mistaken for other fallacies.
Common or important fallacious: beliefs, philosophies, doctrines, attitudes, concepts, practices, tactics, strategies, methods, answers, questions, solutions, plans, systems, schemes of classification, representations, models and simulations, statements, investigations, analyses, syntheses, criticisms, evaluations, arguments, hypotheses, theories, mathematics, assumptions, combinations of things, innovations, decisions, definitions, explanations, descriptions, proofs and disproofs perceptions, examples, principles, rules, laws, extensions, excuses, expectations and predictions, experiments and tests, gestalts, goals and purposes, language, imagery, measurements, paradigms, courses and paths, perspectives, reactions, shortcuts, simplifications, advances, revaluations, unifications, uses and applications, work, correlations, etc.
The 'algebra' of fallacies, or how they: add, multiply, exponentiate, distribute, grow and shrink, bound one another, etc.
The definitive dimensions and relative and absolute scalings of fallacies.
The 'complete' structure, causes, implications, content, effects, classification, etc of a single, random or particular, fallacy-or of all fallacies about a single, random or particular, thing.
The complete range of simplest known or possible through most complex known or possible fallacies, of a given type or of all types.
Ideonomy can work out all of the fallacies that exist in or apply to one area, and then figure out how they are interconnected, relate to one another, etc. It can then generalize the lessons, patterns, etc to ---totally different areas of knowledge or endeavor.
Consider the case of music, which includes composition, performance, the act or art of listening, theory, etc.
Musicians' fallacies include an overly literal rendering of a score, the assumption that the composer explicitly incorporated all of his intentions or mental states in his score, the belief that sufficient musical devices exist to score all musical ideas, treatment of a score as though its meaning or rendering should be time-invariant or insensitive to the circumstances of a given performance, the assumption that a musician is ever 'capable of exactly duplicating his earlier performance of a work or the particular conception of the work he has in his mind-or that each performance is not perforce and properly unique or that it should not represent an act of creation and self-discovery, the concept that any piece of music is less than infinitely complex, the view that a score is unambiguous, the notion that the composer had a perfect or unsurpassarble concept of what the meaning, form, and interpretation of his composition should be, etc.
Composers' fallacies can be the belief that it is always necessary to observe familiar rules, that a musical idea requires to be stated completely in certain cases, that there are only certain ways of creating particular musical effects, that the visual aspects of a score will be apparent to listeners, that listeners are equally capable of feeling all emotions, that musical ideas can be properly grasped immediately or without being introduced and developed, that musical meaning is independent of musical form or context, that musical systems can be arbitrary or that they need not take account of human biology or of universal patterns in nature, that a new musical work is not or need not be an integral part of the historical evolution and contemporary 'ecosystem' of all music, etc.
What are the mutual and conjoint relationships and implications of these and other musical fallacies? And how can they clarify or suggest fallacies in other fields, such as painting, economics, or ethics?
Thus the fallacy that musical meaning is independent of musical form or context may be related to or reflect the fallacy that musical systems can be arbitrary or indifferent to human biology (anatomy, physiology, and genetics): e.g. musical form may reflect inherited acoustic structures or ways of processing sounds and sonic sequences.
The hypothetical relationship between these two musical fallacies could then carry over--mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus--to painterly fallacies.
Originate New Fields of Research
Science and civilization evolve as entirely new fields of research and endeavor come into being. At any one moment the scope of human inquiry is to some extent artificially limited; fields are feasible or needed that have not been thought of. It would be desirable to have a device for visualizing in advance the entire range of fields that could or should exist, and the relative and absolute properties, potentials, and methods of those imaginary fields. Ideonomy is such a device.
The bases of ideonomy's power to suggest new and desirable subjects are sundry and various: comparisons of extant -fields to see what they have and lack; studies of the structure and history of human endeavor, and extrapolations thereof; review of the known and unrecognized needs and desires of mankind; isolation of the fundamental dimensions of knowledge, natural phenomena, science, and thought; critique of existing disciplines; mental construction of imaginary fields by analogy to those that now exist; systematic and permuted combinations of things, including concepts, phenomena, processes, laws, methods, instruments, regimes, etc; surveys of what does not exist, of what is unknown, of unanswered or unasked questions, of unsolved problems, of defects and idiosyncrasies of human knowledge, of futuribles, of scientific anomalies, of possible categories of discoveries and surprises, of extreme and transcendent possibilities, etc; mapping out of the connections and interrelations of things or concepts; explorations of the possible meaningful transformations of things, sciences, tasks, methods, and ideas; investigations of what is possible based on pure logic; generalization and extension of existing fields and things; etc.
Sciences are unequally and differently developed and differentiated, and hence the divisions, subfields, and concerns of certain disciplines can be mapped onto other disciplines to suggest missing divisions, subfields, and concerns of the latter.
Certain new or imaginable mathematical discoveries may have universal exemplification or application, and by postulating or demonstrating same ideonomy can effectively suggest new subfields in all those fields to which the discoveries extend. Thus symplectic groups, catastrophes, chaos, fractals, and cellular automata, e.g., may originate new subfields in chemistry, psychology, physics, biology, technology, meteorology, cosmology, and economics.
Mathematical objects and methods in general can be combined with one another en masse, and these combinations can be applied to diverse disciplines to suggest future subfields thereof.
Ideonomy can show how to put those numerous fields that presently remain outside science on a truly scientific footing for the first time, and in this way it can add to the number of fields and subfields of science.
Many of the divisions and subdivisions of ideonomy itself will become new fields of research-even new sciences-as a result of ideonomy. Moreover, when these ideonomic divisions are applied to the treatment of other disciplines an even greater number of new fields of research will result: e.g. hierarchical chemistry, group-theoretic chemistry, and cybernetic chemistry; analogical biology (at all levels, or in all systems, of biology); or antisyzygial psychology.
Different forms, areas, and programs of research are always to some degree interrelated, and ideonomy has the ability to maximally interweave, and synergistically coordinate, a vast mosaic of investigations and other intellectual endeavors. By raising the efficiency and productivity, reducing the cost, optimizing the diversity or the organic differentiation, lessening the redundancy, improving the planning, and rationalizing the structure of research, ideonomy can make it possible for a greater total number of subjects to be pursued at any given time.
By explaining the reasons for or potential returns to society of research, ideonomy could enlarge the fraction of its income that the world is willing to allot to research, development, and innovation. This would multiply the number of areas of inquiry that could be funded.
Many things flow, either in a literal or in a figurative sense. All things, in fact, may flow. Certainly all things, be they physical or mental, participate in, cause, and are affected by flows--flows that are infinitely many, diverse, ranging, intricate, and important.
About these flows we presently know very little. Only implicitly do we know of the existence or possibility of all but an infinitesimal part of these Heraclitean flows.
The importance of such flows, or of understanding or mastering them, may be many: They may undermine stability, or invalidate what consciously or unknowingly assumes--or frustrate what requires or would presuppose--stability, permanence, constancy, stationariness, cohesion, or rigidity; They may bound, or be necessary to bound or define, the identity and continuity of things; They are an energetic, active, mobile, or formative background or matrix against which the life of the world is defined or from which it is derived; They facilitate the convergence, divergence, interaction, and plexure of things; They add, subtract, and nourish things; They insure the perpetual mutual adjustment and adaptation of things; They transmit patterns and information; They induce the evolutionary transformation of nature; They maintain local and universal equilibrium; They endlessly map the universe onto itself, automorphically; Etc.
The properties of all or some flows include: Swift encirclement and passing of obstructions (purling or circumfluence); Undulation; Turning and eddying; Rolling; Agitation and turbulence; Vibration, pulsation, and quivering; Eruptiveness; Wandering and meandering; Overflowing; Elasticity; Perturbability and responsiveness; Amorphy or blob-likeness; Twisting and spiraling; Corpuscular diffusion; Extension, spreading, diffluence, divergence, and dissipation; Confluence and compression; Interfluence and fusibility; Penetration, invasiveness, and permeation; Anarchy; Incompressibility or 'hydraulic' conservation of volume; Continuity and self- continuity; Cohesion; Viscocity; Direction, linearity, and collimation; Self- boundedness; Possession of discontinuous boundary and a smooth outer surface; Irrigidity, penetrability, and ductility; Running, coursing, streaming and shooting; Scissility, discontinuous furcation (bifurcation and digitation), and sympodeal progression; Concentricity, stratification, tunication, fountaining, folding, and imbrication; Self-interaction, self-organization, self-reorganization, self-government, self-stabilization self-compartmentation, self-arborescence, and self-plexure; vergence, anastomosis, and braiding; Eversion and evertibility; Isotropy; Surging; Homogeneity; Mixing and mixedness; Difformity and proteanness; Stretching and contraction; Lobation and radiation; Growth points; Fissionability; Curvature and roundedness; Passage; Movement, movability, and travel; Transportation and transmission; Dirigibility, deflectibility, and canalizability; Funneling; Swiftness; Accelerability; Instantaneous adjustment and self- interadjustment; Attrition; Self-facilitation; Bipolarity and possession of origin and destination; Uncontainability and unstoppability; Rectangular, cylindrical, ellipsoidal, cylindroidal, or fusiform outline; Graduality; Pushing, pressure, pulling, and suction; Development, quiescence, morphogenesis, and degeneration; Longness and narrowness; Possession of gradients; Finding and taking of shortest path or paths in space, time, energy, e/vc; Unpredictability, indeterminacy, and impulsiveness; Persistence ('momentum'); Closure or openness; Reversibility and bidirectionality; Etc.
Some dimensions of flows are or can be: Velocity; Distance; Rate; Capacity; Power; Instantaneous change; Stability; Rectilinearity; Importance; Isolation; Etc.
Types of flows include: Periodic and aperiodic; Circular, orbital, self- rotational, spiral, helicoidal, and annular; Lineal, surficial, and voluminal; Transverse and diagonal; Countercurrent; Direct and indirect; Normal and aberrant; Incoming and outgoing; Induced and spontaneous; Restrained and free; Parallel and antiparallel; Untwisted and twisted; Concrete and abstract; Simple and complex; Differentiable and undifferentiable; Continuous and discontinuous; Random and deterministic; Local and universal; Real and illusory; Actual and virtual; Fluidal and solid; Individual and integral; Specific and general; Finite and "singular"; Radial; Interlaminar; lsomorphic; Laminar and turbulent; Horocycle; Harmonic; Ergodic; Homentropic; Measurable; Etc.
Examples of specific things that contain flows or that themselves flow internally--and of the things that flow within such things--are: Human body (in which flows blood, food molecules circulating in the blood, lymph, respiratory gases, transmembrane ions, alimentary canal's smorgasbord growing bone, etc); World economy (in which flows dollars, credit, raw materials, manufactured goods, orders, workers, innovations, rumors, turmoil, etc); Earth's solid (in which flows core and mantle currents, volcanic magma, geomagnetic field's structure and photons, circulating waters, escaping gases, crustal plates, extruding mountains, etc); Sea (wherein flow waters of unequal temperature and salinity, soil particles, geochemicals, fish, phytoplankton, giant eddies, internal waves, icebergs, etc); Atmosphere (with its flowing water molecules and droplets, dust, clouds, storm systems, volumes of air, electrons, ions, birds, sound waves, leaves, pollen grains, bacteria, viruses, aircraft, parachutists, photons, body and surface gravity waves, etc); Bios (in which one witnesses the fluid dance of bees, plant species chasing one another in ecological successions, demic bionts, organisms' appendages, predators hunting prey, competing biomes, laterally flowing genes, new species, etc); Man's brain-mind system (wherein flows genomic instructions, EEG waves, neural impulses and information, meandering dendrites and synapses, axoplasmic fluid and vesicles, thoughts, sensa, orders, concepts, correlations between parts of the brain, symbols, gestalten, inspired oxygen atoms, unconscious psychogeneses, neurohormones, etc); Milky Way galaxy (where one could spot flowing planets, stars, dust and molecular clouds, young atoms, magnetic field lines, ultra-deep sounds in the galactic atmosphere, galactic arms, cosmic rays, boulders, exotic particles, etc); The "universe" (in which flows galaxies, free intergalactic stars and dust clouds, cosmic-ray matter and photons, neutrinos, gravitons, clusters and hyperclusters of galaxies, cosmic strings and magnetic monopoles perhaps, etc); Civilization (wherein flows migrants, works of art, techniques, news, governments, cultures, wars, ethical changes and innovations, books, religions, mass adventures, life-styles, words, habits of mind, standards, opinions, debates, facts, logical arguments, inventions, and so forth).
Among the causes of flows are: Contagions; Chain reactions; Growth; Aggression; Locomotion; Attraction; Repulsion; Inequalities; Decomposition or disintegration; Ingestion or absorption; Waste or elimination; Production; Suction; Pushing; Disequilibria; Lawful tendency for entropy to increase; Procreation; Stress and strain; Spontaneous assortation; Spontaneous morphogenesis or evolution; Random background fluctuations (from the tiniest to the vastest scale of the universe); All time-asymmetric processes; Energy fluctuations; Waves; Transportation; All stochastic processes; Diffusional processes; Turbulence; Perpetual motion; Other flows and cessation of other flows (sic); Changes in spaces and manifolds (their metric, curvature, or structure); Combination; Transformation; New connections and encounters; Reversal, inversion, or eversion; Differentiation, diversification, and divergence; Cycling; Perturbation; Triggering; Liberation or dissociation; Innovation; Antagonism; Change of state; Etc.
Ideonomy can help to identify flows by: Analogizing one flow to another; Analogizing one thing to another; Distinguishing one flow (or thing) from another; Grouping, categorizing, and classifying any and all types of flows; Considering the ways in which things other than flows, or things in general, can be identified; Exploring ways of combining different or elementary flows; Investigating ways in which one flow can transform into another or into a different flow or genus of flow, or in which flows can be derived from one another; Classifying, noticing, and analogizing the causes and geneses of flows; Identifying, classifying, and understanding the larger things and systems of things of which given flows are a part or in which they occur; Recognizing, systematizing, and correlating characteristic signs, features, properties, and effects of flows; Differentiating flows' possible or characteristic subtypes; Isolating the laws of or that govern flows; Giving standardized names and descriptions to the types of flows, and popularizing same; Defining the basic or canonical types of flows and relating a] I other types thereto in a strict way; Using the theories of information and probability to classify flows; Determining the subsets of things that types of flows apply to or are exemplified by; Refining the general systems and means of measurement--and mathematics for describing--flows; Clarifying and enriching the fundamental concept of flow itself; Critiquing existing identifications--and means of identifying--flows; Extrapolating or interpolating flows; Recalling and criticizing alternative identifications of a flow; Maximizing the criteria for given types of flows: Furnishing the principles that should guide identification; Etc.
Ideonomy can assist learning and use of all of the above.
At the same time it can help answer such questions about flows as:
How do different scales, or all scales, scale-on all possible or important scales?
What are all the ways in which flow in general, or particular types or instances of fIow, can be put to use, now or in the future?
What are all of the meta-structures of flows or to which flows contribute or that are relevant to flows: the trees, hierarchies, networks, series, lattices, rings, clusters, etc?
What flows and types of flows do not exist (per contra those that do exist)? What explains their nonexistence or nonexemplification?
What is the total abstract and cosmic hierarchy of all increasingly and decreasingly important flows-and what accounts for their relative and absolute placement on this scale?
What is the manifold of all possible quantitative and qualitative dimensions of flow--and what is its-structure?
What is the algebra of--or interlinking--all possible flows?
What are the opposites of all flows and types of flows--and the antisyzygies thereof?
What has been the history of flow in the universe; what is the contemporary system of flows; and what is the presumptive or possible future history of flow?
What are all of the possible things that might lie beyond, or that conceptually transcend, 'flow'?
What is the extent and structure of our ignorance of flow--and what per contra is our knowledge?
What paradoxes of flow--and paradoxical flows--are there? What anomalous flows occur or are possible--and what might they mean?
What set of questions would be the most useful to ask when setting out to analyze or investigate a flow?
What general program of research should guide present and future investigation of flow? What should the priorities be?
What answers to questions--and solutions to problems--about flow would be most apt to resolve or clarify any or all other rheological questions and problems?
What are all of the significant analogies and other relationships between or among flows in different areas or sciences or involving different phenomena--and all of the things that mankind might stand to gain by exploring and exploiting them?
What are all of the flows and types of flows of or in any way associated with or related to a single, random or particular, thing?
Conversely, what are all of the things that exhibit or that are in any way connected with a single, random or particular, flow or type of flow?
What types of flow are equivalent--and why are they equivalent?
What has been the history of research into and discoveries about flow-and what historiographic dendrogram describes both?
What speculative discoveries may be made about flow in the future -and what theoretical implications and practical applications would they have?
What are the limits of different types of flow--and what are their consequences?
Point To All the Forms Things Can Have
Things can have various shapes. What are they?
When they have those shapes, they are likely to have them for certain reasons. What are they?
If they have the shapes for certain reasons, there are apt to be typical corollaries or implications. What are the types? What explains them in turn?
Even if the reasons for the possession of the forms are unknown, the mere having--or existence--of the forms can imply certain effects or consequences. What effects are implied by what forms?
Where the actual forms had, or that might be had, by things are not known, forms that are probable: or at least possible--and forms that are unlikely or impossible--may be indicated by the circumstances or environments that exist, or by the nature of the things themselves. What are such suggestive relationships and the laws thereof?
Yet at the same time many characteristic illusions, fallacies, errors, paradoxes, problems, limitations, etc are apt to be associated with morphology, or with forms' causes, corollaries, effects, types, circumstances, exhibitors, laws, habits, etc. What might they be?
Ideonomy can help with these and all other morphological questions and tasks. Only when knowledge and skills develop in connection with all of them will the science of form begin to display real power and utility. It is clear that we have a long way to go.
One of the first things that needs to be universally investigated is what types--or species and genera--of forms are to be found exhibited in the different phenomena and entities of different sciences, or the range of sciences that exhibit them. What, in terms of those different sciences, are the relative and absolute frequencies, importances, manifestations, clusters, meta-structures, interrelationships, etc of those forms? And, fundamentally, how do those forms, by occurring in those sciences, help to determine what those sciences are and the very nature of their phenomena (rather than, or in addition to, the other way around)?
A second thing to be learned in the broadest possible way is what the dimensionless occurrence of types of forms is on various fundamental scales of nature: e.g. size (length), time, velocity, energy, mass, entropy, etc. How, for example, do such basic shapes as trees, rings, helices, knots, spheres, and cones recur on every size scale in nature--say from that of quantum-mechanical vacuum fluctuations at a mere 10 exp -35 meters to the supposed radius of the entire 'universe' at 10 exp 26 meters--a range of 61 powers of ten = 203 powers of two?
Moreover, why do the shapes recur over that momentous range? How might their occurrences at the different levels of scale be interconnected, by chance or necessity? What dimensionless law or laws might operate? What scale- invariant and scale-sensitive phenomena might obtain? How are the different types of forms distributed and interconnected over all of the levels? Does the universe need to be reseen from the 'internal perspective' of these forms or their all-scale meta-patterns?
An ideonomic principle requires that, when given types of forms are simultaneously studied for their exemplification over the entire range of nature's sciences, phenomena, dimensions, and levels, a much greater understanding will be gained of the real nature, possibilities, and applications of those forms, as well as of the things that exemplify them.
Conversely, when the same forms are studied in a restricted way, there will inevitably be great defects and limitations in our knowledge about them, and the logic and theory of the scientist will be rich with fallacies. The development of specific things, such as models of morphogenesis, will be made far more difficult.
There are many other ways in which ideonomy can aid the study or treatment of forms:
It can relate external form to internal form, or vice versa; both abstractly and in terms of actual things.
It can suggest the set of canonical questions to ask when researching forms, and the canonical or alternative ways to answer those questions.
It can survey the kinds of forms that tend to occur together, or point to their co-functions or simple interplay and interactions.
It can suggest conflicts or contradictions between different types or modes of form, or describe a conflict when one is encountered.
It can suggest how forms are or may be combined with other forms, to produce other forms or different patterns, processes, or phenomena.
It can suggest what the limits are of the morphological (pure) development or physical manifestation of types of forms, including what those forms are and mean in a minimal and maximal sense.
It can depict the networks of forms that occur in and as nature, and the activity that occurs within and among those networks.
It can work out the finite or infinite scale that links the simplest forms to the most complex of all forms, or to the integral form of reality itself.
It can isolate the rules wherewith generic or specific forms can be discovered, constructed, or managed.
It can determine and depict the different quantitative and qualitative ways in which all possible forms can develop, transform, and intertransform.
It can develop a language for describing and discussing forms more efficiently, fundamentally, and meaningfully, and it can name and help to define forms.
It can improve the quantitative and mathematical description of forms, and it can help to quantify the conceptual distance between different types of forms. It can assist the construction or discovery of mathematical and qualitative spaces and manifolds for studying the generation, behavior, and interrelation of all forms and all morphic elements, concepts, and phenomena.
It can characterize the relationships between forms and all of those types of things that are similar or related to forms: e.g. patterns, kinds of order, textures, appearances, sequences, images, structures, configurations, combinations of things, distributions, representations, perspectives, measures, morphisms, relations, sets, symmetries, etc.
It can suggest all pure and physical opposites of types of forms--and their antisyzygies.
It can show alI the ways in which different forms can and should be distinguished from one another.
It can depict the totality of morphological aspects and possibilities of a single, random or particular, thing.
It can suggest the many different phases that given types of forms may have in nature, among which they--or the things that exhibit them--are prone to oscillate.