More on Method of Relativized Conceptualization
We expose hereafter our understanding of MRC. It embodies the developments we have conducted ever since.
After MRC, we are part of a reality we cannot figure out such as it is. Beyond the obvious existence of our own psychic reality, MRC postulates there is also a physical reality, a postulate which rejects solipsism. As a result, any knowledge building is regarded as a motivated construction based on biopsychic perceptions in connection with an inquiring or active attitude. These perceptions are the inner marks of postulated interactions between what we focus on and the beforehand conceptualized physical reality we adopt to describe what goes on and what we perceive (our own body, some technical device, an environment). These traces inextricably mix the observer and the observed. These interactions are postulated since, beyond the evidence of an interiority and of an exteriority rooted in our sensory perceptions, any limit we agree on comes as an convention based on a same performative way of conceptualizing reality. This shared knowledge makes it possible to consensually describe what goes on and what the described entity, or the means we use to describe, are responsible for. We introduce thereby a concept of causality. We can’t grasp the unknown but through the concepts of beforehand built knowledge.
MRC denominates epistemic referential the description of the way we give ourselves a physical entity to describe and we qualify it according to a qualification grid, after some beforehand built knowledge. A physical entity comes as a concept coming out of the assessed statistical stability of the spatiotemporal correlations between the conceptualized description process and the qualifying values recorded. These stable correlations suggest a causality chain centered on the emerging entity, thus determining its properties. MRC denominates genetic class the number of repetitions of the same experience necessary for such a construct be taken for granted.
The concept of described physical entity together with the means used to build this description constitutes a description cell. The associated epistemic referential conceptualizes in a necessary and sufficient way the description process. Anything beyond this referential simply doesn’t exist from the description cell perspective. Conversely, the concept of inactivity itself is relative to the conceptual-physical means used to express this epistemic referential. This appropriate character of the conceptualization level is relative to some implicit or explicit defined contexts, which may simply refer to the amount of experience. No automotive constructor would consider it necessary to pinpoint his cars doesn’t work on planet Mars or at the bottom of the sea as explained in the manual. He can nevertheless specify a temperature range for proper functioning. So is the concept of description cell bereft of any definitive and absolute character. Experimental failures thus tend to make us look for some operational artifact and reconsider the sequence of events, that is to scrutinize the epistemic referential.
Our rational way of conceptualizing Reality starts with essential description. These essential descriptions are basic statements about facts built from perceptions and feelings, supposed to be shared by any stakeholders, as a result of the successful inter-individual cooperations they make possible (shooting while pointing to some menace to make people react). This process results in a sampling of Reality, a collection of intersubjective operational concept available for any further collective construction. The way we come to conceive our limits, what comes from the inner self, what come from the outer, is deeply rooted in our real-life experience, some way of behaving and perceiving. Built-in knowledge makes it possible to gradually rely on natural (a given environment) or artificial (an apparatus for measuring) devices to mediatize our relations with the entity to be described. Out of this knowledge, we postulate the way these devices interact with the field of reality we focus on. It is then possible to regulate the organization, the generalization of achieved descriptions and associated epistemic referential through what MRC calls meta-description. We therefore extend our mastering of reality while abstracting our knowledge through a minimalist core of postulates and definitions, a posteriori supposed to underpin any relative descriptions we may come up with.
Formulizing our knowledge or innovation building processes as an organization of strictly confined description cells may be regarded as oversimplifying, castrating and frustrating. Our illusory but so appealing quest for an absolute knowledge make us think any limit, any formalism we conceive somehow betray what it is supposed to reveal. However, one must for not forget that our concepts too are part of reality and that it is impossible to describe in itself something we are part of. Any absolute is beyond what science can handle. One must not yield to the temptation of denying any limit, of keeping silent, since not intervening, is just a different way of participating in what reality is. On the opposite assuming one’s goals and conventions is a responsible way of facing this implacable fate. There is no limit to the questioning of the already achieved, induced from our moving finalities, from our increasing knowledge, from our deepening thinking and from the theories which result from all that. The references we take for granted to progress are tools useful so long as they make it possible to steer consensual constructions with explicit goals and to organize the factual objectification of the built in concepts.
The followed pathway eventually lead us to consider physical entities, limits, actions, their effects and resulting characteristics as concepts basically relative to an epistemic referential revealing a “consciousness-functioning”, as MRC puts it. Convenience and consensual efficiency are the only criteria that legitimate these constructions. No organization, no conceptualization can any longer be regarded as representative of some piece of reality considered in itself. This elusive Real makes ambiguous the classical distinction between psychic and physical reality. This unthinkable concept stands nevertheless out as the essential container of both the inner and the outer.