Ontological bearings

Why this is needed

Any reasoning about how a person changes rests on ideas about what exists, how things are connected and what change means. In ∆ such ideas are treated as working grounds for discussion. They help to sharpen concepts while keeping them open to revision.

This document does not offer an exhaustive theory of the world. It records a few general assumptions, enough to talk about the subject, action and possibility.

1. Configurations and relations

Objects, people, institutions, habits and beliefs can be described through properties, relations and ongoing processes. Any description picks out only part of reality. The relations between elements can change their possibilities and their meaning.

The current state can be understood as a configuration: a particular combination of conditions, connections, capacities and limitations. A configuration may persist, change in part or be rebuilt. How it is described depends on the task and need not reflect a single correct division of the world.

Separate levels of analysis are useful when they clarify the subject. ∆ assumes no ontological ladder fixed in advance, according to which one type of phenomenon is always more fundamental and more important than another. Giving priority to a particular explanation requires argument.

2. Processes and change

Change means a difference between states, or a change in the very way a state is defined. Individual elements can change, as can their relations, the rules of their interaction and the conditions of their existence.

The fact of a change should be distinguished from its evaluation. A change can be desirable, destructive, neutral or ambiguous. The criteria depend on goals, context and consequences.

Temporary stability matters too. Keeping a habit or a principle sometimes widens a person's capacities and sometimes narrows them. ∆ makes no demand to change everything continuously.

3. Subjecthood

Here a subject is a participant in processes who is able, to some degree, to form goals, interpret circumstances, choose actions and influence their own state or environment.

Subjecthood exists within dependence: on the body, knowledge, relationships, social institutions, time, technology and resources. Taking part in one's own direction does not require complete independence from these conditions.

Subjecthood can show itself in different ways, have limits and change over a lifetime. ∆ derives no single scale of human worth from this definition.

4. Limitations and possibilities

Not every possibility that can be pictured is feasible. For discussion it helps to distinguish:

• actual: what is the case now;
• imaginable: what can be pictured;
• potential: what may become feasible under certain conditions;
• realisable: that for which the necessary means exist or can be created;
• accessible: what the subject is able to do here and now.

Limitations can be physical, biological, material, social, cognitive or logical. Some can be transformed, some depend on circumstances, and some are insurmountable in the given situation. They need to be investigated before being declared absolute or illusory.

5. Openness of the foundations

A description of reality may always turn out to be incomplete or mistaken. New information, experience and arguments can call for revising the original concepts. This also applies to the ideas ∆ holds about change, the subject, freedom and development.

Openness does not forbid holding stable views for a time. It requires distinguishing the grounds of a belief from attachment to it.

Questions for discussion

1. In which situations is describing a person as a stable personality more useful than describing changing possibilities?
2. How can one tell whether a limitation belongs to the person or to the surrounding conditions?
3. Which levels of analysis make it possible to solve a specific problem without creating an artificial hierarchy?
4. What observations could make us revise the assumptions set out here?

Related topics: self-sovereignty, agency, freedom and possibility.