Natural Order and Science

[Neo-Scholastic]

The relationship between choice and commitment is admittedly circular at the start when someone becomes aware of themselves as a personal existent. This start however is not the fullness of a life's journey. While the stance an individual initially selects relies entirely on "blind faith" and is made in the context of limited information,at issue is what follows from the freely made choice. Do some choices hold out the possibility to attain knowledge whereas others preclude it?

Holding out the possibility is only meaningful if knowledge can ultimately be realized. Because we are locked inside our brains/minds, the best we can hope for are models of reality. It's impossible to say whether any given model of reality is the final one. For what it's worth, I don't hold that we know this is the final level of understanding, but I don't invest in purely speculative notions either, whether string theory or final causes. It would seem to me that the principled stance is committed to the idea that the final layer of reality is knowable as the final layer of reality, and this seems unrealistic given our position in the world.

You may be right. The principled stance holds the the promise of a hope that might never by realized. To my mind paradoxical and serendipitous abandon any such hold. Individual temprement seems relevent as to which stance is adpted. Magical may but what gets revealed could also be quite tragic.

In a way, I see my chart as a kind of philosophical Meyers-Briggs. Until I flesh it out with examples people will see what they want. Doing so may also reveal serious flaws. For me its just a fun intellectual exercise.

I tried to be neutral about the labels. Some people love a good paradox and many people I know think of the world as a magical place. But others might interpret those as incoherent and whimsical respectively.

I felt hard pressed to call a reality governed by principles as anything other than principled. I would have preferred something that sounded less pretentious. Everyone wants to think of themselves as principled but the label has nothing to do with a persons character.