And, Therefore.....

The World can be validly construed as  
Forum for Action, 
or as  
Place of Things. 

The former manner of interpretation – more primordial, and less clearly understood – finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature, and mythology. 

The World as Forum for Action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. 

This meaning, which is shaped as a 

consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or – at a higher level of analysis – implication  for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. 

The latter manner of interpretation – The World as Place of Things – finds its formal expression in the Methods and Theories of Science. 

Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually- validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely-determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative  processes). 

No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. 


Bears...
 They Think They Are Bears... 
They Want Us to Think That They are Bears -

Quickly  - How Do You Hunt a Bear ?

The fact that one  mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains 

insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. 

Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific  perspective – who assume that it is, or might become, complete – forget that an impassable gulf currently

divides what is from what should be.
  

We need to know four things: 

What There Is, 

What to do about what there is,  

that there is a difference between knowing what there is, and knowing what to do about what there is 

and 

what that difference is. 

To explore something, to “discover what it is” – that means most importantly to discover its significance  for motor output, within a particular social context, and only more particularly, to determine its precise  objective sensory or material nature. This is knowledge, in the most basic of senses – and often constitutes  sufficient knowledge. 

Imagine that a baby girl, toddling around in the course of her initial tentative investigations, reaches up  onto a counter-top to touch a fragile and expensive glass sculpture. 

She observes its color, sees its shine,  feels that it is smooth and cold and heavy to the touch. Suddenly her mother interferes, grasps her hand,  tells her not to ever touch that object. The child has just learned a number of specifically consequential things about the sculpture – has identified its sensory properties, certainly. 

More importantly, however, she has determined that approached in the wrong manner, the sculpture is dangerous (at least in the presence of Mother); 

has discovered as well that the sculpture is regarded more highly, in its present unaltered configuration, than the exploratory tendency – at least (once again) by mother. 

The baby girl has  simultaneously encountered an object, from the empirical perspective, and its socioculturally-determined  status. 

The empirical object might be regarded as  
those sensory properties “intrinsic” to the object. 

The status of the object, by contrast, consists of its meaning – 
consists of its implication for behavior. 

Everything a child encounters has this dual nature, experienced by the child as part of a unified totality.

Everything is something, and means something – 

and 

The distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn.