Looking at Razie Mah’s (2014) A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form (Part 3 of 24)

0015 The category-based nested form comes first.

Some educators say that evolution should be a key concept in teaching sociology, psychology, and other social sciences.

Yet, the modern social sciences simply take the biological sciences for granted, then mimic the empirio-schematics of the natural sciences.  Disciplinary languages bring mathematical and mechanical models into relation with observations and measurements of phenomena.

The modern social sciences ignore human evolution and the mysterious character of the biological sciences.

The modern social sciences embrace empirio-schematics.

0016 Razie Mah proposes that human evolution has three aspects.  He writes three masterworks, one for each aspect, as depicted in the following figure.

Figure 04

0017 The third work, How To Define the Word “Religion” covers the character of our current Lebenswelt.   Speech-alone talk is one of the defining features of our current Lebenswelt.  The spoken word may be pictured as a category-based nested form.

Here is a diagram.

Figure 05

0018 How To Define the Word “Religion” relies on the truly postmodern philosophy of Charles S. Peirce.  The word, “postmodern”, is a site of contention, because many modern intellectuals label themselves with the term. What a fashionable attribute.  No one wants to be called, “modern”.  “Postmodern” is in vogue.

Yet, these self-identified “postmoderns” cannot identify Peirce’s three categories, nor how they fit together.  The category of firstness is the realm of possibility.  The category of secondness is the realm of actuality.  The category of thirdness is the realm of signs, mediations, judgments and normal contexts.

Instead, postmodern academics propose only two categories: their good and political fellow travelers and their evil and despised detractors.

Just kidding.

0019 Peirce’s categories permit the construction of the category-based nested form.

Here is a picture.

Figure 06

0020 Ten primers prepare the student for How To Define the Word “Religion”.  

The first is A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form.

0021 The student?

This course is suitable for freshmen of all stripes, whether in middle school, high school or college.

0022 How so?

Freshmen enter introductory courses.

Freshmen need intellectual tools.

The intellectual tools introduced in these primers are relevant to understanding all three aspects of human evolutionthe Lebenswelt that we evolved inthe first singularity and our current Lebenswelt.