The current development
The framework provides a common conceptual reference for focused research and particular arrangements. Each develops its own subject, questions and conditions while making its relationships to the wider account intelligible.
Operatio Mundi brings several questions into one connected account. What is being pursued? What cognitive and implementing activity occurs? Which capacities and physical means are involved? How are participants, purposes and authority organized? What changes, and what continues?
Within this axis, Ratio Mundi identifies the cognitive function of purposeful activity and Actio Mundi its implementing function. Intelligentiae Mundi examines intelligences and their capacities; Machinae Mundi examines embodied realization and operative means. These complementary perspectives concern both activity functions.
- Ratio Mundi
- Understanding, interpretation, deliberation, reasoning and judgment in relation to purposes.
- Actio Mundi
- Purposeful production, operation, maintenance and intervention.
- Intelligentiae Mundi
- Diverse intelligences, their capacities, organization and contribution within and across participants.
- Machinae Mundi
- The biological, artificial and mixed physical systems through which capacities and operations are realized.
These distinctions describe different aspects of the same undertaking. Repair combines diagnosis and intervention. Writing combines interpretation and judgment with the operations that produce a manuscript. Cognitive activity is embodied, and implementation can require continuing intelligent guidance.
Relationships within the whole
Context, purpose, systems, reasoning and transformation are connected questions about an undertaking. They help make its circumstances, direction, organization and consequences understandable. Their relationship is not settled by the order of a list or by completing a sequence of fields.
Participants can themselves be organized systems and can form wider wholes through their relationships. Their identities, capacities and roles require distinct accounts. A contribution can be valuable without granting authority; a record can persist while the capability or permission it describes has changed.
The general concepts develop these relationships through participation, authority, commitment, representation and continuity.
Examine the distinctions in use
The architecture is intended to help identify consequential differences and explain their connections. An account should show why a distinction matters to the undertaking: what it clarifies, what it leaves uncertain, and how it changes the examination of a claim or course of activity.
The illustrative cases begin with an essay, a repair and a collective undertaking. The research questions ask where the distinctions need further development and how their contribution can be assessed.
An open framework
Operatio Mundi is the only currently developed axis at this level. Purposeful activity does not define the full possible scope of Architectonica Mundi. Further axes may be developed when their subjects and relationships can be articulated; this account leaves them open.
The present architecture is a basis for investigation and design. Its definitions establish working meanings. Claims about intelligence, valid authority, continuity or practical benefit require support appropriate to the particular claim.
Read the working terms and sources, or learn about the project.