Three Attitudes of Inquiry
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How do you start making sense of Reality and its ways of happening? Just start asking questions. Every way of approaching and making sense of Reality is 'epistemological' in nature. In general, you can think of sensemaking approaches as "ways of inquiry", "ways of knowing", or "ways of revealing".
Consider these Basic Ways of Inquiry
What? – Where? – When? – Why? – How?
They are all questions, but they don't ask for the same thing. There is what-knowledge, what-knowledge, when-knowledge, why-knowledge, and how-knowledge... and they are subtly point to different aspects of anything that happens.
What - Textual - Asks for Subject-Verb-Object, a happening, an it.
Where does it happen?
When does it happen?
Why does it happen?
How does it happen? It gives it away.
Consider Three Ways of Inquiry
The first one inquires about what happens. It appreciates and observes phenomena or "happenings". The appreciation and accounting of immediate (present) and past phenomena has a narrative or declarative attitude.
Ask, "What happens?" and respond with narrative attitude.
The second one inquires about what will happen. It proposes, considers, and speculates future happenings. The anticipation of future phenomena has attitudes speculative, prophetic, propositional. It's the territory of prediction, speculation, and forecasting.
Ask, "What will/might happen?" and consider the attitude of viable responses.
The third one is concerned with what should happen. It evaluates, vouches, guides happenings present and future. Setting direction for phenomena (present, future) has attitudes that are prescriptive, directorial, orthopedic.
Ask, "Must/should this happen?", "What should/must happen?", "What shouldn't/mustn't happen?"
✎ Connection to