Stephen Downes

This is what I would call a 'folk theory of understanding': "To understand something well enough to act on it requires three things to converge: reliable observations about what is happening, theory that can organise those observations into coherent patterns, and mechanisms that explain how and why." In other words: observations, ontologies, and causal principles. We spend a lot of time on this, and Jonathan Boymal takes time to describe "sense-making as a system of (six) interlocking components": "the information ecosystem, our natural and built surroundings, the institutions that produce and distribute knowledge, the cultures we grow up inside, the sensing and feeling bodies through which all experience is filtered, and the mental models we carry as frameworks." But (in my view) all of this is an artifice, constructed rather than discovered, and in a complex world no longer sufficient.