Something to Talk About: Interactions as Descriptive Schema

A “conceptual schema” is a model or pattern of ideas imposed on reality or experience. A “descriptive schema” is a conceptual schema used to communicate. Because we use these schemas very frequently, a large amount of our knowledge comes to resemble the patterns implicit in them. Because the received descriptive schema is a linear reductionist model of the world, it is unreflective of the emergent features of interaction. I will introduce and develop a new descriptive schema based on these emergent properties of interaction rather than on the reductive properties of individual entities. I will show how this new schema fills in the descriptive gap left by the current schema. Finally, I will speculate about the implications this new schema has for understanding ourselves and the universe in which we live.