Abstract

The author’s purpose is to search out patterns of the world and the various manifestations of experience. How he sets out to do this is to develop a "network of theories about the most fundamental aspects of critical thinking." What this entails is a highly technical approach that requires the reader to have a firm grasp of formal logic. Castañeda, however, does present his theories and principles in a way that the reader is not overwhelmed with symbolic notation. The author, in constructing his theories, is highly conscious of the fact that adequate explanations are also necessary to present his claim that practical thinking is a notion that requires critical analysis "of the experience of deliberation, recognition of duties and their conflicts, the conduct of the other person, and the decision to act." In his investigation he proposes that we must examine the agent who possesses mental and bodily dispositions, the representational system containing noemata, which are somewhat like sentence types that precede propositions, and the rest of the world, i.e., facts, events, etc. Now the investigation, as Castañeda claims, must begin with the logico-ontological structure of the representational image of practical thinking. This logico-ontological structure is an analysis of propositions and mandates. His ontology is a phenomenology of sorts when dealing with noemata, but has little relation or resemblance to German ontology. Be that as it may, dialogical considerations of propositions are set forth by Castañeda in a way that human communication emerges as vague yet somehow rational. To be more accurate, in his estimation there are dialectical principles which are vague, yet these principles determine a "minimal ethics of communication."