Work of Patterns

Our actionable comprehension of the environment depends on an ability to contextualize experience. Repertoires of patterns within our cognitive and conative frameworks, some of them hard-wired but most of them learned, make coherent experience possible. They account not only for understanding, knowledge, judgment, memory and other aspects of efficient cognition, but also for our very ability to form true beliefs about the world.

Patterns are configurations of elements and relations. When we are perplexed or stymied, the configurations that would yield understanding are in some way deficient or incomplete. Important elements or relations are missing from the picture. Our effort to comprehend the nature or import of a state of affairs lacks efficacy – it has no fruition in clarity. When the missing pieces are thereafter acquired and the resolving pattern emerges, the confusion dissipates. The adjusted elements and relations generate meaning.