boluopai.Personal-First Humanism
A person encounters an arrangement made for people in general. Something important in their life has no place in it. Making that difference intelligible can begin the work of changing the arrangement.
A philosophy for personal practice begins somewhere concrete: someone perceives, understands, desires, makes, and lives through the consequences. Categories such as user, worker, reader, and citizen make some relations available. The person also brings circumstances and possibilities that those categories may leave unexpressed. Personal-first humanism names an ethical orientation for developing arrangements from that concrete encounter.
Its practical premise is explicit: people's developing understanding, voluntary agency, and ability to sustain worthwhile lives should give tools and cooperative arrangements their direction. A personal philosophy can help articulate what that premise means here, while a model helps give it working form. Actual consequences can then revise the arrangement and its account of the person.
Real persons, revisable descriptions
Taking the person seriously does not require an exhaustive metaphysical theory of personhood. It requires acknowledging the actual life to which a description answers: embodied conditions, experiences, relations, commitments, and effects that continue beyond the description. A model of someone can be inadequate even when it is internally coherent. Their correction can disclose that inadequacy; subsequent experience can disclose another.
The framework adopts modest naturalism: persons, psychological activity, machines, and engineering occur in the same natural world. Within computational ontology, fire monism organizes representations of becoming and transformation; fire can represent a changing person without making that person part of fire. Process ontology asks how things form, persist, and change. A domain ontology expresses that understanding for a particular question through events, states, objects, relations, and transitions, making human activity and change available for description, reasoning, and use. A computational ontology explicitly expresses these distinctions for computational use. This naturalist orientation places the activity in a shared world; computational representation articulates what we select and how we understand it. Natural world and computational abstraction develops this connection.
“The person is real” therefore has a practical force here. A category, metric, or story does not exhaust the one who lives through its application. Its consequences belong in the assessment. The same force applies to other people; the encounter has more than one center of concern.
Construction, nominalism, and fiction
The possibility of constructing a concept invites questions about what it represents and how it is used. A nominalist question concerns the status of universals and general categories. Hobbes's Leviathan, chapter IV, supplies one historical formulation by treating universal names as applying to individual things [1]. Such a formulation does not make those particulars disappear.
Fictionalism raises another question: could a discourse be useful without accepting its apparent claims as literally true? A selected fictional role can organize conduct; a thought experiment can develop consequences under imagined conditions. Computational ontology can represent these contents: a god someone believes in, an imagined companion, or an invented cartoon character can enter a process model through beliefs, expectations, narratives, and actions. The imagining activity and its effects actually occur; the character acquires its meaning within the imagining or story. The model can therefore express who imagines what, how they use it, and what happens later. The metaphor essay develops how expressive constructions become interpretations and realizations.
These distinctions leave room to consider the stronger conditional: if many of the concepts through which we organize life are constructed or treated as fictions, which constructions should we choose? That question makes their adequacy important. It does not establish that everything is fiction. Nor does it derive an ethical answer from an ontological label. A construction could serve administration, efficiency, conformity, discovery, or an individual's development. Choosing among these directions requires reasons about what should matter.
The personal-first premise supplies such a reason: concepts and arrangements should support actual persons' understanding and agency, and remain open to their corrections. Constructibility gives revision room; the ethical premise gives revision a direction. The two contributions should remain distinguishable.
Six connected dimensions
A philosophical account develops questions about the world, existence, truth, knowing, value, and method. An adopted position gives a particular answer within that inquiry. The distinction concerns the work a passage does: a theory unfolds an explanation and its reasons; a position states the understanding adopted in this practice. Both can be developed, criticized, and revised. “Worldview” remains the familiar name for the overall picture in which these answers belong.
| Philosophical dimension and shared practice | Position or activity developed here | Contribution to modeling and practice |
|---|---|---|
| Worldview | Modest naturalism places activity in one changing natural world. | Place persons, models, and their activities in a shared picture of the world. |
| Ontology | Process ontology examines how things form, persist, and change within the natural world. | Articulate the objects, events, relations, and continuity relevant to a domain model. |
| Theory of truth | Correspondence for claims about actuality; truth under an interpretation for statements in a model. | Specify what a claim says, its conditions of truth, and how an actual-world claim relates to its object. |
| Epistemology | Embodied, fallible inquiry that develops through evidence and correction. | Organize observations, candidate explanations, inferences, and tests. |
| Axiology | Personal-first humanism: concrete persons' lives, agency, and chosen development give arrangements their direction. | Form goals and evaluation criteria whose consequences return to the people affected. |
| Methodology | Question-relative pluralism. | Select and combine inquiry, dialogue, formalization, simulation, experiment, and practical construction. |
| Shared practice | Person and model understand, model, express, construct, and evaluate together in reality. | The six dimensions meet in the work; experience and consequences revise understanding and arrangements. |
Here humanism locates value in human lives and agency. Personal-first brings that concern to the concrete person encountered, including circumstances that a generic category can miss. “Personal-first humanism” names the developed value position; “personal-first” and “personal-first orientation” emphasize its practical priority. Other persons remain bearers of purposes and consequences within the same concern. This is the connection between the essay's title, its value argument, and the goal-setting that follows.
An engineering criterion expresses this position in a particular task. For a reading interface, the goal might be to let someone follow a thought across related passages with less navigation effort. That criterion is a selected operational expression of the value position. The reader's experience can reveal whether the arrangement supports understanding, and can lead both participants to revise the criterion or the account that suggested it.
Objects, models, expression, and realization
The six dimensions jointly guide domain understanding, purposes, and inquiry; the domain supplies objects and events that the account seeks to understand. Between them, people and models develop a conceptualization: a question-relative selection of entities, distinctions, and relations. Engineering makes selected meanings explicit and gives them usable forms.
In knowledge engineering, Gruber describes an ontology as an explicit specification of a conceptualization; Guarino further distinguishes that conceptualization from a theory expressing a vocabulary's intended meaning. These accounts help locate a domain ontology among our representations of a domain. Here a process-oriented domain ontology organizes participants, events, states, relations, constraints, and changes. A conceptual model develops a particular account with those distinctions. Clear natural language, diagrams, or formal expressions can give that account a usable expression. Computational ontology makes its conceptual relations explicit for a model to interpret and use. In a private sinthome, relations among person, counterpart, work, correction, and continuation can acquire this computational use through natural language. Gruber, 1993; Guarino, 1998.
| Role in the practice | What it contains | Example: returning to unfinished reading |
|---|---|---|
| Actual world and shared activity | Persons, machines, events, material conditions, and consequences. | A reader loses the connection between two passages and tries to recover it. |
| Domain understanding and conceptual models | Selected objects and relations, proposed explanations, and relevant constraints. | Distinguish the reader, the passages, their conceptual connection, and the interruption; propose why navigation broke the connection. |
| Representation and expression | Language, diagrams, formal statements, data, and records carrying selected meaning. | Write the explanation, draw the reading path, or record where the reader stopped. |
| Engineering realization and use | Programs, tools, interfaces, and working arrangements that interpret and use representations. | Keep related passages together and make the reading position recoverable. |
| Philosophical framework | Developed explanations and adopted positions concerning world, existence, truth, knowing, value, and method. | Ask why continuity of understanding matters, what the explanation commits to, and what would warrant revising it. |
The roles distinguish relations within one practice. A document can carry a conceptual model; a program can embody a decision about which objects matter; a philosophical passage can itself be represented and examined. Their physical carriers and the activities of making and using them belong to the actual world. A representation reaches its subject through meaning and interpretation, while its carrier exists and operates through material processes. These two relations answer different questions.
The represented domain may concern actual life, a hypothesis, or a fictional situation. Actual-world claims invite comparison with their objects; hypothetical and fictional accounts develop consequences under their stated conditions. A person's imagining is actual activity whose content can concern an imagined character. Likewise, a participant, their activity history, selected records, and a conceptual model of them occupy different roles in understanding that life.
Six philosophical dimensions and shared practice expands all six dimensions from the first table, stating each adopted position and its contribution. Within practice, experience and questions inform domain understanding; computational ontology and conceptual models acquire expression; engineering brings them into use. Consequences can revise the understanding, arrangement, and philosophical grounds.
Truth has a definite object here. Claims about actual life are assessed for correspondence with facts. Statements within a model are assessed under its interpretation and given conditions. Inferences from premises to conclusions are assessed under the adopted rules of reasoning. Applying a model to reality also requires examining its assumptions and their relation to the object. People and language models can participate in all these judgments. The theory of truth articulates what it means for a claim to hold; epistemology examines the grounds for accepting, doubting, or revising the judgment.
Evidence representations therefore remain answerable to experience, evaluation criteria to lived purposes, and executed procedures to judgments of methodological fit. A well-formed representation can explain the phenomenon poorly; a predictive model can serve a purpose we have reason to reject. Explanatory adequacy, worthwhile purposes, and methodological fit jointly affect how we use and revise models within the same practice.
“Begin with psychological adequacy before formal refinement” expresses a useful research direction when the question concerns a psychological phenomenon: recognize what needs explanation, then let formal tools clarify and test the candidate structure. The activities can interleave. Adequacy means addressing the phenomenon, including differences that an interpretation fails to explain. Mathematical validity and empirical adequacy retain their distinct checks.
Preferences can choose a question, direct attention, or guide the adoption of a working view. Evidence constrains what can be accepted as true about its object. Intuition and abduction can propose a candidate before all its conditions are explicit; comparison and feedback can develop or defeat it. This is why the epistemological name above emphasizes a starting point and corrigibility.
Adapt arrangements around people
A personal-first design asks how a difficulty is produced before asking the person to absorb it. Some difficulties can be changed through a cooperative arrangement: when work happens, how decisions are shared, or what others need to receive. Others call for different software or an interface. A person can also choose to learn, practice, or change a habit for an end they recognize.
Considering social arrangements and software before demanding personal adaptation is a productive direction. It opens alternatives that a fixed environment might conceal. Actual dependencies can require another order; the question is which change serves the purpose under the circumstances.
For instance, an explanatory assistant might send every investigative detail to the reader. Instead of treating the reader's overload as a defect to train away, the collaborators can redesign the explanation around the judgment the reader needs to make. The model can carry retrieval and implementation while making reasons, alternatives, and material uncertainty intelligible. The person participates through recognition, questioning, and decisions that matter. If the purpose is learning the investigative method, the allocation can change.
The improvement should be assessed through actual work: can the person understand the choice, influence its direction, and use what is produced? Output volume and the model's reassurance are different observations.
Society is an encounter among persons
Society includes institutions and norms that shape what people can do. It also includes other persons with their own purposes, needs, and contributions. A philosophy more adequate to one individual can improve shared arrangements by revealing an overlooked possibility. It can also impose costs on others. Those effects belong to its assessment.
Mill's On Liberty, chapter III, argues for individuality and different experiments of living while retaining the condition of not injuring others [2]. This offers a source for the connection between singular development and plural coexistence. The present proposal develops it through revisable tools and model-supported practices.
A common framework can enable people to cooperate without demanding identical lives. Standards, stable interfaces, and shared procedures can protect useful continuity; they should also be open to criticism where their effects defeat their purposes. A person's disagreement is an occasion to investigate the relation, not automatic evidence that every social constraint is harmful.
Models contribute to that inquiry as interpreting and generating counterparts. Their participation can enlarge human agency while retaining independent judgment. Personal-first humanism chooses a purpose for the arrangement; it does not require the person to author every idea or perform every step. The composition in Sun, Moon, and Earth keeps these contributions and the independent world together.
A changing person in a changing world
A person's understanding develops while tools and social conditions can also change. A representation adequate to an earlier encounter may need revision because the question, capabilities, or conditions have changed. Preserving continuity means retaining what still serves the practice while making such differences recognizable.
Carnap's account of framework adoption attends to purpose, fruitfulness, and the effort involved in using a linguistic form [3]. It provides a comparison for this choice among representations. Embodied Experimental Philosophy connects their selection with participation and later evidence. A system can support reasoning; reflection can also examine its boundary and aim. Dynamic representation and model selection are resources in this work.
Return to the person whose life had no place in a general arrangement. Success need not mean that the person has learned to fit the old category. An explanation may become intelligible, a tool usable, or a different way of cooperating sustainable. The person may also choose a demanding change in themselves. Humanism gives these transformations their measure: what understanding, voluntary agency, and worthwhile activity do they make possible, and what do they ask of other lives?
Sources and scope
The connected naturalist and fire-monist account, the six dimensions, and their model-supported realization state the philosophy adopted here. The sources contribute the distinctions identified above; personal-first humanism gives practice its value direction, developed and revised through actual consequences.
- Thomas Hobbes (1651), Leviathan, chapter IV, “Of Speech.” Original text. One historical account of universal names and particular things, not a proof of the present ethical orientation.
- John Stuart Mill (1859), On Liberty, chapter III. Original text. Individuality and experiments of living within plural coexistence.
- Rudolf Carnap (1950), Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology. Public reprint. Purpose-sensitive adoption of linguistic frameworks; the personal-first premise is supplied separately here.