Thanks for the comment – a lot to think about . Personally, I find that putting these ideas out in a linear form helps me to think about them analytically. I’m certainly not saying that this is how they actually operate; I’m convinced that any given “role” will have its own meta-epistemology, and that these can be totally contradictory.

The issue of “choice” is an interesting one. I’m not using it so much in the sense of “informed, rational choice” so much as the sense of “perceived options”. And, since our perceptions are heavily influenced by our interpretive schemas and emotions, I would hardly argue that they are “rational”, although I would argue that we rationalize them .

Just to trouble things along a bit, my reading of this taps another binary and perhaps another meta-epistemology, the ‘structure/agency’ one. I notice myself reflexing negatively when you say “It is our individual reactions, our choices, that decide which of these two reactions we will have.” Sure. Sometimes. Maybe. Our individual reactions may come from many places other than our choices, e.g. the idiosyncratic pre-conscious habits of a lifetime of stimulus/response loops, ‘habitus’ which is a more widely shared version of that, and ultimately the intellectual and emotional resources and options that cultures enable (and disable).

I’m in favor of holding people responsible for their actions. I don’t extend that to believing that all or even most actions are ‘intentional’ in a big, conscious sense of choosing actively from a complete menu of options.

OK, so digging deeper into this I find myself wiggling uncomfortably about the importance you’ve assigned to formalizable epistemologies. This is consistent with privileging individual choice. I think that’s ethically convenient but anthropologically implausible. It’s my impression that we know that most people’s minds are actually odd bricolages, compartmentalized to allow screaming contradictions to exist. A tool for every purpose.

For some traditions of critical analysis – Marx, Mannheim, even Freud – people’s conscious ideological constructs can never be assumed to match simply with their ‘real’ interests and motives, let alone emotional dispositions. In this critical mode the ABC tautology you identify is evidence that there is some ‘deeper’, individually pre-epistemological causal coherence at work.

In a more non-linear mode we could see A, B and C as emergent clusters in a dynamical system characterized by feedback and some turbulence. Although each cluster is important, none is sui generis or decisively causal for the whole complex.

That’s how I think about individual choice and conscious ways of knowing, which I think you capture better in referring to conditioning by socio-cultural dynamics and environmental selection criteria. Cheers!