About me

One of you, handed the room.

That’s the whole of my authority: not something I was born with, something I was given and took. Judge what I built against what I was given. I’m not above you. I’m one of you who happened to be handed the room, and didn’t just keep it tidy.

I call what I do pragmatisophy. A philosopher can be right in a vacuum. A pragmatisof has to be right in reality — on an ordinary Tuesday, in an ordinary life — or it is not knowledge, it is rhetoric.

Why I write

Pattern essayist

I’m not an author in the usual sense. I don’t write from the inside, about myself. I write what I see. The book is simply the best tool I know for making a pattern visible. If I need a name for it, I am a pattern essayist — essay in the old sense, an attempt: a thought laid out to be tested, not a verdict.

The patterns are ones I have carried for sixty-seven years — as a synchron who sees how things connect, as a neutralist who belongs to no camp, and as someone who has never been able to stop analyzing. Some took me decades to see clearly. A book gives them room to be laid out, checked and argued with. The studies you will find in them are not where the thoughts came from. They are voices in the conversation, there so you can test the thoughts against them.

I work the way medicine and research do: with probabilities, not certainties. Sometimes the evidence leans hard enough that I say where I stand. Most of the time I lay out every side’s reality and let you be the judge. A fact can show a direction. It should never hand you the conclusion.

I don’t write to be right. I write to open a conversation — the kind that continues after the last page, at the kitchen table, at work, in your own head. To know is to keep my conclusion. To understand is to see why, build it yourself, and be able to test it, doubt it, and find it wrong if it is.

I’d rather you understood enough to disagree with me than knew enough to follow me.

The first makes you a thinker. The second makes you an audience — and audiences are interchangeable.

So read these as the work of a person. Weigh them, argue with them, keep what holds.