Dichotomies in the Root Hierarchy

Root Hierarchy

The Root Hierarchy represents the core of the taxonomy. Everything in psychosocial reality emanates from it. So divisions here would be expected to figure in perennial debates about human nature and a "correct" world-view.

Each side of the split may have multiple levels, but academic and philosophical debates typically ignore these internal levels. The mind or reality is presented as a simple X vs Y polarity, with the higher division taken to represent mankind's superior qualities or higher nature.

With competing paradigms or ideologies, there is intense debate over which is right or best. However, these division-generated world-views are different and more fundamental. They are life-defining and generate different academic networks and literatures. Academics stay strictly within their own world-view without experiencing any need to move on. They notice alternatives but exclude them as being the wrong or inappropriate level of analysis.

None of these models would create this list of all possible world-views.

6+1 Split: Sapience Dimension
The Computational Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as mysterious and unknowable apart from tangible behavioral or biological data.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Sapience
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Know-how
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy	Moral judgements
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Meaningfulness
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-Being	Self-awareness
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability	Discrimination
RL2	Inquiry	Knowledge	Certainty	Knowing for sure.
		Choose from the 6 knowing orientations on offer:
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance	Information processing

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Mentality v Functionality i.e. mental states v doing
also:
Mind v Machine i.e. information and pattern v physical mechanism
Consciousness v Behaviour i.e. mysterious mind v sensori-motor output
Responsibility v Instrumentality i.e. judgement v activity
Independence v Agency i.e. freedom to orient v capacity to act

This is the division emphasized by biologists, neuro-physiologists, hard data empiricists and behaviourists, most philosophers and many AI investigators. In practice, it is the approach that reduces man to a machine as in assembly-line work, and reduces mind to the manipulation of symbols like a computer.
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REFERENCES

This computational world-view is labeled in philosophy as the functionalist solution to the mind-brain problem. The idea that the mind/brain is an information processing machine has become the core axiom for cognitive neuroscience research. The computational view has its modern root in the work of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity(1943). Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) argued that a suitably programmed machine would have a genuine claim to mind. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's "Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search" (1976) claims that symbol manipulation is the necessary and sufficient condition for general intelligent action in machines and humans alike. On the philosophical side, Jerry Fodor's The Language of Thought (1975) argued that thinking is a symbol-processing system. Zenon Pylyshyn's Computation and Cognition (1984) contends with rigour that cognition can and must be explained at a distinct computational level. Steven Pinker claims in How the Mind Works (1997), that thinking, feeling, choosing and acting consist of information-processing in the brain.

5+2 Split: Rationality Dimension
The Representational Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as about simulation: an instrument for evaluating and representing a situation prior to any inquiry or action on it.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Representation
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Working models
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy	Systematized models
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Paradigmatic models
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-Being	Internal models
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability	Persuasive models
		Choose from the 5 models on offer:
RL2	Inquiry	Knowledge	Certainty	Using a preferred model.
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Reflection v Execution

This is the division emphasized by planners, therapists, social architects, organisation development consultants and others who reject the simplicity of data or brute facts.

REFERENCES

The representational world-view holds that the mind's defining work is the construction of an internal model of a situation, evaluated and run forward before any commitment to act. Its foundational statement is Kenneth Craik's The Nature of Explanation (1943), which proposed that the organism carries a "small-scale model" of external reality within the head and uses it to anticipate events — thought, for Craik, parallels reality rather than merely registering it. Philip Johnson-Laird's Mental Models (1983) carried this into experimental cognitive science, arguing that people reason not by formal logic but by building and manipulating mental models that simulate the state of affairs in question. The same insight was developed for social and economic life by Kenneth Boulding's The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (1956), whose thesis is that behaviour depends on an internalised representation of the world (an image)—so that what governs action is not what is true but what is taken to be true. In the clinical sphere, George Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955) cast each person as a scientist who builds and tests a system of constructs to anticipate events, with psychological disturbance and therapy alike understood as the failure and revision of that internal model. Finally, Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner (1983) shows how designers, planners and managers work by framing and re-framing representations of messy situations, with reflection preceding and shaping execution.

4+3 Split: Development Dimension
The Evolutionary Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as an instrument for personal growth that accepts the need for a foundation of basic functioning.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Development
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Spiritual development
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy	Ethical development
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Social development
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-Being	Egotistic development
		Choose from 4 evolutionary possibilities on offer:
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability	Focus on safety from danger.
RL2	Inquiry	Knowledge	Certainty
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Thriving v Surviving i.e. developing the self v continuing existence
also:
Significance v Safety i.e. developing meaning v surviving
Subjectivity v Objectivity i.e. personal controls v situational demands
Development v Preservation i.e. drive to grow v drive to maintain
Flourishing v Functioning i.e. enriching focus v situational fitness

Humanistic psychologists focused on growth needs, self-actualization and transcendent values like this division. Positive psychologists, sociologists, mentors promote significance. Some neuroscientists view the brain as classifying the world into what threatens and what sustains life.

REFERENCES

The evolutionary world-view holds that the mind is fundamentally an instrument of growth: its defining work is to develop and actualise the self, with survival treated as a necessary substrate. The dichotomy is present at the tradition's origin:  Kurt Goldstein's The Organism (1939) coined "self-actualization" and set it explicitly against self-preservation, with actualisation as the organism's single master drive and preservation as its lesser, defensive mode. Abraham Maslow's Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962) stacked this polarity into the hierarchy of needs, physiological and safety needs below and belonging, esteem and self-fulfilment needs above. Robert Kegan's The Evolving Self (1982) gave the model its most literally evolutionary form, portraying the self as continually out-growing and reconstructing its own structures of meaning through successive developmental orders. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Positive Psychology: An Introduction" (2000), later extended in Seligman's Flourish (2011), shifted the personal growth task from repairing dysfunction (i.e. surviving) to cultivating flourishing and significance (i.e. thriving). In contrast, primacy can be given to survival over growth:  Darwinian biologists and cognitive-behaviourists view growth as optional. Evian Gordon's Integrative Neuroscience describes the brain's overarching principle as classifying the world into things that either hurt you or help you stay alive.

3+4 Split: Organisational Dimension
The Social Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as a product of social life and individuals function by fitting into various groups.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Organisation
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Humanity
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy	Structured Group
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Informal Network
		Choose from the 3 groups on offer:
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-Being	Individuals constituting a group
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability
RL2	Inquiry	Knowledge	Certainty
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Group v Individual
also:
Transcendence v Actualisation: Submission of self v Assertion of self.
Aspiration v Implementation:
Ideality v Reality:

This is the Trinitarian model of reality in which RL7-Willingness is the source of all energy, RL6-Purpose gives form to that energy, and RL5-Communication sets forms in motion. An infinite variety of things can then be created using RL4-RL1.

Legislators, political scientists, ethicists, humanitarians and sociologists focus on the upper section and assume personal functioning in the lower section must be shaped, managed or controlled for the good of all.

REFERENCES

The social world-viewholds that mind and self are not given prior to society but are products of social life, so that the group is prior to the individual. Its clearest psychological statement is George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self, and Society (1934), whose title is its thesis: the self does not exist at birth but arises within the social process so that "the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual)." The sociological foundation was laid by Émile Durkheim, in The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), who held that "social facts" are a collective reality that is external, constraining and irreducible to individual psychology. Lev Vygotsky's Mind in Society (1978) supplied the developmental mechanism, arguing that higher mental functions appear first between people and only later within the person, so that mind arises from internalised social relationships. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) generalised the claim, treating self, knowledge and reality itself as constructions sustained by social processes. Behind all of this work stands Aristotle's Politics, which holds that man is by nature a political animal and that the city is by nature prior to the individual, who cannot realise a fully human life outside it. The same conviction is carried into contemporary ethics by the communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), Michael Sandel (Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1982), and Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self, 1989). They argue against the "unencumbered individual" of liberal theory that the self is constituted by the community, tradition and webs of relationship it inhabits.

2+5 Split: Reality Dimension
The Control Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as existing to modify reality.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Reality
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Control over reality
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy
Select from the 5 approaches to reality on offer:
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Conformist
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-being	Subjectivist
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability	Perspectivist
RL2	Inquiry	Knowledge	Certainty	Speculative
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance	Practical

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Dynamism v Existence i.e. the vitalizing forces v the stuff of life
also:
Direction v Participation i.e. why anything happens v how anything happens
Potentials v Actuals i.e. hopes for endeavour v phenomena of endeavour

The upper section is preoccupied with control over reality, while existence is encountered and defined in the lower section. As a result, truth can be determined differently within each level.

REFERENCES

The control world-view holds that the mind operates through a governing realm of willingly chosen values and purposes providing directionality and standing over the world of existence to direct and reshape it. In philosophy, its root is Immanuel Kant's thesis that the realm of ends, freedom and the moral "ought" takes precedence over and gives direction to the realm of nature and the "is": a thesis developed as axiology by Hermann Lotze and carried forward by Windelband, Rickert, Scheler, and Hartmann. In psychology, William McDougall built an avowedly purposive psychology, insisting that striving toward a goal is an autonomous category of mind that cannot be resolved into mechanism. In psychiatry, Alfred Adler argued that one cannot think, feel, will or act without some self-chosen goal silently directing the whole personality. And in science and engineering, the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener—anticipated in Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow's Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1943)—re-conceived purpose and goal-direction as the control of a system through feedback. Ludwig von Mises's praxeology envisages all human action as purposive striving toward chosen ends.

1+6 Split: Power Dimension
The Enlightenment Model of the Mind

Here the mind is viewed as entangled with existence such that self and other cannot be separated out.

		Primal Need	Psychosocial Pressure	Varieties of Entanglement
RL7	Willingness	Effectiveness	Selflessness	Power to transcend limits and entanglements
		Choose which of the 6 forms of entrapment to escape from:
RL6	Purpose	Governance	Autonomy	Entangled by values and cultures
RL5	Communication	Association	Understanding	Entangled by societies, groups, and networks
RL4	Experience	Individuality	Well-Being	Entangled inside oneself
RL3	Change	Fitness	Acceptability	Entangled by models, paradigms mindsets.
RL2	Inquiry	Knowing	Certainty	Entangled by existing knowledge
RL1	Action	Achievement	Performance	Entangled by courses of action

Dichotomy Conjecture:  

Spirit v The World
also:
Freedom v Obligation

This division is emphasized by existentialists, spiritual leaders, libertarians, heroes advocating the upper division, while the man in the street and bureaucrats remain in the lower division.

REFERENCES

Summary of Splits

In these splits, the "mind" is allocated to the upper section, which means it is viewed very differently according to the model in use.

Split	World-View	Emphasized Dimension	Revealed Phenomena Upper v Lower
6+1 (between L2 & L1)	Computational	Sapience	Mentality v Functionality
5+2 (between L3 & L2)	Representational	Rationality	Reflection v Execution
4+3 (between L4 & L3)	Evolutionary	Development	Thriving v Surviving
3+4 (between L5 & L4)	Social	Organisation	Group v Individual
2+5 (between L6 & L5)	Control	Reality	Dynamism v Existence
1+6 (between L7 & L6)	Enlightenment	Power	Spirit v The World

 

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Originally posted: 30 Nov 2013. Last updated 6-June-2026.