Connecting and disconnecting concepts.

"Schemas are about relationships, space, and time." I said, at the moment I often blog by sending a text from my phone in order not to lose the thought and with the tiny character limit I packed my meaning so densely that it was hard to get a chunk off for conversation so and Mash told me I have become too Zen to easily engage with.

When I wrote this entry I'd been thinking for a couple of days about what makes a pattern of play a schema and how to individuate schemas. A common problem in the philosophy of human activities (e.g. aesthetics, jurisprudence, and political and philosophy) occurs again in this little tributary of philosophy of education. It is the problem that descriptions of the activities of real people in the world do not divide up neatly into clear theoretical categories. But I do think it reasonable to say that "frogs" are not a schema in the way that "trajectory" is because it is at the wrong level of abstraction; schemas are about relationships, space, and time.

Qarl said I'm working at a "meta-schema schema" and I do think I do schemas with concepts, and here even unto the concept of schemas. But am I connecting and disconnecting

(schemas with relationships, space, and time) and (frogs not-with trajectories),

or am I sorting into a hierachy of abstraction?

1. relationships, space, and time,
2. trajectory, enveloping, connection, disconnection et cetera,
3. frogs and kangaroos

But today I want to think about animals. Nikolien suspects some children investigate their relationship with the living world and people through passionate repeated thinking about animals. I agree it doesn't look as theoretically simple as them being into trajectories and thus frogs, or enveloping and thus kangaroos. I think she's right. There's a way of thinking about animals that feels like a schema.