Overview

The Taxonomy of Human Experience (“THE”) is a collection of brief written depictions of human experience, herein referred to as narrative situations, and a classification of the situations in two categories, namely, Mindset and Action. This first eBook edition of THE contains 3,968 narrative situations organized into 26 Mindset concepts and 34 Action concepts. For each Mindset and Action concept THE also includes a table of related concepts (referred to as Alternatives) under the categories, Cause, Consequence and Inter-subjectivity. 

As described in the Acknowledgements section above, THE is the result of a series of iterative refinements where each phase involved simplification of language and structure. The 3968 narrative situations of THE are phrased to have enough specificity such that they can validly be assigned to one or more values in Mindset and Action, but they are vague such that they avoid reference to culture-specific conventions.  Each narrative situation features up to three characters, namely, Alex, Chris and Pat. Each character can represent a real or fictional person. Any real or fictional person can be Alex, or Chris, or Pat. In some narrative situations, a character will interact with “object (X)”. Object (X) is a placeholder for any conceivable object. 

By stripping away references to gender and cultural conventions, the narrative situations of THE are grounded by the syntax and vocabulary of language itself, but the grounding is also on a deeper level; each of the situations describes a moment that may have occurred at any time in human actuality - past, present or future, and it reveals that each and every moment of human actuality can be described by one or more narrative situations. THE reveals an organic connection between language and experience.

While the breadth of human experience that is depicted in this first edition of THE 1.0 is vast, there will always be more ways to describe human experience. Inherently a work in progress, THE will always be a finite world of infinite possibility. Future editions may be curated by multiple editors to further expand and refine the corpus, to mitigate the inherent bias of single authorship and to further define the relationships between Mindset and Action concepts.

The Mindset - Action classification framework of THE is based on a theory that it is possible to make a relatively valid estimate of Mindset and Action based on a given narrative situation. The 26 Mindset concepts refer to an estimation or prediction of the mental or emotional state of Alex, based on the circumstances of a given situation. The 34 Action concepts refer to an estimation or prediction about what is actually happening in a given situation. Most of the situations appear multiple times to illustrate one or more Mindset and/or Action concepts.

To facilitate the exploration of an alternate point-of-view THE includes a mirror image of the narrative situations where Alex and Chris have been swapped to Chris and Alex. Mindset of Chris shows the same situations as Mindset of Alex, and Action (Chris, Alex, Pat) shows the same situations as Action (Alex, Chris, Pat).

For each Mindset and Action concept THE provides a table of Alternatives. These are links to other Mindset and Action values that may be predicted to be a Cause or a Consequence of a given Mindset or Action. 

By way of example; for the aggressive Mindset we can predict other Mindset or Action concepts that are relatively more likely to contribute to, or “Cause,” an aggressive disposition. Similarly, we can estimate other Mindset or Action concepts that are relatively more likely to be a “Consequence” of aggression. 

Because human beings are fundamentally social beings (language presumes a social context) and characters in proximity necessarily have an impact on each other, THE posits that it is possible to predict a likely Mindset of Chris, given the Mindset of Alex, and vice versa. The Inter-subjective alternatives are links to predictions about the respective Mindset of Chris for each given Mindset of Alex. 

By way of example, if Alex is Aggressive, we might predict that Chris is relatively likely to be Angry, Compulsive or Stressed. THE also provides a link to the mirror view for each Mindset and Action - i.e., for the Aggressive Mindset of Alex there will be a link to the Aggressive Mindset of Chris.