Praxis¶

Understanding that survives action¶

Bring capability, context, judgment and representation into one inquiry. A successful technical intervention can still be unjust; a defensible principle can still fail because its model of the world is wrong.

Shared-resource inquiry¶

Question: how should a community share and maintain a limited resource?

Begin with a fictional irrigation canal, a simulated tool library or a shared room. Use a simulation unless observation and participation are authorized and consented. Do not collect sensitive information or intervene in real infrastructure.

Establish the situation¶

Write a one-page account of the resource, its users, access rules and maintenance. Separate observed facts, assumptions and missing evidence. A stakeholder's account is evidence of their perspective, not automatically a complete causal explanation.

Capability: model what can happen¶

Represent availability, use, loss and replenishment. Check units and conservation. Vary one uncertain assumption and show how it changes the result. For an irrigation simulation, account for withdrawals along the canal without pretending that a simple model captures local ecology.

Study: mathematical reasoning, measurement and experiments.

Context: explain the institution¶

Map who uses, maintains, monitors, decides and appeals. Compare at least two explanations for a failure: incentives, power, information, external constraints or misunderstood local meanings. Find an observation that could distinguish them.

Study: collective action, social evidence.

Judgment: defend the decision¶

Distinguish what is efficient from what is fair or legitimate. State whose interests count, who bears risk and who may contest a decision. Reconstruct the strongest objection to your proposed rule before answering it.

Study: argument and adversarial reasoning.

Representation: make the reasoning inspectable¶

Produce an actor-and-rule diagram, a readable model and a short public explanation. Show uncertainty and alternatives. Ask another person to explain your proposal back to you; revise where your representation caused a misunderstanding.

Study: rhetoric and audience, drawing and diagramming.

The portfolio¶

Submit the situation account, model, source log, actor map, decision argument, public explanation and revision record as one connected work. Include a reversible action proposal with a stopping condition and an appeal route. Actual deployment is not required and may be inappropriate.

The defense¶

A reviewer changes one condition: the resource becomes scarcer, monitoring becomes costly, a group is excluded, or an apparent improvement has a rival explanation. Revise the model and decision together. Explain what remains justified and what does not.

Assess factual adequacy, model limitations, institutional understanding, ethical reasoning, representational clarity and response to criticism separately. A strong result in one area does not erase failure in another. Use examiner guidance to make disagreements explicit. This is a proposed assessment, not an empirically validated measure of general agency.

Further practice¶

Design judgment studio · Learning evidence lab · Life in practice