Four Conditioning Connections (BPC)

Based on a re-conceptualized Aristotle's four causes, further expanded to explain the concept conditioning connections.

(1) Material Conditioning: The strength of a fence is conditioned by the material of its parts—if the parts are iron, then those parts will be stronger than if the fence is made of wood. (2) Formal Conditioning: A fence made of sticks is strong as a result of the way the sticks are woven together—if they're woven tightly, the form makes them strong; if loosely, then the form makes it weak.

In the early 1800s, heat was thought to be a fluid that moved from body to body, causing its temperature to increase. The reason they thought this is because they had identified a particular quantity they called heat, which caused a change in temperature and was always found to be conserved during a heat transfer from a hot object to a cold object. Since the heat gained by the cold object was always found to be equal to the heat lost by the hot object, many concluded that heat was a substance flowing from one to the other.

This hypothesis was consistent with all known information at the time but was insufficient to prove and ultimately wrong. The categories of formal and material conditioning I've laid out could have helped scientists realize there was a second possibility. The heat-as-a-fluid hypothesis is a kind of material conditioning, where heat is an Entity moving from body to body, conditioning temperature. My concept of formal conditioning could have alerted physicists to the possibility that heat is instead a property moving from one body to another without the exchange of some entity. Instead of changing the matter of each entity, contact between hot and cold objects could have been changing the form of each entity—the relationships between the constituents.

Later, it was proven that heat involved formal conditioning since heat was found to be the relationship between the constituents, specifically the motion of the constituent atoms with respect to one another. These two concepts, formal and material conditioning, could have avoided a hasty conclusion and alerted scientists to the full set of possibilities worth investigating in their context of knowledge.

(3) Efficient Conditioning: During the instant that a bat hits a ball, the force on the ball will condition the ball's acceleration. (4) Passive Conditioning: During the instant a bat hits a ball, the mass of the ball will condition the resulting acceleration. The larger the ball's mass, the less acceleration the force will produce in the ball. In F=ma, F is the efficient condition, and m is the passive condition.

Newton found that different objects accelerate differently under a certain force. Using the concept of passive conditioning, he could have used the observation that different objects accelerate differently when under the same force to infer that some property of each of these entities (some kind of passive condition) makes the same force affect them in different ways. He later proves that this passive condition is mass.

One purpose of these four concepts is to identify the different known ways that an entity's properties can condition its other properties. This serves to direct our attention during a scientific investigation. When trying to understand an entity's identity, we can ask four questions:

(1) What is the entity made of, and how does that determine its nature? (Material Conditioning)
(2) How do the parts relate to one another, and how does that determine its nature? (Formal Conditioning)
(3) What other entities are in a relationship with this entity, and how does that determine its nature? (Efficient Conditioning)
(4) What is it about this entity that will influence how it is conditioned by other entities? (Passive Conditioning)