diagnostic grammar for praxis

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

The diagnostic grammar for praxis is RB3’s use of the Laws of Change to distinguish ethical situations by time, scale, stabilization and threats to judgment. It orients attention toward thresholds, lock-in, displaced harm and contestability. The proposal preserves a revisable method of diagnosis rather than deriving a complete moral code, a single scalar score or a guaranteed correct decision.

Explanation

The grammar changes the object of assessment from an isolated act alone to the field through which it becomes possible and consequential. It asks whether reversal is plausible and which feedback is delayed. This does not remove the act from ethical consideration or turn every local injury into a global systems problem.

The later taxonomy distinguishes interpersonal, role-bound, regime-forming, threshold and judgment-capture situations. These types guide reasoning at an appropriate scale rather than constituting an exhaustive classification of every moral event. The proposed entry keeps their orienting purpose distinct from a diagnostic procedure that mechanically determines one action.

The author requires ethical method itself to remain iterative and corrigible. The axes generate questions and tests rather than a code, and PB separately leaves ethical bindingness outside the mathematics. Thus diagnostic structure does not settle normative justification or remove uncertainty from the practical judgment it helps discipline.

Scope and attribution

Diagnostic orientation differs from an exhaustive taxonomy, a decision algorithm or a proof of the binding ought.

AB — The Actual Book

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 198.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The developed account belongs to RB3 in the cited local scope, with antecedents and qualifications retained.

Occurrence locators: 140, 152, 227, 241, 242, 296, 297, 298, 312, 321.

Background used in the editorial explanation

The original source on RB3 p.227 is background on act versus regime. A separate passage on that page explicitly uses Temporal Disparity and Irreversibility for ethical diagnosis and independently establishes the locator.