Prescription and Reflective Behavior

While description is subsequent to, and brings closure to, what it describes, prescription, conversely, precedes and gives rise to what it prescribes. Since the most common usage of 'prescription' pertains to pharmaceuticals, and the most typical Philosophical one entails features that are irrelevant to current purposes, a familiar example of prescription, recipe, will be more helpful here. A recipe entails two primary elements--it is a directive to both proceed, and to how to proceed. One's understanding of a recipe is not, as some theories have it, of its 'sense' or of its 'reference', but of to proceed, and of how to proceed. Usually, a recipe presents several stages--fill kettle with water, place kettle on heating element, place tea bag in cup, pour boiling water into cup, in that order. Knowing how to proceed means, at minimum, being familiar with the constituent stages. The recipe guides the proceeding--e. g. one awaits the whistling of the kettle, one checks the instructions, and then one pours the water into the cup. In other words, there is a cycle of interaction between the awareness of what has been transpiring and the next movement. With enough practice, this interaction becomes so fluent that the movement and the awareness can seem to be running parallel to one another, as Spinoza perhaps observed. The enactment of a recipe is an example of reflective behavior, in which the activity is a product of the Formal and Material Principles. Previous discussions focused on examples which would help clarify how each in itself functions, but those analyses were not meant to be taken as exclusive instances--the two Principles can combine in an infinite variety of ways. One is autobiographical retrospection, another is the guidance of movement by some conscious image or expression. Autobiographical writing is one type of reflective behavior, and skilled action is another.