How to build the bridge between thinking about what to do and doing what you think, that is, between theory and practice?

How does theory work to determine practice, given a certain intention or goal?

To begin with it is as well to say that theory and practice are not categorically different. They are both forms of practice of which the one is always conceptual, whilst the other may or may not be conceptual, but will proceed intentionally on the basis of having been conceptualized.

Practice concerns itself with any form of doing whilst theory is the practice of thinking about doing

One works with concepts and their conceptualized properties to make inferences of the sort P→Q (if P then Q).

The other works with anything: hammers and nails, concrete, bricks and wood, ping pong balls, chisels, concepts, very fine camel hair brushes, you name it.

Any kind of practice needs to be learnt to be done. The practice of theory is the practice of thinking and expressing thoughts about the learning and the doing. It too needs to be learnt.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that theory can only be expressed in words and sentences. It can also be expressed in gesture, image and number.

A practitioner needs to be able to do. Such a person expresses their knowledge through doing. A teacher needs to be able to communicate about doing. Such a person expresses their knowledge by being able to talk about or visualize doing. A reflective practitioner needs to be able to do both. This last group makes great teachers.

Theory may be thought of as a conceptual bridge facilitating some intention that is constructed between what we think to be the case and how best to respond to that, given that intention.

A bridge is a good analogy here, as it facilitates an immediate crossing for the intention. Mind you one does not normally cross the bridge just to get to the other bank. Reaching the other bank is merely a requirement for the start of the next leg of the journey.

The intention represents some goal. Usually, but not always, this goal is quite generically stated. “I want a nice house”; “I want a good future for my children”; “I want to make the world a better place”; “I want to earn enough to live comfortably”; “I want a good car”, etc.

In order to fulfil such an intention, which is formulated as a desire, a wish, a number of things have to happen. We need a plan. That plan must be based on our understanding of how things work within the situation or environment we are operating. That understanding must in turn be the basis for defining more immediate challenges ahead of us. The moment we have those challenges we need to have an idea of how we are going to approach achieving those immediate goals. At all times we must be wary of components of the plan misaligning. Means must be properly aligned with ends, always, otherwise you simply do not get what you want, or you get a lot more beside, much of which is what you will emphatically not want.

If the above is a more or less accurate sketch of intentional behaviour, then we might distinguish three overlapping sorts of theory. A first class of theories confine themselves to offering an analytical description of the way things are and how things work within a situation or environment. We might call them descriptive theories. A second kind of theory builds on that to arrive at a critical position as to what to wish for. We might call them critical theories. Lastly, a third class of theories builds on both to arrive at a position regarding the best means to make a specified wish come true. We might call them practical theories although I am not too happy about that word practical as it could suggest that the other theories are not practical. But rather than think of another name, let me specify that practical theories think about how, or by what means an end should be achieved.

What is the relationship between these forms of theory? Does an understanding of something automatically lead to a critical position as to what to wish for, or is that relationship arbitrary? And what about the relationship between the 2nd and 3rd kind of theory? Does a critical position regarding what it would be good to want, automatically and necessarily lead to a way of achieving the end you want? If you understand what is the case, do you then know good means to good ends? This is where the image of the bridge becomes central to the argument: are bridges constructed or do they also occur naturally? And what do we mean by that?

My thesis is radical. It departs from the position that madness is possible in all conceptual doings. And because madness is possible, drawing conclusions about what to do in order to get what you want and finding out what you want on the basis of understanding how things work is difficult. The relationship between understanding what is the case, wanting to know what it is good to want and finding good means to achieve those that end is arbitrary. And that is a good thing. We would not want it any other way. Honestly.

Where it does not appear to be the case that the relationship is arbitrary, it is because we have either evolved instinctive responses that happened to be successful or we have developed experience, often coded in norms and values, both making it appear as if if the bridge is naturally constructed. But it isn’t. Moreover, bridges age. As such sometimes norms and values come to stand for ways of doing things that are no longer supported by new experience. Sometimes evolved responses, get in the way of new conceptions of ourselves.

Let’s now demonstrate the truth of the madness thesis. The fact is that almost anything that is possible is possible as a response to every situation whatever our understanding of it and whatever our intention. If someone were to say to me “the mainsail is backing, ease the gib!” and I reply by reciting “The Owl and the Pussycat”, the person asking me to do something would probably shake their head and dismiss me as “impossible” or “mad”. And that might well be true, but it does no make it less of a response, It is merely not a very helpful response. Anyway, who knows the correct response to the command “ease the gib!” That requires experience as well as familiarity with the English vocabulary of sailing, i.e. knowing what is the case and knowing what to do.

It is possible, even if it is not sensible, to entertain any and every strategy to achieve what you want. There are an almost infinite number of responses possible to any situation. Completely mad and arbitrary responses are possible in every situation. The clue is this: there is a difference between what is possible and what is sensible, what is effective, what is good. That is why we need words like truth, goodness and beauty to whittle down possibilities to the sensible ones. Without those words we would not know how to align our ends with out means, we would not know how to arrive at good means and good ends, we would just be flailing gormlessly and… die.

This is not true in the world beyond conception. There everything works like clockwork and cannot but do what it does. Thought also works like clockwork and can also only do what it does, but it does madness and it does being sensible. Both are just what thought can do without breaking any laws of nature (which it couldn’t anyway, it can merely think about doing that, but the thinking itself cannot but obey the patterns of nature. The madness thesis works for beings who are capable of conceptualizing their environment and their position in it and who can, through ignorance or willfulness, do stupid things; who can do stupid things because they are mad, angry, stoned, high, drunk, tired, in a joyful mood, because they are depressed, have a proclivity towards fatalism, have a momentary lapse of concentration, are suffering from a debilitating mental disease etc..

Why should this be so? Well it is because we are mobile, growing, developing and learning creatures within a changeable environment. Our brain has evolved the ability to learn, to imagine and reason, that is, to operate exploratively within logical space and then make inferences on the basis of a conceptual framework (a frame of reference) made up of concepts conceptually dressed with properties. These try to twin the real world, but do so from the narrow and mentally more efficient perspective of a person’s relationship to their environment as well as a number of implicit assumptions that have evolved: the will to survive, the wish to accommodate ourselves well: that is, intelligently, intelligibly, comfortably, secure and joyfully. No doubt there are many more such “instinctive assumptions”. But just because they are instinctive does not mean that they are not arbitrary. They have evolved simply because they have been found useful to such a degree that our ancestors selected for them, perhaps not even consciously. You can imagine that the will to survive would need to be a basic requirement for the other instinctive reaction to even get a chance to evolve, but that does not make it any less arbitrary. It just happened to work, the rest is history.

Back to our brain. Think now of the variables at work in our thinking to change the outcome of each game of reasoning. Concepts can be dressed with properties in all sorts of ways. Richly, poorly, slovenly, restrictively, redundantly. We have interactions between different concepts and their properties whereby the one can be badly dressed, whilst the other is well dressed. The person holding them in their frame of reference may not be aware of possible inferences because they do not have the modal or causal competence to make such inferences.

This ability to get things wrong and do crazy things may be seen as a problem, but it is also our wealth. Because our conceptual activity operates within a virtual space of its own, within each subject, it can, through imagining, speculating and reasoning, adapt to different situations relatively quickly. It can learn. Learn new tricks, new ideas, it can see concepts exhibit properties it did not know about simply because the context in which those properties manifest themselves has changed.

So our world of thought and its relationship to the world we act within, is a peculiar one. The world of thought is part of the world we act within, just as much bound by the iron patterns of necessity. It is a world that tries to twin the world it thinks about. Within the necessary pattern of its working it can nevertheless find paths to all possibilities on the basis of the many variables at work that can all tip this way or that way depending on the situation.

This makes it possible for us to change our responses to situations on the basis of what we learn. Unfortunately, the trade off is that madness and the absurd are also possible. In fact anything possible is possible, if you will forgive me for putting it that way.

Of course, we can reduce the responses (including the mad ones) to a handful of sensible responses only if our thinking about the ingredients constructing the bridge linking theory to practice and the conceptual procedures in place for building the bridge are aligned through analogy with earlier experience.

Most people are not mad, but we are all ignorant regarding quite a few subjects. We entertain beliefs that from one perspective appear compelling whilst from another they appear incomprehensible and mad. Nor do we all put equal effort in the cultivation and rigorous maintenance of our frame of reference. Moreover our taste in everything is not everywhere well-formed and critically arrived at. We are generally peer-pressured into our likes and dislikes. So there is quite a lot that stands in the way of building a good bridge between theory and practice to facilitate our better intentions.

Here is a fuller und nicely confusing list of all that stands in the way.

information is everywhere, but knowledge as to what to do with it and how is always personally held
each human being starts their learning adventure at square one
intentions evolve as individuals grow
intentions differ in different settings
the amount to be learnt about what is the case, what is good is indeterminable
the best curriculum and syllabus for a particular intention is hard to determine at the beginning
not everyone has access to a helpful learning environment
learning goals set by others may not align with individual desires
individual short-term desires may not align with long terms sensible desires
learning needs to be learnt
individual best practices regarding some end are not communicated to others or communicated in a slovenly or otherwise unhelpful way
beliefs held may get in the way of being able to wish for good things
partial learning constructing weak frames of reference causes individuals to miss possible inferences
frames of reference that are too large to handle or badly structured, or in which the concepts are badly dressed can lead to strange inferences
best practices for one kind of intention do not translate well to other analogous intentions
best practices for an intention under certain conditions may not translate well to the same intention to be achieved under different conditions
the vocabulary used by a sender to communicate about ends and means is not always aligned with the vocabulary of the receiver
the wish for autonomy sometimes gets in the way of wisdom
the wish to follow the admired sometimes get in the way of a healthy autonomy
bad or unnecessary conclusions may be drawn from any set of premises (reasoning is not the same as good reasoning)
wisdom (knowing good means to good ends) is not the same as cleverness (knowing effective means to any end)
extrinsic motivations cause a mismatch between ends and means
intrinsic or indeed any motivations may not match the intentions of others and cause conflict

The list is doubtlessly incomplete. Contemplating it makes you wonder how things can go right.

A recipe for making good bridges between theory and practice requires us to address everything that can go wrong in making that bridge. This appears a bit of a negative approach, but then what is a bad bridge except one where something went wrong? This has to be prevented before the beauty of the bridge can be considered. Otherwise its apparent beauty will be hollow and seen to merely mislead. Once we can stop things from going wrong we can perhaps look at the criteria for making a beautiful bridge. And these criteria are not difficult when put in universal terms, it simply requires a reasoned harmony between all facets of bridge-building so that they all work together coherently and consistently as a team to make a satisfying product, a product that satisfies in its intelligence, it intelligibility, its usefulness, comfort security and joy. So if everything fits together well, our negative approach will have a positive and positively beautiful outcome.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.