Inferring Context

An interesting issue has come to my attention recently -- in several places all at once, as they often do. It has to do with context.

To give a contrived but illuminating example, consider what you might be able to infer about the environment by looking at the structure of a car. Pretend you're an alien who has no other knowledge of Earth, and no other Earth artifacts. The car is your only source of information.

[More below]
Could you deduce the existence of roads? Traffic signals? CDs? Radio stations? Gas stations? Thunderstorms?

What could you deduce about humans? Their existence? Their average height and weight? Their perceptual abilities? Their social structure? Their usual number of limbs? Their design philosphies? Their opposable thumbs? Their typical family size? Their values?

The key issue has to do with inferring what is not seen from what is seen, or with inferring the context from the internal structure of the form itself. How much can we figure out about what must be outside based solely on what is inside? What can we tell about the relationships that might exist?

This has bearing on questions of cognitive development and perspective. How can we assess our own level of development, when perspectives more complex than ours are beyond our ability to comprehend? Our own thinking is obvious and apparent, while our view of more complex ways of thinking is obscured and clouded. We can only understand them as different flavors of equally complex (or less complex) thinking, rather than as more complex and nuanced versions of the same flavor. The form of our own thinking is clearly visible, but the context is not. How can we tell when we are "down-translating" ideas to our own level of sophistication, rather than authentically understanding their full complexity?

Wilber's pre-trans fallacy (PTF) applies not only to rationality but to each and every stage of cognitive development. They all have the tendency to mistake what comes after, what is more complex, for what came before and what is less complex. If we can deduce something about the context of our thinking from the thinking itself, this may present an approach to spotting the PTF in our own thinking and the possibility of bootstrapping our own perspective up a notch.

On a more abstract level, what can we infer about the things outside our own perspective? Is consciousness our own self-referential version of the alien and the car? If so, how should we tackle that issue? Can we deduce the existence of things outside our own consciousness from the phenomena that occur within our conscious awareness? Or must we take awareness to be the fundamental nature of our universe?

These problems all seem to hinge on the same central point: What can we infer about something's context from the structure of the thing itself? I can see that the sort of thinking required to answer this question involves some particular moves in thought, though I can't quite put my finger on what they are. And although these context inferring moves are clearly closely related to the moves on Basseches' list of moves in dialectical thought, I don't think they can be broken down into the elements listed there.

I'm intrigued.