Helene, I'm delighted we're coming together on this, and so evidently beginning to have a shared way of independently referring to "designs of thought" and "designs of nature". I've often found it quite hard to discuss, though, that switching back and forth between addressing subjects of nature and of our interpretations of them. I think I started making some headway when noticing that it was often naive thinkers that had much less difficulty with it than sophisticated thinkers, trying to think of their own definitions for everything when the things of nature are actually self-defining, not conceptually defined.

One does also see a blending of the two kinds of thought in how natural language works. Most words seem to mingle the meanings we give to subjects of nature and subjects of thought. Nouns, for example, are both defined by the designs of nature to which they refer, and by our personal or communal associations with our experiences with them. So the meanings are not the same as the things, but we mostly speak of the meanings when referring to the things. Some manners of speaking make it easier and some make it harder to distinguish between the two, though, the physical systems of nature and the virtual worlds of our impressions, between "things" and "images".

On the other thread you commented on today, my debategraph topic "Differences between Languages for Natural & Conceptual Systems", you mentioned Tim Gwinn's very interesting collection of comments on Rosen's thinking: http://www.panmere.com/?page_id=18. He seems to have a lot of insight, but also to use some convoluted reasoning, and in my mind muddling the semantics on this point. Why it seems so difficult for advanced thinkers really seems to be just that there's no place in a mental world of definitions for self-defined things, and nature is full of them. So in a self-consistent philosophy it makes referring to anything in nature undefined. All I seem to do to straighten that out is consider the role of theory as organizing my own experience rather than defining it.

Take the difference between how Gwinn begins pp5 and pp6 there:
pp5 - "In discussing natural systems, we must first make the distinction between our self and the world outside our self. This is the dualism between the inner world and the ambience. [1a] This is not something we can know with certainty, but it is what we experience and take to be the case."
pp6 - "A natural system is some portion of the external world that is, at root, based upon a collection of our sensory impressions, or percepts [2]. This portion of reality is something we actively choose: there are no a priori guidelines to tell us what aspects of the external world constitute the boundaries of a ‘system’.

I seems to me he ends up saying the only way he can define the external world is as a kind special mental image, so not actually external to his philosophy. I see nothing wrong with having a special category of mental images, mentally labeled as being faithfully modeled on things of the external world we encounter. I see the problem as needing to equate them with rather than refer to the external world.

I think it just shows how hard it is to "philosophize" about subjects that are *not* philosophical. We just don't philosophize about "spoons", for example, and so never have these problems with them. We have no difficulty going to the kitchen to getting one, or chance the mistake of coming back accidentally with just a sketch of a spoon to put in our soup! We somehow intuitively know not to philosophize about lunch!

So as I see it, the switch between "encoding and decoding" is that between giving attention to things to get input from nature, and then to ideas to organize what we found, between experiencing and philosophizing about them. One might even use a "mental device" and color the mental activity engaged in philosophy as 'pink' and that engaged in experiences 'blue', to tell them apart perhaps.