Preface
Abstract
Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, Vol. 11, No. I, January 2002 (© 2002) There are two different worlds that impact on humans, each with its separate objective, rationale, and cognitive organization. The two worlds consist of (1) the world built and designed .by the forces of nature and (2) a second world build and designed by and for human beings. Each has a totally different historic development; with nature originating in a cosmos and the human world occupying but a brief moment in the history of the cosmos. Our concern with these two worlds revolves around the ways we, humans, go about acquiring information and constructing knowledge about them because they differ so categorically. That is, the means used to acquire reliable information about the forces of nature are necessarily different from those that must be applied to inform humans about themselves. The dominant objective that guides the former is the need to extract information from nature using reasoning processes that attempt to copy it, by maximizing the correspondence between nature and our cognition of it. That is not to say that only one mimetic paradigm satisfies the study of all natural forces. Thus, for example, the