Triads
Triads
Triads
Triads
Triads
Triads

Triads

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Black Garment Washed Carpenter Pants
12 oz, 100% Cotton Duck — 30" inseam

Triad, meaning a group of three: everything comes together. 

Trialectics is the third essential current of the logical thinking that evolved from Aristotle's formal logic and Hegel's dialectics. It is a synthesis of systems of thought that appeared in the 20th century under different names, such as "ecology of mind," "unitary thought", "general systems thinking", "cybernetics" or "synergetics." It was formalized by Henri Lefebvre through the dialectic of triplicity, and further developed and named as trialectics in its application to space by Edward Soja. 

Lefebvre developed his idea by questioning conventional modes of thought. He writes “Reflexive thought, and hence philosophy, has for a long time accentuated dyads. Those of dry and humid, the large and the small, the finite and the infinite, as in Greek antiquity. Then those that constituted the western philosophical paradigm, such as subject/object, continuity/discontinuity, open/closed, etc. Finally, in the modern era there are the binary oppositions between signifier and signified, knowledge and non-knowledge, center and periphery... But is there ever a relation only between two terms...?” Lefebvre goes on to investigate the word imaginary as a portal to his dialectics of triplicety: “'The imaginary'. This word becomes magical. It fills the empty spaces of thought, much like the 'unconscious and culture'. After all, since two terms are not sufficient, it becomes necessary to introduce a third term. The third term is the other, with all that this term implies (alterity, the relation between the present/absent other, alteration-alienation)...There is always the Other.” 

According to Soja "the third term never stands alone, totally separate from its precedents or given absolute precedence on its own." In his book Thirdspace Soja solidifies the triadic structure as a way of thinking and as a spatial form. He writes "everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. ...I define Thirdspace as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality." 

Trialectical thinking is difficult, for it challenges all conventional modes of thought and taken-for-granted epistemologies. It is disorderly, unruly, constantly evolving, unfixed, never presentable in permanent constructions.

Vitruvian Triad
In his treatise Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius asserts that a structure must exhibit three qualities: firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis, that is, stability, utility, and beauty. These are sometimes termed the Vitruvian Virtues or the Vitruvian Triad. These come together to create architecture, an expression of a unification of other fields and forms of knowledge. According to Vitruvius, “The science of the architect depends upon many disciplines and various apprenticeships which are carried out in other arts.

Their personal service consists in craftsmanship and technology. Craftsmanship is continued and familiar practice, which is carried out by the hands in such material as is necessary for the purpose of a design. Technology sets forth and explains things wrought in accordance with technical skill and method. So architects who without culture, aim at manual skill cannot gain a prestige corresponding to their labors, while those who trust to theory and literature obviously follow a shadow and not a reality. But those who have mastered both, like men equipped in full armor, soon acquire influence and attain their purpose.” 

Soil Triangle
Soil is a mixture, consisting of sand, silt, and clay. The ratio that these three components come together in determines soil type. The different compositions of a soil creates a texture with specific chemical and physical properties. Particle size and distribution will affect a soil's capacity for holding water and nutrients. 

Determining soil texture is often aided with the use of a soil texture triangle. One side of the triangle represents percent sand, the second side represents percent clay, and the third side represents percent silt. If the percentages of sand, clay, and silt in the soil sample are known, then the triangle can be used to determine the soil texture classification by starting on any side of the soil triangle. If the texture by feel method was used to determine the soil type, the triangle can also provide a rough estimate on the percentages of sand, silt, and clay in the soil. Fine textured soils generally have a higher capacity for water retention, whereas sandy soils contain large pore spaces that allow leaching.

The term loam is used to describe equal properties of sand, silt, and clay in a soil sample. Twelve major soil texture classifications are defined by the United States Department of Agriculture: sand, loamy sand, sandy loam, loam, silt loam, silt, sandy clay loam, clay loam, silty clay loam, sandy clay, silty clay, and clay. 

Semiotic Triangle
Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards identified that understanding comes from within the individual rather than from the words being interpreted. They aimed to see misunderstanding not as a failure of understanding but rather something that happens due to the difference in understanding. Ogden and Richard studied Saussure’s dyadic semiotics, and built from it a model called “The Triangle of Meaning” for better understanding how language works. This Semiotic Triangle is meant to show the word’s relationship between thoughts and things.

The word means different things to different people in different situations. Any sign or word which has its own meaning is grasped with certain references to it. The referent needs some prior experience and reference about the word or sign for it to be comprehensible. The process of grasping or understanding words or signs, which already have meaning, with the asserted meanings given by the references is called “the meaning of meaning.”

 

Hegel’s Triangle
Glenn Alexander Magee includes a drawing allegedly by Hegel in his book on Hegel’s hermeticism. It is not known when the drawing was made, but it was found among Hegel’s papers and has been attributed to him on that basis. It is not known whether the triangles are supposed to be pointing up or down. The drawing includes astrological symbols for the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn. A planetary symbol appears over each occurrence of “Spiritus.” Magee speculates: “The word Spiritus occurs three times in the midst of astrological and (possibly) alchemical symbols, on each of the sides of the central triangle. This could represent Hegel’s philosophical realization that all reality, whether celestial (the planets) or terrestrial (the elements), must be understood in terms of the development of Spirit…Spiritus is the ‘magic word’ that evokes the ‘shape’ of the Absolute, which allows us to comprehend the Absolute in its totality.”

Trialectic Football
Three-sided football is a variation of Association football in which three teams play instead of just two teams. Danish artist Asger Jorn invented the sport of three-sided football in the 1960’s, a variation of the sport of soccer, Jorn used the game to explain his notion of Triolectics, his refinement on the Marxian concept of dialectics.

The first known game was organized by the London Psychogeographical Association at the Glasgow Anarchist Summer School in 1993, and a few other games have been played since. This game is played on a hexagonal pitch. Unlike normal football, the winner is determined not by the team who scored the most goals, but by the team who conceded the fewest goals. This game is played without a referee as the teams agree amongst themselves on what is allowable or not.

Culinary Triangle
The Raw-Cooked-Rotten triad constitutes what Levi-Strauss called the culinary triangle. The triangle provides a conceptual model within which preparation methods can be placed relative to their position in relation to these three basic states. It also reflects structural-functionalist ideas common to an earlier era in anthropological thinking. At its most basic, this perspective sought to explain the borders and margins between nature (raw, rotten) and culture (cooked), between the elaborated (cooked) and the non-elaborated (raw).

Such categories were thought to reflect deeper mental-cultural structures that shaped the expressions of larger cultural systems. As Levi-Strauss put it, “not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes.” While many contemporary anthropologists have challenged such a binary theoretical orientation, the Raw-Cooked-Rotten triad can be adapted as a useful index for situating current food trends and issues into larger political-economic and socio-cultural contexts. This can include everything from fad diets and dietary discourses to food-identity and power-inequality issues, to issues of food waste, recovery, and sustainability.

sterlingcollege.edu/uncategorized/raw-cooked-rotten

Ecological Crisis
According to Gregory Bateson, three fundamental factors are the necessary conditions for the destruction of our world: 

  • technological progress
  • population increase
  • Western "values" are wrong at the same time they are believed to be right. 

These fundamental factors interact. The increase of population spurs technological progress and creates that anxiety which sets us against our environment as an enemy. Technology both facilitates increase of population and reinforces our arrogance, or "hubris," vis-à-vis the natural environment. 

The factor in each corner of the diagram is also encircled clockwise, denoting that each is by itself a self-promoting (or, as the scientists say, "autocatalytic") phenomenon: the bigger the population, the faster it grows; the more technology we have, the faster the rate of new invention; and the more we believe in our "power" over an enemy environment, the more "power" we seem to have and the more spiteful the environment seems to be. Similarly the pairs of corners are clockwise connected to make three self-promoting subsystems.

It appears, at present, that the only possible entry point for reversal of the process is the conventional attitudes toward the environment. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself. 

Bateson's ideas provide a conceptual framework for understanding the difference between ecological and individual intelligence, and why so little attention is given by environmentalists and philosophers to the linguistic roots of the ecological crisis. His ideas challenge a widely held orthodoxy taken for granted by many academics, including western philosophers. Namely, that language functions as a neutral conduit in a sender receiver process of communication. This assumption sustains the idea of a culture-free rational process, and objective information and data. It also hides the linguistic colonization of the present by the past, which is critical to understanding why we continue to rely upon the same mind-set that is contributing to the ecological crisis to fix it. 

Lacanian Triad 
Lacan considered the full complexity of the psyche to be composed of three major structures. For Lacan, these structures control our lives and our desires, and correlate roughly to the three main moments in the individual's psychosexual development. The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic work together to create the tensions of our psychodynamic selves.

1) The Real. This concept marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neonatal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. As such, "the real is impossible," Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. 

2) The Imaginary Order. This marks the movement of the subject from primal need to what Lacan terms "demand." Whereas needs can be fulfilled, demands are, by definition, unsatisfiable; in other words, we are already making the movement into the sort of lack that, for Lacan, defines the human subject. Once a child begins to recognize that its body is separate from the world and its mother, it begins to feel anxiety, which is caused by a sense of something lost. The demand of the child, then, is to make the other a part of itself, as it seemed to be in the child's now lost state of nature. The child's demand is, therefore, impossible to realize and functions, ultimately, as a reminder of loss and lack. Lacan’s mirror stage corresponds to this demand in so far as the child misrecognizes in its mirror image a stable, coherent, whole self, which, however, does not correspond to the real child and is, therefore, impossible to realize. The image is a fantasy, one that the child sets up in order to compensate for its sense of lack or loss. For Lacan this imaginary realm continues to exert its influence throughout the life of the adult and is not merely superseded in the child's movement into the symbolic. 

3) The Symbolic Order. Whereas the Real concerns need and the Imaginary concerns demand, the symbolic is all about desire, according to Lacan. It exists through language and narrative. Once we enter into language, our desire is forever afterwards bound up with the play of language. The Real and the Imaginary continue to play a part in the evolution of human desire within the symbolic order. The fact that our fantasies always fail before the Real, for example, ensures that we continue to desire; desire in the symbolic order could, in fact, be said to be our way to avoid coming into full contact with the Real, so that desire is ultimately most interested not in obtaining the object of desire but, rather, in reproducing itself. The narcissism of the Imaginary is also crucial for the establishment of desire, according to Lacan: "The primary imaginary relation provides the fundamental framework for all possible erotism. It is a condition to which the object of Eros as such must be submitted. The object relation must always submit to the narcissistic framework and be inscribed in it." For Lacan, love begins here. To foster relationships, the subject must reinscribe that narcissistic imaginary relation into the laws and contracts of the symbolic order. 

https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.html