Illuminated by Fire: Towards a metaphysics and epistemology of proposals

By Todd Packer, CF APMP | Cynthia Weinmann, MS, CP APMP | Colemann Packer

“A bizarre situation for some unusual captives.” — Glaukon, in Plato (1)
“We write to make sense of it all.”— Wallace Stegner (2)

How do we understand our world?
Proposal management professionals experience uncertainty, from political events and artificial intelligence (AI). We can manage the disruptive impact with understanding human-centered, expert-in-the-loop proposal creation. The authors offer a philosophy-informed perspective to begin a dialogue on what, exactly, we do.
Let’s reinforce principles for ethical conduct and effective solution delivery. Epistemology and metaphysics, as developed by Plato and other philosophers, provide a framework to conduct research, develop hypotheses and seek truth to improve our work and our world. Here’s how.

Our Words, Our Worlds
Proposals persuade; with words and images to convey trust, value, expertise and verification that convince an audience to act, specifically to select the proposer’s goods and/or services outlined.
Proposal creators use four time-worn persuasion principles (summarized by Blinn College’s Bryan Writing Center):

Proposal creators hone our tradecraft with rhetorical appeals in product and in process, with content creation and coordination of collaborators (e.g., subject matter experts, graphic designers).
We can discern, mitigate, and correct AI’s limits with rhetorical appeals:

1. Logos failures manifested as hallucinations or confabulations,
2. Ethos disconnects due to biases from sourced content,
3. Pathos blunders from the absence of emotion in the algorithm and
4. Kairos chaos as AI operates and transforms continually without regard to human deadlines.

We can co-create a robust and resilient framework to enhance our profession’s value as a discipline. Let’s explore, beyond rhetoric, the epistemology and metaphysics of proposals.

With reference to Plato’s cave, let’s spark new ideas on this “proposal management” phenomenon.
First an introduction. Then we enter the cave…to emerge into the light…

A Brief Introduction to Epistemology & Metaphysics
Epistemology and Metaphysics address humanity’s complex, essential questions. Philosophers use these approaches for theological, psychological and political analyses.

Epistemology tackles fundamental questions of logic and belief to reveal why and how we think. Epistemology relates to Ethics, as in the Greek philosopher Plato’s view “[his] ethics is inseparable from his epistemology” (Stanford). With logical questioning of beliefs and structures, Epistemology looms large in any scientific field of study. However, because Epistemology focuses on our knowledge of something, we must understand what things even exist in the first place.

Metaphysics, from Aristotle’s treatise title meaning after living things, embraces complexity. Related to ontology, metaphysics questions reality: what it is, how we categorize it, and how it operates. Metaphysics focuses on general principles of matter. While Metaphysics may seem highly abstract and theoretical, the field grounds in the physical world and metaphysicians “attempt to understand reality as it actually is, not the infinite ways in which it may be” (medium).

Plato’s “Cave” Analogy, Explained and Analyzed
Plato created many philosophical concepts, including his famous cave analogy. Featured in his Republic, the Cave Analogy powerfully translates knowledge, reality, and myth into very different applications.

The analogy’s roots present a metaphysical conundrum. The Cave analogy begins with multiple prisoners chained within a cave. They stare at a wall, with projections of images illuminated by fire, as people carry items around the prisoners. One prisoner loosens his chains, and glimpses the entire system of these “images”. Once he leaves the cave for the real world, he’s immediately blinded by the sun and can only perceive all objects through their shadows in the water. As he slowly acclimates to the light, he can see all the objects of the real world, and can finally look up into the source of all the light – the sun itself.

The Cave analogy posits: Our world, or our perception of this world, is a simplification, or, at worst, a complete falsification, of reality. We deceive ourselves if we believe as absolute truth what our senses perceive. Within the Cave analogy “the physical objects over which belief is set are the carved statues in the cave” (Partenie). The Cave analogy teaches us to question how we perceive knowledge, and challenges whether we can trust what we are taught is “right.”

Can We Apply These Ideas to Proposal Management?
If we look at the most basic, fundamental attributes of Proposal Management, we discover how it operates within the metaphysical reality of American business, industry and government.
Like metaphysics, business manages things both abstract and physical – e.g., money, a physical product, an agreement, a transfer of knowledge, etc. The underlying metaphysical structure of physical constructs forms important aspects of business management, the unspoken things of business, such as conversations, ideas, interactions, and disagreements.

If we choose to understand the metaphysical realm of business, then we must understand the epistemological role that proposals play. A good proposal effectively transfers knowledge. It must be concise but detailed, understandable and well-rounded. As our minds process new information, thus do proposals. Proposals make complex, advanced topics understandable and actionable by others. Proposals operate in a metaphysical realm – with the things of business – to represent these things with words and images.

Enlightening the Profession
To forge an effective, evidence-based proposal management profession – we need research – for research we need hypotheses – for hypotheses we need different theoretical frameworks for the concept of “proposal management.”

Our challenge to you, dear reader? Using rhetoric, epistemology and metaphysics, help create theoretical frameworks that we can review, debate and refine. Then build the hypotheses that drive research and innovation, and validate or invalidate threats and opportunities, including AI, that impact our profession.

So, gauntlet thrown. Share your ideas. Let’s get philosophical, then practical, and build a mighty, resilient and authentically intelligent profession to create and deliver proposals long into the future.

References

 1 Plato, The Allegory of the Cave, trans. Shawn Eyer (Plumbstone Books, 2016).
2 From PictureQuotes.com: https://www.picturequotes.com/we-write-to-make-sense-of-it-all-quote-68126

APMP “RFP and Proposal Software” https://www.apmp.org/resources/rfp-and-proposal-software/

Blinn College – Bryan Writing Center Rhetorical Analysis Handout (2023) Accessed online January 5, 2025: https://www.blinn.edu/writing-centers/pdfs/Rhetorical-Analysis.pdf

Cone, Christopher. Which Comes First, Metaphysics or Epistemology? drone.com.
https://drcone.com/2014/04/02/which-comes-first-metaphysics-or-epistemology/ Accessed Aug 9 2024.

Partenie, Catalin, “Plato’s Myths”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/plato-myths/>. Accessed Aug 9 2024.

Pigliucci, Massimo. “The crucial difference between metaphysics and epistemology” medium.com.https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/the-crucial-difference-between-metaphysics-and-epistemology-7943158aba52. Accessed Aug 9 2024.

Plato. The Allegory of the Cave. Translated by Shawn Eyer. Copyright © 2016 Plumbstone Books.

Silverman, Allan, “Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.),
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/plato-metaphysics/>. Accessed Aug 9 2024.