ive processes. If we thereby arrive at a conclusion justifying the basic assumptions of the naïve view, so well and good; but we do not base our understanding on that view. It is an effect, not a cause of knowledge. What matters for us here in phenomenology, to begin with, is what is cognized, irrespective of how it came to be cognized. Because the 'how' is ultimately just another 'what.' For instance, the common thesis that the visual phenomena appearing before me here and now are the end products of a process of some kind involving physical eyes, constitute in this context an attempt at explanation. Taken as a given ab initio, it constitutes Naïve Realism. But to say this does not exclude the truth of the thesis as a final conclusion. Note that we say 'naïve,' not so as to intimidate eventual dissenters into following suit, but because there is an unquestioning acceptance, an unawareness of the issues involved, to correct. In our example, the main issue is (simply put) that, just as each act of seeing something requires validation, so the vision of the eyes themselves is itself open to doubt. It is not because our perceptions are occasionally wrong that they need evaluation, but because a lot of what we regard as perceptual is more precisely (at least in part) conceptual. Phenomenology is the intelligent organization of appearances into knowledge. By 'knowledge' is meant loosely, to start with, our opinions and impressions. If these are well organized, they gain the status of knowledge in a strict sense, or 'true' knowledge. If they remain scattered and confused, they are classed as mere opinions and impressions, or 'false' knowledge. Among the basic methodological principles of phenomenology, we may cite the following: (a) Attention to all appearances in all their details. Awareness that they change and accumulate. (b) Constructing a theoretical model that takes all appearances into consideration, and does not simply ignore them nor (worse still) contradict them. (c) The order of things in knowledge propose