The present chapter provides a detailed presentation of the MMF. First we might recall three general features of the MMF:

1. the mmf treats human thought and behaviour, whether ‘individual’ or ‘social’, as derivative from type iii variables (i.e. variables descriptive of processes within the ‘social manifold’). These variables are the ‘modal states’. Individual and social descriptions and variables are explicitly derivative from these states. In this way, the MMF avoids accepting any conventional dichotomy between ‘individual’ and ‘society’.

2. the mmf treats body and mind as component parts of a mind-body unity. In other words, the MMF avoids assuming a dichotomy between body and mind. This is a necessity, if we are to have proper integration between anthropological and biological modes of explanation. The ‘modal state’ encompasses aspects of both ‘body’ and ‘mind’.

3. the mmf is essentially relational in nature. In other words, its central concepts, in particular the ‘modal state’, are intended to describe patterns of relationship between the individual and his or her environment, physical and social, rather than aspects of the individual as a closed system. The modal state, in terms of the ‘flow’ metaphor used in chapters 1, 3 and 4, is not about what human beings are as separate ‘individuals’, but about how human beings orient themselves to the flow of the stream, that is to their social and physical environment, which includes their own biological organisms. No ultimate separation is assumed to exist between human beings and this environment. It is this relational aspect that makes the modal state into a quantity within the social manifold rather than an attribute of how human beings physically function.