Boyd held that his decision cycle has philosophical generality, though for strategists the point remains that, through swift decisions, one can disrupt an opponents decision cycle. Richard McKeon outlined four classes (each with four subclasses) of modes of philosophical inquiry: (1) Modes of Being (Being); (2) Modes of Thought (That which is); (3) Modes of Fact (Existence); (4) Modes of Simplicity (Experience)—and, corresponding to them, four classes (each with four subclasses) of philosophical semantics: Principles, Methods, Interpretations, and Selections. (See McKeons "Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry" in Freedom and History and Other Essays, 1989.) Jonathan Lowe (E.J. Lowe) argues in The Four-Category Ontology, 2006, for four categories: kinds (substantial universals), attributes (relational universals and property-universals), objects (substantial particulars), and modes (relational particulars and property-particulars, also known as "tropes"). (See Lowes "Recent Advances in Metaphysics," 2001, Eprint)
Four opposed camps of the morality and nature of evil: moral absolutism, amoralism, moral relativism, and moral universalism. In technology
The resin identification code used in recycling to identify low-density polyethylene. Most furniture has four legs – tables, chairs, etc. The four color process (CMYK) is used for printing. Wide use of rectangles (with four angles and four sides) because they have effective form and capability for close adjacency to each other (houses, rooms, tables, bricks, sheets of paper, screens, film frames). In the Rich Text Format specification, language code 4 is for the Chinese language. Codes for regional variants of Chinese are congruent to 4 mod 256.
Credit card machines have four-twelve function keys.
List of basic calculations
Evolution of the Hindu-Arabic digit
Brahmic numerals represented 1, 2, and 3 with as many lines. 4 was simplified by joining its four lines into a cross that looks like the modern plus sign. The Shunga would add a horizontal line on top of the digit, and the Kshatrapa and Pallava evolved the digit to a point where the speed of writing was a secondary concern. The Arabs 4 still had the early concept of the cross, but for the sake of efficiency, was made in one stroke by connecting the "western" end to the "northern" end; the "eastern" end was finished off with a curve. The Europeans dropped the finishing curve and gradually made the digit less cursive, ending up with a digit very close to the original Brahmin cross.While the shape of the character for the digit 4 has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the glyph usually has a descender, as, for example, in . On the seven-segment displays of pocket calculators and digital watches, as well as certain optical character recognition fonts, 4 is seen with an open top.Television stations that operate on channel 4 have occasionally made use of another variation of the "open 4", with the open portion being on the side, rather than the top. This version resembles the Canadian Aboriginal syllabics letter ᔦ. The magnetic ink character recognition "CMC-7" font also uses this variety of "4".