Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 3

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• Contents • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • References • Document History •

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3. Outlook of the Project : All Ways Lead to Inquiry

I am using the word inquiry in a way that is roughly synonymous with the term scientific method. Use of inquiry is more convenient, aside from being the shorter term, because of the following advantages:

1. It allows one to broaden the scope of investigation to include any form of proceeding toward knowledge that merely aims at such a method.
2. It allows one to finesse the issue, for the time being, of how much "method" there is in science.

This Subdivision and the next deal with opposite aspects of inquiry. In many ways it might have been better to interlace the opposing points of comparison, taking them up in a parallel fashion, but this plan was judged to be too distracting for a first approach. In other ways, the negative sides of each topic are prior in point of time to the positive sides of the issue, but sensible people like to see the light at the end of the tunnel before they trouble themselves with the obscurities of the intervening journey. Thus, this Subdivision of the text emphasizes the positive features of inquiry and the positive qualities of its objective, while the next Subdivision is reserved to examine the negative aspects of each question.

In the order of nature, the absence of a feature naturally precedes the full development of its presence. In the order of discussion, however, positive terms must be proposed if it is desired to say anything at all. The discussion in this Subdivision is placed to serve a primer, declaring at least the names of enough positive concepts to propose addressing the negative conditions of knowledge in which inquiry necessarily starts.

In this Subdivision I stand back once again from the problem of inquiry and allow myself take a more distant view of the subject, settling into what I think is a comfortable and a natural account of inquiry, the best that I have at my command, and attending to the task of describing its positive features in a positive light. I present my personal view of inquiry as I currently understand it, without stopping to justify every concept in detail or to examine every objection that might be made to this view. In the next Subdivision I discuss a few of the more obvious problems that stand in the way of this view and I try to remove a few of the more tractable obscurities that appear ready to be cleared up. The fact that I treat them as my "personal insights" does not mean that all of these ideas about inquiry originate with me, but only that I have come to adopt them for my personal use. There will be many occasions, the next time that I go over this ground, to point out the sources of these ideas, so far as I know them.

The reader may take my apology for this style of presentation to be implicit in its dogmatic character. It is done this way in a first approach for the sake of avoiding an immense number of distractions, each of which is not being slighted but demands to be addressed in its own good time. I want to convey the general drift of my current model, however conjectural, naive, uncritical, and unreflective it may seem.

3.1. The Matrix of Inquiry

Thus when mothers have children suffering from sleeplessness, and want to lull them to rest, the treatment they apply is to give them, not quiet, but motion, for they rock them constantly in their arms; and instead of silence, they use a kind of crooning noise; and thus they literally cast a spell upon the children (like the victims of a Bacchic frenzy) by employing the combined movements of dance and song as a remedy.

— Plato, Laws, VII, 790D

Try as I may, I've never seen a way to develop a theory of inquiry from nothing: To take for granted nothing more than is already given, to set out from nothing but absolutely certain beginnings, to move forward with nothing but absolutely certain means of proceeding. In particular, the present inquiry into inquiry, foreshadowed in the form \(y_0 = y \cdot y,\) ought not to be misconstrued as a device for magically generating a theory of inquiry from nothing. Like any other inquiry, it requires an agent to invest in a conjecture, to make a guess about the pertinent features of the subject of interest, and to choose the actions, the aspects, and the attitudes with regard to the subject that are critical to achieving the intended objectives of the study.

I can sum all this up by saying that an inquiry requires an inquirer to suggest a hypothesis about the subject of interest and then to put that particular model of the subject to the test. This in turn requires one to devote a modicum of personal effort to the task of testing the chosen hypothesis, to put a quantum of personal interest at stake for the sake of finding out whether the model fits the subject, and, overall, to take the risk of being wrong. Any model that is feasible is also defeasible, at least, where it concerns a contingent subject of contingent inquiry.

The first step, then, of an inquiry into inquiry, is to put forth a tentative model of inquiry, to make a hypothesis about the features of inquiry that are essential to explaining its experienced characteristics, and thus, in a sense, to make a guess at the very definition of inquiry. This requirement seems both obvious and outrageous at the same time. One is perfectly justified in objecting that there is much that precedes this so-called "first step", namely, the body of experience that prepares one to see it and the mass of observation that prompts one to take it. I can deal with this objection by making a distinction between mundane experience and olympian theory, and then by saying that the making of a conjecture is really the first "theoretical" step, but this is a hedge that covers the tracks of theory in a very deceptive way, hiding how early in the empirical process the "cloven hoof" of theory actually enters.

Leaving behind the mythical states of "pure" experience and "naive" observation, and at least by the time that one has come to give a name to the subject of the investigation, one's trek through the data is already half-shod, half-fettered by the connotations of the name, and in their turn by all of the concepts that it invokes in its train. That name, the concepts that it suggests, and the tacit but vague definition of the subject that this complex of associations is already beginning to constellate, to attract certain experiences to the complex, and to filter out other observations from having any bearing on the subject matter. By this time, one is already busy translating one's empirical acquaintance with the subject into an arrangement of concepts that is intended to define its essential nature.

An array of concepts that is set up in order to capture the essence of a subject is a provisional definition of it, an implicit model of the subject that contains the makings of an explicit theory. It amounts to a selection from the phenomenal aspects of the subject, expresses a guess about its relevant features, and constitutes a hypothesis in explanation of its experienced characteristics. This incipient order of model or theory is tantamount to a definition because it sets bounds on the "stretches" and the "holds" of a term — that is, the extension, intension, and intention of the term — but this is not the kind of definition that has to be taken on faith, that constitutes the first and the last word on the subject. In other words, it is an empirical definition, one that is subject to being falsified in reference to its intended subject, by failing to indicate the necessary, the pertinent, or the relevant features that account for the presence of its phenomena or the persistence of its process.

If I reflect on the conduct of inquiry, seeking to fix it in a fitting image and trying to cast it in a positive light, the best I can do is this:

Inquiry is a process that aims at achieving belief or knowledge.

But even this simple a description already plunges the discussion deep into a number of obscurities. Most prominently, there is the disjunction between belief and knowledge that cries out to be explained or resolved. Stirring a little beneath the surface, and not quite fading into the background, many of the other terms that are invoked in the description are capable of hiding the entire contents of the original ignorance that the image as a whole is aimed to dispel. And yet there is nothing that I can do in this avowedly positive context but to mark these points down as topics for future discussion.

There is already a model of inquiry that is implicit, at least partially, in the text of the above description. Let me see if I can tease out a few of its tacit assumptions.

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• Contents • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • References • Document History •

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