Directory talk:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5

Work Area

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Inquiry Driven Systems

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 1

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3.2.1.  Integrity and Unity of Inquiry

One of the very first questions that one encounters in
the inquiry into inquiry is one that challenges both the
integrity and the unity of inquiry, a question that asks:
"Is inquiry one or many?"  By this one means two things:

1.  Concerning the integrity of inquiry:  How are the components and
    the properties of inquiry, as identified by analysis, integrated
    into a whole that is singly and solely responsible for its results,
    and as it were, that answers for its answers in one voice?  These
    qualities of unanimity and univocity are necessary in order to be
    able to speak of an inquiry as a coherent entity, whose nature it
    is to have and to hold the boundaries one finds in or gives to it,
    rather than being an artificial congeries of naturally unrelated
    elements and features.  In other words, this is required in order
    to treat inquiry as a systematic function, that is, as the action,
    behavior, conduct, or operation of a system.

2.  Concerning the unity of inquiry:  Is the form of inquiry that
    is needed for reasoning about facts the same form of inquiry
    that is needed for reasoning about actions and goals, duties
    and goods, feelings and values, guesses and hopes, and so on,
    or does each sort of inquiry -- aesthetic, ethical, practical,
    speculative, or whatever -- demand and deserve a dedicated and
    distinctive form?  Although it is clear that some degree of
    modulation is needed to carry out different modes of inquiry,
    is the adaptation so radical that one justly considers it to
    generate different forms, or is the changeover merely a matter
    of mildly tweaking the same old tunes and draping new materials
    on the same old forms?

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 2

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3.2.1.  Integrity and Unity of Inquiry (concl.)

If one reflects, shares the opinion, or takes the point of view
on experimental grounds that inquiry begins with uncertainty,
then each question about the integrity and the unity of
inquiry can be given a sharper focus if it is re-posed
as a question about the integrity and the unity of
uncertainty, or of its positive counterpart,
information.

Accordingly, one is led to wonder next:  Is uncertainty one or many?
Is information one or many?  As before, each question raises two more:
one that inquires into the internal composition of its subject, or the
lack thereof, and one that inquires into the external diversity of its
subject, or the lack thereof.  This reflection, on the integrity and
the unity, or else the multiplicity, of uncertainty and information,
is the image of the earlier reflection, on the facts of sign use.
Once more, what appears in this reflection is so inconclusive
and so insubstantial that there is nothing else to do at
this point but to back away again from the mirror.

To rephrase the question more concretely:  Is uncertainty about
what is true or what is the case the general form that subsumes
every species of uncertainty, or is it possible that uncertainty
about what to do, what to feel, what to hope, and so on constitute
essentially different forms of inquiry among them?  The answers to
these questions have a practical bearing in determining how usefully
the presently established or any conceiovable theory of information
can serve as a formal tool in different types of inquiry.

Another way to express these questions is in terms of a distinction between
"form" and "matter".  The form is what all inquiries have in common, and the
question is whether it is anything beyond the bare triviality that they all
have to take place in some universe of inquiry or another.  The matter is
what concerns each particular inquiry, and the question is whether the
matter warps the form to a shape all its own, one that is peculiar
to this matter to such a degree that it is never interchangeable
with the forms that are proper to other modes of inquiry.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 3

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations

Next I consider the preparations for a phenomenology.
This is not yet any style of phenomenology itself but
an effort to grasp the very idea that something appears,
and to grasp it in relation to the something that appears.
I begin by looking at a sample of the language that one
ordinarily uses to talk about appearances, with an eye
to how this medium shapes one's thinking about what
appears.  A close inspection reveals that there are
subtleties issuing from this topic that are partly
disclosed and partly obscured by the language that
is commonly used in this connection.

An "apparition", as I adopt the term and adapt its use to this context,
is a property, a quality, or a respect of appearance.  That is, it is
an aspect or an attribute of a phenomenon of interest that appears to
arise in a situation and to affect the character of the phenomenal
situation.  Apparitions shape themselves in general to any shade
of apperception, assumption, imitation, intimation, perception,
sensation, suspicion, or surmise that is apt or amenable to be
apprehended by an animate agent.

An "allegation", in the same manner of speaking, is any description or
depiction, any expression or emulation, in short, any verbal exhalation
or visual emanation that appears to apprehend a characteristic trait or
an illuminating trace of an apparition.

The terms "apparition" and "allegation" serve their purpose in allowing
an observer to focus on the sheer appearance of the apparition itself,
in assisting a listener or a reader to attend to the sheer assertion
of the allegation itself.  Their application enables an interpreter
to accept at first glance or to acknowledge at first acquaintance
the reality of each impression as a sign, without being forced to
the point of assuming that there is anything in reality that the
apparition is in fact an appearance of, that there is anything
in reality that the allegation is in deed an adversion to, or,
as people commonly say, that there is anything of substance
"behind" it all.

Ordinarily, when one speaks of the "appearance" of an object, one tends
to assume that there is in reality an object that has this appearance,
but if one speaks about the "apparition" of an object, one leaves more
room for a suspicion whether there is in reality any such object as
there appears to be.  In technical terms, however much it is simply
a matter of their common acceptations, the term "appearance" is said
to convey slightly more "existential import" than the term "apparition".
This dimension of existential import is one that enjoys a considerable
development in the sequel.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 4

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)

If one asks what apparitions and allegations have in common, it seems to be
that they share the character of signs.  If one asks what character divides
them, it is said to be that apparitions are more likely to be generated by
an object in and of itself while allegations are more likely to be generated
by an interpreter in reaction to an alleged or apparent object.  Nevertheless,
even if one agrees to countenance both apparitions and allegations as a pair
of especially specious species of signs, whose generations are differentially
attributed to objects and to interpreters, respectively, and whose variety
runs through a spectrum of intermediate variations, there remains a number
of subtleties still to be recognized.

For instance, when one speaks of an "appearance" of a sign, then one is
usually talking about a "token" of that type of sign, as it appears in
a particular locus and as it occurs on a particular occasion, all of
which further details can be specified if required.  If this common
usage is to be squared with calling apparitions a species of signs,
then talk about an "appearance" of an apparition must have available
to it a like order of interpretation.  And thus what looks like
a higher order apparition, in other words, an apparition of an
apparition, is in fact an even more particular occurrence,
specialized appearance, or special case of sign.  At this
point I have to let go of the subject for now, since the
general topic of "higher order signs", their variety and
interpretation, is one that occupies a much broader
discussion later on in this work.

Any action that an interpreter takes to detach the presumed actuality of
the sign from the presumed actuality of its object, at least in so far as
the sign appears to present itself as denoting, depicting, or describing
a particular object, remains a viable undertaking and a valuable exercise
to attempt, no matter what hidden agenda, ulterior motive, or intentional
object is conceivably still invested in the apparition or the allegation.
If there is an object, property, or situation in reality that is in fact
denoted or represented by one of these forms of adversion and allusion,
then one says that there is a basis for acting on them, a justification
for believing in them, a motivation for taking them seriously, a reason
for treating them as true, or a foundation that is capable of lending
support to their prima facie evidence.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 5

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)

Once the dimension of existential import is recognized as a parameter
of interpretation, for example, as it runs through the spectrum of
meanings that the construals of "apparitions" and "appearances"
are differentially scattered across, then there are several
observations that ought to be made about the conceivable
distributions of senses:

1.  In principle, the same range of ambiguities and equivocalities
    affects both of the words "apparition" and "appearance" to the
    same degree, however much their conventional usage tilts their
    individual and respective senses one way or the other.

2.  Deprived of its existential import, the applicational phrase
    "appearance of an object" (AOAO) means something more akin to
    the adjectival or analogous phrase "object-like appearance" (OLA).
    Can it be that the mere appearance of the preposition "of" in the
    application "P of Q" is somehow responsible for the tilt of its
    construal toward a more substantial interpretation, one with
    a fully existential import?

3.  Interpreting any apparition, appearance, phenomenon, or sign
    as an "appearance of an object" is tantamount to the formation
    of an abductive hypothesis, that is, it entertains the postulation
    of an object in an effort to explain the particulars of an appearance.

4.  The positing of objects to explain apparitions, appearances, phenomena,
    or signs, to be practical on a regular basis, requires the preparatory
    establishment of an "interpretive framework" (IF) and the concurrent
    facilitation of an "objective framework" (OF).  Teamed up together,
    these two frameworks assist in organizing the data of signs and
    the impressions of ideas in connection with the hypotheses of
    objects, and thus they make it feasible to examine each
    "object-like appearance" and to convert each one that
    is suitable into an "appearance of an object".

At this point it ought to be clear that the pragmatic theory of signs
permits the "whole of phenomenal reality" (WOPR) to be taken as a sign,
perhaps of itself as an object, and perhaps to itself as an interpretant.
The articulation of the exact sign relation that exists is the business of
inquiry into a particular universe, and this is a world whose existence,
development, and completion are partially contingent on the character,
direction, and end of that very inquiry.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 6

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)

The next step to take in preparing a style of phenomenology, that is,
in acquiring a paradigm for addressing apparitions or in producing an
apparatus for dealing with appearances, is to partition the space of
conceivable phenomena in accord with several forms of classification,
drawing whatever parallel and incidental lines appear suitable to the
purpose of oganizing phenomena into a sensible array, in particular,
separating out the kinds of appearances that one is prepared to pay
attention to, and thus deciding the kinds of experiences that one
is ready to partake in, while paring away the sorts of apparitions
that one is prepared to ignore.

It may be thought that a phenomenology has no need of preparation or partition,
that the idea is to remain openly indiscriminate and patently neutral to all
that appears, that all of its classifications are purely descriptive, and
that all of them put together are intended to cover the entire range of
what can possibly show up in experience.  But attention is a precious
resource, bounded in scope and exhausted in detail, while the time
and the trouble that are available to spend on the free and the
unclouded observation of phenomena are much more limited still,
at least, in so far as it concerns finite agents and mortal
creatures, and thus even the most liberal phenomenology is
forced to act on implicit guidelines or to put forward
explicit recommendations of an evaluative, a normative,
or a prescriptive character, saying in effect that if
one acts in certain ways, in particular, that if one
expends an undue quantity of attention on the "wrong"
kinds of appearances, then one is bound to pay the
price, in other words, to experience unpleasant
experiences as a consequence or else to suffer
other sorts of adverse results.

This observation draws attention to the general form of constraint
that comes into play at this point.  Let me then ask the following
question:  What is the most general form of preparation, partition,
or reparation, of whatever sort of disposition or structure, that
I can imagine as applying to the whole situation, that I can see
as characterizing its experiential totality, and that I can grasp
as contributing to its ultimate result?  For my own part, in the
present situation, the answer appears to be largely as follows.

As far as I know, all styles of phenomenology and all notions of science,
whether general or special, either begin by adopting an implicit recipe
for what makes an apparition worthy of note or else begin their advance
by developing an explicit prescription for a "worthwhile" appearance,
a rule that presumes to dictate what phenomena are worthy of attention.
This recipe or prescription amounts to a critique of phenomena, a rule
that has an evaluative or a normative force.  As a piece of advice, it
can be taken as a "tentative rule of mental presentation" (TROMP) for
all that appears or shows itself, since it sets the bar for admitting
phenomena to anything more than a passing regard, marks the threshold
of abiding concern and the level of recurring interest, formulates
a precedence ordering to be imposed on the spectra of apparitions
and appearances, and is tantamount to a recommendation about what
kinds of phenomena are worth paying attention to and what kinds
of shows are not worth the ticket -- in a manner of speaking
saying that the latter do not repay the price of admission
to consciousness and do not earn a continuing regard.

The issue of a TROMP ("tentative rule of mental presentation") can appear
to be a wholly trivial commonplace or a totally unnecessary extravagance,
but realizing that a choice of this order has to be made, that it has to
be made at a point of development where no form of justification of any
prior logical order can be adduced, and thus that the choice is always
partly arbitrary and always partly based on aesthetic considerations,
ethical constraints, and practical consequences -- all of this says
something important about the sort of meaning that the choice can
have, and it opens up a degree of freedom that was obscured by
thinking that a phenomenology has to exhaust all apparitions,
or that a science has to be anchored wholly in bedrock.

If it appears to my reader that my notion of what makes a worthwhile
appearance is tied up with what I can actually allege to appear, and
is therefore constrained by the medium of my language and the limits
of my lexicon, then I am making the intended impression.  One of the
reasons that I find for accepting these bounds is that I am decidedly
less concerned with those aspects of experience that appear in one
inconsistent and transient fashion after another, and I am steadily
more interested in those aspects of experience that appear on abiding,
insistent, periodic, recurring, and stable bases.  Since I am trying to
demonstrate how inquiry takes place in the context of a sign relation,
the ultimate reasons for this restriction have to do with the nature
of inquiry and the limited capacities of signs to convey information.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 7

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)

Inquiry into reality has to do with experiential phenomena that recur,
with states that appear and that promise or threaten to appear again,
and with the actions that agents can take to affect these recurrences.
This is true for two reasons:  First, a state that does not appear or
does not recur cannot be regarded as constituting any sort of problem.
Second, only states that appear and recur are subject to the tactics of
learning and teaching, or become amenable to the methods of reasoning.

There is a catch, of course, to such a blithe statement, and it is this:
How does an agent know whether a state is going to appear, is bound to
recur, or not?  To be sure, there are hypothetically conceivable states
that constitute obvious problems for an agent, independently of whether
an instance of them already appears in experience or not.  This is the
question that inaugurates the theoretical issue of signs in full force,
raises the practical stakes that are associated with their actual notice,
and constellates the aspect of a promise or a threat that appears above.
Accordingly, the vital utility of signs is tied up with questions about
persistent appearances, predictable phenomena, contingently recurrent
states of systems, and ultimately patterned forms of real existence
that are able to integrate activity with appearance.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 8

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)

In asking questions about integral patterns of activity and appearance,
where the category of action and the category of affect are mixed up in
a moderately complicated congeries with each other and stirred together
in a complex brew, it is helpful on a first approximation to "fudge" the
issue of the agent a bit, in other words, to "dodge", "fuzz", or "hedge"
any questions about the precise nature of the agent that appears to be
involved in the activities and to whom the appearances actually appear.
This intention is served by using the word "agency" in a systematically
ambiguous way, namely, to mean either an individual agent, a community
of agents, or any of the actions thereof.  In this vein, the following
sorts of questions can be asked:

1.  What appearances can be recognized by what agencies to occur
    on a recurring basis?  In other words, what appearances can
    be noted by what agencies to fall under sets of rules that
    describe their ultimate patterns of activity and appearance?

2.  What appearances can be shared among agents and communities that are
    distributed through dimensions of culture, language, space, and time?

3.  What appearances can be brought under the active control of what agencies
    by observing additional and alternative appearances that are associated
    with them, that is, by acquiring and exploiting an acquaintance with
    the larger patterns of activity and appearance that apply?

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 9

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3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations (concl.)

There is a final question that I have to ask in this preparation for a
phenomenology, though it, too, remains an ultimately recurring inquiry:
What form of reparation is due for the undue distribution of attention
to appearance?  In other words, what form of reform is called on to
repair an unjust disposition, to remedy an inadequate preparation,
or to adjust a partition that is not up to par?  Any attempt to
answer this question has occasion to recur to its preliminary:
What form of information does it take to convince agents that
a reform of their dispositions is due?

As annoying as all of these apparitions and allegations are at first,
it is clear that they arise from an ability to reflect on a scene of
awareness, and thus, aside from the peculiar attitudes that they may
betray from time to time, they advert to an aptitude that amounts to
an inchoate agency of reflection, an incipient faculty of potential
utility that the agent affected with its afflictions is well-advised
to appreciate, develop, nurture, and train, in spite of how insipid
its animadversions are alleged to appear at times.  This marks the
third time now that the subject of reflection has come to the fore.
Paradoxically enough, no increment of charm appears to accrue to
the occasion.

A good part of the work ahead is taken up with considering ways to formalize
the process of reflection.  This is necessary, not just in the interest of
those apparitions that are able to animate reflection, or for the sake of
those allegations that are able to survive reflection, but in order to
devise a regular methodology for articulating, bringing into balance
with each other, and reasoning on the grounds of the various kinds
of reflections that naturally occur, the apparitions that arise
in the incidental context of experience plus the allegations
that get expressed in the informal context of discussion.
Later discussions will advance a particular approach to
reflection, bringing together the work already begun in
previous discussions of "interpretive frameworks" (IF's)
and "objective frameworks" (OF's), and constructing a
compound order or a hybrid species of framework for
arranging, organizing, and supporting reflection.
These tandem structures will be referred to as
"reflective interpretive frameworks" (RIF's).

Before the orders of complexity that are involved in the construction
of a RIF can be entertained, however, it is best to obtain a rudimentary
understanding of just how the issues associated with reflection can in fact
arise in ordinary and unformalized experience.  Proceeding by this path will
allow us to gain, along with a useful array of moderately concrete intuitions,
a relatively stable basis for comprehending the nature of reflection.  For all
of these reasons, the rest of this initial discussion will content itself with
a sample of the more obvious and even superficial properties of reflection as
they develop out of casual and even cursory contexts of discussion, and as
they make themselves available for expression in the terms and in the
structures of a natural language medium.

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 10

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3.2.3.  A Reflective Heuristic

In a first attempt to state explicitly the principles by which reflection
operates, it helps to notice a few of the tasks that reflection performs.
In the process of doing this it is useful to keep this figure of speech,
where the anthropomorphic "reflection" is interpreted in the figure of
its personification, in other words, as a hypostatic reference that
personifies the reflective faculty of an agent.

One of the things that reflection does is to look for common patterns
as they appear in diverse materials.  Another thing that reflection
does is to look for variations in familiar and recognized patterns.
These ideas lead to the statement of two aesthetic guidelines or
heuristic suggestions as to how the process of reflection can
be duly carried out:

   Try to reduce the number of primitive notions.

   Try to vary what has been held to be constant.

These are a couple of "aesthetic imperatives" or "founding principles"
that I first noticed as underlying motives in the work of C.S. Peirce,
informing the style of thinking that is found throughout his endeavors
(Awbrey & Awbrey, 1989).  It ought to be recognized that this pair of
imperatives operate in antagonism or work in conflict with each other,
each recommending a course that strives against the aims of the other.
The circumstances of this opposition appear to suggest a mythological
derivation for the faculty of reflection that is being personified in
this figure, as if it were possible to inquire into the background of
reflection so deeply as to reach that original pair of sibling rivals:
Epimetheus, Defender of the Same; Prometheus, Sponsor of the Different.

Aesthetic slogans and practical maxims do not have to be consistent in all
of the exact and universal ways that are required of logical principles,
since their applications to each particular matter can be adjusted in
a differential and a discriminating manner, taking into account the
points of their pertinence, the qualities of their relevance, and
the times of their salience.  Nevertheless, the use of these
heuristic principles can have a bearing on the practice of
logic, especially when it comes to the forms of logical
expression and argumentation that are available for
use in a particular language, specialized calculus,
or other formal system.  Although one's initial
formulations of logical reasoning, in the shapes
that are seized on by fallible and finite creatures,
can be as arbitrary and as idiosyntactic as particular
persons and parochial paradigms are likely to make them,
a dedicated and persistent application of these two heuristic
rudiments, whether in team, in tandem, or in tournament with each
other, is capable of leading in time to forms that subtilize and
universalize, at the same time, the forms initially taken by thought.

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Inquiry Driven Systems -- Ontology List

3.2.  Reflective Inquiry

3.2.1.  Integrity and Unity of Inquiry

01.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05520.html
02.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05521.html

3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations

03.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05522.html
04.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05523.html
05.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05524.html
06.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05525.html
07.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05526.html
08.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05527.html
09.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg05528.html

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Inquiry Driven Systems -- Inquiry List

3.2.  Reflective Inquiry

3.2.1.  Integrity and Unity of Inquiry

01.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001328.html
02.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001329.html

3.2.2.  Apparitions and Allegations

03.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001330.html
04.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001331.html
05.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001332.html
06.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001333.html
07.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001334.html
08.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001335.html
09.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-April/001336.html

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