SUO: Re: Inquiry Driven Ontology Development
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Let us now return to John Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"
or "Sign of Rain" example, and this time put it under
the microscope and look at a few of its finer details.
In particular, I can use it to illustrate a couple of
important issues:
a. The interpretive aspect of inquiry as a semiotic process.
b. The differential aspect of inquiry as a dynamic process.
For ease of reference, I repeat here the original story:
| A man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the
| last time he observed it; but presently he notes, while
| occupied primarily with other things, that the air is cooler.
| It occurs to him that it is probably going to rain; looking up,
| he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then quickens
| his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called
| thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold
| is a thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and
| noting are other modes of activity. The likelihood that it will
| rain is, however, something 'suggested'. The pedestrian 'feels'
| the cold; he 'thinks of' clouds and a coming shower.
|
| John Dewey, 'How We Think', 1910, pages 6-7.
Susan Awbrey and I discussed this example in our article
"Interpretation as Action: The Risk of Inquiry" that we
gave at a Conference on "Hermeneutics & Human Sciences"
in 1992, a revision of which was subsequently published
in 'Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines',
Volume 15, No. 1, pages 40-52, (Autumn 1995), which is
available via the Arisbe Web Site or the following link:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/aboutcsp.htm
Here is what we said about the sign-theoretic aspects
of the inquiry process that we were able to detect in
Dewey's example:
| o Sign (cool air, dark cloud)
| /
| /
| /
| Object o---------@
| (rain) \
| \
| \
| o Interpretant (thought of rain)
|
| Figure 1. Sign Relation in Dewey's "Sign of Rain"
| In this narrative we can identify the characters of
| the sign relation as follows: 'coolness' is a Sign of
| the Object 'rain', and the Interpretant is 'the thought
| of the rain's likelihood'. In his 1910 description of
| reflective thinking Dewey distinguishes two phases,
| "a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt" and
| "an act of search or investigation" (Dewey 1991, 9),
| comprehensive stages which are further refined in his
| later model of inquiry. In this example, reflection
| is the act of the interpreter which establishes a fund
| of connections between the sensory shock of coolness
| and the objective danger of rain, by way of his
| impression that rain is likely. But reflection is
| more than irresponsible speculation. In reflection
| the interpreter acts to charge or defuse the thought
| of rain (the probability of rain in thought) by seeking
| other signs which this thought implies and evaluating
| the thought according to the results of this search.
Next time I will take up the differential aspect
of inquiry as a dynamic process of theory change.
Jon Awbrey
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