ONT Re: Inquiry
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Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JA: I would like to try to start a thread about this thing
that many people call "inquiry", which I think of as
a strategic way of talking about "scientific method",
without getting into, at first, at least, the issue
of whether there really is such a "method", but also
as a way of including all of those less formalized
ways that everyday reasoning manages to take us from
highly confused and uncertain states of mind about
some problem or question to states of mind that are
slightly more clear and settled, at least enough to
be capable of engaging in competent courses of action
with regard to the issues in question.
SS: This process I call development.
That sounds bound to confound biologist and psychologist alike,
but if you wished to retro-sociate to "research" then it might
be apt enough to slip by cerber and sensor alike.
JA: How is this relevant to ontology? Well, because you might say
that inquiry is the process by which ontologies come into being.
SS: In a process of construction.
Loose or Strict?
JA: When I say "ontologies", I mean the theories, not the things.
I get the sense that most people here already talk that way,
but I have to keep reminding myself, because of having come
from communities of interpretation where most people talk
as if they meant the being of the things in themselves.
SS: I think several folks on OCA are of the latter disposition,
but some of us are as you say.
Ah, you have dissembled my dissemblance.
JA: So, if an ontology is "just a theory", a story about "what is",
then it is a story that is told by somebody, a theory that is
fashioned in a particular language, by a particular person,
group, community, or culture.
SS: The process of construction is not just the posing of a theory,
but an elaborate process of testing, etc. In the end it is just
a production of a particular culture at a particular time. It is
important to see the direct role of pragmatics as a final cause for
whatever is constructed.
Yes.
JA: So, I will not argue with anybody that axiom systems are the slickest way
to organize ("organonize"?) and summarize what we know, once we know it,
but we should not forget about the dynamics of the process by which these
special formulations of our knowledge came to be, and not fall into
imagining that we are thereby dictating to Nature.
SS: How about including the proess of inquiry into the
picture of nature instead of leaving it implicit?
This is what my drafty dissertation is all about, treating qualities
like chaos, confusion, disparity, dispersion, dissensus, ignorance,
obfuscuity, obscurity, uncertainty, its names are legion, as state
variables of an agent or a system, and inquiring into the dynamics
that eggs on the time evolution of the "question in question" (QIQ).
JA: My design recommendation, therefore, is that we should remember
to give the system for managing ontologies a "built in" facility
for inquiry -- at least, to make it amenable to the overall drift
and dynamics of inquiry, and better, to make it more fully capable
of supporting continued inquiry on the parts of its human users.
SS: One way is to make the constructiuons vague to one degree or other,
so that they can become more definite "in the long run"?
Not sure. The words "general" and "vague" are a supple-mentary pair
of "terms of art" in Peircean pragmatude, and so I will have to check
whether we are using them to mean the same things.
Many Regards,
Jon Awbrey
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