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.
JA: 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.
SS: Not only them, but economists too. I am developing a general theory of development,
applicable to all material systems because it is cast in very general (thermodynamic,
information theoretic) terms. The canonical mode of development is from more vague
to more definite; from hot to cool.
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.
JA: Loose or Strict?
SS: Both
So it can have the sense of "construal", that is, "interpretation"?
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 constructions vague to one degree or other,
so that they can become more definite "in the long run"?
JA: 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.
SS: I do mean vague, and not general (which is an explicit model of
vagueness constructed from instances that might have descended
from the same vague precursor). Of course, logicians take
vagueness to be a problem.
SS: My attitude is that it is generative, and therefore of keen interest
in understanding the world. Unfortunately, a result of this disdain
by logicians is that there is hardly a logic of vagueness, which Peirce
slightly pointed to. Fuzziness is is partly OK, but the sets are crisp.
Second order fuzziness is better, but ...
Well, there is much discussation to be pondered here.
I am still not sure if we use "vaguity" the same way.
I will dig up some choice quotes from Peirce on this
so we can compare and contrast. Roughly, "general"
is extensional while "vague" is intensional. But
the fact that Peirce's pointers were slighted is
not to say that his pointers were slight, as you
will soon have the opportunity to see.
Jon Awbrey
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