ONT Re: Epistemic Diagrams
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Arisbeans, GOGists, OCAmists, ...
A reader who elects to remain a nonymist,
no doubt all the better to aspire hymner
self with the subdominant note of Nature
and the humming, all too humming partner
of the object of my enchoiry, still does
me the service of recalling to my mime's
eye an episode from my dissurpation that
I have yet refrained from uttering aloud,
and that it now occurs to me might be of
some use in explaining how I plan to lay
out a field of smooth variations between
the casual context and the formal arenas --
the latter being a 3-ring circus, y'know.
At any rite, here is how this bit begins:
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1.3.9.1 The Informal Context
| On either side the river lie
| Long fields of barley and of rye,
| That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
| And thro' the field the road runs by
| To many-tower'd Camelot;
| And up and down the people go,
| Gazing where the lilies blow
| Round an island there below,
| The island of Shalott.
|
| Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott", [Ten, 17]
One of the continuing difficulties of this work is the tension between
the formal contexts of representation, where clarity and certainty are
easiest to achieve, and the informal context of applications, where any
degree of insight into the nature of the problems and the structure of
the entanglements affecting it is eagerly awaited and earnestly desired.
This tension is due to the distances that stretch across the expanses
of these contexts, especially if one considers their more extreme poles,
since there is no release given of the necessity to build connections,
conduct negotiations, establish a continuum of reciprocal transactions,
and maintain a community of working relationships that is capable of
uniting their diversity into a coherent whole. Consequently, it is at
the wide end of the hopper that the real problems of formalization can
be seen to occur, where taking in too resistant and tangled a material
can play havoc with the fragile mechanisms of the formalization process
that the mind has scarcely been able to develop in its time to date.
It may be useful at this point of the discussion to insert a reminder of
why it is apposite to delve into the difficulties of the informal context.
The task of programming is to identify intellectual activities that are
initially carried on in the informal context, especially those that have
obscure aspects in need of clarification or onerous features in need of
facilitation, to analyze the ends and the means of these activities until
formal analogues can be found for some of their parts, thereby devising
suitable surrogates for these components within the formal arena or the
effective sphere, and finally to implement these formalizations within
the efficient arena or the practical sphere.
Inquiry is an activity that still takes place largely in the informal context.
Accordingly, much of what people instinctively and intuitively do in carrying out
an inquiry is done without a fully explicit idea of why they proceed that way, or even
a thorough reflection on what they hope to gain by their efforts. It may come as a shock
to realize this, since most people regard their scientific inquiries, at least, as rational
procedures that are founded on explicit knowledge and follow a host of established models.
But the standard of rigor that I have in mind here refers to the kind of fully thorough
formalization that it would take to create autonomous computer programs for inquiry,
ones that are capable of carrying out significant aspects of complete inquiries on
their own. The remoteness of that goal quickly becomes evident to any programmer
who sets out in the general direction of trying to achieve it.
Jon Awbrey
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Incidental Musement:
http://www.quinlanroad.com/the_visit.html
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