ONT Inquiry Driven Systems
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Inquiry Driven Systems
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I've been wrestling all week with the question of how to continue
from this point. There are a couple of problems that befrazzle the
"inquiry driven ontology development" (IDOD) thread. For one thing,
I have brought the discussion of Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry" example
up to the brink of developing the differential and the distributional
aspects of inquiry, but my last presentation of "differential logic",
that I devised in part just for such tasks, is probably so distant in
your memory by now that I would be forced to recollect it to you anew.
For another thing, there seems to be a persistent problem with the word
"ontology", that despite all one's best intentions and all one's guarded
protests to be encompassing abstractions, processes, reflections, and the
whole mushroom soup of the knowledge stock, there is just something about
the historical baggage of the term that drags one down to what physicists
were once apt to call the "physics of the breadbox sized object" (POTBSO).
For moment there, I thought that I could sidestep the second problem by
shifting my stance just a tiny bit, in the periodic peripatetic fashion
that has become a constitutionally accustomed way for me, away from the
objects of our ontologies and toward the intellectual concepts and the
systems of signs that we use to capture, to objectify, and to represent
these objects to ourselves and to each other. This is the reason that
I started the "inquiry driven intellectual growth" (IDIG) thread, and
yet now that I look at the overall scene from this altered perspective,
it occurs to me that something much more basic is needed than a nodding
new parallax of outlook on the same old stages of the same old scenery.
At any rate, all of these options are still open to me, and I may still
return to them, if I can get any momentum going, but now I believe that
the best course forward is to go even further back, and to build up the
infrastructure that we will need to solidify our advance in these areas.
For my part, that would mean going back to the point in my dissertation
where I begin to apply the basic materials and the stock tools of the
pragmatic theory of sign relations to the analysis and the design of
"interpretive frameworks" (IF's), "objective frameworks" (OF's), and
their synthesis within "reflective interpretive frameworks" (RIF's).
So that is what I will do next.
Jon Awbrey
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