ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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| Document History
|
| Subject: Inquiry Driven Systems: An Inquiry Into Inquiry
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 8.70
| Created: 23 Jun 1996
| Revised: 06 Jan 2002
| Advisor: M.A. Zohdy
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Section 1.3.4 (Discussion of Formalization: Concrete Examples)
| Excerpt: Subsection 1.3.4.17 (Recapitulation: A Brush with Symbols)
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
1.3.4.17 Recapitulation: A Brush with Symbols
A common goal of work in artificial intelligence and cognitive simulation
is to understand how is it possible for intelligent life to evolve from
elements available in the primordial sea. Simply put, the question is:
"What's in the brine that ink may character?"
Pursuant to this particular way of setting out on the long-term quest,
a more immediate goal of the current project is to understand the action
of full-fledged symbols, insofar as they conduct themselves through the
media of minds and quasi-minds. At this very point the quest is joined
by the pragmatic investigations of signs and inquiry, which share this
interest in chasing down symbols to their precursive lairs.
In the pragmatic theory of signs, a "symbol" is a strangely insistent
yet curiously indirect type of sign, one whose accordance with its
object depends sheerly on the real possibility that it will be so
interpreted. Taking on the nature of a bet, a symbol's prospective
value trades on nothing more than the chance of acquiring the desired
interpretant, and thus it can capitalize on the simple fact that what
it proposes is not impossible. In this way it is possible to see that
a formal principle is involved in the meaningful successes of symbols.
The elementary conceivability of a particular sign relation, the pure
circumstance that renders it logically or mathematically possible,
means that the formal constraint it places on its domains is always
really and potentially there, awaiting its discovery and exploitation
for the purposes of representation and communication.
In this question about the symbol's capacity for meaning, then, is found
another contact between the theory of signs and the logic of inquiry.
As C.S. Peirce expressed it:
| Now, I ask, how is it that anything can be done with a symbol,
| without reflecting upon the conception, much less imagining the
| object that belongs to it? It is simply because the symbol has
| acquired a nature, which may be described thus, that when it is
| brought before the mind certain principles of its use -- whether
| reflected on or not -- by association immediately regulate the
| action of the mind; and these may be regarded as laws of the
| symbol itself which it cannot 'as a symbol' transgress.
| (Peirce, CE 1, 173).
| Inference in general obviously supposes symbolization; and
| all symbolization is inference. For every symbol as we have
| seen contains information. And ... we saw that all kinds of
| information involve inference. Inference, then, is symbolization.
| They are the same notions. Now we have already analyzed the notion
| of a 'symbol', and we have found that it depends upon the possibility
| of representations acquiring a nature, that is to say an immediate
| representative power. This principle is therefore the ground of
| inference in general. (Peirce, CE 1, 280).
| A symbol which has connotation and denotation contains information.
| Whatever symbol contains information contains more connotation than
| is necessary to limit its possible denotation to those things which
| it may denote. That is, every symbol contains more than is sufficient
| for a principle of selection. (Peirce, CE 1, 282).
| The information of a term is the measure of its superfluous comprehension.
| That is to say that the proper office of the comprehension is to determine
| the extension of the term. ...
|
| Every addition to the comprehension of a term, lessens its extension
| up to a certain point, after that further additions increase the
| information instead. ...
|
| And therefore as every term must have information, every term has
| superfluous comprehension. And, hence, whenever we make a symbol
| to express any thing or any attribute we cannot make it so empty
| that it shall have no superfluous comprehension.
|
| I am going, next, to show that inference is symbolization and that
| the puzzle of the validity of scientific inference lies merely in
| this superfluous comprehension and is therefore entirely removed
| by a consideration of the laws of 'information'.
| (Peirce, CE 1, 467).
A full explanation of these statements, linking scientific inference,
symbolization, and information together in such an integral fashion,
would require an excursion into the pragmatic theory of information
that Peirce was presenting in lectures at Harvard as early as 1865.
For now, let it suffice to say that this anticipation of the information
concept, fully recognizing the reality of its dimension, would not sound
too remote from the varieties of "law abiding constraint exploitation"
that have become increasingly familiar since the dawn of cybernetics.
But more than this, Peirce's notion of information supplies an array
of missing links that joins together in one scheme the logical roles
of terms, propositions, and arguments, the semantic functions of
denotation and connotation, and the practical methodology needed
to address and measure the quantitative dimensions of information.
This is precisely the kind of linkage that I need in this project
to integrate the dynamic and symbolic aspects of inquiry.
Not by sheer coincidence, the task of understanding symbolic action,
working up through icons and indices to the point of tackling symbols,
is one of the aims that the combination of interpretive frameworks and
objective frameworks being proposed in this project is intended to serve.
An OF is a convenient stage for those works that have progressed far enough
to make use of it, but in times of flux it must be remembered that an OF is
only a hypostatic projection, that is, a virtual image, a reified concept,
or a "phantom limb" of the IF that tentatively extends it.
When the IF and the OF being sketched here have been developed far enough,
I hope to tell wherein and whereof a sign may grow able, by virtue of its
very own character, to address itself to a purpose, one determined by its
objective nature and determining, in a measure, that of its duly intended
interpreter, to the extent that it renders the other wiser than the other
would otherwise be.
Jon Awbrey
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