ONT Inquiry Driven Systems
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Inquiry Driven Systems
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Note 1
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It is rash to think that we can judge the sensibility of what
Peirce says about belief, error, knowledge, truth and so on
if we do not interpret him in the medium of what he means
by those words and not some arbitrary conceptions that
we may happen to bring to the text. And I do not
believe that it is possible to appreciate his
concepts of any of these things outside of
his theories of signs and inquiry.
Thus, I am going to revive one of my intermittent investigations
into the ways that systems of signs, including the expressions
of concepts and beliefs, develop over time under the dynamics
of a generic process that it is convenient to call "inquiry".
In this pass through the work that I have done over the past
decade or more, I will make some effort to trim it down to
the minimal version and to bend the account to the task
of alleviating some of our recent concerns about our
own fallibility, for no doubt our error-proneness,
like the flight of the bumble bee, waits on the
right theory to explain it before it believes
it safe to proceed with buzziness as usual.
If I had to form an immediate hypothesis as to why fallibility
should appear to be such a bewildering phenomenon from certain
outlooks of philosophy, it would probably be that the POV's in
question are the very ones that have always had a problem with
the notion of approximate reasoning, for example, the affected
viewers acting as if they felt duty bound to try and eliminate
abductive and inductive reasoning in favor of deductive styles.
For what your average reflective undergraduate with a modicum of
practical experience knows about belief -- and I know that I can
document the opinions of at least one such case -- would be this:
That what you believe, while you believe it, is not a whim to be
changed at will, but a force to be reckoned with, and in its own
right cannot be distinguished from what you know or believe true.
The test of that is that you acted on it just as if it were true.
Still and again, you can think of times when you changed beliefs
between two logically contradictory opinions, and sometimes even
back again, ofttimes as a consequence of actually acting on them,
and so, independently of which one wins out in the end, you know
that some of the beliefs you had must check out bad. It is also
a rational inductive generalization, from the sample of opinions
that you have maintained in your prior experience, and the ratio
of those that you presently consider to be false, to reckon that
a similar proportion of your future opinions will turn out false.
Whether you accept the likelihood of that self-estimation or not,
you can see the possibility that you may be wrong. Consequently,
I think that it will be impossible to resolve this issue without
a clear appreciation of the rationality of approximate reasoning.
For my part, I have been trying to resolve a couple of problems:
1. What is the proper articulation of the inquiry process in terms
of the various kinds of inference, apodictic and approximate,
that various thinkers have identified as being relevant to it?
2. What is the proper placement of inquiry within a theory of signs?
My approach to this problem area has been to track back to the sources
of some of our initial ideas about signs and inquiry, to see if I could
work out for myself what they were thinking and how they moved from one
stage of their thought to the next, and maybe along the way to see if
I can see anything that they may have missed, or omitted to mention
clearly enough. I am especially interested in the transition that
C.S. Peirce made from syllogistic to relational forms of thinking
about signs and inquiry, as that corresponds to an important task
in what might be called "computational architectronics", that of
building adequate logical systems on a solid propositional layer.
I have spent a fair amount of time staring at the likes
of the following two structures and trying to figure out
how they fit together, figuratively speaking, of course:
o-------------------------------------------------o
| |
| o Sign |
| / |
| / |
| / |
| Object o---------@ |
| \ |
| \ |
| \ |
| o Interpretant |
| |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1. Elementary Sign Relation
o-------------------------------------------------o
| |
| Z |
| o |
| |\ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ Rule |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | Ab > \ |
| | \ / \ |
| Fact | <-o-De o Y |
| | / \ / |
| | In > / |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / Case |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / |
| |/ |
| o |
| X |
| |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 2. Three Kinds of Inference
After I had stared at the second picture a very long time,
I came to see that the two approximate forms of inference,
Abduction and Induction, have in common the property that
they bring a middle term into the immediate configuration.
Then I remembered that Aristotle is supposed to have said:
The essence of quick wit lies in grasping the middle term.
But where do these middle terms come from, anyway? It is
conventional to say that they come in with the abductions
of the cases that first evidence any need to call on them,
and that this is what puts them in the pot for inductions
and deductions to bid for them on any subsequent occasion.
But maybe it would make sense to recognize an independent
process, solely dedicated to finding or making mediations.
Conceived in this way, this process would be a duction in
the opposite direction from Deduction, dub it "Adduction".
o-------------------------------------------------o
| |
| Z |
| o |
| |\ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ Rule |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| | \ |
| Fact | Ad ---> o Y |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / Case |
| | / |
| | / |
| | / |
| |/ |
| o |
| X |
| |
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Figure 3. Adduction of a Middle Term
I'm not too committed to this name for the action,
and it has been used on one or two rare occasions
as yet another name for abduction, but I will use
it until I come up with a name that I like better.
Jon Awbrey
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