ONT Re: Information = Comprehension x Extension -- Discussion
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ICE. Discussion Note 16
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annti, hugh, jack, ...
let us continue with the sub-quest represented by the present e-filiation,
namely, to understand the potential bearing of peirce's anticipatory ideas
about the architectonics of inquiry on many of our contemporary issues with
regard to "global information organelles" (GIO's).
the thing that made the connection for me -- between the subject
of information, such as i knew it in computer science, cognitive
science, cybernetic systems, mathematics, and statistics, and the
subject of inquiry, such as i knew it in logic, the experimental
sciences, and the more applied branches of all of the above fields --
was peirce's early recognition, and dewey's later elaboration, of
the "unavoidably negative circumstance" (UNC) that inquiry begins
in a state of uncertainty, along with the affective cognizance that
this is a very annoying state to be in. peirce notoriously dubbed
this the "irritation of doubt" and said that the "end of inquiry"
was to soothe it.
many interesting discussions branch off from this observation,
some of them quite controversial, but one of the things that is
significant about peirce's model of inquiry from a systems point
of view is the fact that it refers to a state with a potentially
measurable parameter, namely, a "state of uncertainty" (SOU), and
this parameter is critical in determining the subsequent conduct
of the system or its representative agent.
thus, we (susan awbrey and i) came to speak of "inquiry driven systems" in
our joint work, she coming from a background in educational systems design,
with a great appreciation for dewey and a better familiarity with his work,
and i falling more off the peircean branch of our family tree.
eventually, i would like to connect all of this back to a few of
the ongoing proposals that are "out there", as they say on x-files,
as to how information and knowledge, declarative and/or pragmatic,
is, will be, or ought to be represented in the GIO's that we are
all busy building even as we speak.
many other proposals for organizing the world's knowledge and
informericals in web-o-genic form draw on the common stocks of
various traditions in category theory, logic, mathematics, and
model theory. quite a few working groups now describe a theory
of what there is in the world as an "ontology", which is dreamt
or meant to be an axiomatic theory of some domain of existence.
my guess is that most of the disparate organizational regimes that
are currently being spun off by the web-ranks and arachno-files will
some day soon have to start coming to terms with each other. and this
is not just my personal suspicion but a rather common premonition, that
has lately been batted about under the rubrics of "intercommunicability"
and "interoperability".
examples! examples! examples! -- as many voices in my head keep crying --
the problem being, as i have talked back to not a few of these voices,
that one person's excitement with a richly embroidered example is
often the next person's excruciating excess of concrete detail.
and so we are forced to tread a very tense line
between pure abstraction and sheer distraction.
i will return to the examples from peirce
that antti initially had questions about,
and try to give them a thorough analysis.
jon awbrey
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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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