Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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3.2. Reflective Inquiry. Note 6
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3.2.2. Apparitions and Allegations (cont.)
The next step to take in preparing a style of phenomenology, that is,
in acquiring a paradigm for addressing apparitions or in producing an
apparatus for dealing with appearances, is to partition the space of
conceivable phenomena in accord with several forms of classification,
drawing whatever parallel and incidental lines appear suitable to the
purpose of oganizing phenomena into a sensible array, in particular,
separating out the kinds of appearances that one is prepared to pay
attention to, and thus deciding the kinds of experiences that one
is ready to partake in, while paring away the sorts of apparitions
that one is prepared to ignore.
It may be thought that a phenomenology has no need of preparation or partition,
that the idea is to remain openly indiscriminate and patently neutral to all
that appears, that all of its classifications are purely descriptive, and
that all of them put together are intended to cover the entire range of
what can possibly show up in experience. But attention is a precious
resource, bounded in scope and exhausted in detail, while the time
and the trouble that are available to spend on the free and the
unclouded observation of phenomena are much more limited still,
at least, in so far as it concerns finite agents and mortal
creatures, and thus even the most liberal phenomenology is
forced to act on implicit guidelines or to put forward
explicit recommendations of an evaluative, a normative,
or a prescriptive character, saying in effect that if
one acts in certain ways, in particular, that if one
expends an undue quantity of attention on the "wrong"
kinds of appearances, then one is bound to pay the
price, in other words, to experience unpleasant
experiences as a consequence or else to suffer
other sorts of adverse results.
This observation draws attention to the general form of constraint
that comes into play at this point. Let me then ask the following
question: What is the most general form of preparation, partition,
or reparation, of whatever sort of disposition or structure, that
I can imagine as applying to the whole situation, that I can see
as characterizing its experiential totality, and that I can grasp
as contributing to its ultimate result? For my own part, in the
present situation, the answer appears to be largely as follows.
As far as I know, all styles of phenomenology and all notions of science,
whether general or special, either begin by adopting an implicit recipe
for what makes an apparition worthy of note or else begin their advance
by developing an explicit prescription for a "worthwhile" appearance,
a rule that presumes to dictate what phenomena are worthy of attention.
This recipe or prescription amounts to a critique of phenomena, a rule
that has an evaluative or a normative force. As a piece of advice, it
can be taken as a "tentative rule of mental presentation" (TROMP) for
all that appears or shows itself, since it sets the bar for admitting
phenomena to anything more than a passing regard, marks the threshold
of abiding concern and the level of recurring interest, formulates
a precedence ordering to be imposed on the spectra of apparitions
and appearances, and is tantamount to a recommendation about what
kinds of phenomena are worth paying attention to and what kinds
of shows are not worth the ticket -- in a manner of speaking,
is that the latter do not repay the price of admission to
consciousness and do not earn a continuing regard.
The issue of a TROMP ("tentative rule of mental presentation") can appear
to be a wholly trivial commonplace or a totally unnecessary extravagance,
but realizing that a choice of this order has to be made, that it has to
be made at a point of development where no form of justification of any
prior logical order can be adduced, and thus that the choice is always
partly arbitrary and always partly based on aesthetic considerations,
ethical constraints, and practical consequences -- all of this says
something important about the sort of meaning that the choice can
have, and it opens up a degree of freedom that was obscured by
thinking that a phenomenology has to exhaust all apparitions,
or that a science has to be anchored wholly in bedrock.
If it appears to my reader that my notion of what makes a worthwhile
appearance is tied up with what I can actually allege to appear, and
is therefore constrained by the medium of my language and the limits
of my lexicon, then I am making the intended impression. One of the
reasons that I find for accepting these bounds is that I am decidedly
less concerned with those aspects of experience that appear in one
inconsistent and transient fashion after another, and I am steadily
more interested in those aspects of experience that appear on abiding,
insistent, periodic, recurring, and stable bases. Since I am trying to
demonstrate how inquiry takes place in the context of a sign relation,
the ultimate reasons for this restriction have to do with the nature
of inquiry and the limited capacities of signs to convey information.
Jon Awbrey
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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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