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| | to know everything about their material content | | to know everything about their material content |
| | down to the depths that matter can go. | | down to the depths that matter can go. |
| − | </pre>
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| − |
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| − | =====1.3.5.13. A Formal Suspicion=====
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| − |
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| − | <pre>
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| − | | Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off.
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| − | |
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| − | | (Nietzsche, 'The Will to Power', S 522, 283).
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| − |
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| − | I hope that the reader has arrived by now at an independent suspicion that the
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| − | process of formalization is a microcosm nearly as complex as the whole subject
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| − | of inquiry itself. Indeed, the initial formulation of a problem is tantamount
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| − | to a mode of "representational inquiry". In many ways this very first effort,
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| − | that stirs from the torpor of ineffable unease to seek out any sort of unity
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| − | in the manifold of fragmented impressions, is the most difficult, subtle,
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| − | and crucial kind of inquiry. It begins in doubt about even so much as
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| − | a fair way to represent the problematic situation, but its result can
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| − | predestine whether subsequent inquiry has any hope of success. There
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| − | is very little in this brand of formal engagement and participatory
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| − | representation that resembles the simple and disinterested act of
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| − | holding a mirror, flat and featureless, up to nature.
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| − |
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| − | If formalization really is a form of inquiry in itself, then
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| − | its formulations have deductive consequences that can be tested.
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| − | In other words, formal models have logical effects that reflect on
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| − | their fitness to qualify as representations, and these effects can
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| − | cause them to be rejected merely on the grounds of being a defective
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| − | picture or a misleading conception of the source phenomenon. Therefore,
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| − | it should be appreciated that software tailored to this task will probably
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| − | need to spend more time in the alterations of backtracking than it will have
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| − | occasion to trot out parades of ready-to-wear models.
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| − |
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| − | Impelled by the mass of assembled clues from restarts and refits to the
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| − | gathering form of a coherent direction, the inkling may have gradually
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| − | accumulated in the reader that something of the same description has
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| − | been treated in the pragmatic theory of inquiry under the heading
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| − | of "abductive reasoning". This is distinguished from inductive
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| − | reasoning, that goes from the particular to the general, in
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| − | that abductive reasoning must work from a mixed collection
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| − | of generals and particulars toward a middle term, a formal
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| − | intermediary that is more specific than the vague allusions
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| − | gathered about its subject and more generic than the elusive
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| − | instances fashioned to illustrate its prospective predicates.
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| − |
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| − | In a recursive context, the function of formalization is to relate a
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| − | difficult problem to a simpler problem, breaking the original inquiry
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| − | into two parts, the step of formalization and the rest of the inquiry,
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| − | both of which branches it is hoped will be nearer to solid ground and
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| − | easier to grasp than the original question.
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| | </pre> | | </pre> |
