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, 16:16, 20 September 2010+ Inquiry Driven Systems 3.2.10. The Pragmatic Cosmos (June 2002)
==Work Area 4==
==Work Area 4==
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Pragmatic Cosmos
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| Document History
|
| Subject: Inquiry Driven Systems: An Inquiry Into Inquiry
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 8.75
| Created: 23 Jun 1996
| Revised: 10 Jun 2002
| Advisor: M.A. Zohdy
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Section 3.2.10 (The Pragmatic Cosmos)
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
3.2.10. The Pragmatic Cosmos
This Section outlines the general idea of a "priorism of normative sciences" (PONS)
and it presents the particular PONS that I will refer to as the "pragmatic cosmos".
This is the precedence ordering for the normative sciences that best accords with
the pragmatic approach to inquiry, incidentally framing and introducing the order
of normative sciences that I plan to deploy throughout the rest of this work.
From this point on, whenever I mention a PONS without further qualification,
it will always be one or another version of a pragmatic PONS that I mean to
invoke, all the while taking into consideration the circumstance that its
underlying theme still leaves a lot of room for variation in the carrying
out of its live interpretation.
Roughly speaking, in regard to the forms of human aspiration that are
exercised in normative practices and studied in the normative sciences,
the study of states or things that satisfy agents is called "aesthetics",
the study of actions that lead agents toward these goals or these goods
is called "ethics", and the study of signs that indicate these actions
is called "logic". Understood this way, logic involves the enumeration
and the analysis of signs with regard to their "truth", a property that
only makes sense in the light of the actions that are indicated and the
objects that are desired. In other words, logic evaluates signs with
regard to the trustworthiness of the actions that they indicate, and
this means with respect to the utility that these indications exhibit
in a mediate relationship to their objects. As an appreciative study,
logic prizes the properties of signs that allow them to collect the
scattered actions of agents into coherent forms of conduct and that
permit them to indicate the general courses of conduct that are most
likely to lead agents toward their objects.
From this "pragmatic" point of view, logic is a special case of ethics,
one that is concerned with the conduct of signs, and ethics is a special
case of aesthetics, one that is interested in the good of actual conduct.
Another way to approach this perspective is to start with the "good" of
anything and to work back through the maze of actions and indications
that lead to it. An action that leads to the good is a good action,
and this puts the questions of ethics among the questions of aesthetics,
as the ones that contemplate the goods of actions. A sign that indicates
a good action, that shows a good way to act, is a good sign, and this puts
the domain of logic squarely within the domain of aesthetics. Moreover,
thinking is a sign process that moves from signs to interpretant signs,
and this makes thinking a special kind of action. In sum, the questions
that logic takes up in its critique of good signs and good thinking are
properly seen as special cases of aesthetic and ethical considerations.
The circumstance that the domain of logic is set within the domain of ethics,
which is further set within the domain of aesthetics, does not keep each realm
from rising to such a height in another dimension that each keeps a watch over
all of the domains that it is set within. In sum, the image is that of three
cylinders standing on their concentric bases, telescopically extending to a
succession of heights, with the narrowest the highest and the broadest the
lowest, rising to the contemplation of the point that virtually completes
their perspective, just as if wholly sheltered by the envelope of the cone
that they jointly support, no matter what its ultimate case may be, whether
imaginary or real, rational or transcendental.
Logic has a monitory function with respect to ethics and aesthetics,
while ethics has a monitory function solely with respect to aesthetics.
By way of definition, a "monitory function" is a duty, a role, or a task
that one discipline has to watch over the practice of another discipline,
checking the feasibility of its intentions and its proposed operations,
evaluating the conformity of its performed operations to its intentions,
and, when called for, reforming the faith, the feasance, or the fidelity
of its acts in accord with its aims. A definite attitude and particular
perspective are prerequisites for an agent to exercise a monitory role
with any hope or measure of success. The necessary station arises from
the observation that not all things are possible, at least, not at once,
and especially that not all ends are achievable by a fallible creature
within a finite creation. Accordingly, the agent of a monitory faculty
needs to help the agency that is involved in the effort or the endeavor
it monitors to observe the due limits of its proper arena, the higher
considerations, and the inherent constraints that force a fallible and
finite agent to choose among the available truths, acts, and aims.
To recapitulate the pragmatic "priorism of normative sciences" (PONS):
Logic, ethics, and aesthetics, in that order, cannot succeed in any of
their aims, whether they turn to contemplating the natures of the true,
the just, and the beautiful, respectively, for their own sakes, whether
they turn to speculating on the certificates, the semblances, or the more
species tokens of these goods, as they might be utilized toward a divergent
conception of their values, or whether they convert from the one forum to the
other market, and back again, in an endless series of exchanges, that is, unless
their prospective agents possess the initial capital that can only be supplied by
competencies at the corresponding intellectual virtues, and until they are willing
to risk the stakes of adequately generous overhead investments, on orders that are
demanded to fund the performance of the associated practical disciplines, namely,
those that are appropriate to the good of signs, the good of acts, and the good
of aims in themselves. In sum, the domains and the disciplines of logic, ethics,
and aesthetics, in that order, are placed so aptly in regard to one another that
each one waits on the order of its watch and each one maintains its own proper
monitory function with respect to all of the ones that follow on after it.
Why do things have to be this way? Why is it necessary to impose
a PONS, much less a pragmatic PONS, on the array of goods and quests?
If everyone who reflects on the issue for a sufficient spell of time
seems to agree that the Beautiful, the Just, and the True are one and
the same in the End, then why is any PONS necessary? Its necessity is
apparently relative to a certain contigency affecting the typical agent,
namely, the contingency of being a fallible and finite creature. Perhaps
from a "God's Eye View" (GEV), Beauty, Justice, and Truth all amount to
a single Good, the only Good there is. But the imperfect creature is
not given this view as its realized actuality and cannot contain its
vision within the "point of view" (POV) that is proper to it. Even
if it sees the possibility of this unity, it cannot actualize what
it sees at once, at best being driven to work toward its realization
measure by measure, and that is only if the agent is capable of reason
and reflection at all.
The imperfect agent lives in a world of seeming beauty, seeming justice,
and seeming truth. Fortunately, the symmetry of this seeming insipidity
can break up in relation to itself, and with the loss of the objective
world's equipoise and indifference goes all the equanimity and most of
the insouciance of the agent in question. It happens like this: Among
the number of apparent goods and amid the manifold of good appearances,
one soon discovers that not all seeming goods are alike. Seeming beauty
is the most seemly and the least deceptive, since it does not vitiate its
own intention in merely seeming to achieve it, and does not destroy what
it reaches for in merely seeming to grasp it.
Monitory functions, as a rule, tend to shade off in extreme directions,
on the one hand becoming a bit too prescriptive before the act, whether
the hopeful effects are hortatory or prohibitory, and on the other hand
becoming much too reactionary after the fact, whether the tardy effects
are exculpatory or recriminatory. In the midst of these extremes, that
is, within the scheme of monitory functions at large, it is possible to
distinguish subtler variations in the nuances of their action that work
toward the accomplishment the same general purpose, but that achieve it
with a form of such gentle urging all throughout the continuing process
of gaining a good, that affect a promise of such laudatory rewards, and
that afford an array of incidental senses of such ongoing satisfaction,
even before, while, and after the aimed for good is effected, that this
class of moderate measures is aptly known as "advisory functions" (AF's).
In the process of noticing what is necessary and what is impossible,
and in distinguishing itself from the general run of monitory functions,
an AF is able to adapt itself to get a better grip on what is possible,
to the point that it is eventually able to make constructive suggestions
to the agent that it monitors, and thus to give advice that is both apt
and applicable, positive and practical, or usable and useful. If this
is beginning to sound familiar, then it is not entirely an accident.
As I see it, it is from these very grounds that the facility for
"abductive simile" or the faculty of "abductive synthesis" (AS)
first arises, to wit, just on the horizon of monitory observation
and just on the advent of advisory contemplation that an agent of
inquiry, learning, and reasoning first acquires the "quasi" ability
to regard one thing just as if it were construed to be another and
to consider each thing just inasmuch as it haps to be like another.
In the abode of the monitor I thus discover the first clues I can grasp
as to how the "abductive bearing" (AB) of hypothetical reasoning can be
bound together from the primitive elements of the most uncertain states
that the mind can ever know. To my way of thinking, this derivation of
AB's from the general conduct of monitory duties and the specific ethos
of advisory roles, all as pursuant to the PONS, seems to strike a chord
with the heart of wonder beating at the core of every agent of inquiry,
and accordingly to fashion an answer to the central query, in the words
of Wm. Shakespeare: "Where is fancy bred?" Beyond the responsibility
to continue driving the cycle of inquiry and to keep on circulating the
fresh communication of provisional answers, this form of speculation on
the origin of the AB points out at least one way whence these faculties
of guessing widely but guessing well can lead me from the conditions of
amazement, bewilderment, and consternation that the start of an inquiry
all but constantly finds me in.
The anchoring or the inauguration of an "abductive bearing" (AB) within
the operations of an "advisory function" (AF), and the enscouncement or
the installation of this positively constructive advisory, in its turn,
within the office of an irreducibly negative monitory function, one that
watches over the active, aesthetic, and affective aspects of experience
with an eye to the circumstance that not all goods can be actualized at
once -- this array of inferences from the apical structure of the PONS
ought to suffice to remind each agent of inquiry of how it all hinges
on the affective values that one feels and the effective acts that
one does.
In principle, therefore, logic assumes a purely ancillary role in regard
to the ethics of active conduct and the aesthetics of affective values.
On balance, however, logic can achieve heights of abstraction, points of
perspective, and summits of reflection that are otherwise unavailable to
a mind embroiled in the tangle of its continuing actions and immersed in
the flow of its current passions. By rising above this plain immersion
in the dementias swept out by action and passion, logic can acquire the
status of a handle, something an agent can use in its situation to avoid
being swept along with the tide of affairs, something that keeps it from
being swept up with all that the times press on it to sweep out of mind.
By means of this instrument, logic affords the mind an ability to survey
the passing scene in ways that it cannot hope to imagine while engaged in
the engrossing business of keeping its gnosis to the grindstone, and so it
becomes apt to adopt the attitude that it needs in order to become capable
of reflecting on its very own actions, affects, and axioms.
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==Work Area 5==
==Work Area 5==
