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====5.1.2. Conscious Reflection====
====5.1.2. Conscious Reflection====
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In this Section I examine how the intellectual process of reflection is expressed in reflective writing. Not so much as materials for analysis, since the power of analysis present in this work remains in a primitive state, but more to provide a constant reminder of what a reflective text is like, I am taking my epitext from the lifelong work of a single author, who made the aim of reflection an integral part of a whole life's work.
The thesis that is developing here is this: Language users have an innate knowledge of the "situation of communication" (SOC), a knowledge that is built into the language itself and gives its users an inkling of the social setting of communication that the language is meant to serve. Such a knowledge is tantamount to a science of communication that its users develop from its initial state by dint or by virtue of using it. Language users possess an intuitive, if imperfect, appreciation of the forms that are inherent in the social "task of communication" (TOC), and they exercise an implicit, if incipient, understanding of the practical roles that are constrained by the social "hold of communication" (HOC). Although every language user actualizes these roles with more or less competence and participates in the requisite forms of relationship with more or less cognizance, it is poets, playwrights, programmers, policy analysts, and other sorts of reflective writers that are especially charged to articulate these forms in a relatively explicit fashion.
The fact that reflective writers are driven to comment on the SOC itself, even if it is not always desirable or feasible to do so straightforwardly, and the fact that perceptive writers are able to find symbols of the SOC in the most inobvious places, reflected in the most refractory settings, and even when its likenesses are cast into the most unlikely images — these are two of the factors that combine to give creative writing its notably recursive and often cryptic character.
A reflective writer converts a "situation of communication" (SOC), a type of object, into a "communication of situation" (COS), a type of sign, and links the succession of reflective signs into the ongoing reflective text. But what are the forces that force a text, developing freely in a medium of communication, furnishing the vehicle of an observation, and bearing the impression of an object that occasions it, to double back on its writer and itself, to turn back through the medium of communication, all to form a sign for itself and to make a name for its author?
The relevance of reflective writing to the inquiry into inquiry can be seen in the following way. Let one examine a reflective text, a sample from the work of a suitably reflective writer, and one often discovers, besides the interpretation that bears on the obvious subject and serves to carry the ostensible theme, that there is coded or woven through the covering text a comment on the SOC itself, that is, a reflection on the writer, the reader, and the text itself. This reflexive interpretation reveals the writer's impressions about the process of writing, the very process that led to the text as its end result.
By tracing the analogies that exist between reflective writing and the inquiry into inquiry it is possible to gain a measure of insight into the character of the latter task. It is not a strange circumstance for the life and work of a writer to be represented again in that work, indeed, to be critically reflected there. And there is no question that a text can be used by a writer to talk about itself and its author, in a way that conceivably makes sense of them both — the question is whether what a reflexive text says can be interpreted in the same way as a text about external objects, or has to be taken with a distinct grain of salt.
Reflective writing arises from reflection on life and conduct and issues in a description of what goes on in the scene surrounding the reflective writer's "point of view" (POV). Of course, among the forms of conduct that are subject to inspection, a piece of reflective writing can also reflect on the process of writing itself, detailing the conditions that affect its intentions and its outcome, and thus taking on a "reflexive" character, though it is customary to express these narrower reflections in any number of less direct manners. With regard to the scene about a POV, a piece of reflective writing can take any stance from admiring, to amused, to bemused, to critical, to simply trying to puzzle out a fraction of what is going on. With respect to the process of writing and the development of a writer, a piece of reflective writing and what it articulates can be a crucial part of changing or preserving a POV. From this description, it ought to be clear that reflective writing is a naturally occurring species of inquiry into inquiry. That is to say, in analyzing the varieties of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic phenomena that occur in reflective writing, one is performing a task that parallels the inquiry into inquiry.
Notions of "recursion", informally taken, arise in this discussion for several reasons. First, there is the appearance of self application that is involved in an inquiry into inquiry, in the idea that an instrumental activity called "inquiry" can have application to an objective argument called "inquiry" and yield a meaningful result. Second, there is the appearance of self reference that is involved in an inquiry into inquiry, in the fact that a textual record of a self described inquiry needs to refer to itself as falling under the general topic of inquiry.
Strictly speaking, the themes of self application and self reference are less properly described as "recursive" than "reflective" or "reflexive", but it is easy to see how these issues arise in the process of carrying out a genuinely recursive project in an effectively pragmatic context.
In order to do this, I need to give a rough description of these two ideas, that of a recursive project and that of a pragmatic context.
1. In a recursive project, one attempts to clarify a complex concept in terms of simpler concepts. For instance, an important special case occurs when one tries to analyze a complex process in terms of simpler processes. A recursive project recurs upon a type of situation where the "same" concept is applied to simpler objects, in particular, where the same process, procedure, or function is applied to simpler arguments, proceeding to increasingly simpler arguments until the simplest arguments are reached. A recursive project is sound if there is a bound that can be wound around it, and it redounds to good effect if there is a ground that can be found to found it.
2. In a pragmatic context, the canonical way to clarify any concept is to give it an effective representation or an operational definition, that is, to detail the effects that the object of the concept is conceived to have when it is applied to the objects available in a specifiable variety of practical situations. An interpretive agent that follows this pragmatic prescription for clarifying concepts, persisting at it long enough and pursuing it through an adequate array of applications, can convert each concept analyzed into its corresponding "active formula". This is a form of expression that is logically equivalent, or as nearly as possible, to the intended concept, but suitable for immediate application to the contemplated domain of objects.
Now, consider the concept of "inquiry" as a candidate for clarification. In the case of a concept like "inquiry", the object of the concept in question is an activity that applies to the broadest conceivable variety of objects, one of these arguments being the topic of "inquiry" itself. As a result, if one approaches a definition of inquiry by way of the pragmatic prescription for clarifying concepts, one quickly discovers that an important ingredient in the active formula for inquiry is a component that characterizes the concept "inquiry" in terms of its action on itself.
What does the object denoted by "inquiry" have to do with respect to the object denoted by "inquiry", in the first place, to qualify as a genuine inquiry, in the end, to succeed as an inquiry into inquiry? Evidently, something about the sign, the object, or what transpires between the sign and the object is conducive to attaining a better description of inquiry than that given by the mere name "inquiry". The word "inquiry" and the symbol "y" are like a host of difficult signs, starting with "I" and "you", where knowing the sign does not mean knowing the object perfectly, although it can lead to a knowledge of it. Simply knowing the word "I" and being able to use it adequately does not mean that I know myself perfectly, or that I can articulate my own nature. At best, these signs can serve to indicate the direction of the object pointed out or help to remind an agent of the action that is called for to be carried out.
Can the senses of a sign be so confused, or the sense of an interpreter be so confounded by it, that between the two it is difficult to know if the sign refers to something inside the self that is in the world or to something in the world that is outside the self?
Given the description of a question as an unclear sign, it might be thought that the sole purpose of an inquiry is to clarify a question until it acquires the status of an answer, and thus to operate wholly within the syntactic realm of signs and ideas. But this would ignore many cases of experimental inquiry and active problem solving, natural to include among inquiries in general, that involve the manipulation of external objects and the alteration of objective states as they occur in the objective world. With these things in mind, it is best to define an inquiry as a "sign relation transformation" (SRT), in other words, and a bit more pronounceably, as a "transformation of sign relations" (TOSR). This is conceived to be an operation that acts on whole sign relations, changing one into another, typically by acting in specified ways on the "elementary sign relations" (ESR's), or on the ordered triples <o, s, i>. An inquiry, regarded as a TOSR, can be treated as a generalized form of "sign process". Whereas a sign process is restricted to acting within a single sign relation and can only change signs into their interpretants, a TOSR can subject elements of an object domain to experimental actions and induce objective states to undergo a variety of intentional changes.
From an abstract relational point of view, it is not too far from grasping the concept of a sign relation to seeing that transformations, operations, and other sorts of relations that are possible to define on sign relations are bound to become of significant interest. But the present concern is to decide whether the identification of inquiries with TOSR's constitutes a good definition in practice. A good definition in practice, aside from capturing the necessary and sufficient properties of its subject, is one that facilitates the generation of fruitful, incisive, material, pertinent, and relevant ideas about it. To some extent this depends on the context of practices and the specific purposes that a particular interpreter has in mind. Still, some definitions are more generally useful than others. Accordingly, the task I need to take up next is to examine the abstract concept of a TOSR with regard to its utility in practice, in other words, to determine its practical bearing on a concrete conception of inquiry, as it is topically understood.
If the essence of inquiry, or any aspect of what an inquiry can be, is captured by the concept of a TOSR, then a lot can be learned about the nature of inquiry by studying the manifest varieties and the internal structures of TOSR's.
Expressing this in terms of a prospective calculus, the present inquiry, y0, constituted as an inquiry into inquiry, y.y, ...
As the clarification of a concept is pursued to the limit, it approaches the status of a definition. And so one finds oneself contemplating a definition of inquiry that defines it at least partially in terms of itself. But an attempt to define a concept in terms of itself is ordinarily considered to be a bad thing, leading to the sort of circular definition that vitiates the utility of the whole effort toward clarity.
In summary, because the subject of "inquiry" is something that one can reasonably be in question about, and because the topic of "inquiry" is something that one can sensibly inquire into, the chances that one can make sense of an inquiry into inquiry is not merely an interesting and diverting possibility but a necessary part of the meaning of inquiry.
Definitions are limiting cases of clarifications, since a process of clarification pursued far enough approaches a formulation of a concept that is tantamount to its definition.
Before an inquiry can proceed very far, it needs to develop a map or a plan of the territory that the agent of inquiry intends to investigate. This task involves the drawing of distinctions, the finding of natural differences and the making of useful separations, among the objects of inquiry.
Let me call attention to a compound form of existence, the kind that is composed of a sign and the interpreter that authors it, and describe it more briefly as a "sign and issuer" (SAI) or a "text and writer" (TAW). As long as one moves through a casual context it is convenient to carry along these portmanteau words, precisely because their two components are confounded so consistently in informal speech, where it is hardly polite to keep on objecting to their ambiguities and anthropomorphisms. When I say that a SAI does this or that, it is up to the good sense of a charitable interpreter to decide whether this or that is something that a sign or rather its issuer is supposed to be able to do. In these terms, a SAI that speaks of and to itself and addresses its own composition or a TAW that talks about itself in either sense are not likely to have the same interest for others as they do in themselves.
It is ordinarily thought to be a good thing for a SAI or a TAW to be able to reflect on itself, but one whose subject is solely oneself is not ordinarily thought to be of interest to others.
In this work, I am interested in SAI's and TAW's that survive the onset of recursion while avoiding the snares of sheer self reference, that pose patterns of self reference but only in the service of a greater subject, and that slip the snarly bonds of narcissism frequently enough to say something significant about something else.
It is a form of narcissism to think that others are necessarily as interested in every detail of one's existence as one is oneself. But narcissism is an unnatural condition that has to be distinguished from one's more commonly understandable interest in oneself. In its extreme forms, a full blown narcissism is not the natural flourishing of a healthy self interest but the outgrowth of deep and typically early disturbances in the systematic structure of the self.
In order to understand how a sign functions as a sign it is necessary to understand the interpreter for whom it actually functions as a sign. The ways that a sign denotes its objects and connotes its interpretants say a lot about the interpreter for whom it denotes its objects and for whom it connotes its interpretants, where the antecedents of all these "its" can be either the sign or its interpreter. To the extent that all knowledge is expressed in signs, to know anything at all is to know an aspect of oneself, however unwittingly. In this way, one can arrive at the epigrammatic formulas that "all knowledge is self knowledge" and that "every inquiry is an inquiry into inquiry".
A "symbol" is a type of sign whose relation to its object is constituted solely by the fact that an interpreter employs it to denote that object, in other words, that an interpretant connects it with that object in an "elementary sign relation", or an ordered triple of the form <o, s, i>. This means that the nature and the character of an interpreter can be studied especially well as reflected in the symbols that it employs.
Unlike icons and indices, which have rationales for their denotations in the properties and instances, respectively, which are common to objects and their signs, ...
term/premiss/argument: symbols with internal or instructive hints?
An "argument" is a type of symbol that incorporates among its syntactic provisions an independent indication of the method that is intended for its interpretation, that is, it embodies a series of hints about the ways and the means that its issuer intends its prospective interpreter to use in order to achieve its interpretant, in short, to reach its conclusion.
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=====5.1.2.1. The Signal Moment=====
=====5.1.2.1. The Signal Moment=====
