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If one accepts the idea that all of these excerpts are expressions of one and the same POV, but considered at different points of development, as enunciated, as reviewed, and as revised over an interval of many years, then they can be taken to illustrate the diverse kinds of changes that occur in the formulation, the development, and the clarification of a continuing POV.
If one accepts the idea that all of these excerpts are expressions of one and the same POV, but considered at different points of development, as enunciated, as reviewed, and as revised over an interval of many years, then they can be taken to illustrate the diverse kinds of changes that occur in the formulation, the development, and the clarification of a continuing POV.
<pre>
We cannot proceed in the question of the who without introducing the problem of everyday life, self knowledge, the problem of the relation to the other — and, ultimately, the relation to death.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 232]
It is the business of this preview to take up the initial stirrings of many subject matters that cannot hope to be completely developed, even clearly engaged, and much less fully formalized at the present stage of discussion. At many points I can afford to pause only long enough to toss a provisional name in the direction of a subject I plan to address more fully later on, and at times I can merely indicate in cursory terms a topic that I intend to return to at several later points in this work.
There are aspects of inquiry that are difficult to address from a purely cognitive POV, that is, from a standpoint that expects agents of inquiry to behave in a strictly rational fashion. At times it appears that there are complexities in the phenomenology of inquiry that are impossible to compass, comprehend, deal with, fathom, grasp, or tackle by means of a purely cognitive or strictly rational method of approach. Nevertheless, it is not that the manner of proceeding ought to be anything other than what it aims to be, but merely that it cannot expect its subject matter to mirror nothing beyond its own manners of limitations, principles, and scruples.
The reason that these issues have to be discussed at this particular point of this particular inquiry is simply that it cannot proceed beyond this point without facing up to them and facing them down again, that is, without addresing them in some measue and readucing the force of their obstruction. In short, these issues present a real obstacle to the progress of this inquiry.
It is such a rarity for this theme of "internal opposition" (IO) to find a clear expression in the light of day that the latest and best descriptions one sees of it are not all that far removed in their basic characters and their degrees of clarity from the very first inklings one can find of it, namely, those intimations of its nature that remain wrapped up in the perennial figures of perceptive allegory and the ancient images of insightful mythology that are passed down from the foundings of every civilized culture. Thus, I find I cannot discuss this issue, even dimly, without first invoking this class of symbols, no matter what difficulties of interpretation they bring in their train. I can only promise to try to clarify their empirical and rational meanings as the discussion continues.
In general, one can treat the dramatic images presented by literature and mythology as not essentially different from scientific images of action, behavior, and conduct. They all attempt to capture something about human aims and human actions in a compact, exact, and memorable image, to catch a glimmer of human behavior in a singular but still moving form, and to cache it in the coin of a common exchange so that it embodies not just a commemorative but a communerative inheritance, one that anyone with access to the store can recurrently cash in as warranted by the occasion and the development of a particular situation, that all can repeatedly bank on to their individual and common profit. No matter what genre it is cast within, a successful image records a moment's insight into an aspect of human nature, preserving it in such a way that it can reveal itself at relevant moments in future experience, and thus avail itself in such a form that it makes this particular insight into this particular aspect available for the use of many other POV's.
An image is useful if it codifies significant insights about character and conduct. To do this it needs to indicate, descriptively or normatively, important aspects of behavior, involving the necessary structures or the contingent potentials of conduct. An image is especially useful if it is indexed to come to mind at the times when it is appropriate, called for, and helpful. An image begins to make itself useful in a more scientific, or a deliberately controlled way, if it can serve flexibly and not just fixedly in the act of reflecting on a present scene or a real situation. This means that it can make itself available as a suggestive hypothesis about a situation in general and can serve as a constructive critique of the ways to proceed from that point forward, but that it does not force itself on any particular situation, does not take the role of an active ingredient in the objective problem to be resolved, and does not elect itself as the primary constituent of that very predicament.
To be useful in critical reflection, an image has to remain transparently suggestive of the potentials that reside in a real and present situation. To continue its utility in a viable process of reflection, an image cannot allow itself to be so cast in stone that it blocks contemplation of all that demands attention in a real situation, and it cannot become so blindingly opaque in its own right that it obscures and occludes any concern that does not fit within its pre cut scene. In order to preserve its uses in feasible and viable conditions, an image cannot be allowed to coerce the satisfaction of its own application, as in the style of a self fulfilling prophecy or the spell binding picture of a prescience that predestines its own end, descriptively and prescriptively determining the form and the fact of its own fate.
In this connection, it is not just in story and fable that one finds the images of self fulfilling prophecies. The scientific picture of human behavior embodies an equal number of self satisfying limitations and self predicting reductions, analogous to the image of a person who is looking under the lamppost for something lost elsewhere simply because the light is better there, or the image of a person with no tool but a hammer who is determined by this utility to view everything as a nail.
These possibilities highlight and point up another source of perils that one risks in trying to craft a serviceable RIF. One of the main reasons for seeking a RIF is to make reflective and critical images of a chosen framework available within the scope of that very same framework itself. But the original aim of the framework, that orients its agent toward an objective reality, should not be lost in the process of adjoining these reflections on its own form. So the next predicament to be solved, once the inclusion of self images is provisionally made possible and after the license of self reference is tentatively permitted, is how to prevent the extended framework from being swamped by nothing but images of itself, with nothing on the order of an objective nature and nothing of the other that it originally sought.
The particular problematic I am trying to capture here seems to demand a symbol of a sufficient power, and this forces me to raid the reserves of archetype and mythology. So let me stake out this issue under the rubric of "Cerberus". It deserves this name for at least three reasons. First, there is the way that it blocks one's way to underlying sources of insight, the way it closes off one's access to a potential wealth of deeper understandings of oneself. Second, there is the irresistible challenge presented by external forms of resistance to one's own ideals, the instigation that this very resistance represents to one's own drives against it, and the incitement to collective effort and deliberate trials that it causes to mount, thereby harnessing one's motive instincts and promoting their expression in particular directions. Third, there is the snarling dogmatism that it betrays, of a kind that one encounters most acutely in one's dealings with one's counterparts in the community, but that one can tackle only within oneself, as if all along the doubts and the difficulties that the other comes to represent for oneself are merely the reflections, in the mirror afforded by the external world, of one's own internal opposition.
In practice, the obstructions that an effort of inquiry is bound to meet up with in the world outside its state of intention would not be able to knock it off its target if it were not for the opposing tensions that it maintains within its own intentional bearing. Sometimes, these take the form of intrinsic or inherent oppositions, but more often than not they are "introjected" obstacles, the sort that get themselves internalized at a particular point in time. This brings the mythological portion of this tale around to the figure of "Oedipus", portraying the predicament of an inquiry that deliberately blinds itself, not just for what it has seen, but for what it might continue to see.
Given the license to temporarily invoke such powerful cultural symbols, and since the issues they try to capture appear already bound together, I can organize the manifestations of this problematic under three heads:
1. The "negative onus" (NO) of inquiry.
2. The "affective mood" (AM) of inquiry.
3. The "existential subjective tone" (EST) of inquiry.
The pragmatic description of inquiry is notorious for the constellation of problematic and negative features that its account the matter points out. In practice, this complex of negative aspects recurrently presents itself as the most difficult to steadily face up to without flinching and the most troublesome to squarely address without blanching, blinking, or otherwise to break off the approach and even to abandon the question. By way of deriving the minimal service that the simplest name affords, I refer to this problematic aspect as the "negative onus" (NO) of inquiry.
The natural instinct of the mind brings it into frequent encounters with this NO, at least, its short term need for adventure and exploration is often brought up short by it. But there are other tendencies at work in the meantime, and independent dispositions can be found at play on each larger scale of the process of inquiry. For instance, there is evidently a concurrent tendency of the mind to run away from this NO, since its desire for security in the intermediate term is threatened by the practical consequences of affronting and so bearing the brunt of it. In any case, this is how the matter typically develops after the initial fascination with a surprising phenomenon or the original compulsion to resolve a problematic situation have faded, and this is usually sometime before a reasonable explanation or a suitable plan of action can appear. And so one finds that successful inquiries often require a second stage, or even more, that their incipient motivations are seldom enough to get them past the first signs of trouble, that it takes renewable resources of persistence to countenance the negative aspects of inquiry, and that it takes a higher order of dedication to keep from running away in the face of a genuine question's more troubling demeanor.
The NO of inquiry arises at a couple of distinct moments in its process. It arises naturally enough at the outset of inquiry, due to the negative, problematic, and troubling aspects of doubt and uncertainty. But again, no sooner does an inquiry get started in some hopeful direction than it runs into a host of distortions, diversions, obstacles, and resistances that act to impede its progress. Some of these obstructions can be seen as derivative expressions of the original uncertainty that occasioned a specific inquiry, but others go deeper than the issues that stem from a particular topic. Other obstacles, harder to address, have to do with a deficient motivation for a specific inquiry, a deficit in competence at inquiry in general, a constitutional incapacity to change beliefs once their status is fixed, or a lack of desire to make the necessary changes in belief and in conduct that are always at risk in an authentic inquiry. Still other obstacles abide at another order entirely, arising from the necessary properties and structures of inquiry itself.
The fact that the pragmatic POV recognizes uncertainty as the beginning of inquiry means that the dynamic start of its process and the rational foundation of its method are energetically and logically sundered from each other, if not forever split apart, then at least until the inquiry in question is itself resolved.
All attempts to found inquiry on positive intellectual powers and virtues, or to chart its progress through purely rational methods and principles, always come to grief and founder on the fact that one cannot squarely address the obstructions to inquiry without facing up to the negative, troubling, and unruly aspects of truly problematic uncertainties, nor without being willing to look at the affective investments that people have in their own pet notions and their favorite group's fondest ideas. It is neither possible nor necessary to deal with this problem, in its entirety, within the present context. However, it is both necessary and possible to articulate the ways that it impacts on the present concerns. In this regard, a measure of "affective investment" in a customary idea or interpretive conduct is the persistence of the custom or the strength of the habit that associates itself with that particular conduit of ideas. This translates the notion of "affective investment" into a concept with dynamic import, giving it an operational significance and a quantifiable meaning for the current approach to a "dynamic symbolics".
Depending on the accidents and the inevitabilities of their historical reception, the trains of consequences that accompany them, the general drift of intervening events, and the finer shade of the mood from which the totality of this sweep is reviewed, a retrospective LOR can take on all the character of any pure choice or any mixture of options from a whole spectrum of characters. Just by way of example, these can range from apology, casuistry, and attempts at exculpation or explanation by way of mitigating circumstances, through elegy, encomium, and eulogy, then all the way to lamentation, melancholy, panegyric, and requiem.
Is the lack of a mirror really lamented? And if it is literally so, then what is the source of remorseful affect that abides in this impression? From whence does the vast but vaporous plague of advisory injunctions, censorious restrictions, circumspect suspicions, consensual admonitions, delinquent proscriptions, imminent suspensions, monitory animadversions, mundane cautions, and tardy but truant afterthoughts arise, along with the vague but vampirous unease of something forgotten, lost, or forlorn? If one arrives at the point of asking in what sort of space does a POV reside, and what manner of a multitude does it share this manifold with, then the sense of this whole, collective, irksome host begins to appear.
One clue arises from the circumstance that the very purpose of affects, emotions, and motives is to change a POV, to alter a state of being or a position in space, to get through a fit of pique or a point of impasse, to break out of a fixed opinion in the labyrinth of purely intellectual and speculative convictions. And yet this presents nothing but problems for the effort to see the formal skeleton within the living body of inquiry.
Although emotion remains a pervasive factor in the informal realm, it is difficult to see, at least, at first, how its forces could be tramsmitted into and through the formal arena, even if, in spite of all appearances, there were found to be forms of good judgment that permitted it to try. The only hint of an answer that I can see at this point is the insight that is stored up in the very etymology of "form" itself, whose often forgotten connotation is literally "beauty".
The final consequence that I want to derive from these excerpts is their bearing on the differential relationships that exist between a conduct, as it distinguishes itself in action from an action, and the respective ends of this conduct and this action, all in all, which may amount to the very same object in the end. In particular, I want to point out a remarkable implication of this approach that I call the "paradox of conduct" (POC).
Considered as action, the end of life is death, but
considered as conduct, the end of life is life itself.
I am attempting no definition of life here, but merely noting one of its most exemplary and elegant formal properties. In game theoretic terms, if life is a game then its aimed for value is a robustly recursive goal. In generic terms, the pay off, intended target, or desired value of the whole game of life is just the whole game back again. In species terms, the aim of a form of life is to continue its life in the same form, or in what is recognizable to itself as being in its original spirit ("anima"). The content that abides in a form of life is not a satisfaction with the continual repetition of precisely the same state of being or the unending replication of perfectly identical copies of itself, as these by themselves are just different forms of death, but it takes an ability to recognize and regenerate the spirit within the letter, to promote the true content its own essential form, not merely to reproduce the shadow of its shape.
In this sense, and purely with regard to the topographies of their fields and courts of play, life is less like soccer, where the goals fall at the extreme ends of the field, than it is like tennis, where the net measure of its results lies in the midst of the ongoing play. Altogether, this makes life a system of organization that is topologically "open" at both ends, both with regard to its foundations, its "arche", and also with respect to its goals, its "telos".
To draw the conclusion: To say that death is the end of life, in the sense of a goal, is obviously going a bit too far. Death is merely the contingent end of life as form of action, not the intentional end of life as a form of conduct, and all the rest of the confusion is merely verbal equivocation around and about these two senses of an end. In the light of the distinction between action and conduct it is easy to see that death is just a bit beyond the true end of life.
In the same way as it is not sufficient, before beginning to rebuild the house in which one lives, only to pull it down and to provide material and architects, or oneself to try one's hand at architecture, and moreover, to have drawn the plan carefully, but one must also provide oneself with some other accommodation in which to be lodged conveniently while the work is going on, so, also, in order that I might not remain irresolute in my actions during the time that my reason would oblige me to be so in my judgements, and so that I would not cease to live from that time forward as happily as I could, I formed a provisional moral code which consisted of only three or four maxims, which I am willing to disclose.
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, [Des, 45]
The advisability of justifying one's actions as much as one can is clear, but the problems that arise in trying to do so are not trivial, ...
In view of these problems, it is necessary to examine the formation of the JE and to consider its import for the "justification of inquiry" (JOI). It is useful to begin with a traditional idea or a received sense of what a JOI must be. The default justification, that almost everyone seems to fall back on, even when deliberately trying to be critical and reflective, arises from the common notion of a "foundation" as something that forms a necessary prerequisite to all attempts at reasoning.
After giving a critical account of the standard model in the light of a few additional reflections, I review the question of what a real JOI must be like, at least, if it is to allow for inquiry into inquiry and to account for the other features of inquiry already observed. At last, I renew the quest for those JOI's that befit a pragmatic perspective and that can be found within its survey.
There is a standard sort of proposal to justify inquiry that attempts to place its foundations at the beginning of its process and that insists on making them out as certain. I think it is fitting to describe this as a variety of "fundamentalism". If this form of understanding is submitted to reflection, it begins to look inconsistent, or at least hypocritical, since it promises a distinct JOI, but one that it can just as easily tell, by the right reflection at the outset, is not forthcoming by these means. In essence, it claims to have a different sort of justification for itself than every other claim to one's allegiance, but a careful examination of its more finely printed disclaimers begins to turn up the evidence that this, too, is ultimately on a par with every other belief system, with the technical exception that it demands unquestioning faith at the level of a method rather than on the grounds of a doctrine. Even here, it leaves one wondering how to discern these levels in practice, or whether they can be distinguished in principle.
On this fundamental model of inquiry, any appearance of a passage from doubt to certainty has its authenticity placed in doubt, and begins to have its pretensions of creatively discovering new knowledge fall into question, looking more like the illusions of a derivative performance. Indeed, every semblance of a genuine inquiry is parasitic on the host of axioms and methods already taken for granted, and it creates no greater capital of knowledge than the fund of certainty already established in a prior method of inquiry. In effect, this prior method is taken on faith, since it begs to be imitated in a ritual fashion and to have its formulas, while invoked without question, to be invested with blind forms of trust.
In fine, the default manner of approaching the question of foundations makes inquiry into inquiry a moot question, an otiose endeavor that is neither possible to pursue in a bona fide way nor necessary to venture. Given the fundamentalist understanding of inquiry, the application of inquiry to itself can neither accomplish any real purpose nor achieve any goal that is actually at risk. The pretense of establishing the integrity of inquiry under a self application of its principles always results in something of a put up job, a kangaroo court, or a show trial.
Under these conditions, the proceedings that declaim themselves to be engaged in honest inquiry are nothing more than a hypocritical display. They imitate the exterior form of a due process, but their judgment is fixed in advance and their conclusion but extravagantly reconstructs a previously settled system of belief, one that is never really doubted or put in question. The outer inquiry in the self application is not a live inquiry but a "frame" that is prefabricated to isolate the object inquiry. Whether expertly or inertly, it is designed ahead of time to contain and to delimit a picture of inquiry that may or may not already be painted.
Notice that this is not a question of whether the original inquiry is genuine or not. The object inquiry, typically ignited by an external phenomenon, is commonly taken up in good faith, that is, with honest doubts at stake. But when there is never any doubt about what method to use, or about how to use it, or about the chances of its leading to a satisfactory end of the doubts inflamed in the first place, then there is never any need for inquiry into inquiry, and all show of it is vanity.
As a result, the fundamental JOI renders the hallowed method of inquiry just another doctrine among others, equal in its manner of justification, its final appeal, and its ultimate justice to every other belief system. But this is not the criticism that finally condemns it. Being just the same as other systems of belief is not the fatal flaw. That only makes all systems of belief equal under the law, if no longer a law of inquiry but a law of compromising positions and convenient resolutions. Still, there would not necessarily have been anything wrong with this, if it were not for the self imposed burden that inquiry brings down on itself via the dishonesty or the self deception of promising something else.
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would never be quiet,
For every pelting petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder, nothing but thunder.
Merciful heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle. But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep, who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
Measure for Measure: Isabella—2.2.113-126
It is probably wise to stress this point. It is not being claimed that an authority based system of belief, simply by building itself on traditional foundations, is necessarily hypocritical or inconsistent in its own right. It can be as accurate, authentic, and honest in what it says and tries to say as any other belief system or knowledge base. In fact, a modicum of reliance on one source of authority or another is not only prudent but most likely to be found inescapable. Authority based systems, in form so analogous to axiom systems, if not in the context of their use, simply have the specific properties and the generic limitations that they can be observed to have.
At this point, let authority based systems and axiom systems be lumped together into the same class, at least temporarily, on the basis of the forms of derivation that they allow, and without regard for the different ways that they are initially brought to light or subsequently put to use. Further, let this whole class be described as "founded systems", for the moment ignoring the distinction between informal and formal systems, or regarding all prospectively, in anticipation of their formalizations.
Every project of a founded system voluntarily risks certain limitations. But there is one limitation that appears to be a genuine defect from the standpoint of this inquiry, amounting to the chief source of worry that this inquiry has about the whole class of founded systems. This is the fact that whatever acuteness of reverence or accuracy of reference to their objects they do in fact achieve is a matter of grace or luck, and not something that can be subjected to change, criticism, or correction. This puts it outside the sphere of inquiry, as I understand it, even if its formulations are suggested by data within the sphere of experience.
In effect, there is no amplification of intelligence, no leverage of reason, in short, no instrumental gain or "mechanical advantage" to be acquired from the use of a founded system. It can transmit the force of reason, in a conservative way at best, from premisses to conclusions, but the effective output of the system achieves no greater level of certainty as it bears on any question than the level of authority it can grant itself on input or justly claim for itself at the outset. If I can continue to use the image of a lever, while delaying the examination of its exactness until a later point of this work, it is as if the lack of leverage in a founded system can be traced back to one of several defects:
1. The "fulcrum" of a founded system, the fixed point of its critique, is the "examen" of its critical powers, the tongue of its balance, and this has to be placed so evenly between the objective domain, whereof its ignorance is writ so large, and the fund of applied information, wherein its share of accumulated knowledge resides, that no gain in the effective intelligence of the actions thus founded can be derived.
2. A founded system is forced to be a "grounded system", that is, one that requires a moderately strong emplacement on grounds already settled and a preponderance of certainty on the side of the applied intelligence.
3. In effect, "founded or grounded" (FOG) systems require absolute certainty with respect to some of their points, the points on which they are said to rest. It is as if these fixed points put them in contact with an infinite source of knowledge or connect them to an infinite sink for uncertainties. Of course, a FOG system that casts itself as a beacon of enlightenment and sells itself under the label of "science" can never admit to seeing itself in this image, since the very act of making the claim explicit already puts its grant in jeopardy. But that is what it amounts to, nevertheless.
Another way to see the over constrained nature of these FOG conditions, for the certainty of foundations, is by expressing them in terms of the "boundary conditions" that a given system of belief is assumed to have. In this regard, it helps to make the following definition. An "open" system of belief is one that has each of its points "mediated" by the system itself, in other words, surrounded by, apprehended within, and evidentially or argumentatively justified by a neighborhood of similar points that falls entirely within the system in question.
When it is considered in the light of this definition of "openness", a FOG system is clearly seen to constitute a "non open" system of belief. In short, not all of its axioms, points, or tenets are "mediated" within the system itself, but have their motives, reasons, and supports lying in points ulterior to it. In hopes of serving both the understanding and the memory, let me try to express this situation in a couple of striking, if slightly ludicrous, metaphors, a pair of judicial, if not entirely judicious, figures of speech:
1. The "corpus delicti", the body of material evidence and substantial fact that is necessary to justify the institution of the system and the initiation of its every process, is always found to lie in such a disposition that it rests partially beyond the system in question.
2. The "habeas corpus", the body of probable causes and sufficient reasons that is tendered to justify the holding of certain points, is always deposed in such a demeanor that its true warrant either stays unwrit or is writ largely outside the system in question.
Whether it is verifiably jurisprudent or merely a fantastic simile, whether it is really a conspiracy of their natural bents or purely a coincidence of their accustomed distortions, the parody of a judicial process that one constantly sees being carried on in the name of this or that FOG system, and always apparently up to the limits of their several FOG boundaries, makes a mockery of the spirit of inquiry, and of all its pretensions to a critical reflection, since it places not only the first apprehension but the final justice of such a system beyond all question of executive examination, judicial review, and constitutional amendment. The whole matter is even more deceptive that it appears at first sight, precisely because a FOG system, as lit within, or according to its own lights, often takes on all the appearance of being open. But this is only because the boundaries of its viability and the outlines of the external obstacles that represent a threat to the illusions of its omni pervasiveness are actively being obscured by the limitations inherent in its unreflective nature.
This is just the kind of situation that one would expect in the purely deductive or demonstrative sections of science, for instance, in logics and mathematics of the "purer" and less "applied" sorts. In these more abstract traces and more refined extracts of a fully scientific method, the authority of the conclusions, or the level of certainty achieved on output, is no greater than the authority of the premisses, or the level of certainty possessed on input. Thus, the work of reasoning in such a case is purely "expliative", that is, wholly expository or explicational.
But a truly synthetic or "ampliative" analysis should be able to reduce a complex induction to simple inductions, meanwhile gaining a measure of certainty in the process, and all without losing the power to reconstruct the complex from the simple. The perceived gain of practical certainty that develops in this analysis can be explained in the following manner. A complex induction, prior to analysis, is likely to be a very uncertain induction, but is likely to have its certainty shored up if the analysis to simple inductions is successful.
This is a pretty sorry picture, especially in view of all the bright promises of enlightenment through inquiry that inquiry makes, to be a veritable system of belief for constituting systems of veritable belief. But the promise of inquiry to be better than all that, to be an advance over other systems of belief, not just another dogma in the management of uncertainty but a unique way of life, holds out hopes that are still tempting and that deserve to be pursued further. So it is time to ask: If not by means of these foundations, then what form of constitution can provide the sought for JOI?
Fortunately, there is another JOI, arising from the pragmatic critique of even the most enlightened fundamentalism. If the fundamental approach is viewed as a project to conjoin three positive features — "founding", "beginning", and "certain" — in single point of conceptual architecture, then the pragmatic critique of this plan can be understood as objecting that this point is overloaded. There are ways to preserve this triarchic association, but not without protracting other angles of approach to the juncture and not without compassing other senses of the terms than the meanings originally intended. It is perhaps easier just to abrogate one of the terms, either rescinding its constraint or trading it in for its logical negation.
The pragmatic approach to the foundations of inquiry, more precisely, its approach to the hoped for JOI, whether or not this leaves room in the end for a notion of secure foundations, suggests that reason does begin with unreason, but only in the sense that inquiry starts from a state of uncertainty. If one objects that this doubt is not radical, because many things in the meantime are never in fact doubted at all, then this is correct, but only in the sense that these things are not doubted because they are never even consciously questioned. If that sort of lack of doubt is the type one plans to found their reason on, then I think it is a very fond notion indeed.
There's a double meaning in that.
Much Ado About Nothing: Benedick—2.3.246
(Yes, there is a subtext. (There is always a subtext.) A reader who has access to the subtext, who can read it in the face of the pretext, and who remains both sensitive to and sensible about its connotations, is already beginning to suspect that what I intend to argue in the end is exactly that the chief justification of inquiry is nothing less and nothing more than the pure joy of it. But the moment that I depend on this subtext to carry the logical argument, to go beyond supporting the intuition and encouraging the effort of reasoning, is the moment that I utterly fail in my intention. This bears on the matter of a harmonious balance between rhetoric and logic, where the former appreciates and is bound to consider the affective and the impressionable nature of the interpreter, and takes into account the need for reason's ponderous beacon to be buoyed over the deep by incidental glosses and light exhortations.)
Self awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies. It enables us to take off our "glasses" and look at them as well as through them. It makes it possible for us to become aware of the social and psychic history of the programs that are in us and to enlarge the separation between stimulus and response.
Covey, Merrill, & Merrill, First Things First, [CMM, 59]
How is it possible for one to use an organization of thought in order to think about that same organization of thought, or indeed, about others? How is it possible to draw distinctions, even the most basic distinctions necessary to thought, in such a way that they can be redrawn and even withdrawn when necessary? In other words, what are the conditions for having a "critical reflection of inquiry" (CROI), a system of assumptions and methods that acts continuously and self correctively to constitute a critically reflective belief system? This would be tantamount to a POV where no assumption is forced to be taken for granted, even if at any given moment many assumptions are contingently being acted on just as if they were true. For instance, if a distinction between dynamic and symbolic systems, or aspects of systems, is a part of one's present POV, to what extent can one reflect on that fact, and thus be able to think about alternative POV's or to think about changing one's current POV?
This ends my preview of the kinds of issues that the pragmatic theory of sign relations and their reflective extensions is intended to comprehend.
In the sequel I propose a particular way of approaching these problems. I introduce a simplified model of the general situation to be addressed, but one with sufficient structure to embody analogous versions of many of the problems and phenomena of ultimate interest. By exploring the issues that develop in this miniature model, and by looking for ways of resolving them that work on this scale, I hope to gain insight into ways of dealing with the corresponding issues in the larger study of inquiry.
To be specific, I restrict my discussion at first to "propositional" or "sentential" models of POV's, and I examine a particular type of logical strategy that allows agents operating within this framework to describe the constitutions of a broad class of POV's. If this strategy turns out to be flexible enough, it can permit agents to reflect on the bases and the biases of their POV's and those of others, at least, to some degree.
This circumscription of expressions with a double meaning properly constitutes the hermeneutic field.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 13]
Even with its meaning duly circumscribed, "reflection" retains the dual senses of an " ionized" word, referring to both a process and a result. As such, it is already on its way to becoming a highly charged term in this investigation. Even though a complete analysis of inquiry, from the top to the bottom of its putative hierarchy, is yet to be made available, the tendency to invoke "reflection" at every step and stage of inquiry is already apparent. This is clear from the fragmentary and scattered, but steadily mounting evidence of the word's textual circumstances that is currently piling up at the level of inquiry's most primitive details.
In other words, the constant invocation of "reflection" as an auxiliary to inquiry is apparent from the elementary syntactic fact that the charge of "reflection" is found in the mission statements of so many processes that are already noted to be involved in inquiry. In this connection, any time one senses the need to add the adjective "reflective" to the title of an agent, process, or faculty, then it speaks to the suspicion that the simple carrying out of actions and the perfunctory execution of procedures is not enough for the sake of composing intelligent conduct, but that there is an obligation to adjoin a component of reflection to whatever else is going on.
The elliptic nature of the discussion in this subsection, touching on topics that must be left in the forms of questions, raising issues that cannot be answered or even fully addressed until later sections of this project, lighting on a range of promontories in a field of problematic icebergs, and glancing up against problems that stay largely submerged and keep barely connected only through a medium of chance associations constantly in flux — all of this makes it advisable for the writer to come up with a device for continually warning the reader of the text's approaching discontinuities.
In view of these requirements, the text proceeds by highlighting a number of thematic points that find themselves to be reinforced in prior stages of its own construction, not all of which stages survive erasure enough to be explicitly marked in the text, and all in all continuing to develop as if by a pattern of constructive and destructive interference. It is hoped that this can reveal significant aspects, however partial and confounded, of its subject, its medium, and the forms that shape them.
A few words need to be spent in advance on the status of these points. Most of them are no longer controversial from my current POV, indeed, they partially constitute that POV. However, I recognize that some of them are likely to be controversial from the perspective of other POV's. Thus, these points are not intended to be taken as self evident axioms, the kinds of logistical supports on the basis of which one customarily and confidently marches forward to the conquest of ever more powerful theorems. It is true that one of the best ways of testing these points is to take them up as premisses and to reason forward from them as far as one can. But the main reason for pointing them out in an explicit form of expression is so that their meanings, their logical implications, and their practical consequences can be examined in a circumspect light.
In short, none of the points to be staked out here is taken as evident or proven, and nothing of final certainty can be proved from them, but a demonstration can be made from them in the sense of an illustration, showing and testing their strength, trustworthiness, and utility for organizing an otherwise overwhelming complexity and depth of material. This process of examination and clarification, just as often as it has to reason forward, in the direction of the contingent theorems, also has to reason backward, to interrogate the mediately obvious principals and to ask whether more basic points can be discerned, as if lurking within the points already noted and secretly required to shore them up.
Out of this material I need to develop a method of inquiry, one that is extensible to its self application. As an adjunct, or in adjutant fashion, I need to develop a justification of this method that can lend support to the justification of inquiry in general, and in its turn help to justify the application of inquiry to itself. Accordingly, the prospective aim to be sighted through the series of points ahead, and the line of survey to be projected through the elliptic text that charts it, are directed toward an effective theory of sign relations, one that is capable of resolving some of the subtleties it discerns in discourse, on occasions when a resolution is what is called for.
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