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Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 6 (view source)
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===6.2. A Candid Point of View===
===6.2. A Candid Point of View===
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This section discusses, in a general and informal way, the objectives inspiring and the requirements surrounding the elaboration of a RIF. This is approached, in part, by taking up the intuitive notions of a "point of view" (POV) and a "point of development" (POD), as they stake out, respectively, the intellectual repertoire and history of a typical agent of inquiry. Initially, these ideas serve in a familiar manner to characterize the intellectual skills and growth of agents, in particular, as they redound on the cultivation of the agents' reflective resources. Increasingly, these concepts are subjected to formalization, partly by analyzing their relations to each other and gradually by relating their inherent structures and referent involvements to the already formalized concepts of objective frameworks, genres, and motifs.
As I reflect on signs and texts, I am led to enumerate more and more phenomena associated with the process of interpretation and with the models of it that I find in sign relations. Some of the deepest and subtlest of these phenomena, at least, that I am able to observe and recount, take their theme from a certain "intermingling of categories" that is found at the basis of every real phenomenon. This issue comes to prominence and makes itself evident as topic of inquiry whenever one tries to organize the original chaos of phenomena through the imposition of a suitable scheme of categories.
What is the typical outcome of setting out such a scheme for nature? No sooner does one institute a provisional scheme of categories for organizing phenomena than one discovers every system with a stamp of reality to it steadfastly ignoring the lines of one's naive imagination. And yet it soon becomes clear that this seeming "perversity of nature" arises from an error of attribution on the part of the mind that casts the aspersion. Ultimately, it stems from the fact that every scheme of categories that the mind can forge and foist on nature, for instance, "sign" and "object", "self" and "other", remains, after all, the scene of a mere abstraction, implicating the "pallid" and the "shadowy" sides of the same dissention, but all the while circling about and turning on the complex but unitary reality that underlies the phenomenon in question.
In view of these complexities, that interfere with applying even the simplest of organizational paradigms to the material of signs and texts, it is necessary for me to pause a while and carefully contemplate how I can rehabilitate their use, at least, for the ends of this investigation. First, I examine the distinction between "sign" and "object". Then, I consider the duality between "self" and "other", or what amounts to the same thing, the relation between a "first person" and a "second person" POV. In each case, the task is to discover how a distinction that seems so easy to subvert can ultimately be developed into a useful instrument of analysis and articulation.
There's nought but care on ev'ry han',
In every hour that passes, O;
What signifies the life o man,
An 'twere na for the lasses, O.
Robert Burns, Green Grow the Rashes, O
Any object, anything grasped as a whole, can be a sign. Indeed, the entire life of a person or a people can serve as sign unto itself or others and take on a significance all its own. In converse fashion, every sign token is an object in the world. In this role, a sign is forced to obey the ruling and relevant natural laws and empowered to take on a dynamics all its own.
In the contention between signs and objects, the answer initially given by the pragmatic theory of signs is that anything can potentially serve in any role of a sign relation. In particular, the distinction between "sign" and "object" is a "pragmatic" distinction, a mark of use, not an "essential" distinction, a mark of substance. This is the right answer as far as the beginning of the question goes, where it is the possible character of everything that is at issue. The pragmatic approach makes it possible to begin an investigation that would otherwise be obstructed by a futile search for non existent essentials, as if it were necessary to divine them from prior considerations before any experience has been ventured and before a bit of empirical evidence has been collected.
Reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. Therefore conscience, which makes us love the one and hate the other, though it is independent of reason, cannot develop without it.
Rousseau, Emile
But the form of answer that is sufficient to begin a study is not the form of answer that is necessary to end it. Even though it is useful for a general theory of signs to provide a patently indifferent form of answer at the preliminary phases of its investigation, this style of response is ultimately judged to be facile when it comes to questions about the good of a sign, the end of an inquiry, or the suitability of each thing to the role it is assigned. In the end, an all purpose brand of conceptual scheme, allowing for the equipotential coverage of every conceivable option, however useful or necessary to the task, is likely to be found insufficient for wrapping up these goods and delivering them into the service of the mind. Thus, by the round about way of this objection, one brings to mind the other meaning, the underlying nuance and the ultimate sense, of the word "object", which suggests the end, the goal, or the good of something.
Questions about the good of something, and what must be done to get it, and what shows the way to do it, belong to the "normative sciences" of aesthetics, ethics, and logic, respectively. Aesthetic knowledge is a creature's most basic sense of what is good or bad for it, as signaled by the experiential features of pleasure or pain, respectively. Ethical knowledge deals with the courses of action and patterns of conduct that lead to these ends. Logical knowledge begins from the remoter signs of what actions are true and false to their ends, and derives the necessary consequences indicated by combinations of signs.
In pragmatic thought, the normative disciplines can be imagined as three concentric cylinders resting on their bases, increasing in height as they narrow, from aesthetics to ethics to logic, in that order. Considered with regard to the plane of their experiential bases, logic is subsumed by ethics, which is subsumed by aesthetics. And yet, in another sense, logic affords a perspective on ethics, while ethics affords a perspective on aesthetics.
That is about all I can say about normative considerations at this point. Further discussion is put off until this text has developed either the intuitive insight or the theoretical power to say something more definite.
Because a sign, so far as it can tell in the time it passes, addresses an unknown future interpretant, that is, an indefinite futurity of potential responses, there is always an aspect of dialogue about the sign relation, especially insofar as it is subject to extension. This is true no matter who, whether self or other, is ostensibly addressed by the sign or text at issue, and never mind what the chances are of a literal return in the communication. In this regard, it is recognizance enough for a sign to be issued or a text to be written in anticipation of its future result. And though it is never certain, it is always possible that the author of a text partially anticipates the use that others make of what is signed.
It is one of the rules of my system of general harmony, that the present is big with the future, and that he who sees all sees in that which is that which shall be.
G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy, paragraph 360
When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
"These are their reasons", "they are natural",
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
Julius Caesar: Casca—1.3.28-32
Indeed it is a strange disposed time;
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
Julius Caesar: Cicero—1.3.33-35
In order to recover the faculties supported by one's favorite categories and to maintain the proper use of their organizational schemes, it is incumbent on the part of the wary, conscientious, and duly circumspect schemer to recognize in every case how each part of the contention is implicated in the action of the other. In this connection, a triumvirate of closely related aspects of sign relations comes to the fore:
1. There is an aspect of "futurity", marking the openness of signs to interpretation and the extensibility of sign relations in multitudes of novel but meaningful ways. This dimension of regard is staked out in anticipation of the possibility that perfectly fitting but previously unsuspected interpretants can be discovered within or added to any given sign relation, whether passed or present.
2. There is a factor that contemporary theorists call "alterity", noting the quality of radical and reciprocal otherness that is involved in the dialogue of one self with another. Besides its invocation of the wholly other, this term subsumes all the ways that one being can be alien and unknown to itself, and it even suggests the host of alterations, errors, deviations, distortions, and transmutations that accompany all acts of record keeping and interpretation.
3. There is a feature that C.S. Peirce called "tuity", acknowledging the aspect of "thouness" or the prospect of a second person POV that is brought into play whenever one self addresses another. Along with the perspective of a genuine other, this recognizes all the referrals and deferrals that an interpretive agent can make to a past, present, or potential self.
All of these dimensions of concern focus on the circumstance that signs, especially written or recorded signs, moderate a complexly integrated sort of relationship between self and other, or between "first person" and "second person" POV's, in such a way that they render the paired categories of each scheme inextricably involved in one another.
There are well known dangers of paradox, but not so well acknowledged risks of distortion, that arise in the interrogation of any reflection. Although its outward signs are obvious, the source of the difficulty is remarkably difficult to trace. Perhaps it can be approached as follows. Without trying to say what consciousness is, I can still speak sensibly of its contents, and talk of their structures in relation to each other. These contents, whether percepts or concepts or whatever, are all signs. And so I can study the effects of reflection in the medium of its texts and develop a model of reflection as a process that evolves these texts.
What generally happens when one tries to model reflective consciousness and to formalize the reflective discourses that signify its public life? In reaching for the available languages of logic and set theory, one is likely to use them as reductively as possible on the first attempt, and thus to state the relation of anything to awareness directly in terms of membership, in sum, by means of a globally overarching dyadic relation. What does this picture of reflection pretend about the relation of the world to the mind, or conversely, the relation of awareness to anything? Although it confuses the relation of "content" to "consciousness" with the relation of "object" to "concept", this degree of play in the imagery is a forgivable, occasionally useful, and a probably inescapable analogy. In any case, it does not amount to the most serious distortion in the picture as a whole.
What is really wrong with the dyadic picture of reflection is the fact that it treats both of the relations it surveys, of minds to ideas and of ideas to things, on the model of a consummation and a containment, as if to place everything being related in an all embracing hierarchy and in opposition to all forms of reciprocal participation among its entities. This image renders a consciousness of contents and a concept of objects each in the likeness of a set and its elements, rather than presenting them as they most likely are, a relationship of systems or agents and of texts or signs to the ideals or objects that motivate them, constituting mutually embracing forms of participation in a unified textual activity. In all, the initial attempt at explaining reflection lays it out according to a conception that grasps it prey, and loses the creature in the process, rather than a conception that releases the potential of what it imprisons.
One of the reasons for bringing the pragmatic theory of signs to bear on this discussion is deal with just these problems, constellated by the need for reflection and made acute by the defects of the dyadic picture. By means of triadic sign relations, and given a capacity to create and modify the interpretant signs that fill out its original set of semantic equivalence classes, an interpretive agent has the "elbow room" needed to stand aside from the ongoing process of interpretation, to reflect on its present determinants, and to consider its possible developments.
An inquiry that cannot clearly and completely comprehend itself as an object can at least inquire into the succession of signs that record its progress. The writer of a text can use that text to describe, at least partially, the process of writing and using it so. The reader of a text can understand that text to describe, at least partially, the process of reading and understanding it so. Further, a discussion can generate a record that describes, more than just the transient proceedings of that discussion, the principles and parameters that determine its creation. In each of these ways, a text can address the qualities that determine its intended character, comment on the context in which it takes a part, and act on behalf of its pretended objectives.
The procedural distinction just recognized, between the passing traces of a process and the permanent determinants of its generic character, informs a significant issue, on which is staked nothing less than the empirical feasibility of an inquiry into inquiry. From this point on, a certain figure of speech can be used to mark this distinction, when it is relevant to the course of discussion, and to signal a deliberate turn in the direction of consideration, when the corresponding exchange of its dialectical roles is intended. According to the nuances of this paradigm, one can distinguish a process intended in the "substantive generative" sense from a process intended in the "genitive gerundive" sense, and address oneself selectively, at turns, to the "process that achieves" versus the "process of achieving" any contemplated activity or result.
An inquiry at such a point of development that it cannot entirely grasp its ongoing process of inquiry as an object of thought, namely, as the "process that inquires", can at least try to capture a representative sample of the signs that record its "process of inquiring". Speaking metaphorically and with the proper apology, every thus generated and thus collected "text of inquiry" (TOI) can be addressed as a partial reflection of the generative process of inquiry. Moreover, it is not irredeemably illegitimate to say that a TOI can partly describe itself, since this merely personifies the circumstance that a process of inquiry can describe itself partly in the form of a TOI.
O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible
As a nose on a man's face or a weathercock on a
steeple.
My master sues to her, and she hath taught her suitor,
He being her pupil, to become her tutor.
O excellent device! Was there ever heard a better?—
That my master, being scribe, to himself should write
the letter.
Two Gentlemen of Verona: Speed—2.1.127-132
When I write out my thinking in the form of a text, a critical thing happens: It faces me as the thought of another, and I start to think of what it says as though another person had said it. Almost unwittingly, a critical process comes into play. In regarding the text as expressing the thought of another, I begin to see it from different POV's than the one that led to its writing. As I find my own inquiry reflected in one or another TOI, it addresses me afresh as the question of another and I encounter it again as a novel line of investigation. This time around, though, the topic of concern and the style of expression become subject to directions of criticism that would probably not occur to me otherwise, since the angles of attack permitting them do not open up on their own, neither on first thinking nor ever, most likely, while merely speaking. This can be the beginning of critical reflection, but it can also stir up destructive forms of interference that inhibit and obstruct the very flow of thought itself.
If I can be granted the license to continue saying that a text says this or that about itself when what I really mean is that a person or process employs its text to say the corresponding thing about itself or its text, then I can begin to introduce a variety of descriptive terms and logical tools into this text that can be used to talk about what this or another TOI "thinks" or "believes" at various points in its development, that is, in order to detail what I or its proper author thinks or believes at the corresponding points of discussion.
Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;
What magic myst'ries in that number lie!
Your hen hath fourteen eggs beneath her wings
That fourteen chickens to the roost may fly.
Fourteen full pounds the jockey's stone must be;
His age fourteen a horse's prime is past.
Fourteen long hours too oft the Bard must fast;
Fourteen bright bumpers bliss he ne'er must see!
Before fourteen, a dozen yields the strife;
Before fourteen e'en thirteen's strength is vain.
Fourteen good years a woman gives us life;
Fourteen good men we lose that life again.
What lucubrations can be more upon it?
Fourteen good measur'd verses make a sonnet.
Robert Burns, A Sonnet Upon Sonnets
One of the main problems that the present TOI has to address is how a TOI can address the problems of self reference that an inquiry into inquiry involves. If a sonnet can say something true about sonnets, then a TOI, far less limited in the number and measure of its lines, ought to be able to say something true about TOI's in general, unless the removal of these limitations takes away the only things whereof and whereby it has to speak, the ends and means of its own form of speech.
Using the pragmatic theory of signs, the forms of self reference that have to be addressed in this project can be divided into two kinds, or classified in accord with two dimensions of referential involvement. Roughly speaking, reference in the broader sense can suggest either a denotative reference to an object or a connotative reference to a sense. Therefore, a projected self reference can be classified according to the ways that its components of reference propose to recur on themselves: how much pretends to be a self description along denotative lines and how much purports to be a self address in the connotative direction.
Under suitably liberalized conditions of interpretation, then, what is meant by "a self referent text", whether one that denotatively describes or connotatively addresses itself? Apparently, it can mean a text that addresses, describes, refers to, or speaks to either one of two issues: (1) the outwardly passing features of its own succession of signs, or (2) the inwardly relied on properties of its own regenerative sources.
It is one thing for a text to be generated according to the laws laid down in another. This takes place, for example, in devising or following a proof according to the axioms and rules of inference that are recorded in a proof system. It is another thing entirely for a text or a corpus of texts to derive or induce the very principles of their own generation and then return to disclose the process of derivation or induction itself according to which the whole text or corpus is divined or drafted.
What the discussion of reflection has so far been leading up to, if I stop to reflect on what might be the implicit project behind its scheme of development, is tantamount to a "monadology", a project of a complete and total provision for a system of perfect but virtual self reflections. But I suspect that such a project is unsupportable in reality outside the realm of infinite resources and pre established harmonies, while my present aim is to see what can be done with finite and empirical means. A monadology, if it entertains itself with any form of investigation at all, addresses the task as a sheer masquerade, styling its inquiry after the fashion of a "complete logical analysis" (CLA).
On principle, there is nothing inherently the matter with the form of the CLA itself, but it does not embody all by itself the spirit of suspense that accompanies a genuine human inquiry. A real inquiry cannot know before it starts what the answer is and how the end will be achieved, and it cannot, if it wishes, merely trick out the foils of an already completed and pre arranged survey, parading them as a passing series of plotted and transient complications in the guise of an honest quest. Some types of completeness are far more complete than others, however. Taken with respect to a properly limited and workably modest context, and treated as "relatively complete" rather than "absolutely complete", the ideal substrate of the CLA forms a suitably plastic material for modeling many forms of concretely reasonable inquiry.
Invoked with a spirit of moderation, the idealized model envisioned in the CLA can nevertheless serve as virtual guide for practical inquiries, highlighting the space of conceivable models and projecting a standard against which to measure every approximate, likely, and partial result. An inquiry of this self controlled kind, that considers in addition the logical alternative to every hypothesis it finds itself making, if it is addressed appropriately to the conditions of its constraining resources, can achieve complete success only within a tightly circumscribed sphere of action. Thus, the ideal of CLA informs a workable genre of inquiry, but the experimental variations that it enables and permits an agent to contemplate are bound up with the experiences that can be expressed in a language of finite and discrete signs, and exactly to the extent that they are in fact expressible.
In principle and in effect, an inquiry pushing the envelope of CLA is restricted to a "universe of limited marks". For all practical purposes, it must keep its remarks to a finite universe of discourse, and a small one at that. Beyond these bounds, every inquiry is forced to take its chances on a pure hypothesis, unmitigated by any consideration of the opposite case. Communities of inquiry, however, are likely to embody a distribution of individual inquiries that have placed their bets on opposing options. Diversity of interpretation leads to disjunctions of opinion that can render many heads much smarter than one, but it also engenders forms of disagreement, discord, and duplicity that, for all their practical inevitability, are not essentially necessary.
Engaging in practical inquiry in a community of partially informed and presumptively constrained reasoners, then, is a task that leads to the recognition of several critical needs, not only for ways of synthesizing fragmentary interpretations of the presumptive truth and for reconciling divergent accounts of the objective world, but also for strategies that make these methods of negotiating differences and resolving conflicts more commonly available to all the inquirers in a putative community. Finally, an agent attempting to be reasonable under these conditions needs to be permitted to exercise a number of "editorial" prerogatives. For example, there needs to be a way to "retract projections", that is, to recognize the alienated aspects of oneself that appear to crop up in others and to reconsider the rejected options for thought and action that nevertheless are capable of leading to bona fide values.
In a striking analogy with visual perception, it is the reflections in the ambient flow of energy that make it possible for one complication in the medium, a living being, to see another variation in the density of the medium, animate or otherwise, as an object. Reflection permits one to render an experience as due to a separate entity, to regard its occasion as the appearance of an object, and to respond to its cause as a reality. The analogy is broken at the junctures where an agent attributes these reflections to the passive "reflectances" of the object itself rather than perceiving them as the active responsibility of every participant in the process as a whole.
In accord with this visual analogy, two factors frustrate the prospects of indefinitely extending and smoothly finishing any project of inquiry that works in a medium of CLA:
1. The "transparent obstruction" (TO), or "obstacle of transparency", is due to an initial inability to discover and to render visible every assumption, category, or distinction that one automatically and implicitly acts according to.
2. The "opaque obstruction" (OO), whether it presents itself in the guise of an obvious or an obscure obstacle, arises on account of a final incapacity to consider both sides of every question posed. This can amount to either one of two shortcomings: (1) failing to identify a logical alternative to every presumption or thesis that one identifies with, or (2) failing to evaluate a logical alternative to every assumption or hypothesis that one does in fact identify.
In short, a "finite information creature" (FIC) is required to keep the contents of its forms within the range of a definite set of figures and to rest the forms of its contents within the scope of a certain cast of characters. To be sure, these are precisely the characters that can be modeled and the figures that can be cut within a circumscribed theater of operations that everyone calls a "partial logical analysis" (PLA).
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===6.3. A Projective Point of View===
===6.3. A Projective Point of View===