12,080
edits
Changes
Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 (view source)
Revision as of 18:34, 29 July 2011
, 18:34, 29 July 2011→5.2.6. Approaches, Aspects, Exposures, Fronts: + raw text
====5.2.6. Approaches, Aspects, Exposures, Fronts====
====5.2.6. Approaches, Aspects, Exposures, Fronts====
<pre>
A large part of this project is devoted to the construction of various frameworks, as objects that are intended to satisfy a set of abstract requirements or partial specifications.
Over and above the specialized properties that go toward distinguishing the structural and the functional approaches from each other, and apart from the levels of detail that go to make up their particular instances, it is useful to consider the common form of activity that appears to be involved in both approaches, and thus to abstract the form of a "front". In general, a "front" is an abstract form of organization that appears to embody itself or manages to realize itself in a concrete mass of material activities, and thus to constellate a pattern of action in space and time. This explains how the image of a "front" is relevant to various ways of approaching an object, and thus it indicates the sense of the metaphor, as far as it goes. But when it comes to the kind of a "front" that finds itself configured in a particular way of approaching the construction of an intended object, then there are more specific features that remain to be described.
As a form of activity that possesses a definite direction and perhaps even a deliberate purpose, a front marks the initial organization of an otherwise confused mass of material actions and momentary transits into a moderately coherent movement toward a common end or a shared goal. When a front is regarded as a partial envisioning of its intended object, a prospective view of the possibilities that are being afforded for its construction, and a proximal approach to many critical questions about the object, for instance, whether and how an object that satisfies the intended description can be constructed, then this front is clearly seen to constitute a form of inquiry in its own right.
Regarded as a form of inquiry, a front arrays itself into a gradual succession of agencies, faculties, or processes. Broadly taken, these divide into two parts, which can be personified in the following terms:
1. The "van" exposes the generative ideas that come to the fore in shaping a front. In this role, the van is exposed to a host of material instances that it is forced to face with some ambivalence, since they afford not only a field of real opportunities for the advance of the front but also a range of obstructive challenges to its continued viability. The duty of agents in the van is to try to enunciate as clearly as possible the principles that determine the constitution of the front, the virtues of which ideas are in all likelihood responsible for inspiring their allegiance to this front. Actions that belong to the van, in regard to the ways that their logical arrangements, spatial placements, and temporal successions can be put in relationship to each other, are typically found to work best if they can (a) keep to the leading edge of the front, (b) stay as far as possible ahead of the game, (c) finish their part of the work before the main body of activities in the front gets going to cloud the issue, and (d) vest their results on the crest of the wave, where they are the easiest to find in a pinch.
2. The "ruck" collects the supporting activities of the front that (a) stand behind its gradual advance, (b) contribute to its incremental development, and (c) maintain the continuity of its automatic functions.
As forms of partial and proximal approach, the structural and functional fronts of inquiry, considered in connection with the trains of supporting activity that stand behind their gradual advance, and taken in light of the waves of successive investigation that are bound to follow in their causal wakes, are constitutionally required to interrogate each other's prerogatives and even prospectively to cover the selfsame jurisdiction. Of course, it is almost inevitable that the persistent advances of these independently principled inquiries will eventually run across each other, since they criss cross the same regions of concern over and over again. Over time, as these contrasting frontal systems come to meet and start to pass through each other, no matter whether they find themselves in one common accord or whether they are found at cross purposes to each other, no matter whether it is a mutual facilitation or a counterposed reluctance and resistance that their regimes of effrontery induce in one another, they are most likely determined to continue with their separate progressions until, sooner or later, they intersect each other at every point of interest under survey, and accordingly transect their common space in a way that yields a coordinate system for the RIF as a whole.
In the previous paragraph I tried to give a graphic description of how a coordinate system for an area of discussion can arise from conceptual considerations and develop through what are "principally" logical forms of analysis. If the whole development seems a bit obtuse in the beginning, and remains oblique until the very end, when it finally becomes obvious what is already transpiring, then that is just the way it often occurs. It frequently happens that one person, working at one time, presents a formally defined domain, as it appears from one point of view, and then another person, or the same person working at another time, presents a formally different domain, or one that appears from another perspective, and only a bit late does it occur to anyone that the underlying domains referred to are partially the same, or perhaps wholly coincident spaces of objects. Only then, as if an afterthought to this step of synthesis, does it become abundantly clear that inferences comprising a whole new level of implications can derive from the superimposition of the various analytic frameworks, that is, from the fact that these different kinds of properties apply to each and every object in the composite view.
</pre>
====5.2.7. Synthetic A Priori Truths====
====5.2.7. Synthetic A Priori Truths====