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Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 (view source)
Revision as of 17:20, 31 July 2011
, 17:20, 31 July 2011→5.1.2.2. The Symbolic Object: + raw text
=====5.1.2.2. The Symbolic Object=====
=====5.1.2.2. The Symbolic Object=====
<pre>
I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing
Gaily in the sunny beam,
List'ning to the wild birds singing,
By a falling crystal stream;
Straight the sky grew black and daring,
Thro the woods the whirlwinds rave,
Trees with aged arms were warring
O'er the swelling, drumlie wave.
Robert Burns, I Dream'd I Lay, [CPW, 45]
To paraphrase, the present inquiry acts on the pretense that an inquiry can inquire into other inquiries, perhaps even those that are presently ongoing, and even inquire into itself, in sum, being entitled to inquire into the full genus of inquiry, Y, a class that includes y0 as a member. But these representations, under cross examination, lead to a number of unanswered questions, like: Just what is a "generic inquiry", anyway? Even more critically, their close and repeated examination leads to a host of "unquestioned answers", answers already accepted as adequate, but whose appearances as answers need to be questioned again.
The "formal posability" of a self application, for example, as expressed by the term "y.y", especially when the formal calculus that is called on to make sense of these applications is still merely prospective and still highly speculative, ought to arouse a lot of suspicion from the purely formal point of view. Indeed, I cannot justify this way of proceeding, beginning in the middle of things and without stopping to establish a well defined formal system ahead of time, except to say that something very like it is unavoidable in a large number of natural circumstances, and so one ought to find a way of getting used to it. A way of getting used to the natural situation of inquiry is one of the things that the present inquiry hopes to find.
If it appears that this allows the present inquiry an unlimited scope or an excessive freedom, it has to be remembered that a "formal posability" is barely enough of a formal subsistence to begin an inquiry, but rarely enough to finish it. It can be invaluable as the provisonal "grubstake" for a prospecting expedition, supplying the initial overhead it takes to "prime the pump" of subsequent exploration, but it is not sufficient to continue very far with an investigation. In essence, it is nothing more substantial than a grammatical allowance or a syntactic hypothesis, in effect, a poetic license, a verbal permission, or a written suggestion. Taking all of these cautions into account, it leaves the present inquiry motivated and justified by no more authority than their titles connote, and it obliges the precocity of what is written to be atoned for with all the critical benevolence of afterthought that can be mustered after the fact, to wit, through the diligent application of that turn of mind that allows one to write first and only later to think on the meaning.
Such was my life's deceitful morning,
Such the pleasures I enjoy'd!
But lang or noon, loud tempests storming,
A' my flowery bliss destroy'd.
Tho fickle Fortune has deceiv'd me
(She promis'd fair, and perform'd but ill),
Of monie a joy and hope bereav'd me,
I bear a heart shall support me still.
Robert Burns, I Dream'd I Lay, [CPW, 45]
The present inquiry acts on the purely formal suggestion that a generic inquiry can inquire into other inquiries, perhaps even those that remain ongoing, moreover, that a particular inquiry can even inquire into itself. Interpolating the appropriate symbols, the present inquiry, referring to itself as "y0", acts on the instance of a purely formal possibility, one that it expresses as a premiss in the formula "y0 = y.y", intending this to be interpreted to the effect that an inquiry can inquire into a class of inquiries that includes itself as a member, and this is a hypothesis that is based on little more authority than the fact of its expression a prospective formal language, in other words, one whose interpretation is still a largely prospective matter.
Stepping back and reflecting on the situation, one needs to ask how in general and how in particular does one fall so blithely into these forms and into these manners of representation. Once that process is better understood then it becomes possible to evaluate in a fairer way whether this direction of fall is tantamount to a happy accident of the natural intuition or whether it constellates a disastrous catastrophe that needs to be remedied through the application of a severer style of reasoning. Generally speaking, the point at which intellectual developments like these begin to take on an automatic character is when the intention is formed of devising a formal calculus, in the present case, a prospective calculus of "applications" or "appositions" of the form f.g, the terms of which are intended to be capable of referring to processes potentially as complex as inquiries. The project of an "appositional calculus" (AC) is what formalizes the intuitive possibility of an inquiry into inquiry and continues to suggest the formal possibility that any inquiry can be applied to itself, at least, any inquiry that can be symbolized in this calculus.
But not every form of words that can be formed within the permissions of a formal language does in fact point to a form of objective reality. Whether an inquiry into inquiry is a real possibility, how its possibility is to be actualized if it is indeed real in fact, and why it is necessary for an individual species of agents to bother with the actualization of this possibility — these are just some of the questions that demand to be addressed at this point, no matter how gingerly and how tentatively it is presently conceivable to respond to them, and they are just a few of the issues the distribution of whose partial solutions are found to occupy the greater body of this work.
</pre>
=====5.1.2.3. The Endeavor to Communicate=====
=====5.1.2.3. The Endeavor to Communicate=====