12,080
edits
Changes
Directory:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 7 (view source)
Revision as of 17:00, 19 August 2011
, 17:00, 19 August 2011→7.2.2. Imperfect Design and Persistent Error: + text
====7.2.2. Imperfect Design and Persistent Error====
====7.2.2. Imperfect Design and Persistent Error====
Participation in an adequately adaptive sign relation affords interpreters with a singular brand of generative capacity for meeting the exigencies of life. An incrementally or recursively developed sign relation, so long as it continues to develop suitably, can provide agents and communities of interpretation with the living form of "sui generis" resource that is demanded to deal with unpredictable changes occurring in both their internal and external environments. In fact, one could well claim that this "je ne sais quantum" measure of utility is indispensable to all forms of intelligent action.
The use of signs in general allows discussion and thought to come into being, permitting agents to stand back in reflection on their objects and to take up a critically aesthetic distance from those pressing forms of engagement that an all too immediate involvement with their objectives can place on the powers of optimal decision. This freedom, this very play in the will, gives agents the tolerance for uncertainty that is essential to the process of inquiry. But even this tiniest bit of detachment, this very modicum of disengagement from the grinding gears of the world, comes at a price.
Philosophic recognition of the risks pertaining to the use of abstract symbols goes back as far as Plato's Socratic dialogues, in particular, to the "Sophist".
There are dangers incurred by the inveterate use of abstract symbols, and the good they do is oft interred with their runes. In this respect it is possible to recognize two distinct, but naturally related, kinds of trouble that can occur whenever the automatic functioning of generic symbols in an interpretive process deteriorates into the carelessly habitual use of meaningless tokens:
# From the outset there are the ordinary risks of interpretive error that go with the territory of symbolic understanding. No interpreter intrepid enough to take on symbols can avoid undertaking these risks, not while traversing a terrain so littered with fragmentary impressions and inhabitated by indications that are rendered deliberately insufficient to totally and finally determine interpretation. Difficulties of this type make of each symbol an obstacle, of course, but to a purpose. In this more superficial vein of literal obscurity, remarking on the obstinate character of a symbol is only another way of marking the obligatory complement to its implemental utility. The intentional obstruction to interpretation that goes into the formation of a genuinely useful symbol is hardly a matter that one plays at solely for the sake of pitting sheer obliqueness against pure opacity, but it is an enterprise that aims its approach exactly as it does and forms its object precisely as it does because it prizes the beneficial side effects of sharpening particular shapes of instrumental edge.
# With agents and communities that are capable of more complicated forms of interpretation, symbolic processing incurs a correspondingly more serious danger of going off track and falling into ineffectiveness. Besides the above types of intentional obstruction, there is also a more subtle and invidious brand of liability that is incumbent on the use of symbols. This arises from the power that symbols have to shift the gears of an interpretive process into reverse, as it were, leading discussion and thought in a retrograde or regressive direction and almost always as a consequence onto paths of ineffective diversion. That this is a reversion of the initial drive that goes into the very formation of symbols, no matter whether it is the natural constitution or the beneficial construction of symbols that is seen to be at stake. Somehow, in opposition to the normal regulation of the interpretive process as directed by genuinely beneficial symbols, the avowed direction of symbolic guides becomes subverted and they lead discursive thought down the garden path, back into the very manifold of chaotic sensory impressions from which genuinely useful symbols are intended to rescue the mind in the first place.
Both of these problems with symbolic functioning become aggravated when interpreters yield to the temptation of totally detaching symbols from their real life within sign relations.
Genuine abstractions are not rendered autonomous by disconnecting them from what they abstract from. Detached abstractions lose their elevated status as authentic generalizations, unless one wants to propose what I do not wish to, namely, to take the indications of prepositions for self fulfilling propositions and to count the void as something that categorical features can safely dangle over. But saving this chance of a synthetic a priori, and otherwise unsupported by ongoing experience, the processing of abstract labels expresses no substantial generality, but is just another peculiar form of conduct that the general run of sign bearing agencies can degenerate into. The condition that ensues is something that might be described as "idiosyntactic" behavior.
The only way I know of that interpretive agents and communities can put off devolving into idiosyntactic patterns of cultural degeneracy is by constantly maintaining a critical level of reflective capacity throughout the formation and growth of their interpretive frameworks. The problem is to allow for healthy forms of dependency on the use of abstract symbols without precipitating a precocious fall into the traps of disconnected abstraction. To subsist at this level of self awareness an IF must be steeped in such a pervasive dispensation of the critical disposition that reflective reasoning has become a habitual reflex.
The agents and communities that pursue inquiry must build a slight but non vanishing chance of wariness into every point of their fundamental IF, the one on which they originally found themselves and thereafter continue to find themselves contingent. Then, as a practically necessary consequence, this IF must keep the powers and responsibilities of critical reflection as deeply embedded and as widely distributed as possible throughout the entire medium of the form of life it intends to inculcate. This leaves a life unexamined no place to rest within the desired form of life and thus maintains an ironic suspension of reflexive examination at every turn. When this can be achieved, it keeps alive the habit of examining life as a form of life in its own right. If the entire medium of interpretation is thoroughly steeped in this critical disposition, it makes reflective conduct a constitutional part of the global IF and establishes it as a persistent style of participation on which the continued plausiblity of this very big IF remains contingent.
This makes the reflective critique a constitutional part of the very life of inquiry, keeping the ability to reflect on its own conduct as one form among others as deeply embedded and as widely distributed as possible throughout the medium of its IF, as if in suspension, and impregnating the medium of this living IF with the constant potential and the contingent power to examine its own form of conduct at every turn.
Inquiry, as a form of life, keeps a life examined active as a form of life in its own right and makes the means to examine life a constitutional part of its very form of life.
The worth of a good symbol, one that incorporates a genuinely useful abstraction, is that it lets the mind rise above the individual details of its formation, with all their potential for distraction, and yet all the while it remains connected with their general import and persistently maintains the power to recall some shadow of their particular vivacities back into the evidence of present awareness.
The occupational diseases of symbol spinners are easy to diagnose in the case of isolated individuals, but it is much trickier to detect the warp when whole communities or entire cultures, especially the ones that inform the fabric of one's own frame of reference, are drifting toward the trap of idiosyntactic abstraction or lumbering toward the brink of ethnocentric collapse.
====7.2.3. Propositional Reasoning About Relations====
====7.2.3. Propositional Reasoning About Relations====