Directory talk:Jon Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry Driven Systems : Part 5 - Revision history

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	==5. Interlude : The Medium and Its Message==		==5. Interlude : The Medium and Its Message==

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	In principle, therefore, logic assumes a purely ancillary role in regard to the ethics of active conduct and the aesthetics of affective values. On balance, however, logic can achieve heights of abstraction, points of perspective, and summits of reflection that are otherwise unavailable to a mind embroiled in the tangle of its continuing actions and immersed in the flow of its current passions. By rising above this plain immersion in the dementias swept out by action and passion, logic can acquire the status of a handle, something an agent can use in its situation to avoid being swept along with the tide of affairs, something that keeps it from being swept up with all that the times press on it to sweep out of mind. By means of this instrument, logic affords the mind an ability to survey the passing scene in ways that it cannot hope to imagine while engaged in the engrossing business of keeping its gnosis to the grindstone, and so it becomes apt to adopt the attitude that it needs in order to become capable of reflecting on its very own actions, affects, and axioms.		In principle, therefore, logic assumes a purely ancillary role in regard to the ethics of active conduct and the aesthetics of affective values. On balance, however, logic can achieve heights of abstraction, points of perspective, and summits of reflection that are otherwise unavailable to a mind embroiled in the tangle of its continuing actions and immersed in the flow of its current passions. By rising above this plain immersion in the dementias swept out by action and passion, logic can acquire the status of a handle, something an agent can use in its situation to avoid being swept along with the tide of affairs, something that keeps it from being swept up with all that the times press on it to sweep out of mind. By means of this instrument, logic affords the mind an ability to survey the passing scene in ways that it cannot hope to imagine while engaged in the engrossing business of keeping its gnosis to the grindstone, and so it becomes apt to adopt the attitude that it needs in order to become capable of reflecting on its very own actions, affects, and axioms.
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		+	====5.2.11. Reflective Interpretive Frameworks====
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		+	=====5.2.11.1. Principals vs. Principals=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.2. The Initial Description of Inquiry=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.3. An Early Description of Interpretation=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.4. Descriptions of the Mind=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.5. Of Signs and the Mind=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.6. Questions of Justification=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.7. The Experience of Satisfaction=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.8. An Organizational Difficulty=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.9. Pragmatic Certainties=====
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		+	=====5.2.11.10. Problems and Methods=====

	===5.3. Reflection on Reflection===		===5.3. Reflection on Reflection===

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	Aesthetic slogans and practical maxims do not have to be consistent in all of the exact and universal ways that are required of logical principles, since their applications to each particular matter can be adjusted in a differential and a discriminating manner, taking into account the points of their pertinence, the qualities of their relevance, and the times of their salience. Nevertheless, the use of these heuristic principles can have a bearing on the practice of logic, especially when it comes to the forms of logical expression and argumentation that are available for use in a particular language, specialized calculus, or other formal system. Although one's initial formulations of logical reasoning, in the shapes that are seized on by fallible and finite creatures, can be as arbitrary and as idiosyntactic as particular persons and parochial paradigms are likely to make them, a dedicated and persistent application of these two heuristic rudiments, whether in team, in tandem, or in tournament with each other, is capable of leading in time to forms that subtilize and universalize, at the same time, the forms initially taken by thought.		Aesthetic slogans and practical maxims do not have to be consistent in all of the exact and universal ways that are required of logical principles, since their applications to each particular matter can be adjusted in a differential and a discriminating manner, taking into account the points of their pertinence, the qualities of their relevance, and the times of their salience. Nevertheless, the use of these heuristic principles can have a bearing on the practice of logic, especially when it comes to the forms of logical expression and argumentation that are available for use in a particular language, specialized calculus, or other formal system. Although one's initial formulations of logical reasoning, in the shapes that are seized on by fallible and finite creatures, can be as arbitrary and as idiosyntactic as particular persons and parochial paradigms are likely to make them, a dedicated and persistent application of these two heuristic rudiments, whether in team, in tandem, or in tournament with each other, is capable of leading in time to forms that subtilize and universalize, at the same time, the forms initially taken by thought.
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		+	====5.2.4. Either/Or : A Sense of Absence====
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		+	====5.2.5. Apparent, Occasional, and Practical Necessity====
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		+	====5.2.6. Approaches, Aspects, Exposures, Fronts====
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		+	====5.2.7. Synthetic A Priori Truths====

	====5.2.8. Priorisms of Normative Sciences====		====5.2.8. Priorisms of Normative Sciences====

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 What is one's conception of the practical consequences that result by necessity from a case where the "conception" of practical consequences that result by necessity from the truth of a conception constitutes an infinite process, that is, from a case where the conceptual process of generating these consequences is capable of exceeding any finite bound that one can conceive?
-<pre>
+It is may be helpful to append at this point a few additional comments that Peirce made with respect to the concept of reality in general.
-| And what do we mean by the real?  It is a conception
+{| align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="90%"
+|
-| (Peirce, CP 5.311, 1868).
+<p>And what do we mean by the real?  It is a conception which we must first have had when we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion;  that is,  when we first corrected ourselves.  Now the distinction for which alone this fact logically called, was between an ''ens'' relative to private inward determinations, to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ''ens'' such as would stand in the long run.  The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you.  Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.</p>
-| The real is that which is not whatever we
+{| align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="90%"
+|
-|(Peirce, CE 2:467, 1871).
+<p>The real is that which is not whatever we happen to think it, but is unaffected by what we may think of it.</p>
-| Thus we may define the real as that whose characters
-| are independent of what anybody may think them to be.
+{| align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="90%"
+|
-|(Peirce, CP 5.405, 1878).
+<p>Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.</p>
-Having read these exhibits into evidence, if not yet to the
+Having read these exhibits into evidence, if not yet to the point of self-evidence, and considered them to some degree for the individual lights they throw on the subject, let me now examine the relationships that can be found among them.
-These excerpts are significant not only for what they say, but for how
+These excerpts are significant not only for what they say, but for how they say it.  What they say, their matter, is crucial to the whole course the present inquiry.  How they say it, their manner, is itself the matter of numerous further discussions, a few of which, carried out by Peirce himself, are already included in the sample presented.
-Depending on the reader's POV, this sequence of excerpts can appear to
+Depending on the reader's POV, this sequence of excerpts can appear to reflect anything from a radical change and a serious correction of the underlying POV to a mere clarification and a natural development of it, all maintaining the very same spirit as the original expression of it.  Whatever the case, let these three groups of excerpts be recognized as forming three successive ''levels of reflection'' (LORs) on the series of POVs in question, regardless of whether one sees them as disconnected, as ostensibly related, or else as inherently the very same POV in spirit.
-From my own POV, that strives to share this spirit in some measure,
+From my own POV, that strives to share this spirit in some measure, it appears that the whole variety of statements, no matter what their dates of original composition, initial publication, or subsequent revision, only serve to illustrate different LOR's on what is essentially and practically a single and coherent POV, one that can be drawn on as a unified frame of reference and henceforward referred to as the ''pragmatic'' POV or as just plain ''pragmatism''.
-There is a case to be made for the ultimate inseparability of all of the issues
+There is a case to be made for the ultimate inseparability of all of the issues that are brought up in the foregoing sample of excerpts, but an interval of time and a tide of text are likely to come and go before there can be any sense of an end to the period of questioning, before all of the issues that these texts betide can begin to be settled, before there can be a due measure of conviction on what they charge inquiry with, and before the repercussions of the whole sequence of reflections they lead into can be brought to a point of closure.  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.
 ==Document History==

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 Let me just state what I think are the three main issues at stake in this passage, leaving a fuller consideration of their implications to a later stage of this work.
-.  Reflective agents, as a price for their extra powers of reflection, fall prey to a new class of errors and liabilities, any one of which might be diagnosed as a ''reflective illusion'' or a ''delusion of reflection'' (DOR).  There is one type of DOR that is especially easy for reflective agents to fall into, and they must constantly monitor its swings in order to guard the integrity of their reflective processes against the variety of false images that it admits and the diversity of misleading pathways that it leads onto.  This DOR turns on thinking that objects of a nature to be reflected on by an agent must have a nature that is identical to the nature of the agent that reflects on them.
+#<li value="1">Reflective agents, as a price for their extra powers of reflection, fall prey to a new class of errors and liabilities, any one of which might be diagnosed as a ''reflective illusion'' or a ''delusion of reflection'' (DOR).  There is one type of DOR that is especially easy for reflective agents to fall into, and they must constantly monitor its swings in order to guard the integrity of their reflective processes against the variety of false images that it admits and the diversity of misleading pathways that it leads onto.  This DOR turns on thinking that objects of a nature to be reflected on by an agent must have a nature that is identical to the nature of the agent that reflects on them.</li>
 An agent acts under many different kinds of constraints, whether by choice of method, compulsion of nature, or the mere chance of looking outward in a given direction and henceforth taking up a fixed outlook.  The fact that one is constrained to reason in a particular manner, whether one is predisposed to cognitive, computational, conceptual, or creative terms, and whether one is restrained to finitary, imaginary, rational, or transcendental expressions, does not mean that one is bound to consider only the sorts of objects that fall into the corresponding lot.  It only forces the issue of just how literally or figuratively one is able to grasp the matter in view.
@@ Line 482: / Line 482: @@
 To imagine that the nature of the object is bound to be the same as the nature of the sign, or to think that the law that determines the object's matter has to be the same as the rule that codifies the agent's manner, are tantamount to special cases of those reflective illusions whose form of diagnosis I just outlined.  For example, it is the delusion of a purely cognitive and rational psychology, on seeing the necessity of proceeding in a cognitive and rational manner, to imagine that its subject is also purely cognitive and rational, and to think that this abstraction of the matter has any kind of coherence when considered against the integrity of its object.
-.  The general rule of pragmatism to seek the difference that makes a difference has its corollaries in numerous principles of indifference.  Not every difference in the meantime makes a difference in the end.  That is, not every  difference of circumstance that momentarily impacts on the trajectory of a system nor every difference of eventuality that transiently develops within its course makes a difference in its ultimate result, and this is true no matter whether one considers the history of intertwined conduct and experience that belongs to a single agent or whether it pertains to a whole community of agents.  Furthermore, not every difference makes a difference of consequence with respect to every conception or purpose that seeks to include it under its "sum".  Finally, not every difference makes the same sort of difference with regard to each of the intellectual concepts or purported outcomes that it has a bearing on.
+#<li value="2">The general rule of pragmatism to seek the difference that makes a difference has its corollaries in numerous principles of indifference.  Not every difference in the meantime makes a difference in the end.  That is, not every  difference of circumstance that momentarily impacts on the trajectory of a system nor every difference of eventuality that transiently develops within its course makes a difference in its ultimate result, and this is true no matter whether one considers the history of intertwined conduct and experience that belongs to a single agent or whether it pertains to a whole community of agents.  Furthermore, not every difference makes a difference of consequence with respect to every conception or purpose that seeks to include it under its "sum".  Finally, not every difference makes the same sort of difference with regard to each of the intellectual concepts or purported outcomes that it has a bearing on.</li>
 To express the issue in a modern idiom, this is the question of whether a concept has a definition that is ''path-dependent'' or ''path-invariant'', that is, when the essence of that abstract conception is reduced to a construct that employs only operational terms.  It is because of this issue that most notions of much import, like mass, meaning, momentum, and number, are defined in terms of the appropriate equivalence classes and operationalized relative to their proper frames of reference.
-.  The persistent application of the pragmatic maxim, especially in mathematics, eventually brings it to bear on one rather ancient question.  The issue is over the reality of conceptual objects, including mathematical "objects" and Platonic "forms" or "ideas".  In this context, the adjective "real" means nothing other than "having properties", but the import of this "having" has to be grasped in the same moment of understanding that this old schematic of thought loads the verb "to have" with one of its strongest connotations, namely, that nothing has a property in the proper sense of the word unless it has that property in its own right, without regard to what anybody thinks about it.  In other words, to say that an object has a property is to say that it has that property independently, if not of necessity exclusively, of what anybody may think about the matter.  But what can it mean for one to say that a mathematical object is "real", that it has the properties that it has independently of what anybody thinks of it, when all that one has of this object are but signs of it, and when the only access that one has to this object is by means of thinking, a process of shuffling, sifting, and sorting through nothing more real or more ideal than signs in the mind?
+#<li value="3">The persistent application of the pragmatic maxim, especially in mathematics, eventually brings it to bear on one rather ancient question.  The issue is over the reality of conceptual objects, including mathematical "objects" and Platonic "forms" or "ideas".  In this context, the adjective "real" means nothing other than "having properties", but the import of this "having" has to be grasped in the same moment of understanding that this old schematic of thought loads the verb "to have" with one of its strongest connotations, namely, that nothing has a property in the proper sense of the word unless it has that property in its own right, without regard to what anybody thinks about it.  In other words, to say that an object has a property is to say that it has that property independently, if not of necessity exclusively, of what anybody may think about the matter.  But what can it mean for one to say that a mathematical object is "real", that it has the properties that it has independently of what anybody thinks of it, when all that one has of this object are but signs of it, and when the only access that one has to this object is by means of thinking, a process of shuffling, sifting, and sorting through nothing more real or more ideal than signs in the mind?</li>
 The acuteness of this question can be made clear if one pursues the accountability of the pragmatic maxim into higher orders of infinity.  Consider the number of "effects" that form the "whole" of a conception in PM<sub>1</sub>, or else the number of "consequences" that fall under the "sum" in PM<sub>2</sub>.  What happens when it is possible to conceive of an infinity of practical consequences as falling among the consequential effects or the effective consequences of an intellectual conception?  The point of this question is not to require that all of the items of practical bearing be surveyed in a single glance, that all of these effects and consequences be enumerated at once, but only that the cardinal number of conceivable practical bearings, or effects and consequences, be infinite.