All Process, No Paradox

Post   : All Process, No Paradox : 1
URL    : http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2014/01/13/all-process-no-paradox-1/
Posted : January 13, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Author : Jon Awbrey

| This thing all things devours:
| Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
| Gnaws iron, bites steel;
| Grinds hard stones to meal;
| Slays king, ruins town,
| And beats high mountain down.
|
| Tolkien • The Hobbit

Talking about time is a waste of time.  Time is merely an abstraction from process
and what is needed are better languages and better pictures for describing process
in all its variety.  In the sciences the big breakthrough in describing process came
with the differential and integral calculus, that made it possible to shuttle between
between quantitative measures of state and quantitative measures of change.  But every
inquiry into a new phenomenon begins with the slimmest grasp of its qualitative features
and labors long and hard to reach as far as a tentative logical description.  What can
avail us in the mean time, still tuning up before the first measure, to reason about
change in qualitative terms?

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