Re: Inquiry Driven Systems

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3.2.  Reflective Inquiry.  Note 2

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3.2.1.  Integrity and Unity of Inquiry (concl.)

If one reflects, shares the opinion, or takes the point of view
on experimental grounds that inquiry begins with uncertainty,
then each question about the integrity and the unity of
inquiry can be given a sharper focus if it is re-posed
as a question about the integrity and the unity of
uncertainty, or of its positive counterpart,
information.

Accordingly, one is led to wonder next:  Is uncertainty one or many?
Is information one or many?  As before, each question raises two more:
one that inquires into the internal composition of its subject, or the
lack thereof, and one that inquires into the external diversity of its
subject, or the lack thereof.  This reflection, on the integrity and
the unity, or else the multiplicity, of uncertainty and information,
is the image of the earlier reflection, on the facts of sign use.
Once more, what appears in this reflection is so inconclusive
and so insubstantial that there is nothing else to do at
this point but to back away again from the mirror.

To rephrase the question more concretely:  Is uncertainty about
what is true or what is the case the general form that subsumes
every species of uncertainty, or is it possible that uncertainty
about what to do, what to feel, what to hope, and so on constitute
essentially different forms of inquiry among them?  The answers to
these questions have a practical bearing in determining how usefully
the presently established or any conceiovable theory of information
can serve as a formal tool in different types of inquiry.

Another way to express these questions is in terms of a distinction between
"form" and "matter".  The form is what all inquiries have in common, and the
question is whether it is anything beyond the bare triviality that they all
have to take place in some universe of inquiry or another.  The matter is
what concerns each particular inquiry, and the question is whether the
matter warps the form to a shape all its own, one that is peculiar
to this matter to such a degree that it is never interchangeable
with the forms that are proper to other modes of inquiry.

Jon Awbrey

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