ONT Re: Inquiry Oriented Systems

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IOS.  Note 2

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3.2.10.  The Pragmatic Cosmos (cont.)

By way of making a first approach to examining the relationships
that exist among the forms of human aspiration that we exercise
in our normative practices and study in the normative sciences,
let me suggest that the study of states or things that satisfy
agents in some way is what we know most broadly as Aesthetics,
that the study of actions that lead agents toward these goals
or these goods is what we know most generally as Ethics, and
that the study of signs that indicate these actions, whether
positively or negatively, is just Logic.

Understood this way, logic involves the enumeration and the analysis of signs
with regard to their "truth", a property that makes the sense that it can only
in the light of the actions that are indicated and the objects that are desired.
In other words, logic evaluates signs with respect to the trustworthiness of the
actions that they indicate, and this means with respect to the utility that these
indications exhibit in a mediating relation to their objects.  As an appreciative
study, then, logic prizes the properties of signs that allow them to collect the
scattered actions of agents into coherent forms of conduct and that permit them
to indicate the general courses of conduct that are most likely to lead these
agents toward their established objects.

From this "pragmatic" point of view, logic is a special case of ethics,
one that is concerned with the conduct of signs, and ethics is a special
case of aesthetics, one that is interested in the good of actual conduct.

Another way to approach this perspective is to start at the "end", that is,
with the "good" of anything, and to work back through the maze of actions
and indications that lead up to it.  An action that leads to the good is
a good action, and this puts the questions of ethics among the questions
of aesthetics, as the questions that contemplate the goods of actions.
A sign that indicates a good action, that shows a good way to act, is
a good sign, and this puts the domain of logic squarely within the
domain of aesthetics.  Moreover, thinking is a sign process that
moves from signs to interpretant signs, and this makes thinking
a special kind of action.  In sum, the questions that logic
takes up in its critique of good signs and good thinking
are properly seen as special cases of aesthetic and
ethical considerations.

Jon Awbrey

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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