Stephen, list,
Peirce usually speaks of 'doubt' but I think one can and ought to speak
just as well of suspicion. An agnostic, for example, if not convinced of
the question's unanswerability, both doubts and suspects that God exists
or is real. The point is some sort of uncertainty or unsettledness on a
question upon whose resolution or settlement one would be disposed to
act. It's quite natural for inquiry to proceed from the unsettled to the
settled (settled at least for the time being). Doubt and suspicion imply
questioning, and, well, questioning is inquiry.
Then there is the question of whether inquiry also proceeds not just
from uncertainty, but from surprise, anomaly, novelty. Peirce also talks
about the explanatory effort as attempting to get from the
complex/complicated to the simple. As occasions of inquiry, to
bewilderment by the complex, and surprise by the anomalous, one could
add impatience and suspense about the indefinite future (what will be
the Milky Way's fate?) and frustration, hesitation, inagency, in the
face of what feasibly could be around the corner.
Best, Ben
On 6/30/2014 11:51 PM, Stephen C. Rose wrote:
It's late and I'm punched out watching the Yankees go down. Just to
say I approach this entirely from an experiential side with no sense
of what a mathematical theory of inquiry would be. I take inquire to
mean any question. If I wonder how I am, to take an example, we could
assume I was speaking from doubt but I could be asking the same
question to explain an unaccountable happiness or an encounter that
puzzles me. My question could have many nuances that would suggest
anything from whimsy to simple matter-of-factness. This all would seem
far removed from inquiry as an effort to operate within the context of
mathematics. So perhaps the differing contexts makes it hard to apply
what we sense or understand from Peirce in the same way.
*@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 11:06 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Thread:
JA:http://web.archive.org/web/20140630220000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13446
SR:http://web.archive.org/web/20140701002000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13447
JA:http://web.archive.org/web/20140701003000/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13448
SR:http://web.archive.org/web/20140701024001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/13449
Stephen, List,
Not a problem, we all must begin from the doubts we actually have,
and there a few things we have more doubts about than whether a
given description or theory of X is really a good description or
adequate theory of X, and that is every bit as true if X = inquiry
as anything else. Indeed, the whole point of an "inquiry into
inquiry" is just to find an adequate theory of inquiry.
What prompted me to open this particular can of worms —
Dispersion, Uncertainty, Doubt, Entropy — was the linkages that
potentially exist, at a very abstract logical and mathematical
level, between this complex of subjects and Peirce's hints about
the nature of the inquiry process.
Jon
Stephen C. Rose wrote:
I have no argument save my own guesses and my recollections of
reading
something that said to me that CSP thought as I suggested so I
will read
some more and see if anyone else chimes in. Cheers, S
*@stephencrose <https://twitter.com/stephencrose>*
--
academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
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