[Arisbe] Reflective Interpretive Frameworks (RIF's)

[Jon Awbrey]

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| Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
| Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.
|
| The world's unwithered countenance
| Is bright as on the earliest day.
|
| Goethe, 'Faust',
| Quoted in Weyl, 'The Open World', (Weyl, 29)

The straightforward way of Aristotle is a turn that I can admire,
but not quite achieve;  he writes it straight out:  soul is form.

| Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
|
| No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
| But by reflection, by some other things.
|
| 'Tis just;
| And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
| That you have no such mirrors as will turn
| Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
| That you might see your shadow.  ...
|
| Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
| That you would have me seek into myself
| For that which is not in me?
|
| Therefor, good Brutus, be prepared to hear.
| And since you know you cannot see yourself
| So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
| Will modestly discover to yourself
| That of yourself which you yet know not of.
|
| William Shakespeare, 'Julius Caesar', 1.2.53-72

The rest of this section, continuing the discussion of formalization
in terms of concrete examples and extending over the next 50 subsections,
details the construction of a "reflective interpretive framework" (RIF).
This is a special type of sign-theoretic setting, illustrated in the
present case as based on the sign relations A and B, but intended
more generally to constitute a fully developed environment of
objective and interpretive resources, in the likes of which
an "inquiry into inquiry" can reasonably be expected to
find its home.

An inquiry into inquiry necessarily involves itself in various forms of self-application
and self-reference.  Even when the "inquiree" and the "inquirer", the operand inquiry and
the operant inquiry, are conceived to be separately instituted and disjointly embodied in
material activity, they still must share a common form and enjoy a collection of definitive
characteristics, or else the use of a common term for both sides of the application is
equivocal and hardly justified.  But this depiction of an inquiry into inquiry, if it
is imagined to be valid, raises a couple of difficult issues, of how a form of activity
like inquiry can be said to apply and to refer to itself, and of how a general form of
activity can be materialized in concretely different processes, that is, represented
in the parametrically diverse instantiations of its own generic principles.  Before
these problems can be clarified to any degree it is necessary to develop a suitable
framework of discussion, along with a requisite array of conceptual tools.  This is
where the construction of a RIF comes in.

| And now the investigation itself is under investigation.
|
| President Clinton, August 17, 1998

The task of building a RIF is here approached on two fronts, structural and functional.
The structural approach looks to the formal constitution of the framework itself, with
an eye to the static logical relationships that potentially exist among its objective
and its interpretive elements, that is, the abstract relations that can be permitted
through the medium of its use to be brought to light, to be recognized on future
occasions, and to be signified to a community of observant and interpretive agents.
The functional approach looks to the dynamic and effective conduct of a typical
reflective interpreter, with an eye to the medium of operational resources that
support its activity, and it seeks to discover amid this defrayal the workings
of the act of reflection that makes it all possible.

| I was, at that time, in Germany, whither the wars, which have not yet finished there,
| had called me, and as I was returning from the coronation of the Emperor to join the army,
| the onset of winter held me up in quarters in which, finding no company to distract me, and
| having, fortunately, no cares or passions to disturb me, I spent the whole day shut up in a
| room heated by an enclosed stove, where I had complete leisure to meditate on my own thoughts.
|
| Rene Descartes, 'Discourse on Method', (Des1, 35)

On the manifest I can see the ostenciled mark --
a reputed distinction?  a travel destination? --
let us inspect the credential of the customed
stamp, collected at the border: "Ego-Non-Ego".

| A child hears it said that the stove is hot.  But it is not, he says;  and, indeed,
| that central body is not touching it, and only what that touches is hot or cold.
| But he touches it, and finds the testimony confirmed in a striking way.  Thus,
| he becomes aware of ignorance, and it is necessary to suppose a self in which
| this ignorance can inhere.  ...
|
| In short, error appears, and it can be explained only by supposing a self
| which is fallible.
|
| Ignorance and error are all that distinguish our private selves
| from the absolute ego of pure apperception.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', (CP 5.233-235)

Peirce makes the point that one's first awareness of a personal existence arises in reaction to
the brute impact of experience and is ultimately compounded by way of reflection on its imports.
Taking this to echo the exchange between Brutus and Cassius, I have the points that I need to
stake out and to sound out a significant portion of the RIF that I intend to discuss.

Jon Awbrey

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