[Inquiry] Re: Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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INT.  Note 11

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1.5.  Inquiry Driven Systems (concl.)

An inquiry driven system, in the simplest cases worth talking about,
requires at least three different modalities of knowledge component,
referred to as "expectations", "intentions", and "observations" of
the system.  Each of these components has the status of a theory,
that is, a propositional code that the agent of the system carries
along and maintains with itself through all of its changes of state,
possibly updating it as the need arises in experience.  However, all
of these theories have reference to a common world, and they indicate
under their varying lights more or less overlapping regions in the
state space of the system, or in some derivative or extension of
the basic state space.

The inquiry process is driven by the nature, the degree, and the extent
of the differences that exist at any time among its operative theories,
for example, the differences among the expectations, the intentions, and
the observations of the inquiry agent or the relevant community of inquiry.
These discrepancies are evidenced by differences in the assemblies of models,
empirical or theoretical, that are held to satisfy the respective theories.
Normally, human beings experience a high level of disparity among these
theories as a dissatisfying situation, a condition of cognitive discord.
For people, the incongruity of cognitive elements is accompanied by an
unsettled affective state, in Peirce's phrase, the "irritation of doubt".
A person in this situation is usually motivated to reduce the annoying
disturbance by some action, all of which activities we may classify
under the heading of inquiry processes.

Without insisting on strict determinism, we may say that the inquiry process is
lawful if there is any kind of informative relationship connecting the state of
cognitive discord at each time with the ensuing state transitions of the system.
Expressed in human terms, a difference between expectations and observations is
experienced as a surprise to be explained, a difference between intentions and
observations is experienced as a problem to be solved.  We begin to understand
a particular example of inquiry when we can describe the relation between the
momentary intellectual state of its agent and the subsequent action that the
agent undertakes.

These simple facts, the features of inquiry outlined above, already raise
a number of issues, some of which are open problems that my research will
have to address.  Given the goal of constructing supports for inquiry on
the grounds of systems theory, each of these difficulties is an obstacle
to progress in the chosen direction, to understanding the capacity for
inquiry as a systems property.

Jon Awbrey

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