[Inquiry] Re: Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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INT.  Note 17

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2.1.  The Pragmatic Approach to Inquiry (cont.)

In classical terminology, forms of judgment that require attention
to the context and the purpose of the judgment are said to involve
an element of "art", in a sense that is judged to distinguish them
from "science", and in their renderings as expressive judgments to
implicate arbiters in styles of rhetoric, as contrasted with logic.

In a figurative sense, this means that only deductive logic
can be reduced to an exact theoretical science, while the
practice of any empirical science will always remain to
some degree an art.  This has important implications
for any attempt to support inquiry with automated
or computable procedures, constraining both the
manner and the degree of their likely success.
Among the more obvious consequences of this
contingency, we may observe the following:

1.  Inquiry support software will need to be highly interactive,
    capable of being sensitive to the run-time conditions at
    at least two kinds of interfaces, those with its human
    users and those with the real world.

2.  The main effect of automation, at least, in the beginning,
    will be to speed up and to strengthen deductive reasoning.

3.  The chief assistance that computation can provide to induction
    is through measures of fit between the empirically gathered
    data sets and the theoretically conceived constructions.

4.  The limited guidance that formal and computable methods can bring
    to abduction, diagnosis, and hypothesis generation is restricted to
    checking the partly logical properties of consistency or feasibility,
    and defeasibility or falsifiability, and to speeding up the process
    of evaluation that pursues the initial pretense of a hypothesis.
    
5.  All of the above notwithstanding, on account of the circumstance that
    inquiry is an iterative cycle, improving the rate of performance at
    any critical bottleneck can serve to accelerate the entire process.

Jon Awbrey

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