[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 37

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1.2.3.  Architecture of Inquiry

The outlines of one important landmark can already be seen
from this station.  It is the architecture of inquiry, in
the style traced out by C.S. Peirce and John Dewey on the
foundations poured by Aristotle.  I envision being able
to characterize the simplest drifts of its dynamics in
terms of certain differential operators.

It is important to remember that knowledge is a different sort of
goal from the run-of-the-mill set-points that a system might have.
The typical goal is a state that a system has actually experienced
many times before, like normal body temperature for a human being.
But a particular state of knowledge that an intelligent system moves
toward may be a state it has never been through before.  The fundamental
equivocation on this point expressed in Plato's 'Meno', whether learning
is functionally equivalent to remembering, was discussed above.  In spite
of this quibble, it still seems necessary to regard states of knowledge
as a distinctive class.  The reasons for this may lie in the fact that
a useful definition of inquiry for human beings necessarily involves
a whole community of inquiry.

On account of this social character of inquiry, even those states of
knowledge which might be arrived at through accidental, gratuitous,
idiosyncratic, transcendental, or otherwise inexplicable means are
useless for most human purposes unless they can be communicated,
that is, reliably reproduced in the social system as a whole.
In order to do this it seems necessary as a practical matter,
whatever may have been the original process of construction,
that such states of knowledge be obtainable through the option
of a rational reconstruction.  Hence the familiar requirement of
proof for mathematical results, no matter how inspired their first
glimmerings.  Hence the discipline of programming that challenges
workers in AI to represent intelligent processes in terms of
computable functions, however differently intelligence
may have evolved in the frame of biological time.

Aristotle long ago pointed out that there can be no genuine science
of the purely idiosyncratic subject, no systematic knowledge of the
totally isolated event.  Science does not have as its domain all of
experience but only that fraction that is indefinitely repeatable.
Likewise on the negative branch, concerning the lack of knowledge
that occasions a problem, a state that does not recur does not
present a problem for a system.  This limitation of scientific
problems and scientific knowledge to recurrent phenomena yields
an important clue.  The placement of intelligence and knowledge
in analogy with system attributes like frequency and momentum
may turn out to be based on deeply common principles.

Jon Awbrey

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