[Inquiry] Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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PRO.  Note 38

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1.2.3.1.  Inquiry Driven Systems

One goal of this work is to develop a formalism that is adequate
to the description of "knowledge oriented inquiry driven systems"
in logical and differential terms, to be able to write down and to
run as simulations qualitative differential equations that describe
individual cases of systems that exhibit knowledge directed behavior,
systems that are capable of progressing toward the goals of knowledge.

A "knowledge oriented system" is one that maintains a knowledge base that
figures into its behavior in a double role, as a guide to action and as
the object of a system goal to increase the measure of its usefulness.

An "inquiry driven system" is one that develops its knowledge base in
response to the differences that occur between three aspects of state
that are projected or generated from its total state, components that
may be called:  expectations, intentions, and observations.

It is not clear at this point if there can be interesting classes of
inquiry driven systems that are purely deterministic in causal terms,
but a consideration of what such a system would be like might help to
clarify the limits of the notion.  In a certain sense a deterministic
inquiry driven system would fulfill a behaviorist dream, amounting to
to a scientific agent whose every action is predictable, right down to
the phenomena that it will encounter, hypotheses that it will entertain,
and experiments that it will perform as a consequence.  If it is granted
that the behaviorist programmes are tantamount to a restriction of sound
methodology to the level of finite state description, then less elaborate
characterizations of such systems are always available.  Proper hypotheses,
which are not just summaries of finite past experience but can refer to an
infinite collection of projected examples, are associated with complexities
in actual behavior that mount from the essentially context-free level on up.

One important use of a system's current knowledge base is to project
expectations of what is likely to be actualized in its experience, an
image of what state it envisions probable.  Another use of a system's
personal knowledge base is to preserve intentions during the execution
of series of actions, to keep a record of a current goal, a picture of
what it would desire to find actualized in its experience, an image of
what state it envisions desirable.  From these two uses of images two
kinds of differences crop up in the process of inquiry.  I describe
these two axes of discrepant tension as "surprises" and "problems".

Jon Awbrey

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