[Inquiry] Re: Blocks On The Road Of Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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BOTROI.  Discussion Note 4

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| An ism is but a prism ---
| With monochromaticism ...

BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: BOTROI 12.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2004-March/001885.html
Or: BOTROI 12.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-March/001298.html

JA: Was away in Chicago to see a special exhibit
    of Rembrandts, plus all my favorite Monets
    and Renoirs, and listen to some Prokofiev,
    so my brain is in a whole other universe
    right now, but I will try to remember
    what this was about.

In that other universe, psychologically speaking, JA wrote:

JA: So how can we sift out the theoretical potential, and I would even
    say the practical necessity, of using hypostatic abstractions, with
    all due examination of their warrants, from what I criticize as the
    methodological error of reifying categories, petrifying concepts,
    and sedimenting ideal types, as though cast in solid bedrock?

JA: The first difference I notice is this.  In the wise use
    of abstractions, whether prescisive or hypostatic, one
    tends to remain aware of their status as abstractions,
    and this involves an awareness of the concrete things
    from which the abstraction is formed.  In doing this,
    one cannot help but to realize that the conception
    captures only a tiny facet of the object reality.
    This leaves the mind free to step back and take
    another glance from another angle or distance.

JA: In contrast, the error of reifying concepts acts to
    overwrite the reality with the conceit of the image.
    A world ill-lost leaves one transfixed in the glare.

BM: Yes agreed Jon.  Yet I tend to think that this is just a
    kind of inner view, or may be quite a psychological view,
    on the more general subject-matter of BOTROI.

JA: Not sure.  I meant it as a statement about the proper use of abstractions,
    as I learned to use them in mathematics and mythology both, among others.
    It is a common tactic in trying to convey an idea of an ideal limit type
    (whether in Weber or in Weierstrass) to say things like "it's all this
    and none of that".  This naturally leads to "tomic" or "nodal" figures
    of speech, even though we are really talking about aspects or modes.
    Again, to me it's just a rookie mistake to read these figures in
    an essentialist vein, turning 3-adic into 3-tomic, for example.
    And I am not an anti-essentialist.  I am sure there are such
    things as essences, though I tend to call them invariants.
    It's just that these invariants are almost never read
    off the cuff of phenomena.  They have to be sifted.
    It is why ontology walks on math and phenom legs.
    I mused for a time in front of a statue of the
    "Celestial Worthy of the Primordial Beginning",
    one of the "Three Purities".  Is Literal Mind
    Zen Mind?  Perhaps.  I eschew nirvana for now.

BM: Hypostatic abstraction surely keeps awareness towards concrete things:
    it is itself a concrete act, a momentaneous suspension of the time fly.

Ha!  In amber, you say!?

BM: If this fact is considered as being of some value it is because
    a good method of thinking and searching requires taking together
    both concrete and abstract facets.

Yes.  And this is precisely the dialectic that is working itself out,
all across the formal sciences of the 1800's, in the Goethean series
of transformations from Galois through Klein and Lie, or from Boole
and De Morgan through Peirce.

BM: The next two questions are:
    how can this be done and why
    is it not more widespread?

Good questions.  I would venture that one of the
obstacles is the abject reductionism of the 1900's.
What is not so well grasped, perhaps, is that both
essentialism and nominalism are two sides of the
same reductionism.  Sic semper isms.

Jon Awbrey

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Save for later >>>~~~>>>

BM: I had no time enough to respond to your previous messages in this
    thread but I think that the whole subject turns around the concept
    of way of thinking or method.  Something which is called in French
    "tournure d'esprit".  The required way of thinking in order to let
    open the road of inquiry is the capacity of reasoning upon distinct
    aspects, one after/or the other while keeping alive in the foreground
    their relationships, and furthermore the capacity of examining such
    relationships themselves.

BM: May be this idea is some kind of reification of my personal experience
    with regards to Peirce.  I am convinced that I was already prepared to
    understand quite easily what he was inquiring into, and how he was doing
    this, because I was trained to think in a dialectical way for a long time.
    Dialectics is not a word that we often encounter under the pencil of Peirce.
    But I think  that he was always thinking this way in inquiry which makes him
    so paradoxical to most people.  So the objective idealist, the nominal realist,
    the philosophical scientist, ending into pragmaticism.

BM: The fact is that such a "tournure d'esprit" is very rare in the actual
    fields of science, with a noticeable exception for the systemic school.
    The reasons why this is so would require a whole history of human ideas.
    So I will let it aside.

BM: One aspect of it is the role of time and experience in the course
    of inquiry.  There is a time where we need to separate the sheep
    from the goats as CSP puts it (CP 5.37) but there is next a time
    where such distinctions in yes/no become insufficient, which CSP
    calls the accession to the quantitative stage of inquiry (CP 1.359)
    as opposed to the former qualitative one.  May be that it will appear
    to our successors that we were blocked into this former one.  One good
    subject on this is the commonly agreed clash between natural and social
    sciences.

BM: Ways of thinking, Roads of inquiry are time marked.  This is a real fact
    of the human condition.  Despite the prodigious growth of science in the
    two last centuries the quantitative stage seems mostly to await becoming.

BM: Put otherwise scientific men are seconds as all humans are,
    but they remain for now degenerate seconds in demand of
    thirdness.  As they are, they often put themselves the
    Blocks On their Roads.  As it is impossible for me
    to think that they can in some future golden age
    or paradise become authentic thirds, they will
    always put blocks.  But what is possible is
    trying to put less and less blocks and to
    put some of them out of the road.

BM: To conclude:  We need to make the question of Method the first class
    subject into our agenda, inquiring into and teaching it.  The things
    to which the Method can apply will come in surplus.

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