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

[Jon Awbrey]

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BOTROI.  Discussion Note 6

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BM = Bernard Morand

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.

I like this description.  It brings to mind this favorite line from Dewey:

| Reflection is turning a topic over in various aspects and in various lights
| so that nothing significant about it shall be overlooked -- almost as one might
| turn a stone over to see what its hidden side is like or what is covered by it.
|
| John Dewey, 'How We Think', p. 57

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.

Perhaps pragmatic thinking as a "method of reflection" would be Peirce's equivalent.

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.

There need to be -- and could be -- more bridges between
qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry.  Peirce
gave us this big bag of tools for building these bridges,
tools that could also be used to reconstruct metaphysics.
What I seen is mostly this:  People say, "Thanks for the
encouragement!", and then they run off, leaving the bag.

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.

Yes, my pet name for the question of method is the "inquiry into inquiry".

Jon Awbrey

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