[Inquiry] Re: Introduction to Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

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INTRO.  Note 15

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2.1.  The Pragmatic Approach to Inquiry

This Division sketches the main features
of a canonical model of inquiry that will be
employed throughout the rest of this project.

The pragmatic model or theory of inquiry was extracted by Charles Sanders Peirce
from its raw materials in classical logic and refined in parallel with the early
development of symbolic logic to address problems about the nature of scientific
reasoning.  Borrowing a brace of concepts from Aristotle, Peirce examined three
fundamental modes of reasoning that play a role in inquiry, commonly known as
abductive, deductive, and inductive inference.

In rough terms, "abduction" is what we use to generate
a likely hypothesis or an initial diagnosis in response
to a phenomenon of interest or a problem of concern, while
"deduction" is used to clarify, to derive, and to explicate
the relevant consequences of the selected hypothesis, and
"induction" is used to test the sum of the predictions
against the sum of the data.

These three processes typically operate in a cyclic fashion,
systematically operating to reduce the uncertainties and the
difficulties that initiated the inquiry in question, and in
this way, to the extent that inquiry is successful, leading
to an increase in knowledge or in skills.

In the pragmatic way of thinking everything has a purpose, and the purpose of each
thing is the first thing we should try to note about it.  The purpose of inquiry
is to reduce doubt and lead to a state of belief, which a person in that state
will usually call "knowledge" or "certainty".  As they contribute to the end
of inquiry, we should appreciate that the three kinds of inference describe
a cycle that can be understood only as a whole, and none of the three makes
complete sense in isolation from the others.  For instance, the purpose of
abduction is to generate guesses of a kind that deduction can explicate
and that induction can evaluate.  This places a mild but meaningful
constraint on the production of hypotheses, since it is not just
any wild guess at explanation that submits itself to reason and
bows out when defeated in a match with reality.  In a similar
fashion, each of the other types of inference realizes its
purpose only in accord  with its proper role in the whole
cycle of inquiry.  No matter how much it may be necessary
to study these processes in abstraction from each other,
the integrity of inquiry places strong limitations on
the effective modularity of its principal components.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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