[Inquiry] Re: Inquiry Blockage Amplifiers

[Jon Awbrey]

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IBA.  Note 5

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| Motto Of Social Inquiry
|
| If you have to say a
| false thing to please
| a friend, what kind of
| friend is that?

Arisbe List, Inquiry List,

One of the aims of this inquiry is to understand the phenomena
that I have experienced and observed in online discussion fora,
as it concerns the ability of the participants to address what
most of the participants would agree are important goals, with
special focus on the facets of those ends that have to do with
inquiry, and the chances that any group as a whole can succeed
in bringing any inquiry to the requisite state of completeness.

Given all those annoying properties of the condition in which inquiry begins,
when it's genuine, that C.S. Peirce all but euphemized under the heading of
the "irritation of doubt", one of the most critical human factors will be
the "zone of comfort" (ZOC) that affects the individual human being who
finds him-or-herself, willy nilly, thrust into the midst of inquiry.
In my earliest days of thinking about a host of questions related
to these, I visualized a measure of this zone that I thought of
then as a "radius of consciousness" (ROC), the consideration
in the hay-daze of the 60's being how to expand the zone.
Well, thasa whole nother story, more giggly than googly,
but formally speaking the problem is very much the same.

On the former horn of the dilemmatic, we must respect everyone's particular ZOC.
On the latter horn of the apocalypso, its playn' "no growth sans growing pains".

One of the goods of society in the first place, then,
at least so far as what's good for what ails inquiry,
is that ZOC's overlap but not completely, ever a few
covering what others leave bare and thus cannot bear.

In accord with this consideration, we may then identify one of the features
of social arrangements that serve to facilitate inquiry, namely, the factor
that permits them to form a union of ZOC's, as opposed to the other extreme,
an intersection, to wit, the maximum available ZOC, and not the minimum ZOC.

Jon Awbrey

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