[Inquiry] Actual, Existent, Real -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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AER.  Discussion Note 1

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JP = Jim Piat 

JP: I think I understood some if not all of your comments on the actual and the real.
    My impression is that you covered much the same ground as Peirce, and more or less
    reached similar conclusions, but for various reasons cut the terminological pie
    somewhat differently than Peirce.  I know this is at best a very superficial
    summary of your comments but before I press on I want to know if I have more
    or less understood you or missed the boat competely?

Hi Jim,

For many years before I wrote those passages I was under the blithe impression
that some aspects of Peirce's system were just so well understood and beyond
controversy that it would be possible to start applying and extending them
to clarify some problematic regions that had so far resisted the analyses
of dyadic and dichotomous methods.  I still think the overall impression
of servicability is on target, but I can see that there is a reluctance
to get on to the applications.  At any rate, I regard everything that
I wrote there to be more or less derivative of what Peirce set forth,
and I was merely trying to extend his insights by analogy to regions
of current interest to myself, for instance, designing software to
assist inquiry.  This involves considerations of data structures
and algorithms that Peirce almost precursorily appears to have
anticipated, but still there is much that must be fleshed out
in our contemporary medium.

One of the most important of Peirce's insights for the application to
inquiry driven information systems is his relativization of our concepts
and language to an interpretive agent's or interpretive community's current
state of knowledge about their world.  Working out a computational conceptual
framework in which it becomes practically feasible to organize a growing body
of information about the comprehensions and extensions of concepts that are
available to an agent or community over time -- that is one of the tasks
that I was in the process of addressing with those passages.

It's a work in progress, of course ...

Jon Awbrey

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