[Inquiry] Re: Purpose Of Scientific Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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POSI.  Discussion Note 2

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JW = John Warfield

Re: POSI-DIS 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/003232.html
In: POSI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-November/thread.html#3232

JW: It was Willard Gibbs' view that the purpose to be attached to scientific inquiry
    was to find that point of view from which the subject could be understood in its
    greatest simplicity.  That is not of course the same as "simplistic".  But the
    way I interpret this is that when someone starts to construct models of some
    piece of the world or of the world itself, it is a good thing right away to
    begin to imagine as many isomorphs of whatever seems to be a way of modeling
    as possible with a constant eye out as to what particular isomorph might serve
    whatever sub-purpose and, in particular, the presentation of the subject in its
    greatest simplicity.  It's my view that one may interpret the latter always as
    lying outside the scope of the generating discipline because ultimately the
    merit of whatever is discovered ought to be in terms of its utility for
    humanity in general and not for a self-sealing discipline.

JW: I realize that this is a sort of a selfish point of view.

JW: Anyway in looking at George J. Friedman's constraint theory where he uses
    bipartite graphs to show that variables are connected through relationships,
    and is able to find a very wide variety of structural features enabling
    consistency to be determined by the structural features alone without
    resorting to the details of the relationships, I have urged him many
    times to consider the concept of tying the interpretation to the
    underlying lattice, where I felt the whole of constraint theory
    could be seen in its simplest point of view.  George either
    did not agree, or had too much else to do.

JW: In this respect I wonder if folks working on graphics in
    chemistry or Peirce-like graphics have sat down and looking
    at the foundational assumptions of their work and found them
    to lie outside the scope of elements and relationships.  I ask
    this knowing that virtually all scientific investigators have
    placed undue relationships on elements and always treated
    relationships as intuitive, not making the explicit,
    this being true from the time of Aristotle onward.

John, Cybernetics List,

Roads Scholar (or Dr. Seuss?) version of Peirce's theory of inquiry:

| It's nudged by whorls of doubt.
| It's driven to smooth them out.
| It's not a steam roller though.
| It's not pin for rolling dough.
| It's just the way inquiry goes.
|
| Burma Shave

That is, inquiry is a process that takes us from a state
of relative uncertainty to a state of relative certainty.
I have seen a lot of nonsensical discussions get started
by taking "certainty" and "doubt" either as absolutes or
as totally subjective conditions.  So let's not go there.

If we think of logic as a normative science that has its
natural residence in the same subdivision as probability,
statistics, and information theory, as Peirce very early
treated them, then most everything else falls into place
along what we can recognize as familiar cybernetic lines.

It made me tired just thinking that,
so I'll have to take a rest for now.

Jon Awbrey

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