QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 2nd August 2010, 12:49pm)
Jon, your academic work following up on Kant and Peirce devising "a concept or term of description that unifies a manifold of sense impressions" concords with my own work on modeling or characterizing a system. I don't use the same vocabulary terms as you. My terminology comes from the fields of Systems Theory, Systems Science, and Systems Modeling, as pioneered by those who, some 60 years ago, called their work "Cybernetics". But we fundamentally have been using the same tools for thought.
I am perplexed by the recurring observation that these reflective inquiry processes keep getting halted, just as we are converging to a deeper and more profound insight, model, or understanding of the rascally beast we are seeking to tame.
The variable of state that comes into play at this juncture is called by many names, the top three being Doubt, Entropy, Uncertainty. Peirce observed that Inquiry begins with the “Irritation of Doubtâ€, a mentally distressing state that we launch into inquiry for the sake of avoiding, if not now then maybe at a future date. But inquiry tends be a backtrack process, recurrently requiring us to relearn things that we thought we had learned well enough already, and that requires us to regress a bit, to re-experience irritating doubts that we dreamed we were well quit of. People tend to demur at that.
Jon Awbrey