Category Archives: Inquiry Into Inquiry

Inquiry begins when an automatic routine or normal course of activity is interrupted and agents are thrown into doubt concerning what is best to do next and what is really true of their situation.  If this interruptive aspect of inquiry … Continue reading →

The Reader may share with the Author a feeling of discontent at this point, attempting to reconcile the formal intentions of this inquiry with the cardinal contentions of experience.  Let me try to express the difficulty in the form of … Continue reading →

Our survey of obstacles to inquiry has dealt at length with blocks arising from its formal aspects.  On the other hand, I have cast this project as an empirical inquiry, proposing to represent experimental hypotheses in the form of computer … Continue reading →

Using form in the sense of abstract structure, the focus of my interest in this investigation is limited to the formal properties of the inquiry process.  Among its chief constituents are numbered all the thinking and unthinking processes supporting the … Continue reading →

There is a particular type of “justification trap” a person can fall into, of trying to prove the scientific method by solely deductive means, that is, of trying to show the scientific method is a good method by starting from … Continue reading →

Clouds and thunder: The image of Difficulty at the Beginning. Thus the superior man Brings order out of confusion. — I Ching ䷂ Hexagram 3 Inquiry begins in doubt, a debit of certainty and a drought of information, never a … Continue reading →

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary … Continue reading →