Introduction:  The Mind's Own Method

In 1971, I had the chance to attend a lecture by Stephen Spender. He described in some detail the stages through which he would pass in crafting a poem. I was struck by the similarities between his procedures and those commonly associated with scientific investigation, and began to wonder whether there was such a thing as a unique "scientific method"--that is, whether the method on which science relies may not exist wherever we find systematic inquiry. This was an early stimulus for what has since become a long inquiry into the nature of inquiry.

Because the process that I was investigating was the process in which I was engaged, my search became a case-study of itself. As I came to consider what was involved in the articulation of an antecedently grasped meaning, I had my own simultaneous attempt at articulation as a model; even my sketchy notes shared in this self-reference as I reflected in them on the significance of the sketchiness of note taking. In the end, I came to realize that it was my conversation with myself--an act which seems only incidentally to accompany the mind's effort to understand itself--that was the very act I was trying to understand.

This should not have come as any great surprise, for the goal of any general theory of inquiry has been the "mind's own method": to find, beneath the surface of the various strategies which we may devise in response to the contingencies of our search into special areas, the parent scheme common to them all--the general method by which we expand our knowledge. Discovering this method was a hope shared by classical philosophers and scientists. It was Plato who first defined the problem and recognized its place at the foundation of epistemology. His preoccupation with inquiry animated not only his search for definitions and the structure of his dialogues, but also (more self-consciously) his formulation of the Meno paradox, and his explicit recognition of the need for diverse modes of cognition as a basis for the agreement of the mind with itself. Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel each believed so strongly in the existence and power of this method that they allowed themselves to consider that it was not only patterns of inference but actual truths that could be generated "from within." And for Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo, the method found in mathematical reasoning was not simply an indispensable tool for scientific investigation, but the natural language of inquiry itself.

In many ways, it has been the philosophy of science that has assumed the responsibility for Plato's project, trying to identify the logical method whereby new knowledge may be generated. Yet it seems to have succeeded no more than Plato in formulating a satisfactory theory of inquiry. Why has this been so? The first reason is that whereas Plato tried to resolve the paradox of inquiry by relying on the side which enhanced method at the expense of novelty, contemporary philosophy of science has come to adopt the opposite strategy, believing that the price of novelty is the sacrifice of the ratio- nality of its generation.

Each of these unbalanced approaches failed to appreciate the fact that two distinct generative processes are essential to inquiry: the partial generation from experience of ideas which come to explain that experience, and the partial generation from ideas of consequences which come to match experience. These two parallel processes themselves require, of course, a distinction between the two types of cognition represented as "experience" and "thought." Coming-to-know is the mutual adjustment of the demands of these distinct material and formal constraints: as experience acquires the articulated formal clarity of thought, thought acquires the material content of experience. Inquiry has the give- and-take of a conversation because of this fundamental duality, and because of the fact that these twin demands are not satisfied simultaneously: altering a thought to make it fit our experience may cause it to lose its logical clarity; improving its logical clarity, however, may cause it to lose its connection to experience. One side lags behind the other.

It might seem that it is the rationalist philosophical systems of the past that, despite their commitment to accounting for one side of this generative process, are constitutionally non-dualistic and thus hostile to inquiry. Empiricists have often concluded that Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, for example, claimed an insight into the nature of things so exhaustive that all other truths might be deduced directly therefrom; in rejecting the role of empirical confirmation, they came to "spin things out of their own heads," providing no more than a grotesque caricature of true inquiry.

I want to challenge this conventional belief. It is true that the language they used and the ontology they proposed support this appraisal to some extent; nevertheless, Plato and Hegel also recognized that, in being "self-correcting," knowledge emerges from a process of mutual adjustment among various constraints. While this perspective is sometimes taken as representative of coherence theories, I will argue that it is a distortion of Plato to see his depreciation of sense knowledge as evidence for the sort of theoretical monism sometimes associated with a coherence theory, for it is obvious that, even with the recollection doctrine, he relies on a distinction between implicit (intuitive) and explicit (discursive) cognition. His epistemology would be incomprehensible without this fundamental duality. And, insofar as knowing something in one cognitive mode is truly different from knowing the same thing in another cognitive mode, the translation from one such mode to another is not epistemically redundant; and so, there may be a source of epistemic novelty in his system after all.

On the other hand, it might also seem that, in preserving a fundamental duality in the distinction between observational and theoretical components in knowledge, contemporary philosophy of science is inherently friendlier to inquiry. I will challenge this belief as well--for the empirical constraints which it acknowledges are consequential (confirmational) in nature, not generative. Theoretical explanations are not inferred "from the facts," and there is no logical method for generating new ideas. It is its narrow, formal conception of inference, I will argue, that has hamstrung the philosophy of science in its attempts to characterize the rational generation of theories. It could not see how deductive, logically non-ampliative inference could still be epistemically ampliative. The result is that contemporary philosophy of science, where if anywhere we would expect to find a theory of inquiry, has pretty much given up on the whole project.

The abandonment of inquiry derives not only from a failure to grasp the nature of ampliative inference, but also from a policy decision that has shaped our conception of the nature of epistemology. Anglo-American philosophy has for a long time committed itself to a conception of knowledge as the "justification of true belief"--an orientation that excludes as epistemically irrelevant the question of the generation of the content of our beliefs. This is the traditional reason given by many philosophers of science for ignoring the "logic-of-discovery" question. I shall propose a conception of "second-order" justification, however, where it is not only the belief itself, but also its generation that is justified. Much of the purpose of this book is to "remember Plato" by regaining for the problem of inquiry its proper place at the center of a philosophical theory of knowledge.

The theory of inquiry to be developed here rests on three fundamental principles:

First: No intelligent inquiry is possible without simultaneously knowing and not knowing the object into which we are inquiring. This is indispensable for a resolution of the Meno paradox.

Second: No intelligent inquiry is possible without determining the degree of proximity to the desired object of inquiry. We must not only somehow "know" the desired result before "coming to know" it in the way we seek; we must also be able to judge how far we are from that result. This essentially quantitative judgment provides the information we need to approach that result more closely.

Third: Where inquiry is directed toward attaining some more adequate level of representation of the object, the "object" is really dual, determined by two independent epistemic criteria--one material and one formal. Whether we seek to paint a portrait, or provide a scientific explanation of a phenomenon, or to articulate some antecedently grasped meaning (all acts of representation), our goal is not merely to reflect the actual facts of our experience, but also to provide representations which themselves satisfy some independent formal criterion--that is, representations that are "well- formed." Such inquiry will therefore require a double or dual application of the first two principles.

I develop the theory embodying these principles in four stages:

In Part I, I explore the problem of a logic of discovery in science and present my own model of science as a "self-correcting" enterprise with dual justificatory principles. This is done not as an end in itself, for I do not take science as an ideal of inquiry to which all other forms should aspire, but as a form in which the pattern of inquiry in general might be more easily detected and defined. I argue against the prevailing view that there is no rational method for the generation of new theories (and that therefore empirical constraints can function only in consequential testing of theories) by developing the idea that the generation of a new hypothesis is the correction of an antece- dent hypothesis. The mapping which makes correction possible also provides the context in which "second-order" justification arises. I also show how the form of inference on which correction relies may be taken as simultaneously logically non-ampliative (deductive) and epistemically ampliative. Finally, I establish the basis for the fundamental duality of inquiry, relying on a notion of reciprocal justification distinct from the perspectives of both foundationalism and the coherence theory.

In PART II, I outline a theory of representation that can act as a bridge to a more general theory of inquiry. I argue that the analog/digital distinction is not coextensive with the distinction between pictorial and descriptive representation (as the mental imagery debate has usually assumed), for there are digital elements (not derived from background knowledge) in pure perception and analog elements (not derived from sense imagery) in abstract thought. Among these latter analog mental states are unarticulated meanings. The articulation of meaning, like the scientific explanation of natural phenomena, is a case of representation, that is, of analog-to-digital conversion.

In PART III, aided by this theory of representation, I use the model of inquiry developed in PART I to interpret the process by which we come to articulate meanings for ourselves. This elemental process involves the same procedures of reciprocal correction uncovered in scientific inquiry; the latter is in fact only a more refined version of the former. From this perspective I look back to classical philosophy to analyze the kindred theories of inquiry found in Plato, Kant and Hegel.
In Part IV, I move forward again to contemporary cognitive theory, in order to explore the relevance of this view of inquiry for theories of human consciousness. The link between inquiry and human consciousness is inner speech--the conversation of the "soul with itself."

"Inquiry" may mean very different things to different people. It is sometimes associated with the psychology of creativity, for which studies of creative individuals would provide the data. Psychological conceptions of intuition and insight (Poincare and Kekule are now familiar examples) are sometimes prominent components of such studies. This approach is often undertaken with a desire to isolate what the roots of "genius" are, with a view toward developing these traits in others through new pedagogies. Inquiry is studied as the context for isolating a special "talent."

While this conception of inquiry certainly bears scrutiny and investigation, it has little relation to the project undertaken here. I am more interested in the logic of inquiry than in the psychology of individual inquirers. I suppose I could say that this book provides an epistemology of inquiry, but this might be misleading given the fact that "naturalized" epistemology has raised questions about the nature of epistemology itself, and that even traditional "unnaturalized" epistemology might exclude the topic of inquiry on the grounds that epistemology confines itself to the question of the justification of already discovered true beliefs.

This is not to say that empirical studies are not relevant for the theory I propose (as will be seen), but the theory is not built up from data supplied by these studies. My proposals come from the other direction; that is, top-down rather than bottom-up. I do not, for example, examine in any great detail the various attempts to simulate actual human problem solving by means of appropriately designed computational heuristics. Many of these treatments are concerned with the mechanisms whereby we detect regularities in quite specific problem-domains. My discussion will remain at the level of what Herbert Simon calls "weak heuristics," which relies on such highly general principles as "means-end analysis." Such principles are, I maintain, highly relevant for general epistemology. Artificial intelligence simulations and research in the psychology of problem solving are (understandably) less sensitive to these epistemological issues: they do not generally examine such problems as the Meno paradox and the nature of ampliative inference; they may sometimes refer to the discovery-justification distinction, but seldom if ever provide any analysis of the general problem surrounding it; nor do they usually consider such basic epistemological questions as the relation between generative and consequential justification or the relative merits of foundationalism and the coherence theory. This is not in itself a criticism: it merely acknowledges a division of labor.

This is also why I am a bit obstinate in not relying on historical cases to any great extent, for I am convinced that the theoretical principles underlying basic inquiry are to be found even in the most mundane cases. The use of complex case studies can give the impression that true inquiry, properly speaking, is to be detected only in such cases. I may therefore provide only a fleshless skeleton of a theory; but surely there is a place even for this--if only as a balance to the many empirical investigations which offer a rather boneless mass of flesh. I maintain that, contrary to what may be the general impression among more empirical investigators, not everything about the nature of inquiry that is at once extremely general and yet still illuminating has been uncovered. I rely on the historical cases and empirical studies to which I appeal in this book, therefore, more as a means for implementing the exposition of the theory than as adequate evidence for it. I am advancing a hypothesis: I hope only to provoke others to consider its plausibility and check the evidence for themselves.

Another question that arises with respect to more theoretical analyses of the nature of inquiry has to do with the extent to which a proposed theory takes itself to be the "royal road" to all understanding of inquiry. In my case, more specifically, one may ask: Is some species of correction to be found in each and every instance of productive inquiry? My answer to this question will materialize in the explication of the theory, but I can say this much now: My model should apply to all those cases in which some form of an inference to an explanation is to be found (this includes, I will argue, the Platonic conception of inquiry). Further, cases in which there seems to be no role for explicit correction of antecedent hypotheses may nevertheless be assimilated to the correction model by recognizing that "correction" covers not only the editing of fully specific antecedent hypotheses, but also both the specification of highly general or sketchy antecedent conceptions, and the combination of unrelated (individually unaltered) antecedent ideas.

The account of inquiry I provide in this book takes some time to unfold. The first third--on scientific discovery--could have stood by itself, as a separate volume. I chose not to divide this more specialized analysis from the broader treatment which follows it; those interested in this more local issue should also appreciate its place in a general theory of cognition; and those more concerned with the broader, classical problem should also benefit from the specific advances in the discussion achieved by that microcosm of epistemology which is the philosophy of science. The problem of inquiry has been neglected and misunderstood by many philosophical schools and factions; I hope this work in part bridges the divisions of specialization which have to a great extent been responsible for this neglect and misunderstanding. Keeping all of these perspectives under one roof, however, has produced a whole which will require some patience to work through.

Because of its breadth, this treatment is not, I suspect, easily categorized. A reader in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy or cognitive science might pause after finding that it contains substantial analyses of some classical philosophers, while someone interested in classical or continental philosophy might be put off by the emphasis on science, by the discussions of the analog-digital distinction, sensory transduction or brain lateralization. But is it really so surprising that inquiry should inspire such an ecumenical gathering of topics--that its principles should be of such importance to philosophy of science, computational heuristics, theories of mental representation and human consciousness, conceptions of metaphor and poetry, and classical dialectic? With a little forbearance, therefore, the reader may discover some items of worth in unexpected sources--in Plato or Fodor, Kant or Vygotsky, Hegel or Ryle, Arendt or Johnson-Laird, Dennett or Rawls, Gazzaniga or Peirce, Simon or Whitehead. I value the contributions of these individuals despite their deep disciplinary, ideological, and stylistic differences. I have proceeded as a scavenger might, examining what's available regardless of the source, taking what I need and leaving the rest. I invite the reader to do the same.