Pattern of Inquiry

Inquiry-based logic is rooted in biology. This is a core axiom of Dewey’s Darwinian-based naturalistic epistemology and that which separates it from traditional schools of logic, whether those more empirically or rationalistically based. It is this assumption that grounds Dewey’s problem-solving functionalism in which the organism transacts life processes through an environmental medium in which privation and danger compel an instinctive search for restoration that typically moves beyond the always tentative equilibrium initially disturbed by the problematic situation. On this view, the requirements of living itself exhibit “a continual rhythm of disequilbriums and recoveries of equilibrium” (p. 34) with the pressing medium of need and the compulsion to survive driving the process of reconstruction.

The “searching activities” (p. 35) that follow are sequenced responses that take on different functions in the various stages in the hunt for satisfactory resolution, which are guided by the qualitative whole that defines the problem situation, on Dewey’s reading all the way through the means-ends continuum. “At each intermediary stage [en route to resolution] there is still tension between contact activities and those responses to stimuli through distance-receptors. Movement continues until integration is established…in the consummatory act” (p. 36) resulting in the resolution of whatever it was that drove the process of active searching. Thus, whether a stimulus or response, various functions of behavior do not stand alone. They are an organic part “of the total coordinated serial behavior” (p. 37) leading ultimately to the resolution of the focused upon problem. The various stages of behavior are instrumental in which their function is defined by what they accomplish at the given time toward the greater whole that is driving the process.

On this biological interpretation, “logical forms” can only but accrue through the process of investigation itself, in the cumulative construction of reality toward the desired restoration. To draw from our example, an understanding of the meaning and significance of literacy may emerge from a systematic examination of the conflicting definitional viewpoints, which propels the research that may bring a sense of resolution to the field missing out of the arguments and sources of evidence that are currently prevalent to this particular arena of investigation (Demetrion, 2004). The process, discussed more fully in later sections of this paper, requires a broad range of methodologies in the pursuit of questions and potentially fruitful lines of research that may come to be accepted as a warranted assertability, which may only open up as the work ensues in which the logic underlying it unfolds through what is discovered.

Human inquiry builds on these biological processes, adding the important components of language, including inference capacity, symbolization, and highly discriminating forms of reasoning of both analytic and synthetic dimensions. The a priori exists only in the process itself in which consciousness emerges as a pressure point out of a more general habitude of “mind” through a problematic disruption that sets off the search for satisfactory resolution (Dewey, 1929/1958, p. 303). Thus, in our example, lack of clarity and broad-based agreement on the meaning and significance of adult literacy, to the extent that it is perceived as a problem, drives the investigative process, which cannot rest until some reasonably satisfactory resolution has been achieved. “Restoration of integration can be effected… only by operations which actually modify conditions, not by merely ‘mental’ processes” (Dewey 1938/1991, p. 110). These operations need to be carefully calibrated to the investigation of “the facts of the case” (p. 113) all the way through the various stages in the working from problem identified to problem resolved.

Once a problem is identified, the critical next stage calls for an initial hypothesis as a potential solution to guide both the collection and analysis of relevant data. This process of concept building informed by data analysis and tightly correlated to the “functional fitness” (p. 114) of the case at hand continues as long as the investigation endures, though taking on different hues as the process unfolds. What is crucial is that whatever stage of investigation that is underway that the forming concepts represent the best possible hypothesis consistent with the data that the researcher can access in its potential problem resolution function. The focus at any given time may be on either emergent idea formation or concentrated data collection and analysis in the testing out of the functional fit. The underlying dynamic is that maximal efforts to resolve the problem are operative throughout all the stages of the process.

Consequently, the ends-in-view are symbolically embedded throughout the means-ends continuum, creating a holographic effect in which the different dimensions of the effort are functionally correlated to that which needs to be accomplished at the given time in moving the inquiry to its destination. This crystalline effect establishes a tension that stimulates the compulsive drive toward the achievement of the ultimate aim, itself modifiable as the inquiry proceeds. Various “intermediate meanings” are formed that are progressively “more clearly relevant [italics in original] to the problem at hand than the originally suggested idea” (p. 115). Dewey explains the functional inquiry-based inquiry process that grounds his thesis in Logic in this representative statement:

Facts are evidential and tests of an idea in so far as they are capable of being organized with one another. The organization can be achieved only as they interact [italics in original] with one another. When the problematic situation is such as to require extensive inquiries to effect its resolution, a series of interactions intervenes. Some observed facts point to an idea that stands for a possible solution. The idea involves more observation. Some of the newly observed facts link up with those previously observed and are such to rule out other observed things with respect to their evidential function. The new order of facts suggests a modified idea (or hypothesis) which occasions new observations whose result again determines a new order of facts until the existing order is both unified and complete. In the course of this serial process, the ideas that represent possible solutions are tested and ‘proved’ (p. 117)

It is this reconstructive process emerging from problem resolution to which Dewey refers as “controlled inquiry” in which its logic unfolds through the investigation.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1141