Re: Pragmatic Cosmos

Jeff, Sung, Helmut, List,

It is only human of human beings to project their affairs on celestial spheres but doing so does not 
alter the circumstance that we project our own images from anthropic centers.  There are times when 
our projections hit the mark.  And there are times when we end up imagining the universe compassed 
by Bearded Father Figures (BFFs).  Speculative projections require critical reflection to sift the 
reality from the fantasy.

I am mainly concerned with inquiry as a form of human conduct, a practical activity carried on by
individuals and communities, increasingly supported by the tools our species of tool-makers has 
evolved and learned to make.  Thus I view inquiry stereoscopically, from two distinct angles, 
descriptive and instrumental.

On the descriptive side, Peirce's work on relations in general and sign relations in particular 
gives us, perhaps for the first time in history, a paradigm of theoretical models adequate to the 
task of describing inquiry.  The category theory developed by mathematicians has many applications 
in describing the functions and structures of inquiry, especially if the potential generalizations 
of category theory to handle relations in their own terms can be realized.

On the instrumental side, we have the task of engineering software that can better aid inquiry. 
Building instruments to extend our capacities in any realm requires a model of the organon that 
nature gave us, and so we "prime the pump" of the instrumental task by knowing ourselves first. 
Given that start, the cycle of amplification can begin.

Regards,

Jon

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