Inquiry as Emergence: Empirical Non-Foundationalism

Stop trying to get it right, enjoy instead the creative freedom of aspiring instead to get it less wrong, of continually creating new generative stories using all three loops

Empirical non-foundationalism:

• Recognize the inadequacy of purely empirical approaches, embrace the additional two productive loops ... the unconscious/story teller and the interpersonal
  • seeking objectivity is just a matter of getting as much intersubjective agreement as you can manage
• Accept/value the role of stories in inquiry, and of diversity of stories
  • If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
• Commit to helping students acquire not only critical but creative skills, using all three loops
  • The logic of aspiring to, and teaching, "objectivity" thus derives not only from our individual needs to make our individual ways in a mysterious world but equally from a recognition that we can better do so in state of the most effective exchange with people whose experiences/understandings are different from our own.
• Stop worrying about the uncertainty of the known. Enjoy/share enjoyment of the certainty of the unknown and our collective participation in creating what might yet be
• Commit to sharing that understanding/enjoyment with students ... and with the world at large

Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there. Jelaluddin Rumi 13th century Sufi poet

Inquiry, like emergence, like biological evolution proceeds without a pre-existing intention or a pre-defined objective, and somewhat unpredictably. Its progress reflects an interaction between "pattern detection" (the expertise of the unconscious) and story creation/story sharing. Its success depends on giving primacy to neither, but instead to the (indeterminate) interaction between the two. One need not choose between "patterns and rules" and unpredicable (unjustifiable) intuition, both are made available by the bipartite brain, which is itself a product of undirected and somewhat unpredictable exploration.

Inquiry as emergence

• convergence AND divergence
• no fixed rules
• no premature story extinction
• determinate but complex, ill-mannered universe versus indeterminate universe
• objective is not to describe "Truth" or "Reality" nor to figure out what everyone else is doing and do it better
• objective is to figure out what everyone else is doing wrong or not doing at all in order to come up with new "less wrong" ways of proceeding, to find new ways of seeing things, to be generative

Immediate new questions:

• How sharp is the unconscious/story teller divison? knowing ourselves and knowing the world? which comes first, how do they interrelate?
• How many additional divisions are to be productively considered? trees/bacteria versus leeches/frogs?
• Can one build models that show a transition from inanimate to model builders? from model builders to story tellers?
• How are systems organized to create productive/generative exchange among diverse elements? within individuals? within groups/cultures?

Thanks for listening to my story, please share your thoughts about how it relates to/influences your own stories and how that might in turn influence mine ...