This explanation clarifies the historical process of the inquiry. It presents the ultimate goal which thought more or less unknowingly seeks from the first perception: the ultimate potential of every idea, what is implicitly at work at every step of reflection, steadily countering irrelevant excursions and seeking the completion of fragmentary knowledge into a stable system. The farther thought progresses, the more clearly its system reveals the character of the system that pervades with supervening principles of thought.
A systematic unity controls reflection in ordinary thinking. The impulse of all thought is self-revision. We don't know the end result, but we can see the direction we must take to reach it.
Thought seeks to supersede all partial systems by a further system that will not nullify its earlier gains but absorb and extend them. Thinking stops only when the process cannot be continued, whether by choice or other factors.
And if thought is the potential of what it tries to know, then the theoretic impulse must produce the most complete and immediate experience of what is real.
Monday, June 21, 2004
Self-Proving Inferential Algorithms
4.31.24
The letters we use to stand for our meanings are freely and independently movable and keep their identity as they move. Why shouldn't the meanings too?
But the identities pointed to are not
The ultimate ideal of thought is provable. Can't be much of a question about proof anyway, if we do not know what proof is in advance.
There is a standard and ideal necessarily used in the process of thinking. Understanding is always through a system that does not change. Understanding becomes more complete through a system of increasing explanatory unity.
Understanding cannot be mere association, for its truth would contradict it's own assertion by not *itself* being verifiable as *more* than mere association!
Concrete necessity organizes and appraises insights. Anything else will exclude them.
The letters we use to stand for our meanings are freely and independently movable and keep their identity as they move. Why shouldn't the meanings too?
But the identities pointed to are not
The ultimate ideal of thought is provable. Can't be much of a question about proof anyway, if we do not know what proof is in advance.
There is a standard and ideal necessarily used in the process of thinking. Understanding is always through a system that does not change. Understanding becomes more complete through a system of increasing explanatory unity.
Understanding cannot be mere association, for its truth would contradict it's own assertion by not *itself* being verifiable as *more* than mere association!
Concrete necessity organizes and appraises insights. Anything else will exclude them.
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