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An inquiry is any process that has the aim of augmenting knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem. A theory of inquiry is an account of the various types of inquiry and a treatment of the ways that each type of inquiry achieves its aim.

Classical sources[link]

Deduction[link]

When three terms are so related to one another that the last is wholly contained in the middle and the middle is wholly contained in or excluded from the first, the extremes must admit of perfect syllogism. By 'middle term' I mean that which both is contained in another and contains another in itself, and which is the middle by its position also; and by 'extremes' (a) that which is contained in another, and (b) that in which another is contained. For if A is predicated of all B, and B of all C, A must necessarily be predicated of all C. ... I call this kind of figure the First. (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 1.4)

Induction[link]

Inductive reasoning consists in establishing a relation between one extreme term and the middle term by means of the other extreme; for example, if B is the middle term of A and C, in proving by means of C that A applies to B; for this is how we effect inductions. (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.23)

Abduction[link]

The locus classicus for the study of abductive reasoning is found in Aristotle's Prior Analytics, Book 2, Chapt. 25. It begins this way:

We have Reduction (απαγωγη, abduction):

1. When it is obvious that the first term applies to the middle, but that the middle applies to the last term is not obvious, yet is nevertheless more probable or not less probable than the conclusion;
2. Or if there are not many intermediate terms between the last and the middle;

For in all such cases the effect is to bring us nearer to knowledge.

By way of explanation, Aristotle supplies two very instructive examples, one for each of the two varieties of abductive inference steps that he has just described in the abstract:

1. For example, let A stand for "that which can be taught", B for "knowledge", and C for "morality". Then that knowledge can be taught is evident; but whether virtue is knowledge is not clear. Then if BC is not less probable or is more probable than AC, we have reduction; for we are nearer to knowledge for having introduced an additional term, whereas before we had no knowledge that AC is true.
2. Or again we have reduction if there are not many intermediate terms between B and C; for in this case too we are brought nearer to knowledge. For example, suppose that D is "to square", E "rectilinear figure", and F "circle". Assuming that between E and F there is only one intermediate term — that the circle becomes equal to a rectilinear figure by means of lunules — we should approximate to knowledge. (Aristotle, "Prior Analytics", 2.25, with minor alterations)

Aristotle's latter variety of abductive reasoning, though it will take some explaining in the sequel, is well worth our contemplation, since it hints already at streams of inquiry that course well beyond the syllogistic source from which they spring, and into regions that Peirce will explore more broadly and deeply.

Inquiry in the pragmatic paradigm[link]

In the pragmatic philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and others, inquiry is closely associated with the normative science of logic. In its inception, the pragmatic model or theory of inquiry was extracted by Peirce from its raw materials in classical logic, with a little bit of help from Kant, and refined in parallel with the early development of symbolic logic by Boole, De Morgan, and Peirce himself to address problems about the nature and conduct of scientific reasoning. Borrowing a brace of concepts from Aristotle, Peirce examined three fundamental modes of reasoning that play a role in inquiry, commonly known as abductive, deductive, and inductive inference.

In rough terms, abduction is what we use to generate a likely hypothesis or an initial diagnosis in response to a phenomenon of interest or a problem of concern, while deduction is used to clarify, to derive, and to explicate the relevant consequences of the selected hypothesis, and induction is used to test the sum of the predictions against the sum of the data. It needs to be observed that the classical and pragmatic treatments of the types of reasoning, dividing the generic territory of inference as they do into three special parts, arrive at a different characterization of the environs of reason than do those accounts that count only two.

These three processes typically operate in a cyclic fashion, systematically operating to reduce the uncertainties and the difficulties that initiated the inquiry in question, and in this way, to the extent that inquiry is successful, leading to an increase in knowledge or in skills.

In the pragmatic way of thinking everything has a purpose, and the purpose of each thing is the first thing we should try to note about it. The purpose of inquiry is to reduce doubt and lead to a state of belief, which a person in that state will usually call knowledge or certainty. As they contribute to the end of inquiry, we should appreciate that the three kinds of inference describe a cycle that can be understood only as a whole, and none of the three makes complete sense in isolation from the others. For instance, the purpose of abduction is to generate guesses of a kind that deduction can explicate and that induction can evaluate. This places a mild but meaningful constraint on the production of hypotheses, since it is not just any wild guess at explanation that submits itself to reason and bows out when defeated in a match with reality. In a similar fashion, each of the other types of inference realizes its purpose only in accord with its proper role in the whole cycle of inquiry. No matter how much it may be necessary to study these processes in abstraction from each other, the integrity of inquiry places strong limitations on the effective modularity of its principal components.

Art and science of inquiry[link]

For our present purposes, the first feature to note in distinguishing the three principal modes of reasoning from each other is whether each of them is exact or approximate in character. In this light, deduction is the only one of the three types of reasoning that can be made exact, in essence, always deriving true conclusions from true premises, while abduction and induction are unavoidably approximate in their modes of operation, involving elements of fallible judgment in practice and inescapable error in their application.

The reason for this is that deduction, in the ideal limit, can be rendered a purely internal process of the reasoning agent, while the other two modes of reasoning essentially demand a constant interaction with the outside world, a source of phenomena and problems that will no doubt continue to exceed the capacities of any finite resource, human or machine, to master. Situated in this larger reality, approximations can be judged appropriate only in relation to their context of use and can be judged fitting only with regard to a purpose in view.

A parallel distinction that is often made in this connection is to call deduction a demonstrative form of inference, while abduction and induction are classed as non-demonstrative forms of reasoning. Strictly speaking, the latter two modes of reasoning are not properly called inferences at all. They are more like controlled associations of words or ideas that just happen to be successful often enough to be preserved as useful heuristic strategies in the repertoire of the agent. But non-demonstrative ways of thinking are inherently subject to error, and must be constantly checked out and corrected as needed in practice.

In classical terminology, forms of judgment that require attention to the context and the purpose of the judgment are said to involve an element of "art", in a sense that is judged to distinguish them from "science", and in their renderings as expressive judgments to implicate arbiters in styles of rhetoric, as contrasted with logic.

In a figurative sense, this means that only deductive logic can be reduced to an exact theoretical science, while the practice of any empirical science will always remain to some degree an art.

Zeroth order inquiry[link]

Many aspects of inquiry can be recognized and usefully studied in very basic logical settings, even simpler than the level of syllogism, for example, in the realm of reasoning that is variously known as Boolean algebra, propositional calculus, sentential calculus, or zeroth-order logic. By way of approaching the learning curve on the gentlest availing slope, we may well begin at the level of zeroth-order inquiry, in effect, taking the syllogistic approach to inquiry only so far as the propositional or sentential aspects of the associated reasoning processes are concerned. One of the bonuses of doing this in the context of Peirce's logical work is that it provides us with doubly instructive exercises in the use of his logical graphs, taken at the level of his so-called "alpha graphs".

In the case of propositional calculus or sentential logic, deduction comes down to applications of the transitive law for conditional implications and the approximate forms of inference hang on the properties that derive from these. In describing the various types of inference I will employ a few old "terms of art" from classical logic that are still of use in treating these kinds of simple problems in reasoning.

Deduction takes a Case, the minor premise Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Y

and combines it with a Rule, the major premise Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): Y \Rightarrow Z

to arrive at a Fact, the demonstrative conclusion Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Z.

Induction takes a Case of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Y

and matches it with a Fact of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Z

to infer a Rule of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): Y \Rightarrow Z.

Abduction takes a Fact of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Z

and matches it with a Rule of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): Y \Rightarrow Z

to infer a Case of the form Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X \Rightarrow Y.

For ease of reference, Figure 1 and the Legend beneath it summarize the classical terminology for the three types of inference and the relationships among them.

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \                        |
|                   |     \   R U L E             |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   |       \                     |
|               F   |        \                    |
|                   |         \                   |
|               A   |          \                  |
|                   |           o Y               |
|               C   |          /                  |
|                   |         /                   |
|               T   |        /                    |
|                   |       /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /   C A S E             |
|                   |    /                        |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
| Deduction takes a Case of the form X → Y,       |
| matches it with a Rule of the form Y → Z,       |
| then adverts to a Fact of the form X → Z.       |
|                                                 |
| Induction takes a Case of the form X → Y,       |
| matches it with a Fact of the form X → Z,       |
| then adverts to a Rule of the form Y → Z.       |
|                                                 |
| Abduction takes a Fact of the form X → Z,       |
| matches it with a Rule of the form Y → Z,       |
| then adverts to a Case of the form X → Y.       |
|                                                 |
| Even more succinctly:                           |
|                                                 |
|           Abduction  Deduction  Induction       |
|                                                 |
| Premise:     Fact       Case       Case         |
| Premise:     Rule       Rule       Fact         |
| Outcome:     Case       Fact       Rule         |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1.  Elementary Structure and Terminology

In its original usage a statement of Fact has to do with a deed done or a record made, that is, a type of event that is openly observable and not riddled with speculation as to its very occurrence. In contrast, a statement of Case may refer to a hidden or a hypothetical cause, that is, a type of event that is not immediately observable to all concerned. Obviously, the distinction is a rough one and the question of which mode applies can depend on the points of view that different observers adopt over time. Finally, a statement of a Rule is called that because it states a regularity or a regulation that governs a whole class of situations, and not because of its syntactic form. So far in this discussion, all three types of constraint are expressed in the form of conditional propositions, but this is not a fixed requirement. In practice, these modes of statement are distinguished by the roles that they play within an argument, not by their style of expression. When the time comes to branch out from the syllogistic framework, we will find that propositional constraints can be discovered and represented in arbitrary syntactic forms.

Example of inquiry[link]

Examples of inquiry, that illustrate the full cycle of its abductive, deductive, and inductive phases, and yet are both concrete and simple enough to be suitable for a first (or zeroth) exposition, are somewhat rare in Peirce's writings, and so let us draw one from the work of fellow pragmatician John Dewey, analyzing it according to the model of zeroth-order inquiry that we developed above.

A man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last time he observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other modes of activity. The likelihood that it will rain is, however, something suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; he thinks of clouds and a coming shower. (John Dewey, How We Think, pp. 6-7).

Once over quickly[link]

Let's first give Dewey's elegant example of inquiry in everyday life the quick once over, hitting just the high points of its analysis into Peirce's three kinds of reasoning.

Abductive phase[link]

In Dewey's "Rainy Day" or "Sign of Rain" story, we find our peripatetic hero presented with a surprising Fact:

• Fact: C → A, In the Current situation the Air is cool.

Responding to an intellectual reflex of puzzlement about the situation, his resource of common knowledge about the world is impelled to seize on an approximate Rule:

• Rule: B → A, Just Before it rains, the Air is cool.

This Rule can be recognized as having a potential relevance to the situation because it matches the surprising Fact, C → A, in its consequential feature A.

All of this suggests that the present Case may be one in which it is just about to rain:

• Case: C → B, The Current situation is just Before it rains.

The whole mental performance, however automatic and semi-conscious it may be, that leads up from a problematic Fact and a previously settled knowledge base of Rules to the plausible suggestion of a Case description, is what we are calling an abductive inference.

Deductive phase[link]

The next phase of inquiry uses deductive inference to expand the implied consequences of the abductive hypothesis, with the aim of testing its truth. For this purpose, the inquirer needs to think of other things that would follow from the consequence of his precipitate explanation. Thus, he now reflects on the Case just assumed:

• Case: C → B, The Current situation is just Before it rains.

He looks up to scan the sky, perhaps in a random search for further information, but since the sky is a logical place to look for details of an imminent rainstorm, symbolized in our story by the letter B, we may safely suppose that our reasoner has already detached the consequence of the abduced Case, C → B, and has begun to expand on its further implications. So let us imagine that our up-looker has a more deliberate purpose in mind, and that his search for additional data is driven by the new-found, determinate Rule:

• Rule: B → D, Just Before it rains, Dark clouds appear.

Contemplating the assumed Case in combination with this new Rule leads him by an immediate deduction to predict an additional Fact:

• Fact: C → D, In the Current situation Dark clouds appear.

The reconstructed picture of reasoning assembled in this second phase of inquiry is true to the pattern of deductive inference.

Inductive phase[link]

Whatever the case, our subject observes a Dark cloud, just as he would expect on the basis of the new hypothesis. The explanation of imminent rain removes the discrepancy between observations and expectations and thereby reduces the shock of surprise that made this process of inquiry necessary.

Looking more closely[link]

Seeding hypotheses[link]

Figure 4 gives a graphical illustration of Dewey's example of inquiry, isolating for the purposes of the present analysis the first two steps in the more extended proceedings that go to make up the whole inquiry.

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|     A                                               D     |
|      o                                             o      |
|       \ *                                       * /       |
|        \  *                                   *  /        |
|         \   *                               *   /         |
|          \    *                           *    /          |
|           \     *                       *     /           |
|            \   R u l e             R u l e   /            |
|             \       *               *       /             |
|              \        *           *        /              |
|               \         *       *         /               |
|                \          * B *          /                |
|              F a c t        o        F a c t              |
|                  \          *          /                  |
|                   \         *         /                   |
|                    \        *        /                    |
|                     \       *       /                     |
|                      \   C a s e   /                      |
|                       \     *     /                       |
|                        \    *    /                        |
|                         \   *   /                         |
|                          \  *  /                          |
|                           \ * /                           |
|                            \*/                            |
|                             o                             |
|                             C                             |
|                                                           |
| A  =  the Air is cool                                     |
| B  =  just Before it rains                                |
| C  =  the Current situation                               |
| D  =  a Dark cloud appears                                |
|                                                           |
| A is a major term                                         |
| B is a middle term                                        |
| C is a minor term                                         |
| D is a major term, associated with A                      |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 4.  Dewey's 'Rainy Day' Inquiry

In this analysis of the first steps of Inquiry, we have a complex or a mixed form of inference that can be seen as taking place in two steps:

• The first step is an Abduction that abstracts a Case from the consideration of a Fact and a Rule.

Fact: C → A, In the Current situation the Air is cool.

Rule: B → A, Just Before it rains, the Air is cool.

Case: C → B, The Current situation is just Before it rains.

• The final step is a Deduction that admits this Case to another Rule and so arrives at a novel Fact.

Case: C → B, The Current situation is just Before it rains.

Rule: B → D, Just Before it rains, a Dark cloud will appear.

Fact: C → D, In the Current situation, a Dark cloud will appear.

This is nowhere near a complete analysis of the Rainy Day inquiry, even insofar as it might be carried out within the constraints of the syllogistic framework, and it covers only the first two steps of the relevant inquiry process, but maybe it will do for a start.

One other thing needs to be noticed here, the formal duality between this expansion phase of inquiry and the argument from analogy. This can be seen most clearly in the propositional lattice diagrams shown in Figures 3 and 4, where analogy exhibits a rough "A" shape and the first two steps of inquiry exhibit a rough "V" shape, respectively. Since we find ourselves repeatedly referring to this expansion phase of inquiry as a unit, let's give it a name that suggests its duality with analogy—"catalogy" will do for the moment. This usage is apt enough if one thinks of a catalogue entry for an item as a text that lists its salient features. Notice that analogy has to do with the examples of a given quality, while catalogy has to do with the qualities of a given example. Peirce noted similar forms of duality in many of his early writings, leading to the consummate treatment in his 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories" (CP 1.545-559, W 2, 49-59).

Weeding hypotheses[link]

In order to comprehend the bearing of inductive reasoning on the closing phases of inquiry there are a couple of observations that we need to make:

• First, we need to recognize that smaller inquiries are typically woven into larger inquiries, whether we view the whole pattern of inquiry as carried on by a single agent or by a complex community.
• Further, we need to consider the different ways in which the particular instances of inquiry can be related to ongoing inquiries at larger scales. Three modes of inductive interaction between the micro-inquiries and the macro-inquiries that are salient here can be described under the headings of the "Learning", the "Transfer", and the "Testing" of rules.

Analogy of experience[link]

Throughout inquiry the reasoner makes use of rules that have to be transported across intervals of experience, from the masses of experience where they are learned to the moments of experience where they are applied. Inductive reasoning is involved in the learning and the transfer of these rules, both in accumulating a knowledge base and in carrying it through the times between acquisition and application.

• Learning. The principal way that induction contributes to an ongoing inquiry is through the learning of rules, that is, by creating each of the rules that goes into the knowledge base, or ever gets used along the way.
• Transfer. The continuing way that induction contributes to an ongoing inquiry is through the exploit of analogy, a two-step combination of induction and deduction that serves to transfer rules from one context to another.
• Testing. Finally, every inquiry that makes use of a knowledge base constitutes a "field test" of its accumulated contents. If the knowledge base fails to serve any live inquiry in a satisfactory manner, then there is a prima facie reason to reconsider and possibly to amend some of its rules.

Let's now consider how these principles of learning, transfer, and testing apply to John Dewey's "Sign of Rain" example.

Learning[link]

Rules in a knowledge base, as far as their effective content goes, can be obtained by any mode of inference.

For example, a rule like:

• Rule: B → A, Just Before it rains, the Air is cool,

is usually induced from a consideration of many past events, in a manner that can be rationally reconstructed as follows:

• Case: C → B, In Certain events, it is just Before it rains,
• Fact: C → A, In Certain events, the Air is cool,

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Rule: B → A, Just Before it rains, the Air is cool.

However, the very same proposition could also be abduced as an explanation of a singular occurrence or deduced as a conclusion of a presumptive theory.

Transfer[link]

What is it that gives a distinctively inductive character to the acquisition of a knowledge base? It is evidently the "analogy of experience" that underlies its useful application. Whenever we find ourselves prefacing an argument with the phrase "If past experience is any guide..." then we can be sure that this principle has come into play. We are invoking an analogy between past experience, considered as a totality, and present experience, considered as a point of application. What we mean in practice is this: "If past experience is a fair sample of possible experience, then the knowledge gained in it applies to present experience". This is the mechanism that allows a knowledge base to be carried across gulfs of experience that are indifferent to the effective contents of its rules.

Here are the details of how this notion of transfer works out in the case of the "Sign of Rain" example:

Let K(pres) be a portion of the reasoner's knowledge base that is logically equivalent to the conjunction of two rules, as follows:

• K(pres) = (B → A) and (B → D).

K(pres) is the present knowledge base, expressed in the form of a logical constraint on the present universe of discourse.

It is convenient to have the option of expressing all logical statements in terms of their logical models, that is, in terms of the primitive circumstances or the elements of experience over which they hold true.

• Let E(past) be the chosen set of experiences, or the circumstances that we have in mind when we refer to "past experience".
• Let E(poss) be the collective set of experiences, or the projective total of possible circumstances.
• Let E(pres) be the present experience, or the circumstances that are present to the reasoner at the current moment.

If we think of the knowledge base K(pres) as referring to the "regime of experience" over which it is valid, then all of these sets of models can be compared by the simple relations of set inclusion or logical implication.

Figure 5 schematizes this way of viewing the "analogy of experience".

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                          K(pres)                          |
|                             o                             |
|                            /|\                            |
|                           / | \                           |
|                          /  |  \                          |
|                         /   |   \                         |
|                        /  Rule   \                        |
|                       /     |     \                       |
|                      /      |      \                      |
|                     /       |       \                     |
|                    /     E(poss)     \                    |
|              Fact /         o         \ Fact              |
|                  /        *   *        \                  |
|                 /       *       *       \                 |
|                /      *           *      \                |
|               /     *               *     \               |
|              /    *                   *    \              |
|             /   *  Case           Case  *   \             |
|            /  *                           *  \            |
|           / *                               * \           |
|          /*                                   *\          |
|         o<<<---------------<<<---------------<<<o         |
|      E(past)        Analogy Morphism         E(pres)      |
|    More Known                              Less Known     |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 5.  Analogy of Experience

In these terms, the "analogy of experience" proceeds by inducing a Rule about the validity of a current knowledge base and then deducing a Fact, its applicability to a current experience, as in the following sequence:

Inductive Phase:

• Given Case: E(past) → E(poss), Chosen events fairly sample Collective events.
• Given Fact: E(past) → K(pres), Chosen events support the Knowledge regime.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Induce Rule: E(poss) → K(pres), Collective events support the Knowledge regime.

Deductive Phase:

• Given Case: E(pres) → E(poss), Current events fairly sample Collective events.
• Given Rule: E(poss) → K(pres), Collective events support the Knowledge regime.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Deduce Fact: E(pres) → K(pres), Current events support the Knowledge regime.

Testing[link]

If the observer looks up and does not see dark clouds, or if he runs for shelter but it does not rain, then there is fresh occasion to question the utility or the validity of his knowledge base. But we must leave our foulweather friend for now and defer the logical analysis of this testing phase to another occasion.

Citations[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Angluin, Dana (1989), "Learning with Hints", pp. 167–181 in David Haussler and Leonard Pitt (eds.), Proceedings of the 1988 Workshop on Computational Learning Theory, MIT, 3–5 August 1988, Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1989.
• Aristotle, "Prior Analytics", Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.
• Awbrey, Jon, and Awbrey, Susan (1995), "Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry", Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 15, 40–52. Eprint.
• Delaney, C.F. (1993), Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C.S. Peirce, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN.
• Dewey, John (1910), How We Think, D.C. Heath, Lexington, MA, 1910. Reprinted, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1991.
• Dewey, John (1938), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Henry Holt and Company, New York, NY, 1938. Reprinted as pp. 1–527 in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, Volume 12: 1938, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), Kathleen Poulos (text. ed.), Ernest Nagel (intro.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1986.
• Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
• Hanson, Norwood Russell (1958), Patterns of Discovery, An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• Hendricks, Vincent F. (2005), Thought 2 Talk: A Crash Course in Reflection and Expression, Automatic Press / VIP, New York, NY. ISBN 87-991013-7-8
• Misak, Cheryl J. (1991), Truth and the End of Inquiry, A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
• Peirce, C.S., (1931–1935, 1958), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Cited as CP volume.paragraph.
• Stalnaker, Robert C. (1984), Inquiry, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

See also[link]

Thinking portal

Look up inquiry in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography
• C. West Churchman
• Curiosity
• Information entropy
• Information theory
• Logic of information
• Pragmatic information
• Pragmatic theory of truth
• Pragmaticism
• Uncertainty

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (August 2011)

This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject, rather than references from independent authors and third-party publications. Please add citations from reliable sources. (August 2011)

David Cooperrider is the Fairmount Minerals Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case.^[1]

According to Ode, "In the field of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, David leads the movement towards a more sustainable future, as manifested in many international forums and gatherings, such as the Global Forum 'Business as an Agent of World Benefit: Management Knowledge Leading Positive Change'".^{[2][unreliable source?]}

Educational background[link]

Professor Cooperrider completed his undergraduate studies at Augustana College^{[disambiguation needed ]} in 1976.^{[citation needed]} He earned a Master's of Science at George Williams University in 1983.^{[citation needed]} His Ph.D. was conferred by Case Western Reserve University in 1985.^{[citation needed]}

Contributions[link]

Cooperrider is best known for his work in the field of appreciative inquiry, an organizational development (OD) methodology for organizational renewal.

His works include:

• Cooperrider, D. L., Whitney, D., & Stavros, J. M. (2003). Appreciative inquiry handbook. Bedford Heights, OH: Lakeshore Publishers.
• Cooperrider, D. L. (2007). Business as an agent of world benefit: Awe is what moves us forward. [1]
• Cooperrider, D. L., & Whitney, D. (2008). A positive revolution in change: Appreciative inquiry. [2]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Professor Cooperrider featured in The Weatherhead Collection - Book 1(pg. 16)
• Presentation from 2008 International Alliance for Learning Conference

Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker in 2011
Born	(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 57) Montréal, Québec, Canada
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	Canadian
Fields	Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater	Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known for	How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate
Influences	Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards	Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society)
Website
http://www.stevenpinker.com/

Steven Pinker in Göttingen in 2010

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,^[2] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Biography[link]

Career[link]

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.^[3] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[4]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004^[5] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005^[6] and 2008;^[7] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.^[10]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.^[11]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the New York Times.^[12] Gladwell published a rebuttal in the Times regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal.^[13] The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.^[14]

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. ^[15]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows. ^[16]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[17] Pinker appeared on the Colbert Report on 10/18/11.

Personal[link]

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.^[18][19] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.^[20] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.^[21] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."^[22] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.^[23] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".^[24] Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.^[25]

Theories of language and mind[link]

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work[link]

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.^[26] The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker in 2005

Books[link]

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) ISBN 978-0-674-51055-5
• Visual Cognition (1985) ISBN 978-0-262-66178-2
• Connections and Symbols (1988) ISBN 978-0-262-66064-8
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989) ISBN 978-0-262-66073-0
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992) ISBN 978-1-55786-354-6
• The Language Instinct (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-097651-4
• How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999) ISBN 978-0-465-07269-9
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) ISBN 978-0-670-03151-1
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004) ISBN 978-0-618-24698-4
• Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007) ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3

Articles and essays[link]

• Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science 253 (5019): 530–535. DOI:10.1126/science.1857983. 
• Ullman, M.; Corkin, S.; Coppola, M.; Hickok, G.; Growdon, J. H.; Koroshetz, W. J.; Pinker, S. (1997). "A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 289–299. 
• Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does the Mind Work?". Mind and Language 20 (1): 1–24. DOI:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x. 
• Jackendoff, R.; Pinker, S. (2005). "The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky)". Cognition 97 (2): 211–225. DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006. 
• S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
• A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Pinker

• Official website

Interviews

• In Depth interview with Pinker, November 2, 2008
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
• Live interview with Steven Pinker on The Blank Slate
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Online video interview with Pinker

TED talks

• Chalking it up to the blank slate, 2003
• The stuff of thought, 2005
• A brief history of violence, 2007

Debates

• The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
• The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke