Inquiry is fundamentally different from stated conclusions, even when those conclusions can be legitimately qualified as knowledge (which is to say, as the products of valid inquiry). One can ennunciate a profound truth without ever even remotely approaching the effort of inquiry needed to earn that truth.

This is one of those "enough monkeys randomly pounding on typewriters" observations; sooner or later even the most capricious and willfully arbitrary of productions will generate something that is "true," "correct," "interesting," etc. [1] But such "results" are devoid of any philosophical or cognitive interest.

Bertrand Russell was frequently abused as a child by his parents and elders with the titling piece of snark to this blog entry. While not a particular Russell fan (though he was a spectacularly clear writer) I find myself of late returning to the above snottily dismissive piece of dogmatic anti-intelligence with singluar antipathy towards those who ennuciate it of late. You see, questions of mind and matter have been weighing heavily on my these last few months.

• I have a front row seat to my father's delamination due to dementia, possibly early onset alzheimers.
• His sister, my aunt, is evidently racing to catch up with him.
• Which additionally suggests that I have a genetic predisposition to join them on the merry-go-round.

The main stream media (“MSM”)[1] frequently treat us to dramatic stories of “scientific controversies” supposedly playing themselves out before our eyes. However, while such stories might make for exciting reading, they are seldom especially informative as regards to scientific inquiry itself.

The reasons for this are not hard to find: any reasoned inquiry requires patience, discipline, depth and commitment, none of which readily express themselves in 15 second sound bytes or breathless “he said/she said” paragraphs that rush ahead of the facts in the name of “balance.”

(This is the first in what I anticipate to be a series of three essays on moral inquiry. The second will be a survey of some traditional themes and their contemporary applications, and the third will focus on the “center” around which such inquiries ought to be oriented.)

Statements of moral/ethical[1] evaluations are often confronted in turn by the varyingly self-righteous demand, “Who are we to judge?”

Anyone who has taught classes in ethics (and I've done so both in traditional “brick and mortar” settings as well as online) will encounter that phrase repeatedly. It is an only slightly more specific version of the basic question “Says who?” to any claim of ethical evaluation.

Medical doctors often like to characterize themselves as scientists, and many others in the public are happy to join them in this.

I submit, however, that such a characterization is an error.

It is not a slur on the profession or its practitioners to say this, particularly once one understands that science is not the only, or only worthy, or even the most prominent form of reasoned inquiry that people can and do engage in. Furthermore, it is not a slur to say something that is simply true.

Philosophers have the embarrassing habit of apologizing for formal logic. Mathematicians don’t bother because they don’t care -- they’re just interested in the pretty pretty symbols and waste no part of their lives checking to see if their activities actually mean anything. But philosophers worry about everything, and the more obvious a thing or its explanation might be, the more worrisome it becomes to them. And since a particularly large part of philosophy in the last 140 years has specifically centered itself around the importance of formal logic -- which is “obviously” important -- this becomes especially problematic.

For some thousands of years “logic” was viewed as the “theory of inquiry” – “inquiry into inquiry” if you will. This was almost certainly the case with Plato, definitely the case with Aristotle, and by and large true throughout the history of Western thought right up to the revolution in symbolic logic that occurred with Frege, Dedekind and Peano in the late 19th Century. However, with these changes the notion of logic came to be swallowed up by formal and symbolic concerns.

Logic as the theory of inquiry was lost sight of leaving mathematical logic as the sole claimant to the title of “Logic.”