Constraining Inquiry

Once questions and possibilities are available, inquiry can be shaped more deliberately.

We can ask what we had not previously asked, deliberately search for alternatives, or preserve several possibilities instead of allowing one to close the inquiry too early.

Suppose six possibilities are competing in your head.

You compare the first with the second.

Then you remember something relevant to the fourth.

The fifth disappears from attention.

You return to the second but no longer remember why it had seemed weak.

Now write the six possibilities down. They persist when attention moves elsewhere.

You can return to one.

Cross another out.

Add a seventh.

Compare two side by side.

Give the list to someone else.

Nothing about writing guarantees a good inquiry. But the conditions have changed. Parts of the inquiry now persist outside immediate memory. They can be inspected repeatedly.

Tables can preserve comparisons, and diagrams can make relations easier to inspect. Checklists or measuring instruments may stabilize a procedure or standard. Symbolic notation and formal rules can impose stronger constraints by fixing distinctions and limiting which transformations are permitted.

In each case, some part of the inquiry has been made more explicit and less dependent on what happens to remain in attention.