Pathways of Enquiry

Abstract

A brief and generally applicable description of the endeavours, the activities and the goal that satisfies the enquirer into nature would amount to this: he wants to bring his thoughts into the best possible agreement with the facts and with each other. The same idea is expressed with minor variations by “complete and simplest description” (Kirchhoff 1874), “economic representation of the facts” (Mach 1872), “agreement of thought with being and thought processes amongst themselves” (Grassmann 1844). Conveying to others the adaptation of thought to fact turns it into description, and if this is complete and as simple as possible, into economic representation. Every avoidable incongruity or incompleteness, logical differentiation or superfluity of the describing thoughts involves a loss and is uneconomic. General and indeterminate as this characterization of enquiry may seem, it is likely to contribute more to an understanding of the enquirer’s activity than more specialized and therefore more one-sided accounts of it, as some examples will show.