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SUO: RE: article on the pitfalls of metadata




> Rich,
> 
> I have an old bibliography, current to about 1992, that I 
> will dig out later.


Thanks, I would especially appreciate URLs to tutorials 
about his work, if there are any.  


> If you read Peirce's early work (1865-1870), you can see that 
> he began by
> trying to figure out how science works, more broadly, to 
> understand the
> logic of any method that deserves to be called scientific, in whatever
> field that it might be applied.  It was in order to do this that he
> was forced to develop the theory of signs, or "semiotics", and the
> logic of relative terms, a fragment of which was a major source
> of predicate calculus and founded relational database theory.

I see.  I've been hearing about Peirce on this list for quite
some time, but he always sounded more like a philosopher than
a student of discovery processes.  


> In critiquing the Cartesian and Kantian models of science,
> Peirce revived some old ideas of Aristotle that identified
> three basic types of reasoning, that have come to be called
> abductive, deductive, and inductive.  

>Abductive reasoning is
> the form of reasoning that generates hypotheses, and thus it
> is critical to the whole process of discovery and invention
> in science.  The nature of hypothesis formation, which is
> also akin to diagnostic reasoning, is a thing that needs
> to be better understood, but most people eventually come
> to the conclusion that it is the most difficult kind of
> reasoning to formalize, much less automate.  About the
> best you can do is clarify the conditions under which
> it is apt to succeed, like restricting hypotheses to
> consequential and falsifiable statements, that are
> subject to deductive follow-up and inductive test.

This sort of hypothesis formation is what many current
discovery systems are using.  It would be nice to read
a formalization of it.  


> Jon Awbrey

Thanks for your comments.  

Rich


> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
> 
> Richard Cooper wrote:
> > 
> > Jon:
> > > Having swum a sufficient number of cycles in the 
> eternally recurring
> > > literature on "discovery", or whatever it's being called 
> this month,
> > > I have learned a criterion for recognizing the contributaries who
> > > are least likely to repeat the same old set of trials and errors
> > > eternally, and that is whether they have done their homework.
> > > Doing your homework means reading something beyond the 5-year
> > > window on the literature that is de rigueur mortis in some
> > > fields I know, that keeps them eternally rediscovering
> > > what they eternally discredited just 5.5 years ago.
> > > A good rule of thumb, as I know you know, is to
> > > look in their bib or index and see if you find
> > > the name of Peirce figuring there.  Filtering
> > > on that admittedly fallible feature leaves
> > > me with still more than I can mine my way
> > > through in this brief life, and so I will
> > > focus mostly on that radioactive residue.
> > >
> > > Jon Awbrey
> > 
> > How is Peirce's work related to discovery?
> > 
> > Rich
> 
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
> 
>