SUO: Re: article on the pitfalls of metadata
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Richard Cooper wrote:
>
> > 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.
You might try Googling up names like Holland, Holyoak, Nisbett, Thagard,
with AND or OR between them, Dedre Gentner, Arthur W. Burks, J.R. Josephson,
Peng & Reggia, not all of them completely kosher as Peirceans go, but who have
at least taken his work into some account.
JA: 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.
I'm not sure these sorts of distinctions were quite so cut and dried before
the "PhD Octopus" got a hold on our collective imaginations, but his early
papers were published in the premier math and science journals of his day.
JA: 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.
>
JA: 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.
The orginal formulation is the syllogistic one that
goes back to Aristotle's 'Prior Analytics' 2.25.
cf: http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg06917.html
One of Peirce's early formulations is in his
1867 paper "On a New List of Categories":
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p32.html
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/newlist/nl-main.htm
There was a transition in Peirce's thought from this syllogistic model to a more
relational imformation-theoretic model. The shift paralleled a sea-change that
was taking place all along the pebbled beaches of science about the same time,
and I am still in the process of trying to figure whether it was continuous
or discontinuous in its character. One of Peirce's best descriptions of
the 3-phase cycle of inquiry can be found in a paper with the disarming
title "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", 'Collected Papers',
CP 6.452-493, also anthologized in the volume edited by Philip Wiener:
|'Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)',
| Edited with an Introduction by Philip P. Wiener, Dover, New York, NY, 1966.
Jon Awbrey
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