SUO: Re: automating abduction?
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JA = Jon Awbrey
TE = The English
TJ = Tom Johnston
TJ: Or, as the English have often exclaimed:
TE: O Times! O Daily Mirror!
TJ: Once we get an automated procedure that can:
TJ: (a) create a set of hypotheses among which to pick,
TJ: (b) apply the pragmatic maxim to those hypotheses
as some kind of cost/benefit analysis, ...
No, that's the "lo-road" reading of "pragmatic" you're citing here --
I reckon both roads lead to the same destiny at the end of inquiry,
but it's a long road to hobo from what I gather -- at any velocity,
the "hi-road" taking of "pragmatic" embarks from this exhorstation:
| Consider what effects that might 'conceivably'
| have practical bearings you 'conceive' the
| objects of your 'conception' to have. Then,
| your 'conception' of those effects is the
| whole of your 'conception' of the object.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CP 5.438, 1878/1905.
Properly read, this provides a criterion of acceptable conceptions,
and thus furnishes us with a propadeutic contraceptive against all
futile metaphysics that would not even tri to be a science. And
in this manner and degree the pragmatic maxim answers the riddle
of abduction, to the slim degree that its swerving inclinations
can be answered in advance, by ruling out notions that have no
chance whatsoever of proving themselves meaningful in the end.
The "economy of inquiry" does come into play throughout though,
pragmatically speaking ...
TJ: and (c) modify the set of criteria used in the cost/benefit analysis when
the use of said criteria proves to be too costly and not beneficial enough --
well, then we can all retire and let the machines do the thinking for us.
Granted that we have formalized and computerized a lot of what we knew
about the "logic of discovery" half a century and more ago, have we
really moved any closer to the goal of creating that kind of procedure?
Given that granted, which covers a lot of work I am sure, I doubt it.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not ONEOF (those who thinks this to be a routine matter),
even if I think that there are various algorithmic resources that might be devised
to bear fruitfully on the problems of inquiry (= ab_de_in_ductive reasoning). And,
if you take up Peirce's description of inquiry as a cyclic (iterative or recursive)
process, then it's a useful observation that speeding transduction at the venturis
of deductive proving and inductive testing can work to acclerate the whole process.
My own last (written down) thoughts on this are here (and there):
http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
TJ: The relevance of this remark to our concerns in this forum is that since (as I take it)
the gap between such procedures and any reasonably creative and informed human hypotheses
generator/evaluator is great, we should continue to rely on the humans. In the context of
creating upper ontologies, the hypotheses we are concerned to generate and choose among are
proposed generalizations of a set of concepts, i.e. supertype tables to subsume a set of lower
level tables, object classes to subsume lower level classes.
The catch to abductive inference is where one has to create wholly new terms.
I try to do my part, and invent five or six a day before coffee, but I never
if any of them'll catch on, not many. My last bit of clear thinking on this
question -- the catch is that lucidity can be so (d)elusive at times -- left
me reckoning that the critical factor was the greatest common divisor of the
sum (ab+in)duction, which I dubbed "adduction", overruling a small number of
occasions when Peirce used the term as an approximate alternym for abduction.
I will have to dig up some old notes ...
TJ: We can indeed build tools to help us with these efforts, but these are not the
same as tools to take over these efforts. Automated supertype generators cannot
yet replace the hard work human beings do. The human ontologists working at Cyc
are not about to be replaced by some creature arising from the cog sci labs.
Again, autonomic supertype generation, along with all this up-down business,
is very likely beside the point as far 3-adic models of signs and inquiry go.
Creative concept formation is much more a middling affair, a muddling through:
| Fortun, Mike, and Bernstein, Herbert J.,
|'Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century',
| Counterpoint/Perseus, Washington, DC, 1998.
| Raskin, Marcus G., and Bernstein, Herbert J., with Susan Buck-Morss,
| Noam Chomsky, Michael Goldhaber, Edward S. Herman, and Joseph Turner,
|'New Ways of Knowing: The Sciences, Society, and Reconstructive Knowledge',
| Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, NJ, 1987.
Muddling through is something we ought to be good at here.
Jon Awbrey
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