ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard,
I'm going to make another attempt to address the issues of your initial comment,
and also to clarify the metaphorical responses that I have issued along the way.
Wish Me Luck!
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
HP quoting AE:
| The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
| It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot
| possibly be restricted to the examination of concepts of his own special
| field. He cannot proceed without considering critically a much more
| difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday
| thinking.
|
| Einstein, "Physics and Reality", 1936.
| What, precisely, is 'thinking'? When, at the reception of sense impressions,
| memory-pictures emerge, this is not yet 'thinking'. And when such pictures form
| series, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not 'thinking'. When,
| however, a certain image turns up in many such series, then -- precisely through such
| return -- it becomes an ordering element for such a series, in that it connects series
| that are in themselves unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept.
| I think that the transition from free association or 'dreaming' to thinking is
| characterized by the more or less dominating role which the concept plays in it.
| It is by no means necessary that the concept must be connected with sensorily
| cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case,
| thinking becomes, by means of that fact, communicable.
|
| Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes", 1944.
HP: It is now generally accepted, by physicists at least, that the relation between
sense impressions and such unifying concepts cannot be articulated by means of
any method or logic, but arises as a type of aesthetic or "vague instinct that
must be felt" (Poincare). I don't "think" it's going to rain the logical way
Dewey and Jon do. I feel it's going to rain.
HP: As Polanyi ["Personal Knowledge"] expressed it: "I believe that by now three things
have been established beyond reasonable doubt: the power of intellectual beauty to
reveal truth about nature; the vital importance of distinguishing this beauty from
merely formal attractiveness, and the delicacy of the test between them, so difficult
that it may baffle the most penetrating scientific minds."
HP: I have more confidence in empirical approaches to inquiry.
The analytic Peircian pragmatic "canonical" approach that
Jon describes is certainly closer to what we have been
indoctrinated with in our western culture. But that is
not what actually goes on in the brain. My conversion
from the canonical approach evolved from teaching a course,
"The Psychology of Problem Solving," over a period of 25 years.
There is now much empirical evidence of how inquiry actually takes
place from many quarters:
HP: (1) the introspection of creative scientists [e.g., Hadamard,
'The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field', Polanyi,
'Personal Knowledge', Ghiselin, 'The Creative Process', Miller,
'Imagery in Scientific Thought', Lakatos, 'History of Science and
its Rational Reconstructions', Feyerabend, 'Against Method', etc.],
HP: (2) the more recent models of distributed, concurrent networks and evolved behavior --
including agent-based approaches to artificial life and artificial intelligence [e.g.,
Brooks, 'Cambrian Intelligence', Hinton and Sejnowski, eds., 'Unsupervised Learning',
Arkins, 'Behavior-Based Robotics', Mitchell, 'An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms', etc.],
HP: (3) on empirical knowledge of how brains actually integrate their evolved
instincts, senses, and individual experiences [e.g., Abbott and Sejnowski, eds.,
'Neural Codes and Distributed Representations', Rugg, ed., 'Cognitive Neuroscience'].
HP: What is now evident is that by the time we are using words and logics of any type
where thinking is explicit and communicable, we are no longer in the creative mode in
which images and concepts emerge from our instincts, memories, and sense impressions.
Furthermore, the creative mode is by its nature a sub-symbolic mode, or more precisely,
a sub-thinking mode. (Whether it is still explicit enough to be called symbolic or
a sign activity is only a matter of definition.) The brain's activities in even the
simplest pattern recognition or one-bit decision involves hundreds of millions of
neurons in which instinct, memory, models, and sensory inputs are concurrently
seeking some kind of metastability. This network dynamic activity is so
complex, diffused, and delicate that any attempt to impose rules, methods,
and logic would only disturb and limit the emergence of novel ideas.
JA: In the pragmatic way of thinking everything has a purpose,
and the purpose of each thing is the first thing we should
try to note about it. The purpose of inquiry is to reduce
doubt and lead to a state of belief, which a person in that
state will usually call knowledge or certainty.
HP: This is not the case for many physicists. The purpose of models is to reduce ambiguity,
not doubt. Doubt should always be a dominant emotion since it is the primary check
against overenthusiasm and error. The state of "belief" is especially dangerous,
since no model is complete, and very likely will be replaced. Belief is for the
religious. What physicists seek first in their models is clarity, elegance,
and empirical decidability.
JA: For our present purposes, the first feature to note in
distinguishing these modes of reasoning is whether they
are exact or approximate in character. Deduction is the
only type of reasoning that can be made exact, always
deriving true conclusions from true premisses, while
induction and abduction are unavoidably approximate
in their mode of operation, involving elements of
fallible judgment and inescapable error in their
application.
HP: Paraphrasing Einstein:
Insofar as deductive reasoning ("the propositions of mathematics")
is exact ("certain") it does not apply to reality; and insofar
as it applies to reality it is not exact ("certain").
Yes, I think I said that.
JA: Abductive reasoning is the mode of operation which is involved
in shifting from one paradigm to another. In order to reduce
the overall tension of uncertainty in a knowledge base, it is
often necessary to restructure our perspective on the data in
radical ways, to change the channel that parcels out information
to us. But the true value of a new paradigm is typically not
appreciated from the standpoint of another model, that is, not
until it has had time to reorganize the knowledge base in ways
that demonstrate clear advantages to the community of inquiry
concerned.
HP: Abduction, as I understand it, is not reasoning. It is sub-rational, and I would
say sub-symbolic. Computers lack the knowledge base acquired from 4 billion years
of surviving in a complex environment as well as the vast distributed network, senses,
and body actions necessary to efficiently integrate this mass of experience. Most of
this was acquired by natural selection and integrated into our metabolism, hormonal
and motor controls, senses, pattern recognition, perceptions, motivations, brains,
thoughts, imagination -- the whole organism. It's not likely we can pull this off
in silicon except for simple, closed domains.
I fully understand, I guess, why anybody would want to say this,
especially if they judge ab-apodictic, approximate, contingent,
and non-demonstrative manners of inference against the bar of
deductive reasoning. But it seems fairly clear when you come
to examine it that some patterns of abduction and induction
just plain work better than others in the long run, and so
our concern is one of accounting for how this can be so.
I have been posting a bunch of stuff on these topics
and will be interested in your reactions to them.
JA: We seem to be about the business of marking explicitly what's given implicitly.
But is it a mark against our ephemeris that celestial bodies do not consult it
for their itineraries, nor have the eyes in their orbs to read our fine prints,
that the planets are enlightened by the sun on their courses and their destiny
by some adumbration other than differential equations in plain black and white?
JA: Just an initial impression that comes to mind.
I am still working my way through the rest
of the issues that you are raising here.
The point here is that a different order of being comes into play
when being begins relating itself to itself via the automediation
of signs. Being a material and a natural thinker, I see this all
taking place within the order of matter and nature, as an utterly
internal development, differentiation, and "ontologogenesis" of a
cosmos, if you catch my drift, but nothing about saying this does
anything to diminish the import of the formal aspect of its being.
I hope this acts to reduce the metaphor of senseless impressions to a eusemy.
I will keep this phyle intact and try to develop its phylogogenesis as we go.
Jon Awbrey
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