ONT Re: Inquiry
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
SS: [Differentiation during development as modeled by increasing specification]
is unavoidable since the creation of subclasses by increasing specification
(the basic model of development) necessarily generates trees because of
coordinate subclasses emerging out of potentiality.
SS: Differentiation ensues if more than one subclass survives (and continues
in each as long as a lineage of subsubclasses continues to survive).
JA: The paragraph that I cited from ['Interpretation as Action: The Risk of Inquiry']
was the residue of a much longer discussion that was cut down due to space limits,
but the sense of it was, insofar as I can remember it all, just a bit different
from your description of an autonomous external system.
SS: I would say 'system modeled exernally'.
By "autonomous external system", I mean an object system that is being regarded,
and to a pertinent approximation usefully so, as a system in which we ourselves,
as "agents of construal" (interpreters & observers) are negligible participants.
Is that what you mean by "system modeled externally"?
JA: You see, I am mediately and ultimately concerned with how we each determine our own conduct,
as agents immersed in streams of half-congealed, half-dissolved activity, trying to reflect
and to critique as best we can the nearity of our previous approximations to some eternally
cherished ideal. And so my sense of statistics is very personal, like the Savage Mind that
I am. Out of the confusion that we face on a moment of inquiry's birth, or even conception,
we must discern some hint of a form that tells us which way might just be the best way to go.
That is what I mean by "differentiation", the third art, the art of distinction, elsewise
yclept as the art of discretion, the highest partitioner of value that makes its case
between those other two arts, the art of acquisition and the art of production.
SS: OK, I would say that you are taking an internalist perspective, trying to get at generativity,
which is in general not accessible to typical externalist (global, fully explicit, totalizing,
atemporal) discourse.
Not sure. I always tend to become a bit suspicious of any discourse, whether my own or others,
that becomes too littered with these insuperable suffixes "-ism" and "-ist", and I do not think
that any tried and true pragmatician such as I keep trying to be would rush to accept any such
label as either "externalist" or "internalist".
Side question: Are you using "generativity" in the sense of Chomsky?
SS: It is not, I think, clear that in this discourse the kind of choice
you refer to can be represented. Different choices would not, I think,
be available to the system AS choices. "Hints of forms", OK, "confusion".
OK, "conception" and "birth", yes, "hints" perhaps. So, "distinction" --
definitely not. No distinctions would be available internally in my view.
Distinctions are pre-eminently externalist things. They are too crisp
for vague internality. Vague groping guided by tendencies, OK.
Fuzzy distinctions might be more believable.
Again, I am not sure what all is being suggested here -- I was hoping to givvie up
the discussion of fuzzy concepts to a more disentangled thread, as I threaded to
do with that old post on "Fuzzy Stuff" -- but I think that these issues are what
drives me to use various families and sundry samples of triadic sign relations
as my conceptual framework of choice. Here, the "object domain" contains any
old thing that we purport to make an object of "discussion and thought" (DAT),
the domains of signs and interpretant signs contain the signs and mental ideas
that we use to talk about and to think about the objects of the object domain.
JA: Roughly, "general" is extensional while "vague" is intensional.
SS: An interesting point. This allows 'vague' to be generative by incorporating more
descriptors into its sentence as further and further qualifiers. In contrast,
'general' can but extend its hegemony.
JA: Yes, I think so, at least, provisionally. It was with (lack of exhaustive) respect for
these dual notions, dichotomies and dualities being anathematic to Peirce, and so with
trying to compound their synthesis or to discern their tertium quid that Peirce first
came to the shores of what he named the "Theory of Information" (TOI), around about
1865, by the evidence of his Harvard University and Lowell Institute Lectures.
SS: Cool on "Theory of Information", since the process of subclass generation
is the reduction of informational constraints (emerged from vagueness) to
information neat (as in NPI).
JA: I did not understand this sentence much. Is "cool" good or bad?
SS: Oh, sorry -- I meant "Theory of Information" fits well as a label for
the way some of us think of development using modern information theory.
Cool!
JA: What is NPI?
SS: The negentropy theory of information.
That is, information is a reduction
in possibilities ontologically, or
of uncertainty epistemologically.
Gosh, I feel so dense! "What the heck is the 'P' for?", asked Princess Principia.
Negative Probability Integral?
SS: I note further that 'general' can only extend its hegemony IF 'vagueness' differentiated
more plentifully into a bigger tree. So it is not so dichotomous with 'vagueness' as one
might think. It is its backward projection.
JA: I am not sure if we are talking about the same things by means of these words.
Is backward projection the same thing as inverse projection, id est, a fiber?
SS: What I mean is that generality is constructed from particular instances,
gradually uniting fewer and fewer properties of more and more instances.
But instances themselves were developed out of a vague precursor, by
differentiation among them during their development. Thus, as Peirce
suggests (somewhere) generality is a kind of explicit model of vagueness.
So, what I was saying is that if a given vagueness developed into a greater
tree of definite descendents, then the generality that can be constructed with
respect to these will have greater hegemony.
Give me some more clues and I will try to find this.
I do not have the CD of CP yet -- maybe some party
on the Arisbe list will perk up and help us find it?
Jon Awbrey
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤