ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Well, I sorta thought we said this in the title,
not to mention repeatedly throughout the article:
| "Interpretation as Action: The Risk of Inquiry"
|
| The fallibility of signs is shared with the human activities of interpretation and inquiry,
| and bears a relation to the situated character of all dynamic processes of determination.
| |
| | If doubt and indeterminateness were wholly within the mind --
| | whatever that may signify -- purely mental processes ought
| | to get rid of them. But experimental procedure signifies
| | that actual alteration of an external situation is necessary
| | to effect the conversion. A 'situation' undergoes, through
| | operations directed by thought, transition from problematic
| | to settled, from internal discontinuity to coherency and
| | organization. (Dewey, TQFC, p. 185).
| |
| | John Dewey, "The Quest for Certainty", in J.A. Boydston (ed.),
| |'John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, (Vol 4: 1929)',
| | Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, 1988.
This attitude toward object reality derives from Peirce's ground-breaking,
cornerstone-laying work to discern the "Logic of Science", real science,
with which he was very much acquainted, however labeled or libeled as
a "mere logician" he may've been by some people, who had been content
until his time, as many still are, to lounge in their armchairs
and listen to the facile fantasias of the Mills Brothers.
Some emphasis added,
Jon Awbrey
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H H Pattee wrote (some emphasis lost):
>
> I am not sure how I fit into this discussion. Jon obviously has enough comments to answer without
> my adding more. Anyway, here is another view of inquiry. I am not sure how Jon's discussion of
> inquiry gets into the observable world of science. As a non-logician, it seems to me Jon is just
> inquiring into Peirce and logical strings and graphs. If this is Peirce's main contribution I can
> understand why scientists do not pay him much attention. Inquiry to most scientists does not
> really depend on this type of logical analysis, but on imagination and observation. I don't know
> of any cases of discovery in science, or even mathematics, where logical analysis played the
> creative role. Of course, in math proofs require logic, but rarely is logic the source of the
> inquiry.
>
> I think for most scientists "inquiry" means exploration or looking for something entirely new in
> our experience. After all, modern scientific inquiry did not begin with logic but with the
> extension of our natural senses by instruments and by the extension of our natural imagination by
> mathematics. Modern biology began with the microscope, chemistry with the analytic balance and
> chemical indicators, and physics with the telescope, theodolite, and mathematics. Chronometers,
> galvanometers, spectroscope, mass spectrometers, centrifuges, chromatography, radioactive tracers,
> particle accelerators, and especially mathematics, are the essential prostheses for our senses and
> brains without which scientific inquiry would have come to a dead end like scholasticism.
>
> The real problem for scientific inquiry is: How do we know what are we looking for? This is an old
> problem. Meno asked Socrates, "But how will you look for something when you don't in the least
> know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of
> your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that
> what you have found is the thing you didn't know?" This is the big question, but Socrates gives
> one of his sillier answers: "The soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has
> seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that there is."
> Therefore, he concludes: . . . "learning is nothing but recollection."
>
> It is not the metaphysics of reincarnation that is silly here (I'm in favor of it). It is
> Socrates' lack of understanding of problem identification. As we are all too well aware today,
> if you don't know what you are looking for, access to an infinite database (no matter how well
> indexed, and whether it is in an immortal soul or in an infinitely fast computer) is not a
> solution. In fact, the more the data, the worse the problem. You still don't know what you are
> looking for. I think Peirce worried about this problem too, but I don't think he found an adequate
> answer. Jon may have another opinion.
>
> There have been two extreme approaches to this problem. At one extreme is the assumption of
> initial total ignorance. Then blind search and natural selection is the only hope. Of course, this
> requires many trials and memory of failures and successes (i.e., the Darwinian solution:
> replication, heritable variation, and natural selection, also assumed by evolutionary
> epistemologists, a la Campbell, Popper, et al.). The other extreme, a physical equivalent of
> Socrates omniscient soul, is a Laplacean omnipotent determinism where free will and ignorance are
> just illusions and have nothing to do with the inexorable course of events. Neither of these
> extremes alone makes much sense in terms of current physics and biology. Today the active
> controversy in evolution is over finding a suitable balance between chance and determinism, that
> is, between Darwinian blind search and selection and non-selective self-organizing (dynamic)
> processes.
>
> I think there are two misconceptions of the search problem. The first is that the search space it
> too large. The main criticism of the creationists, intelligent design theists, and even the
> self-organizing anti-Darwinians, is that the search space for the totally ignorant is so large
> that successful blind search is too improbable. But the evidence is clear that in the course of
> evolution organisms have greatly increased their searchable domains by adding more sensors and
> motor controls; and as I pointed out above, science also depends for its progress on greatly
> increasing its searchable domains by instrumentation. Enlarging the searchable domain is not the
> problem, it is part of the answer to evolution and learning. What would be the evolutionary future
> of organisms if their inquiries were restricted to a fixed set of sensors (or a fixed logic)? The
> second misconception is that "blind" applies to the entire search process. But "blind" applies
> only to a simple initial event in a highly organized living system that has adapted to a highly
> ordered environment. This is a genetic form or analog of intelligence. Similarly, there is at some
> level in every creative idea a blind search, but usually in the context of highly developed
> problem domain.
>
> I think the most significant change in attitudes towards this balance between determinism and
> chance in the last 20 years has been the loss of dominance of logic-based, hard-programmed
> problem-solving, as in GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) and the renewed appreciation of the power of
> biological analogs like neural nets and genetic algorithms to discover solutions and integrate
> behaviors. Most important, however, has been the realization that blind search and selection
> requires strong, open-ended interactions with a rich, highly-ordered (i.e., descriptively
> compressible) environment (as has been partially simulated by environmentally "embedded autonomous
> robots") What is still missing in these robots is the open-ended ability to construct new sensors.
> It appears that only with this unrestricted "sensing" of a rich, ordered environment does a
> balanced coupling of self-organization and blind search and natural selection become effective.
>
> Here are a few references on these points:
> Brooks, R., "Intelligence without reason." In 12th Int. Conf. on AI, Morgan Kauffman, 1991.
> Campbell, D., "Evolutionary epistemology." In The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Schilpp, ed.,
> Open Court, 1974.
> Cariani, P. "Some epistemological implications of devices that construct their own sensors
> and effectors." In Artificial Life II, Langton, et al, eds., Addison-Wesley, 1992.
> Clark, A., "Being there." MIT Press, 1997.
> Conrad, M., "The geometry of evolution." BioSystems 24, 61-81, 1990.
> Dawkins, R., "The evolution of evolution." Artificial life I, Langton, ed.,
> Addison-Wesley, 1989, p.201.
>
> This is one view of inquiry. I suspect I am missing something about Jon's view.
>
> Howard
> Howard H. Pattee
> Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Dept.
> SUNY Binghmaton, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000
> pattee@binghamton.edu
> http://www.ssie.binghamton.edu/pattee
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