ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Mishtu Banerjee wrote (MB):
MB: By way of re-connecting Peirce the Logician with Peirce the Scientist, I wonder if it is possible
for anyone on this list to discuss Peirce's scientific work on gravity and sources of error in
gravity measurements for the coast survey, in terms of the formation of his views on logic.
This is true, and it shows that Peirce knows whereof he speaks when he speaks of science
as she is spoke. In its relevance to his view of logic it helps to illustrate the fact
that he was a pragmatic thinker and a "real" thinker -- it is my vigil of custom to use
the adjective forms in lieu of the "-isms" -- in every sense of the word "real", to wit,
objective, platonic, scholastic, and so on. But I will try to focus on issues that are
pertinent to the topics of organization, complexity, autonomy. For me, the activities
of intelligent agents, and systems witted enough to do some kind of inquiry, however
reflectively, from absently to dimly to fully, which I am guessing that every living
organism has to do in order to maintain its definition as living per se, if only at
the level of its evolutionary quest -- let me catch my breath -- these are examples
of the most complex behavior and the most fascinating conduct that I know. And all
I want to know while I have yet breath to live is how this inquiry bit is carried off --
and so I return to abductive reason, not to get too carried away by the transport of it.
MB: As I understood it, Peirce's use of logic, was a way of teasing out
all the implications of a creative guess ... and this is abduction.
To guess "at the riddle", then to logically work out all the logical
correlates (necessary implications) of that guess, then to make
measurements, to confirm or falsify the correlates.
Yes, that is a decent summary of the generic cycle of inquiry.
Of course, nobody ever teases out "all" of the implications
of any good guess, but you already knew that. Still, this
general idea is only the beginning if you want to fathom
more deeply and exactly how the whole rigamorole can ever
really work, or if you get down one day, as I did one day,
to trying to write computer programs that would genuinely
extend our humane capacity to "do inquiry", as we say.
MB: I always wondered why Popper's book was
called "The Logic of Scientific Discovery"
when the logic usually comes after the discovery ...
Well, that's "a cute observation", the likes of which I can "admire", to say we envy,
but if I try to read Popper's line with a bit of interpretive charity, then I would
hazard a guess that the word "Logic" is used here to evoke the idea of "Pattern",
the "condition of posing" (COP), the "way of being" (WOB), to sum in up, the
overall "form, lay, and play" (FLAP) of the activity in question. It is but
our modish brain-lyzing by a certain "school of analytic philosophy" (SOAP)
that has brought us down the slippery slope of thinking that we can reduce
every notion of that once-hallowed LOGOS to the mere reflex of deduction.
MB: My own, developing view of logic ... is that any given logic depends first
on making certain distinctions (cuts -- say distinction of right and left
handedness in organic molecules), and that the logic follows depending on
the cuts. Scientific discovery often begins with making new distinctions ...
but the big discoveries seem to be by cutting through distinctions, and
showing that two things share the same form (motion of a ball falling
to earth, motion of the earth around the sun).
This sounds like a plan to me.
I myself long ago epitomized
logic as the "autotomic axe".
Many Regards,
Jon Awbrey
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> -----Original Message-----
> Subj: Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
> From: H H Pattee [mailto:pattee@binghamton.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2001 9:16 PM
> To: oca@cc.newcastle.edu.au
>
> 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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