ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard,
You continue to rush on ahead of my more plodding ways,
and so I find that I have to keep taking your messages
in several tries to get through their briar patches.
Previously on this thread:
Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
HP: 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.
Pragmaticians are "real" thinkers. They guess that there is a world beyond them,
that it has properties -- this is, a little Peirce tells me, the authorized sense
of the word "real", as it was originally introduced into our culture's discourse.
My own experience tells me that this "real world" will just keeping on thumping
me in the head, as it were, until I pay attention to the features thereof, and
this forces me, all against my initial inclination, to try to catch its drift.
All the nets that I have to catch it with are made, in the end, of signs and
the types of signs that we know as affects, concepts, impressions, or mental
ideas, and so I must, per force aforesaid, contemplate the relations that
insist, persist, subsist, or systematicaly exist among these arrays of
so-called "real" objects, signs, and their host of interpretant signs.
HP: 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 am guessing then that you are one of those who does not consider
this art that we call "computer science" to be a "real" science?
HP: 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.
Ah, the "2001: A Space Oddity" picture of science!
These instruments just fell from the sky one day,
and science began. It would explain a lot of
this cargo cultism that I see about me today,
but I have another picture of the motion.
HP: 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.
Yes, I came to the university as a post-sputnik era math and physics major,
and so I heard all the same stories of history, read all the same romantic
accounts of our noble climb from pre-historical slime (=< 1901), but then
I made the "experiment" of actually going out and "observing" what was
actually laid down in some of the old "fossil pits", and lo and behold
I discovered that our "ascent" was far more gradual and rule-governed
than all these romantic novel-ists had been catechizing me to believe.
HP: 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."
Here, now, Howard, you have, in your own inimitable way, a way that I would not even
dare to attempt to imitate, brought us to the very hub and nub of the Big Question.
So I will fortify myself with another cup of coffee, and return with anticipation.
Jon Awbrey
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HP: 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.
HP: 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.).
HP: 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.
HP: 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)?
HP: 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.
HP: 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.
HP: 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.
HP: 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.
HP: This is one view of inquiry. I suspect I am missing something about Jon's view.
JA: Well, I sorta thought we said this in the title,
not to mention repeatedly throughout the article:
J&SA: | "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.
JA: 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.
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