ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
HP: Mishtu's has stated my problem. How are we to use logical analysis
in discovery? How does Jon's and Peirce's approach differ from
logic-based AI schemes? I agree that logic can in some cases
"tease out" some relations among our observations. When we
have an excessive amount of details, as in remote sensing
and gene sequencing, then data-mining logic programs are
essential. But no physical laws have been discovered
this way. The number of relations is transcomputable.
HP: Mishtu says: "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."
HP: Poincare agrees with him: "Logic is nothing but the study of properties
common to all classifications [cuts, distinctions, observables, etc.]."
With the provision that, "... the classification that is adopted is
immutable." Therefore, the logic can only follow the cuts and cannot
escape from the given classifications. I don't see how logic can make
the cuts, as Jon's "autotomic axe" seems to suggest. As I indicated,
scientific inquiry, or looking for something unknown, is primarily
a search for new classifications, new cuts, new observables.
I don't see how logic helps at this stage of inquiry.
It might even hinder.
Howard, I do not know how to communicate with you.
You are using the word "logic" to mean something
else than I do, and attaching that meaning to
the statements that I am trying to make about
what I call "logic". Of course that cannot
preserve the sense that I intend to make.
When a person will not hear that one has
another meaning then novel communication
and communication of novelty will cease.
When I go into my local college bookstore and peruse
the textbooks of the subject called "logic" that are
being used today, I "discover", to no real surprise,
that they are almost exactly the same in content and
in scope as the ones that I first cracked open more
than thirty years ago, with the possible exception
of the CD of 'Tarski's World' or 'Turing's World'
tucked under the back cover flap. You will get
no argument from me, logical XOR imaginative,
that this textbook subject called "logic" is
a pretty paltry panoply of petty principian
paste and pinchsnuff, barely powerful enough
to solve the artificially cooked up textbook
exercises that are spoon-fed through the text.
The sense in which you are using the word "logic" is a relatively "modern" innovation,
not really hammered into stone this way until after 1900, before which time the word
"logic" still bore a hint of the LOGOS, the Form, Formula, Ideal, Pattern, ..., that
the Ancients initially expressed by means of it. It is not for no reason that the
challenging charge of Warren McCulloch, that blazing writing on the wall, so often
haunts my thoughts about what Logic might have been and what it ought to be again:
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| Please remember that we are not now concerned with
| the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and physiology,
| of man. They are my daily business. They do not contribute
| to the logic of our problem. Despite Ramon Lull's combinatorial
| analysis of logic and all of his followers, including Leibnitz with
| his universal characteristic and his persistent effort to build logical
| computing machines, from the death of William of Ockham logic decayed.
| There were, of course, teachers of logic. The forms of the syllogism
| and the logic of classes were taught, and we shall use some of their
| devices, but there was a general recognition of their inadequacy to
| the problems in hand. Russell says it was Jevons -- and Feibleman,
| that it was DeMorgan -- who said, "The logic of Aristotle is inadequate,
| for it does not show that if a horse is an animal then the head of the horse
| is the head of an animal." To which Russell replies, "Fortunate Aristotle,
| for if a horse were a clam or a hydra it would not be so." The difficulty
| is that they had no knowledge of the logic of relations, and almost none
| of the logic of propositions. These logics really began in the latter
| part of the last century with Charles Peirce as their great pioneer.
| As with most pioneers, many of the trails he blazed were not followed
| for a score of years. For example, he discovered the amphecks -- that
| is, "not both ... and ..." and "neither ... nor ...", which Sheffer
| rediscovered and are called by his name for them, "stroke functions".
| It was Peirce who broke the ice with his logic of relatives, from
| which springs the pitiful beginnings of our logic of relations of
| two and more than two arguments. So completely had the traditional
| Aristotelian logic been lost that Peirce remarks that when he wrote
| the 'Century Dictionary' he was so confused concerning abduction, or
| apagoge, and induction that he wrote nonsense. Thus Aristotelian logic,
| like the skeleton of Tom Paine, was lost to us from the world that it
| had engendered. Peirce had to go back to Duns Scotus to start again
| the realistic logic of science. Pragmatism took hold, despite its
| misinterpretation by William James. The world was ripe for it.
| Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, followed by a
| host of lesser lights, but sparked by many a strange character
| like Schroeder, Sheffer, Gödel, and company, gave us a working
| logic of propositions. By the time I had sunk my teeth into
| these questions, the Polish school was well on its way to glory.
| In 1923 I gave up the attempt to write a logic of transitive verbs
| and began to see what I could do with the logic of propositions.
| My object, as a psychologist, was to invent a kind of least psychic
| event, or "psychon", that would have the following properties: First,
| it was to be so simple an event that it either happened or else it did
| not happen. Second, it was to happen only if its bound cause had happened --
| shades of Duns Scotus! -- that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent.
| Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were
| to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions
| concerning their antecedents. (McCulloch, WIANTAMMKIAAMTHMKAN?, EOM, pages 7-8).
|
| Warren S. McCulloch,
|"What Is a Number that a Man May Know It,
| and a Man, that He May Know a Number",
| The Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture,
|'General Semantics Bulletin', Numbers 26 & 27,
| Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT, 1961,
|'Embodiments of Mind', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.
|
| http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-July/000704.html
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