ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Inquiry SIG --
JA: As I carry out one of my periodic post mortem investigations
of the many communication failures that I have made over the
last two or three or ten years, I suspect that one of the most
serious of them may be that I have consistently failed to convey
the aptness of the propositional and syllogistic levels of analysis
to the task of understanding the logical and informational structure
of the inquiry process. So I will endeavor to work on that for a while.
But first I will try to comment more directly on each of Howard's remarks.
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JA: Initial Invitation To Inquiry Into Inquiry:
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg02959.html
JA: Approaches To Inquiry -- Divisions 1 and 2:
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg02961.html
HP quoting AE:
| The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
| It is for this reason that the critical thinking of the physicist cannot
| possibly be restricted to the examination of concepts of his own special
| field. He cannot proceed without considering critically a much more
| difficult problem, the problem of analyzing the nature of everyday
| thinking.
|
| Einstein, "Physics and Reality", 1936.
HP quoting AE:
| What, precisely, is 'thinking'? When, at the reception of sense impressions,
| memory-pictures emerge, this is not yet 'thinking'. And when such pictures form
| series, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not 'thinking'. When,
| however, a certain image turns up in many such series, then -- precisely through such
| return -- it becomes an ordering element for such a series, in that it connects series
| that are in themselves unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept.
| I think that the transition from free association or 'dreaming' to thinking is
| characterized by the more or less dominating role which the concept plays in it.
| It is by no means necessary that the concept must be connected with sensorily
| cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case,
| thinking becomes, by means of that fact, communicable.
|
| Einstein, "Autobiographical Notes", 1944.
Compare with John Dewey, distinguishing three or four broad senses of "thought":
| In the first place 'thought' is used broadly, not say loosely.
| Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads", is
| called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of
| it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding
| whatever is directly presented; we think (or think of) only such things
| as we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning
| is further limited to beliefs that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony.
| Of this third type, two kinds -- or, rather, two degrees -- must be discriminated.
| In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds
| that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought
| and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought ...
|
| John Dewey, 'How We Think', Dover, Mineola, NY, 1997;
| Originally published by D.C. Heath, Boston, MA, 1910; pages 1-2.
N.B. Philosophical writers tend to use the word "belief" in the senses of
estimation, judgment, opinion, and to differentiate it from "faith".
HP: It is now generally accepted, by physicists at least, that the relation between
sense impressions and such unifying concepts cannot be articulated by means of
any method or logic, but arises as a type of aesthetic or "vague instinct that
must be felt" (Poincare). I don't "think" it's going to rain the logical way
Dewey and Jon do. I feel it's going to rain.
I have no problem with describing experience in this way, in terms of "aesthesis",
aching bunions, cricks in the neck, dampness in the bones, gut feelings, hunches,
impressions, premonitions, senses, superpostitions, and so on, and so forth, but
all that this acccomplishes is to shift the template of terminology with respect
to the phenomena of our experience -- it does not alter the fact that reflective
thought, by whatever name, rises by a winding stair to a certain significance in
our lives. Indeed, I insist on the idea that the cognitive is wholly derivative
and properly subsidiary to the affective. (You did not hear that here first --
it derives from Aristotle if not from much earlier sources.)
The questions that arise in my work with regard to the operation of "reflection",
as it does with this whole complex of typically "-ionized" words, each of which
characteristically denotes both a process and its product, are just these three:
1. How do we do it? (Descriptive Actuality)
2. How might we do it? (Speculative Possibility)
3. How ought we do it? (Exhortative Quasi-Necessity)
The question of 'how we might do something' includes
the question of 'how we might do something if we had
a panoply of well-designed tools to further the work'.
In Peirce's articulation of the well-formed inquiry process,
it does not matter all that much from whence the hypothesis
arrives in our mind. It could be where the spinner finally
settles down on a Lullian wheel of intellectual fortune, it
could be divine inspiration, a configuration of yarrow rods,
or the inscrutable influence of an obsidian monolith on the
primate ancestral brain at a juncture in its evolution many
millions of years ago. All that is as much fun to guess at
as any other mystery in this cosmos, but what has a bearing
on the conduct of science is whether there are more routine
ways of transmitting the skill to our community and progeny.
And I know that you know the name of this question. Viewed
in a light of what we need to do with them in practice, the
most pressing question that we need to ask about hypotheses
in general is what qualifies them to be suitable candidates
in a proceeding of inquiry if the process in question is to
manifest that admirable character that we call "scientific".
This is Peirce's inquiry about "giving a rule to abduction".
His answer to this question is called the "pragmatic maxim".
That's all I can do for today,
Jon Awbrey
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JA: We seem to be about the business of marking explicitly what's given implicitly.
But is it a mark against our ephemeris that celestial bodies do not consult it
for their itineraries, nor have the eyes in their orbs to read our fine prints,
that the planets are enlightened by the sun on their courses and their destiny
by some adumbration other than differential equations in plain black and white?
JA: The point here is that a different order of being comes into play
when being begins relating itself to itself via the automediation
of signs. Being a material and a natural thinker, I see this all
taking place within the order of matter and nature, as an utterly
internal development, differentiation, and "ontologogenesis" of a
cosmos, if you catch my drift, but nothing about saying this does
anything to diminish the import of the formal aspect of its being.
JA: I hope this acts to reduce the metaphor of senseless impressions to a eusemy.
I will keep this phyle intact and try to develop its phylogogenesis as we go.
JA: Well, it seems it did not.
JA: What comes to mind in this connection is the analogy between
the inquiry ability and language development in mental growth.
Think of a person who will one day grow up to become a linguist
at three different stages along life's way:
JA: 1. The neonate who is born with an innate competence
for learning and for using any language whatever
of the human kind to which he or she is exposed.
JA: 2. The person who demonstrates an adequate level of performance
in the comprehension and the use of his or her native language.
JA: 3. The expert in languages or specialist in linguistics who has achieved
a "comparative and reflective theoretical acquaintance" (CARTA) with
many diverse languages types, and who can write out something that
approaches a formal grammar for rulier portions of these languages.
JA: I think that it is useful to contemplate three similar
moments in the development of our ability for inquiry:
First, when we are merely granted the benefit of a doubt
that we might have the use of an inquiring mind; Second,
when we actually show our ability to carry out successful
inquiries in practice; Third, when we can reflect on the
conduct of inquiries, successful or otherwise, enough to
provide a rational reconstruction of the procedure, say,
as a test, enough to teach others how the thing is done.
HP: As Polanyi ["Personal Knowledge"] expressed it: "I believe that by now three things
have been established beyond reasonable doubt: the power of intellectual beauty to
reveal truth about nature; the vital importance of distinguishing this beauty from
merely formal attractiveness, and the delicacy of the test between them, so difficult
that it may baffle the most penetrating scientific minds."
HP: I have more confidence in empirical approaches to inquiry.
The analytic Peircian pragmatic "canonical" approach that
Jon describes is certainly closer to what we have been
indoctrinated with in our western culture. But that is
not what actually goes on in the brain. My conversion
from the canonical approach evolved from teaching a course,
"The Psychology of Problem Solving," over a period of 25 years.
There is now much empirical evidence of how inquiry actually takes
place from many quarters:
HP: 1. the introspection of creative scientists [e.g., Hadamard,
'The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field', Polanyi,
'Personal Knowledge', Ghiselin, 'The Creative Process', Miller,
'Imagery in Scientific Thought', Lakatos, 'History of Science and
its Rational Reconstructions', Feyerabend, 'Against Method', etc.],
HP: 2. the more recent models of distributed, concurrent networks and evolved behavior --
including agent-based approaches to artificial life and artificial intelligence [e.g.,
Brooks, 'Cambrian Intelligence', Hinton and Sejnowski, eds., 'Unsupervised Learning',
Arkins, 'Behavior-Based Robotics', Mitchell, 'An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms', etc.],
HP: 3. on empirical knowledge of how brains actually integrate their
evolved instincts, senses, and individual experiences [e.g.,
Abbott and Sejnowski, eds., 'Neural Codes and Distributed
Representations', Rugg, ed., 'Cognitive Neuroscience'].
HP: What is now evident is that by the time we are using words and logics of any type
where thinking is explicit and communicable, we are no longer in the creative mode in
which images and concepts emerge from our instincts, memories, and sense impressions.
Furthermore, the creative mode is by its nature a sub-symbolic mode, or more precisely,
a sub-thinking mode. (Whether it is still explicit enough to be called symbolic or
a sign activity is only a matter of definition.) The brain's activities in even the
simplest pattern recognition or one-bit decision involves hundreds of millions of
neurons in which instinct, memory, models, and sensory inputs are concurrently
seeking some kind of metastability. This network dynamic activity is so
complex, diffused, and delicate that any attempt to impose rules, methods,
and logic would only disturb and limit the emergence of novel ideas.
JA: In the pragmatic way of thinking everything has a purpose,
and the purpose of each thing is the first thing we should
try to note about it. The purpose of inquiry is to reduce
doubt and lead to a state of belief, which a person in that
state will usually call knowledge or certainty.
HP: This is not the case for many physicists. The purpose of models is to reduce ambiguity,
not doubt. Doubt should always be a dominant emotion since it is the primary check
against overenthusiasm and error. The state of "belief" is especially dangerous,
since no model is complete, and very likely will be replaced. Belief is for the
religious. What physicists seek first in their models is clarity, elegance,
and empirical decidability.
JA: For our present purposes, the first feature to note in
distinguishing these modes of reasoning is whether they
are exact or approximate in character. Deduction is the
only type of reasoning that can be made exact, always
deriving true conclusions from true premisses, while
induction and abduction are unavoidably approximate
in their mode of operation, involving elements of
fallible judgment and inescapable error in their
application.
HP: Paraphrasing Einstein:
Insofar as deductive reasoning ("the propositions of mathematics")
is exact ("certain") it does not apply to reality; and insofar
as it applies to reality it is not exact ("certain").
JA: Yes, I think I said that.
JA: Abductive reasoning is the mode of operation which is involved
in shifting from one paradigm to another. In order to reduce
the overall tension of uncertainty in a knowledge base, it is
often necessary to restructure our perspective on the data in
radical ways, to change the channel that parcels out information
to us. But the true value of a new paradigm is typically not
appreciated from the standpoint of another model, that is, not
until it has had time to reorganize the knowledge base in ways
that demonstrate clear advantages to the community of inquiry
concerned.
HP: Abduction, as I understand it, is not reasoning. It is sub-rational, and I would
say sub-symbolic. Computers lack the knowledge base acquired from 4 billion years
of surviving in a complex environment as well as the vast distributed network, senses,
and body actions necessary to efficiently integrate this mass of experience. Most of
this was acquired by natural selection and integrated into our metabolism, hormonal
and motor controls, senses, pattern recognition, perceptions, motivations, brains,
thoughts, imagination -- the whole organism. It's not likely we can pull this off
in silicon except for simple, closed domains.
JA: I fully understand, I guess, why anybody would want to say this,
especially if they judge ab-apodictic, approximate, contingent,
and non-demonstrative manners of inference against the bar of
deductive reasoning. But it seems fairly clear when you come
to examine it that some patterns of abduction and induction
just plain work better than others in the long run, and so
our concern is one of accounting for how this can be so.
I have been posting a bunch of stuff on these topics
and will be interested in your reactions to them.
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