ONT Re: Inquiry Into Information
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
HP: Your selections from Peirce have cleared up
many of my misconceptions, but his awkward
style has probably generated more.
I have heard people say this about Peirce's style --
awkward, obscure, mal-practicing his own preaching
about making ideas clear, and so on, are just a few
of the nicer things that I've heard said -- so I guess
that it's time for me to report my own first impressions
of his writing, that it felt like diving into cool, clear
water after years of wallowing in the big muddy slough of
despond that was all I had ever known up until that time.
HP: What I still do not understand is how Peirce justifies his many point blank assertions.
He says symbols are comparable in three ways, 'extension,' 'intension,' and information,
and that logical writers generally speak only of extension and intension. That was my
understanding of logic, and that is why his eccentric definition of logic is so confusing.
It appears that he would require empirical justification only for the informational
comparisons, since I find none for most of his other assertions.
HP: If they were "worked out by arduous and long labour" as Peirce often says,
and if they agree with his "too-evident-to-be-demonstrable" introspections,
that is fine. But the question remains: How does he determine if the
assertions he makes have any wide consensual conformity with the
experiences and usages of other observers? For example:
CSP: | That whatever action is brute, unintelligent, and unconcerned
| with the result of it is purely dyadic is either demonstrable
| or is too evident to be demonstrable.
This seems evident to me. If there is action, then there is reaction --
that is the 2-adic character of the idealized abstraction that forms
a purely causal action. If there is also "intelligence" (Latin for
"understanding", from "inter" + "legere" = "to gather among" and
"to select between") and if there is concern with the result of
the 2-adic action, to wit, a reference of the 2-adic transition
to an exterior goal or setpoint, as in a control problem, then
the elementary type of situation that is being considered here
is a 3-adic relation or a 3-point configuration.
The point is that control, critical reflection, deliberation, intelligence,
intention, pragmatic praxis, purposive action, and all of those characters
that constitute what is commonly known as "conduct", require one to gather
under consideration not just the default trajectory that lies under one's
nose but a full range of alternative courses, to compare and contrast and
to select from among their lot the one that makes some optimal beeline to
one's not-yet-actualized but still potentially realizable objective state.
CSP: | But in case that dyadic action is merely a member of a triadic action,
| then so far from its furnishing the least shade of presumption that all
| the action in the physical universe is dyadic, on the contrary, the entire
| and triadic action justifies a guess that there may be other and more marked
| examples in the universe of the triadic pattern. No sooner is the guess
| made than instances swarm upon us amply verifying it, and refuting the
| agnostic position; while others present new problems for our study.
| With the refutation of agnosticism, the agnostic is shown to be
| a superficial neophyte in philosophy, entitled at most to
| an occasional audience on special points, yet infinitely
| more respectable than those who seek to bolster up what
| is really true by sophistical arguments -- the traitors
| to truth that they are ... (CSP, CP 6.332).
If you think about the fact that a series of 2-point configurations is what
you use to compute a derivative, and that a series of 3-point configuations
is what you use to compute a curvature, and so on up the taylor series, as
it were, then you will probably realize, as Peirce did, that intelligence
involves non-linear effects on our dynamic orbits. And the development
of your thinking after that point will follow a course that ought to be
familiar to folks in the complexity sciences -- no sooner do you drop the
scales from your eyes, for instance, the assumption that everything just
has to be linear, than examples of phenomena previously invisible to you
begin to swarm before your eyes.
HP: I have no problem with divergent individual opinions.
My own personal opinion is: I not only can dispute
(or give an alternative view) of everything Peirce
said here, but I also don't like the way he said it.
But who cares about our personal opinions?
We do. Whosoever is without opinion may cast the first tome.
HP: That is not what scientific inquiry is about.
My point is: Why should one take such blustery
polemics as more than his opinion if we are shown
no empirical consensual evidence or agreement on
its content?
It is something that Peirce evidently had strong feelings about.
And we ought to consider the circumstance that this passage was
extracted from a long digression in a manscript that was found
among Peirce's Nachlass, previously unpublished.
CSP: | Note the great difference between this view and Hegel's.
| Hegel says, logic is the science of the pure idea. I should
| describe it as the science of the laws of experience in virtue
| of its being a determination of the idea, or in other words as
| the formal science of the logical world.
|
| In this point of view, efforts to ascertain precisely how the
| intellect works in thinking, -- that is to say investigation
| of internal characterictics -- is no more to the purpose which
| logical writers as such, however vaguely have in view, than
| would be the investigation of external characteristics.
| [CSP, CE 1, pages 168-169.]
HP: Of course "precisely how the intellect works" is not the issue.
But do you believe that no level of "internal characteristics"
of experience is significant for understanding how our languages
and logics arise?
Logic is a normative science concerned with the form of conduct known as "thinking".
Maybe it would be slightly better to say "a normative inquiry into thinking conduct".
A normative inquiry into X is one that goes looking for knowledge about how we ought
to do X, that is, on the charitable assumption that we care about doing X as well as
it can be done by creatures such as ourselves. A normative inquiry into X is harder
than a descriptive inquiry into X, because it needs a decent sample of descriptive
data just in order to know what it is talking about, but no sample of "what it is"
can ever be enough to determine the normative questions of "how best to do what
will achieve the aims of what we have already seen". I realize that "normative"
is not a very exciting word to most people -- some folks I know even confuse it
with "prescriptive" -- probably if our market-sensitive culture were to reinvent
and reinvest it today, we would call it "design science" or something more catchy
than "normative". Logic is not brain surgery -- it is reckon science. Its basic
insights amount to nothing more exalted than the brands of practical good sense
that is well understood by every potter and smith who knows that the same mass
of clay or ingot of iron can be cast into many different forms of utensils,
some more suitable for a given purpose than others.
CSP: | A cognition 'à priori' is one which any experience contains reason for
| and therefore which no experience determines but which contains elements
| such as the mind introduces in working up the materials of sense, or rather
| as they are not new materials, they are the working up.
HP: Can all the concepts about which Peirce makes so many assertions,
like determinism and chance, continuous and discrete, cause and
consequent, and his categories be adequately understood as logic
("the science of the laws of experience") without knowing how our
experiences have evolved using our senses, motor systems, modes of
perception, spatial, temporal, and motion feature detectors, imaging,
and our languages and mathematics? It is certainly just the nature
of these types of nervous system activities (the "working up") that
both enable and limit how we think.
This is all fascinating stuff. But when we study it what we are studying is
one brand of implementations, one species of realizations, of a generic spec.
HP: Here is another of Peirce's definitions of logic that really has me stumped:
CSP: | I define logic therefore as the science of the conditions
| which enable symbols in general to refer to objects.
HP: I don't see why Peirce would not understand that such
an eccentric view of logic would confuse everybody.
"Eccentric" means "off center". Whenever I have taken the time
to look into the matter, and I have on many initially skeptical
occasions, I find that Peirce's use of terminology speaks almost
directly from the center of gravity of each term's total meaning,
if you take the integral, as he characteristically does, over the
entire history of that word's usage. In this case, I happen to
recognize that Peirce is standing squarely atop the shoulders
of a formerly famous and well-received definition of Locke.
HP: How symbols in general refer to objects is the most
difficult conceptual problem of scientific inquiry.
That is why I have been attempting to provide you
with some of the best available help with the task.
HP: It is what the ideal of objectivity, decidability, and communicability
of symbols requires. It is what physicists spend most of their time
struggling over. Relating symbols to objects is what the creation
and interpretation of theories entails. It is precisely what
Hertz's condition was addressing. Establishing how symbols
refer to objects is also what discriminating observations
and cleverly designed measuring instruments must initiate.
This is where depth of knowledge, skills of observation,
the art of the imagination, experience in design and
construction, mathematical competence, and aesthetic
maturity must all be integrated. To define all this
as "logic" suggests a lack of awareness or judgement
of what real scientific inquiry is all about.
See note above re opinions.
HP: I foresee your response: "You do not understand Peirce because you have not
read at least six volumes of his works". You may be right, but I'm still
looking for some explicit logic rules applicable to scientific inquiry.
I mean, accepting his grandiose concept of logic, then how, exactly (or
in a particular case), can we actually use it for scientific inquiry?
Howard, I perused a bit of Peirce in my undergrad years, while I was taking
a brief detour into philosophy and psychology, and then one day I realized
that the pragmatic maxim was a kind of a "representation principle", of the
sort that I had dimly glimpsed in the types of "group theory for physicists"
books that I had run across in the physics libary were I happened to work,
and this took me back into mathematics to find out more about the matrix
representations of algebraic structures, which Peirce used for logical
operators. The problems in graph theory and group theory that I ran
into kept getting harder to tackle, and so, after much resistance,
I started working on building myself a "theorem prover that learns".
I did use renditions of Peirce's basic logical ideas in the "rational"
module of that, but it was not until ten more years went by that I found
myself running up against a set of problems that all of our contemporary
conventional wisedom simply did not begin to touch, but that I remembered
Peirce had some novel ideas about, and so I went back to see what use could
be made of it. In case after case I found that Peirce was saying straight
out exactly what I had spent several years of programming experimentation
to learn the hard way. So I have learned to consider what he says about
this stuff. Moral Of The Story: I would not even be looking into this
particular mine if it were not paying out on a recurring basis in terms
of solid applications to do so.
Jon Awbrey
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