ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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Note 5
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Review:
01. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04278.html
02. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04279.html
03. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04280.html
04. http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04281.html
Since it was never clear in whose effigy that flaming strawperson,
the ardent fallibilist, was supposed to have been fashioned, let's
return to what remains at stake in our trials to understand Peirce.
I will focus on my own impressions of what I thought Peirce was saying
in the "Fixation of Belief", and it may be that I will soon be forced
to go back and carry out an agonizingly slow reading of that document,
but for now I will try to highlight some points that I always thought
were strikingly clear, though now I am beginning to wonder at the fact
that it is possible to read these few words in so many discrepant ways.
First off, it seemed clear to me that Peirce was talking throughout
this paper and throughout his entire corpus of work on the subject
about "states of mind" (SOM's) that have consequences for action,
in that "general conditional resolution to act" sort of way.
Thus, the sententious expressions of these SOM's are always
derivative, incidental, even tangential, you might say, to
the SOM's themselves, however important we might otherwise
take our syntactic formulations of our dormant SOM's to be.
The points that Peirce makes seemed utterly common sensible to me,
expressing the features of this domain of inquiry phenomena about
as well as we might expect common sense formulas and rubrics to
be apt to do. Any further imping out of his investigation will
naturally demand the usual sort of sharpening and trimming,
but all the basic clues are already incipient within it.
Since human fallibility is a fact akin to human mortality,
the fact is not affected by our formulation of a theory
about it, unless that theory should enable our acting
on it, and by this act to say we end it. But that
happy day does not appear imminent. Not yet.
Notice that the fact of error is nearly apodeictic
for anyone who has changed their mind at least once,
since such a person knows for a near certainty that
either his previous or his present belief will have
been false. The only escape from this would depend
on the distinction at issue being a false one, which
means that he was wrong to pose it in the first place.
Now the prediction that one will most likely err in the future,
based on the body of one's experience with error in the past,
is a piece of empirical, inductive, or probable inference.
It may be analyzed as a form of reasoning by analogy.
Here is a section of an essay that I wrote on this topic:
Approaches to Inquiry
| Document History
|
| Author: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 6.20
| Created: 20 Aug 1996
| Revised: 28 Oct 2001
| Excerpt: Section 2.3.2 (Transfer)
2.3.2 Transfer
What is it that gives a distinctively inductive character
to the acquisition of a knowledge base? It is evidently the
"analogy of experience" that underlies the useful application.
Whenever we find ourselves prefacing an argument with the phrase
"If past experience is any guide ..." then we can be sure that
this principle has come into play. We are invoking an analogy
between past experience, considered as a totality, and present
experience, considered as a point of application. What we mean
in practice is this: "If past experience is a fair sample of
possible experience, then the knowledge gained in it applies
to present experience". This is the mechanism that allows a
knowledge base to be carried across gulfs of experience that
are indifferent to the effective contents of its rules.
Here are the details of how this works out in the "Rainy Day" example.
Let us consider a fragment K_pres of the reasoner's knowledge base that
is logically equivalent to the conjunction of two rules:
K_pres = (B => A) and (B => D).
It is convenient to have the option of expressing all logical
statements in terms of their models, that is, in terms of the
primitive circumstances or the elements of experience over which
they hold true.
1. Let E_past be the chosen set of experiences,
or the circumstances that we have in mind
when we refer to "past experience".
2. Let E_plus be the collective set of experiences,
or the projective total of possible circumstances.
3. Let E_pres be the current experience, or the circumstances
that are present to the reasoner at the current moment.
If we think of the knowledge base K_pres as referring
to the "regime of experience" over which it is valid,
then all of these sets of models can be compared by the
simple relations of set inclusion or logical implication.
In these terms, the "analogy of experience" proceeds by inducing a Rule
about the validity of a current knowledge base and then deducing a Fact,
its applicability to a current experience, as in the following sequence:
Given the Case: E_past => E_plus, Chosen events fairly sample Collective events.
Given the Fact: E_past => K_pres, Chosen events support the Knowledge regime.
Induce the Rule: E_plus => K_pres, Collective events support the Knowledge regime.
Given the Case: E_pres => E_plus, Current events fairly sample Collective events.
Given the Rule: E_plus => K_pres, Collective events support the Knowledge regime.
Deduce the Fact: E_pres => K_pres, Current events support the Knowledge regime.
Jon Awbrey
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