Abduction

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Prof David West]

Nick,

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

dave west

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Email had 1 attachment:

• BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf
  
    640k (application/pdf)
  

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Eric Charles-2]

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

dave west

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Email had 1 attachment:

• BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf
  
    640k (application/pdf)
  

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Eric,

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you.

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. 

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Email had 1 attachment:

• BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf

  640k (application/pdf)

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Frank Wimberly-2]

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Eric,

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you.

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. 

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

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Email had 1 attachment:

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  640k (application/pdf)

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Frank.  I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, actually.  It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks it should be. 

 

I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Eric,

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you.

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. 

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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Email had 1 attachment:

• BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf

  640k (application/pdf)

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Eric Charles-2]

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology.  Compare: Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is green".

Though it seems convoluted,  I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," which itself means,  "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns,  they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." 

For that to work,  we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is,  we have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Frank.  I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, actually.  It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks it should be. 

 

I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Eric,

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you.

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. 

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

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Email had 1 attachment:

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  640k (application/pdf)

 

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[David Eric Smith]

Eric and Nick et al.

May I ask a question as someone who wonders about this topic as a “general knowledge” user but without a commitment to try to do serious work in it?

I often, in a hope of staying oriented in the complicated world, try to think of how many of the informally used language concepts I think have a decent, at least approximate, formalization within some system we know how to manipulate mechanically, and which is thus much less complicated.  Abstraction has been one of these.  The formalizations to which I tend to assimilate it are that of equivalence relations in mathematics and predicates in logic — of particular types.

Following Dave W., a good first-approximation cartoon of the person in the world is that of a necessarily finite-state entity in a world that can create indefinitely many situations.  So I don’t need either to be formally finite or infinite; what I care about is that the world is so much bigger than the small person that I need to deal with the different orders between them.  There is nothing a finite-state small system can do in an arbitrarily larger-number-of-states world than create equivalence classes, responding to many situations in which some difference could be found with the same state of its own.  One could go on with how the equivalence classes are indexed, but Dave’s email already gave many good examples so I won’t digress further in that direction.

In a slightly different garb, the kind of predicate I am thinking of is a classifier that, given a large set lf elements, will assign them to one set or another, but never to two sets that the predicate treats as distinct.  The importance for living or doing science is that the predicate is operationalized in some kind of behavioral recipe: interact with your world in such-and-such a way, and on the basis of what the world delivers back to you through the channel of the interaction, make your classification as X or Y.  So it is not only a premise that an equivalence relation exists, but some algorithm for generating an instance of it for the situations you happen to experience.  As I read your description of what “water” means re. electrolysis, I am internally parsing it in these terms.  This solvent is water, that one is formamide, the other is liquid methane, etc.

It seems that the abstracitons (~ equivalence relations ~ predicates) we want in science are by some criteria “good” or “useful” ones, meaning that it is possible to make propositions using them which have consistent truth assignments, despite the fact that the propositions are indexed by the equivalence classes while the world is a collection of indefinitely more potential instances.  The updating of science is an ongoing process of looking for ways in which the equivalence relations could be adjusted to make using them more reliable, or ways in which they could be refined so that new propositions could be found for the refinements that respect the propositions for the coarser partitions.  This solvent is H2O, that one is D2O, and tardigrades don’t care, but Quincy can sleuth out that a human victim was assassinated by feeding him D2O instead of H2O, (an ancient television show for which Harold Morowitz consulted on one episode) etc.

For this too, there are lots of names, which seem to have less difference as formalisms than as tags for how they are meant to be applied to situations.  Coarse-grainings in thermodynamics a la Gell-Mann et el., or successive approximations as have been used in mechanics for nearly two centuries, come to mind, but one can surely think of many others.

Is my semantic association of these different terms okay with the point you want us to take from your post?  (Meaning, doesn’t violate it, even if it is not aiming to emphasize exactly the same point.)

Thanks,

Eric

> On Dec 23, 2018, at 6:01 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.
>
> When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?
>
> However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  
>
> I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.
>
> Now, however, we must work our way backwards:
> *  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,
> *  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,
> *  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.
> *  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.
>
> In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."
>
> (I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)
>
>
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Nick,
>
> Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.
>
> Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.
>
> We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.
>
> First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"
>
> Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.
>
> Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."
>
> If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:
>
>    -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,
>    -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)
>
> Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?
>
> Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.
>
> But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.
>
> The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]
>
> It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.
>
> Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"
>
> At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.
>
> Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.
>
> dave west
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Hi, Everybody,
>>  
>> Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays.
>>  
>> Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.
>>  
>> I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed.
>>  
>> I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours.
>>  
>> Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything?
>>  
>> I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.
>>  
>> Nick
>>  
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>> Clark University
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>  
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>> Email had 1 attachment:
>>
>> • BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf
>>   640k (application/pdf)
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Nick Thompson]

Eric (Charles),

 

I like THAT answer, too.  I am still flummoxed by the grammar of “real”. 

 

Unicorns can be real but they cannot be true.  “That unicorns are real” can be true but it cannot be real. 

 

But I am the only one who seems to be bothered by grammar.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 6:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

 

I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology.  Compare: Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is green".

 

Though it seems convoluted,  I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," which itself means,  "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns,  they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." 

 

For that to work,  we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is,  we have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. 

 

 

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Frank.  I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, actually.  It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks it should be. 

 

I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone [phone]

 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email] wrote:

Thanks, Eric,

 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you.

 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real. 

 

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real.

 

When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?

 

However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.  

 

I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above.

 

Now, however, we must work our way backwards:

*  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions,

*  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out,

*  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real.

*  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions.

 

In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real."

 

(I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.)

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

 

On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

 

Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.

 

Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.

 

We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.

 

First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"

 

Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right.

 

Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."

 

If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:

 

   -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,

   -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)

 

Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?

 

Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.

 

But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.

 

The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]

 

It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.

 

Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"

 

At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.

 

Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.

 

dave west

 

 

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Hi, Everybody,

 

Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3^rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 

 

Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.

 

I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 

 

I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 

 

Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 

 

I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

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Email had 1 attachment:

• BP 2018 (Thompson) (in press).pdf

  640k (application/pdf)

 

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[gepr]

I've tried to catch up with this thread and probably failed to grok most of it.  But it strikes me that your coarse- and fine-graining formulation of abstraction and Nick and Eric's true/real distinction are both instances of what I'll call "layer prejudice".  I almost want to call it a form of reductionism as a criticism of Nick's original posted paper and the conception of "Natural Design" as a favoritism for the fine-layer structure over the meta-stuff (self, agency, intention, etc.).  But neither your coarse-/fine- nor the true/real distinction seem to fully commit to reduction, perhaps for different reasons.

Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?  Are the equivalence classes things-in-themselves (Platonic)?  Or are they merely convenient/useful fictions (Construction) we use to parse an *inherently* dynamic (perhaps even unstable or mystical/hidden[†]) world?

It's unclear to me why we have to be "layer prejudiced".  Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.  Given a particular culture, every little girl knows what a unicorn is and can predict with certainty what another little girl will expect to see when presented with one.  Hence, studies of unicorns *will* eventually stabilize as long as the underlying culture is stable.  This is exactly the same type of statement one might make about the multiverse.  We can predict the properties of spacetime outside the observable universe *if* the underlying multiverse is stable.  These little unicorn experts eventually evolve into "shut up and calculate" adults who hang unicorns from their rear view mirrors, nostalgic for the (innocent) days when they were committed to the status of unicorns.  (At least 1/2 the cheesy XMas movies Renee's made me watch involve reinvigorating one's belief in "magic", "santa claus", or "christmas spirit", much like Einstein or Russell might have felt after their paradigms were successfully challenged.) So why would statements about unicorns have a different ontological status than statements in physics?  And, further, why would the subjects of statements about unicorns have a different status than the subjects of physical laws?

It seems reasonable to claim that the answer to my question is: one's metaphysical commitment (Platonic or Construction).

[†] By which I intend something like B.C. Smith's "ontological wall", Hoffman's Interface, or OOO's withdrawn objects ... not the spiritual stuff.


p.s. In this post, I *wanted* to talk about quasi-periodicity, the perhaps-periodic-within-some-larger-context signals that we can successfully classify as periodic for some (but not other) purposes. It seems to me this prejudice toward "convergence" and the ontological status of limit/horizon points Nick and Eric keep claiming Peirce was after fits methods for quasi-periodicity to a tee.  But if we proceed with a badly formulated problem, all we'll get is a badly formulated solution.  If we don't know where we're going, how will we know when we (do or don't) get there? For what purposes should unicorns be metaphorically real and for what purposes should they be metaphorically fictitious?  I demoted quasi-periodicity to the postscript because I'm worried that not enough of us have enough experience learning they've been *tricked* by pareidolia.  But, ultimately, concepts like stationarity target the meta-friendly question of whether the coarse- can be stable while the fine- is unstable.  And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?

p.p.s. Merry Christmas! >8^D


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[Nick Thompson]

Glen,

 

I am having a terrible time keeping up with my own thread here.  (Fools rush in, etc.)  But I will add a little larding where I can, below.  Thanks for your work, here.  Thanks to Renee for loaning you to us. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2018 8:02 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

I've tried to catch up with this thread and probably failed to grok most of it.  But it strikes me that your coarse- and fine-graining formulation of abstraction and Nick and Eric's true/real distinction are both instances of what I'll call "layer prejudice".  I almost want to call it a form of reductionism as a criticism of Nick's original posted paper and the conception of "Natural Design" as a favoritism for the fine-layer structure over the meta-stuff (self, agency, intention, etc.).  But neither your coarse-/fine- nor the true/real distinction seem to fully commit to reduction, perhaps for different reasons. [NST==> I think the term, “layer prejudice” is patentable and I would like, if you don’t mind, to purchase a license for its  use.  I might suggest “layer bias”, just because the rhythm works better, but the basic idea is  stunner, and I want to keep it close.  However, I hope you have misread “natural design” because otherwise I have mis-wrote it.  My level-bias is distinctly upward.  Where others might think of an intention as an inner state, something about my guts or my brain, I think of it as a higher-order patter.  For most people who talk about the brain, it is serving as a covert behavioral model, but without the potential for falsifiability that a genuine behavioral model would afford.   <==nst]

 

 

Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?  Are the equivalence classes things-in-themselves (Platonic)?  Or are they merely convenient/useful fictions (Construction) we use to parse an *inherently* dynamic (perhaps even unstable or mystical/hidden[†]) world?

[NST==>Remember, the whole point about the ding an sich is that it is inaccessible.  Peirce thought “generals” were real but not inaccessible.  <==nst]

 

It's unclear to me why we have to be "layer prejudiced".

[NST==>I agree.  I guess I believe in “ontological “ levels, just the way the different levels in a fractal are real patterns.  But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk.  In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things “of” us.  ==nst]

 Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.

[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up.  I think it’s possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without there ever having been a unicorn.  Obviously, a unicorn is a white horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a garland crown, and a white gown.  Obviously.  We all agree on THAT, don’t we?  <==nst]

 Given a particular culture, every little girl knows what a unicorn is and can predict with certainty what another little girl will expect to see when presented with one.  Hence, studies of unicorns *will* eventually stabilize as long as the underlying culture is stable.  This is exactly the same type of statement one might make about the multiverse.  We can predict the properties of spacetime outside the observable universe *if* the underlying multiverse is stable.  These little unicorn experts eventually evolve into "shut up and calculate" adults who hang unicorns from their rear view mirrors, nostalgic for the (innocent) days when they were committed to the status of unicorns.  (At least 1/2 the cheesy XMas movies Renee's made me watch involve reinvigorating one's belief in "magic", "santa claus", or "christmas spirit", much like Einstein or Russell might have felt after their paradigms were successfully challenged.) So why would statements about unicorns have a different ontological status than statements in physics?  And, further, why would the subjects of statements about unicorns have a different status than the subjects of physical laws?

[NST==>I am afraid I don’t have a lot to say here.  My family spent Christmas day rewatching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  <==nst]

 

It seems reasonable to claim that the answer to my question is: one's metaphysical commitment (Platonic or Construction).

[NST==>I think this is also known as the distinction between realism and nominalism.  Are generals real things, or just conveniences of the mind. <==nst]

 

[†] By which I intend something like B.C. Smith's "ontological wall", Hoffman's Interface, or OOO's withdrawn objects ... not the spiritual stuff.

[NST==>I still haven’t fulfilled my promise to read OOO with you.  I have read it; but forgotten it.  Ugh!  But withdrawn objects sounds right<==nst]

 

 

p.s. In this post, I *wanted* to talk about quasi-periodicity, the perhaps-periodic-within-some-larger-context signals that we can successfully classify as periodic for some (but not other) purposes. It seems to me this prejudice toward "convergence" and the ontological status of limit/horizon points Nick and Eric keep claiming

[NST==>them are fighting words, son!  (See G, B, U, aforementioned)  Do you doubt Peirce, or our account of him.  We can supply quotes. <==nst]

Peirce was after fits methods for quasi-periodicity to a tee.  But if we proceed with a badly formulated problem, all we'll get is a badly formulated solution.  If we don't know where we're going, how will we know when we (do or don't) get there? For what purposes should unicorns be metaphorically real and for what purposes should they be metaphorically fictitious?  I demoted quasi-periodicity to the postscript because I'm worried that not enough of us have enough experience learning they've been *tricked* by pareidolia.  But, ultimately, concepts like stationarity target the meta-friendly question of whether the coarse- can be stable while the fine- is unstable.  And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?

[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT.  But I don’t think Peirce, or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us to be.  I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a supermarket window.  See my Nesting and Chaining paper, if you can stand it.  <==nst]

 

p.p.s. Merry Christmas! >8^D

 

 

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[lrudolph]

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the
ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish to question the implicit assumption that
mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological status" of
_anything_ in particular.

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It appears at the
beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book, "Qualitative Mathematics for the
Social Sciences: Mathematical models for research on cultural dynamics"; the "our" and "we" in
the first sentence refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not to me-and-a-
mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social scientist, and only very
occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I have edited out some footnotes, etc., but
in return have expanded some of the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

===begin===

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians {Ralph Abraham;
three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not heard of before working on the
book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical modeling". Here is a fourth.

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and cognize it) is, or
appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a reciprocal process in which we
_construct/discover/bring into awareness_ correspondences between mathematical structures and
structures `in the world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give meaning to,_
those structures and correspondences.

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of "evolutionary
epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s doctrine of the a priori in the
light of contemporary biology}. In this chapter, I view modeling from the standpoint
informally staked out by (D), which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." My discussion
is sketchy (and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this volume and
perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular ontological
attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in mathematics, in order to
proceed with the project of modeling the former by the latter and drawing inspiration for
the latter from the former. It is, I claim, possible for someone simultaneously to adhere to a
rigorously `realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered Platonism) and to take
the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a crass reduction of the
Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice mathematical modeling in good faith_ if not
with guaranteed success. Other (likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes are (I claim)
just as possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling.  

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not done), would
declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and physical `realists´. I also have
the impression that a large, overlapping group of practitioners, observed in action (which
I have done, in a small and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to _behave_ like
thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human behavior_ is based, I am
claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in other language,
on creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some `lower order
structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one) independently of one´s ontological
stances. That is not all there is to it, as behavior; but that is its basis.

===end===

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre Lakatos also used
the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But why on earth have `ultimate´ tests,
`final authority´? Why foundations, if they are admittedly subjective?  Why not honestly admit
mathematical fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge from cynical
scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend the latest tear in the
fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to
the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from
Nick; but I might be wrong...).

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[gepr]

First, by saying you and Eric(C) *attribute* so-and-so to Peirce, I'm not suggesting you're wrong.  I'm expressing my ignorance.  But I don't want to (falsely) accuse Peirce of anything, since he's not here to defend himself.  So, I can only respond to what you say about what he said.  I'm very grateful for your attempts to suss it all out and serve it on a platter for people like me.

Second, in that same vane (Ha!), I haven't put in the effort to grok your "Natural Designs".  So, when I'm wrong, feel free to simply call me ignorant and move on.  I'm cool with that.

But on to the meat: When you say

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk.  In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things 'of' us"

I believe you're (implicitly) committing an error.  I've failed to call it out before.  You're asserting that the hierarchy is *strict*, which MAY be wrong.  As Eric(S)'s post reflects (I think), higher order comprehensions (in the sense of "set comprehension" or quantifications like ∃ and ∀) are context-dependent and *may* even be dynamic.  That was my point about the inadequacy of "levels" (where N is stable but N+1 is unstable).  This is why "layer" is a better concept, because it's *softer*, weaker.

If you imagine an onion, some of the layers are like levels, thick and impenetrable.  And some of them (in some regions on the surface) are thin and mixed with the layers just inside or just outside.  The layers are heterarchical, not hierarchical.  If you really must use "level", we can say that some things in the level N comprehension are also contained in the level N+1 comprehension ... perhaps it helps to think of multiplying a scalar against a matrix, where the scalar is multiplied by each element of the matrix.  The scalar is of level 1, but the matrix is of level N+1 and it still makes sense to combine the two into something like a level 0.5 (or 1.5 ... or whatever) ... a fractional leveling.

Eric(S)'s discussion of equivalence, as dynamically regenerable coarse comprehensions of finer grained elements allows for this, whereas I'm not sure your "convergence to the real" does.

But my layer prejudice criticism of both your and Eric(S)'s conceptions applies, I think, because it's direction-independent.  While Eric(S) seems prejudiced to the fine-grain (inferred from his idea that the coarse equivalences should be robust to refinement), yours seems prejudiced to the coarse-grain (inferred from your "convergence to the real", and bolstered by your statement below about Natural Designs).  Which direction one is biased toward is less relevant to me than the assumption of a strict hierarchy.

And particular responses below:

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> On 12/25/18 7:02 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>>  Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.
>
> */[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up.  I think it’s possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without there ever having been a unicorn.  Obviously, a unicorn is a white horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a garland crown, and a white gown.  Obviously.  We all agree on THAT, don’t we?  <==nst] /*

You forgot the sparkles and the rainbows!

> [...]

>> And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?
>
> */[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT.  But I don’t think Peirce, or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us to be.  I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a supermarket window.  See my Nesting and Chaining <http://www.behavior.org/resources/146.pdf> paper, if you can stand it.  <==nst] /*

But both your treatment of 1) statements about unicorns and 2) convergence to the real *seem* to imply that this isn't true, that you *are* layer prejudiced in the way I infer you are.  With (1) why would comprehensions be more or less real/true than their components? Are matrices more or less real than scalars?  Why wouldn't we eventually settle out that unicorns are just as real as statements about unicorns?  With (2) why can't temporary things be just as real as permanent things ... or perhaps more accurately, why can't intermediate states (stepping stones) be just as primary as the limit points they approach?  Considering a furniture maker, is the chair any more real than the hammer?  What if, after the chair is finished, on a lark, she nails the hammer she used to make the chair, to the back of that chair?  The time-ignorant compositional circularity should be obvious, here.

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[Nick Thompson]

Glen,

I thought the Century-Link outage was going to rescue me from my present quandary, which is that I am still working on your email from three days ago, while now you heap on more, each more interesting and pertinent than the one before.  

So to THIS one I say only that to a Peircean, all relations are SIGN relations and all sign relations have there "arguments", or "operators" or "values" or whatever you smart people call it.  Every relation is seen from a point of view.   But that does not amount to solipsism because I can adopt your point of view and see what you see.  Only if there is NO point of view from which an onion is in layers does your point hold in Peirce-land.  Says I.  I should remind you, and everybody else, that my Peirce mentor, Mike Bybee, who has taught me everything I know about Peirce, routinely rejects every assertion I ever make about Peirce, even when I try, docilely to repeat whatever he has just said.  Peirce experts are a hard lot.  

I reserve the right to deny everything I have written here when, in five year's time, I finally get done with answering your message of three days ago.

Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 12:59 PM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction


First, by saying you and Eric(C) *attribute* so-and-so to Peirce, I'm not suggesting you're wrong.  I'm expressing my ignorance.  But I don't want to (falsely) accuse Peirce of anything, since he's not here to defend himself.  So, I can only respond to what you say about what he said.  I'm very grateful for your attempts to suss it all out and serve it on a platter for people like me.

Second, in that same vane (Ha!), I haven't put in the effort to grok your "Natural Designs".  So, when I'm wrong, feel free to simply call me ignorant and move on.  I'm cool with that.

But on to the meat: When you say

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk.  In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things 'of' us"

I believe you're (implicitly) committing an error.  I've failed to call it out before.  You're asserting that the hierarchy is *strict*, which MAY be wrong.  As Eric(S)'s post reflects (I think), higher order comprehensions (in the sense of "set comprehension" or quantifications like ∃ and ∀) are context-dependent and *may* even be dynamic.  That was my point about the inadequacy of "levels" (where N is stable but N+1 is unstable).  This is why "layer" is a better concept, because it's *softer*, weaker.

If you imagine an onion, some of the layers are like levels, thick and impenetrable.  And some of them (in some regions on the surface) are thin and mixed with the layers just inside or just outside.  The layers are heterarchical, not hierarchical.  If you really must use "level", we can say that some things in the level N comprehension are also contained in the level N+1 comprehension ... perhaps it helps to think of multiplying a scalar against a matrix, where the scalar is multiplied by each element of the matrix.  The scalar is of level 1, but the matrix is of level N+1 and it still makes sense to combine the two into something like a level 0.5 (or 1.5 ... or whatever) ... a fractional leveling.

Eric(S)'s discussion of equivalence, as dynamically regenerable coarse comprehensions of finer grained elements allows for this, whereas I'm not sure your "convergence to the real" does.

But my layer prejudice criticism of both your and Eric(S)'s conceptions applies, I think, because it's direction-independent.  While Eric(S) seems prejudiced to the fine-grain (inferred from his idea that the coarse equivalences should be robust to refinement), yours seems prejudiced to the coarse-grain (inferred from your "convergence to the real", and bolstered by your statement below about Natural Designs).  Which direction one is biased toward is less relevant to me than the assumption of a strict hierarchy.

And particular responses below:

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> On 12/25/18 7:02 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>>  Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.
>
> */[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up.  I think it’s
> possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without
> there ever having been a unicorn.  Obviously, a unicorn is a white
> horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle
> of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a
> garland crown, and a white gown.  Obviously.  We all agree on THAT,
> don’t we?  <==nst] /*

You forgot the sparkles and the rainbows!

> [...]

>> And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?
>
> */[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT.  But I don’t think Peirce,
> or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us
> to be.  I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he
> would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a
> supermarket window.  See my Nesting and Chaining
> <http://www.behavior.org/resources/146.pdf> paper, if you can stand
> it.  <==nst] /*

But both your treatment of 1) statements about unicorns and 2) convergence to the real *seem* to imply that this isn't true, that you *are* layer prejudiced in the way I infer you are.  With (1) why would comprehensions be more or less real/true than their components? Are matrices more or less real than scalars?  Why wouldn't we eventually settle out that unicorns are just as real as statements about unicorns?  With (2) why can't temporary things be just as real as permanent things ... or perhaps more accurately, why can't intermediate states (stepping stones) be just as primary as the limit points they approach?  Considering a furniture maker, is the chair any more real than the hammer?  What if, after the chair is finished, on a lark, she nails the hammer she used to make the chair, to the back of that chair?  The time-ignorant compositional circularity should be obvious, here.

--
∄ uǝʃƃ

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[Nick Thompson]

Lee,

Since your substance is way beyond me, I have to raise a matter of style.

Is, perhaps, your reference to a mouse in your pocket, a covert reference to
an old bar joke which I thought only I knew (despite my having told it a
hundred times) to which the punch line is, "And that goes for your goddamned
cat, too."

If so, good to meetya, Brothuh.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
[hidden email]
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 9:24 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to
ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish
to question the implicit assumption that mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought
to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological status" of _anything_ in
particular.

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It
appears at the beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book,
"Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical models for
research on cultural dynamics"; the "our" and "we" in the first sentence
refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not to me-and-a-
mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social
scientist, and only very occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I
have edited out some footnotes, etc., but in return have expanded some of
the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

===begin===

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians
{Ralph Abraham; three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not
heard of before working on the book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical
modeling". Here is a fourth.

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and
cognize it) is, or appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a
reciprocal process in which we _construct/discover/bring into awareness_
correspondences between mathematical structures and structures `in the
world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give meaning to,_
those structures and correspondences.

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of
"evolutionary epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s
doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology}. In this
chapter, I view modeling from the standpoint informally staked out by (D),
which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." My discussion is sketchy
(and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this volume and
perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular
ontological
attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in
mathematics, in order to proceed with the project of modeling the former by
the latter and drawing inspiration for the latter from the former. It is, I
claim, possible for someone simultaneously to adhere to a rigorously
`realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered Platonism) and to
take the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a
crass reduction of the Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice
mathematical modeling in good faith_ if not with guaranteed success. Other
(likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes are (I claim) just as
possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling.  

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not
done), would declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and
physical `realists´. I also have the impression that a large, overlapping
group of practitioners, observed in action (which I have done, in a small
and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to _behave_ like
thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human
behavior_ is based, I am claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or
Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in other language, on
creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some
`lower order structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one)
independently of one´s ontological stances. That is not all there is to it,
as behavior; but that is its basis.

===end===

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre
Lakatos also used the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But
why on earth have `ultimate´ tests, `final authority´? Why foundations, if
they are admittedly subjective?  Why not honestly admit mathematical
fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge from
cynical scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend
the latest tear in the fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have
learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity
of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but
I might be wrong...).

============================================================
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[Nick Thompson]

Lee Rodulph wrote:

 

As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

Well, it’s possible your learned the sentiment from me, but your way of expressing it, is, like Glen’s “level prejudice”, a patentable thought, and I would like to be the first to license it. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of [hidden email]
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 9:24 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish to question the implicit assumption that mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological status" of _anything_ in particular.

 

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It appears at the beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book, "Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical models for research on cultural dynamics"; the "our" and "we" in the first sentence refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not to me-and-a- mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social scientist, and only very occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I have edited out some footnotes, etc., but in return have expanded some of the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

 

===begin===

 

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians {Ralph Abraham; three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not heard of before working on the book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical modeling". Here is a fourth.

 

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and cognize it) is, or appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a reciprocal process in which we _construct/discover/bring into awareness_ correspondences between mathematical structures and structures `in the world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give meaning to,_ those structures and correspondences.

 

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of "evolutionary epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology}. In this chapter, I view modeling from the standpoint informally staked out by (D), which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." My discussion is sketchy (and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this volume and perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

 

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular ontological

attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in mathematics, in order to proceed with the project of modeling the former by the latter and drawing inspiration for the latter from the former. It is, I claim, possible for someone simultaneously to adhere to a rigorously `realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered Platonism) and to take the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a crass reduction of the Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice mathematical modeling in good faith_ if not with guaranteed success. Other (likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes are (I claim) just as possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling. 

 

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not done), would declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and physical `realists´. I also have the impression that a large, overlapping group of practitioners, observed in action (which I have done, in a small and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to _behave_ like thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human behavior_ is based, I am claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in other language, on creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some `lower order structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one) independently of one´s ontological stances. That is not all there is to it, as behavior; but that is its basis.

 

===end===

 

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre Lakatos also used the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But why on earth have `ultimate´ tests, `final authority´? Why foundations, if they are admittedly subjective?  Why not honestly admit mathematical fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge from cynical scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend the latest tear in the fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Prof David West]

"Trump supporters are not individualists, they are just people trying to recover privilege they didn’t earn and now see slipping away"

Three brief comments:

  1- Refusal to "know your enemy" and insistence on erroneous straw man characterizations of that enemy is exactly what will allow Trump to be re-elected.

  2- Individualism is about responsibility - not ego, not 'privilege' - and includes a deeply felt responsibility to aid others who's circumstances mandate such aid. Questioning the means of providing that aid is not an argument against providing it. (Same thing is true of climate change - for the majority, not the straw man characterization - it is not a question of science, but of means for rectification.)

  3- The most blatant assertion of privilege that I see on this list is the privilege given to "Science." While I am certain that individuals among you have earned your position to speak about, and assert the privilege of, "Science," the subject itself has not demonstrated that it has "earned" its insistence on denying all other avenues to knowledge and understanding as 'erroneous', emotional (emphasis on the sexism here), irrational, or simply wrong. (The assertion of privilege for "liberal" viewpoints comes a very close second.)

davew

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018, at 5:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Lee Rodulph wrote:

 

As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

Well, it’s possible your learned the sentiment from me, but your way of expressing it, is, like Glen’s “level prejudice”, a patentable thought, and I would like to be the first to license it. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of [hidden email]
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 9:24 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish to question the implicit assumption that mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological status" of _anything_ in particular.

 

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It appears at the beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book, "Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical models for research on cultural dynamics"; the "our" and "we" in the first sentence refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not to me-and-a- mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social scientist, and only very occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I have edited out some footnotes, etc., but in return have expanded some of the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

 

===begin===

 

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians {Ralph Abraham; three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not heard of before working on the book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical modeling". Here is a fourth.

 

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and cognize it) is, or appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a reciprocal process in which we _construct/discover/bring into awareness_ correspondences between mathematical structures and structures `in the world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give meaning to,_ those structures and correspondences.

 

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of "evolutionary epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology}. In this chapter, I view modeling from the standpoint informally staked out by (D), which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." My discussion is sketchy (and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this volume and perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

 

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular ontological

attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in mathematics, in order to proceed with the project of modeling the former by the latter and drawing inspiration for the latter from the former. It is, I claim, possible for someone simultaneously to adhere to a rigorously `realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered Platonism) and to take the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a crass reduction of the Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice mathematical modeling in good faith_ if not with guaranteed success. Other (likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes are (I claim) just as possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling. 

 

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not done), would declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and physical `realists´. I also have the impression that a large, overlapping group of practitioners, observed in action (which I have done, in a small and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to _behave_ like thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human behavior_ is based, I am claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in other language, on creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some `lower order structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one) independently of one´s ontological stances. That is not all there is to it, as behavior; but that is its basis.

 

===end===

 

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre Lakatos also used the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But why on earth have `ultimate´ tests, `final authority´? Why foundations, if they are admittedly subjective?  Why not honestly admit mathematical fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge from cynical scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend the latest tear in the fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

David remarks:

"2- Individualism is about responsibility - not ego, not 'privilege' - and includes a deeply felt responsibility to aid others who's circumstances mandate such aid. Questioning the means of providing that aid is not an argument against providing it. (Same thing is true of climate change - for the majority, not the straw man characterization - it is not a question of science, but of means for rectification.)"

The notion of what circumstances mandate aid is presented as objective, but it is subjective.   It is not sufficiently grounded to be a basis for an argument about how to design and maintain systems of governance.  It does not uncover any subjective detail of other groups who have other experiences.   Here you even invoke providing aid as if there was someone in need or vulnerable as opposed to people who are actively oppressed and exploited at every possible turn and on the receiving end of a malicious dominant culture.

Marcus

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Dear Prof,

There was a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh named Adolph Grunbaum whose career was partly defined by his writings on "is psychoanalysis science?" 

His papers and books generally concluded that it isn't.  Pitt also had one of the only university-affiliated psychoanalytic institutes in the US.

Definition: "psychoanalysis" includes the theories and treatment modalities introduced by Freud as well as innovations like neo-Freudian psychology, object relations theory, and other more modern treatments and theories.

One of the senior psychoanalysts, who was a friend of Grunbaum, asked why it isn't as valid to ask if science is psychoanalytic.  This is hard to explain. What really matters to a person are his own drives and feelings.  Grunbaum would become angry if anyone asked him
if his father was a psychoanalyst because he thought they would argue that his interest in the topic was an expression of a childish rivalry with his father.   His brother was a psychoanalyst even though his father wasn't.

The point is that our deepest wishes and fears are personal and rooted in our earliest experiences.  In Grunbaum's case his scientific hypothesis might be a form of "my father is smarter than yours".  I am not saying that is the case.

The question of whether science is *the* royal road to the truth depends on which truth you mean.

Is that related to your objection to the third privilege?

Frank

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018, 5:26 PM Prof David West <[hidden email] wrote:

"Trump supporters are not individualists, they are just people trying to recover privilege they didn’t earn and now see slipping away"

Three brief comments:

  1- Refusal to "know your enemy" and insistence on erroneous straw man characterizations of that enemy is exactly what will allow Trump to be re-elected.

  2- Individualism is about responsibility - not ego, not 'privilege' - and includes a deeply felt responsibility to aid others who's circumstances mandate such aid. Questioning the means of providing that aid is not an argument against providing it. (Same thing is true of climate change - for the majority, not the straw man characterization - it is not a question of science, but of means for rectification.)

  3- The most blatant assertion of privilege that I see on this list is the privilege given to "Science." While I am certain that individuals among you have earned your position to speak about, and assert the privilege of, "Science," the subject itself has not demonstrated that it has "earned" its insistence on denying all other avenues to knowledge and understanding as 'erroneous', emotional (emphasis on the sexism here), irrational, or simply wrong. (The assertion of privilege for "liberal" viewpoints comes a very close second.)

davew

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018, at 5:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Lee Rodulph wrote:

 

As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

Well, it’s possible your learned the sentiment from me, but your way of expressing it, is, like Glen’s “level prejudice”, a patentable thought, and I would like to be the first to license it. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of [hidden email]
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 9:24 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

 

Glen wrote, in relevant part, "Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods?"  I wish to question the implicit assumption that mathematicians _do_ (or even _ought to_) "ultimately commit to the ontological status" of _anything_ in particular.

 

I wrote (some time ago, and not here) something I will still stand by.  It appears at the beginning of a me-authored chapter in a me-edited book, "Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical models for research on cultural dynamics"; the "our" and "we" in the first sentence refer to me and my coauthor in an introductory chapter, not to me-and-a- mouse-in-my-pocket.  (Note that I am a mathematician, _not_ a social scientist, and only very occasionally a mathematical modeler of any sort.) I have edited out some footnotes, etc., but in return have expanded some of the in-line references {inside curly braces}.

 

===begin===

 

In our Introduction (p. 17) we quoted "three statements, by mathematicians {Ralph Abraham; three guys named Bohle-Carbonell, Booß, Jensen, who I'd not heard of before working on the book; and Phil Davis} on mathematical modeling". Here is a fourth.

 

(D) Mathematics has its own structures; the world (as we perceive and cognize it) is, or appears to be, structured; mathematical modeling is a reciprocal process in which we _construct/discover/bring into awareness_ correspondences between mathematical structures and structures `in the world´, as we _take actions that get meaning from, and give meaning to,_ those structures and correspondences.

 

Later (p. 24 ff.) we briefly viewed modeling from the standpoint of "evolutionary epistemology" in the style of Konrad Lorenz (1941) {Kant´s doctrine of the a priori in the light of contemporary biology}. In this chapter, I view modeling from the standpoint informally staked out by (D), which I propose to call "evolutionary ontology." My discussion is sketchy (and not very highly structured), but may help make sense of this volume and perhaps even mathematical modeling in general.

 

Behind (D) is my conviction that there is no need to adopt any particular ontological

attitude(s) towards "structures", in the world at large and/or in mathematics, in order to proceed with the project of modeling the former by the latter and drawing inspiration for the latter from the former. It is, I claim, possible for someone simultaneously to adhere to a rigorously `realist´ view of mathematics (say, naïve and unconsidered Platonism) and to take the world to be entirely insubstantial and illusory (say, by adopting a crass reduction of the Buddhist doctrine of Maya), _and still practice mathematical modeling in good faith_ if not with guaranteed success. Other (likely or unlikely) combinations of attitudes are (I claim) just as possible, and equally compatible with the practice of modeling. 

 

I have the impression that many practitioners, if polled (which I have not done), would declare themselves to be both mathematical `formalists´ and physical `realists´. I also have the impression that a large, overlapping group of practitioners, observed in action (which I have done, in a small and unsystematic way), can reasonably be described to _behave_ like thoroughgoing ontological agnostics.  Mathematical modeling _as human behavior_ is based, I am claiming, on acts of pattern-matching (or Gestalt-making)-which is to say,in other language, on creation/recognition/awareness of `higher order structures´ relating some `lower order structures´-that one performs (or that occur to one) independently of one´s ontological stances. That is not all there is to it, as behavior; but that is its basis.

 

===end===

 

To take Glen's question in (perhaps) a different direction, I note that Imre Lakatos also used the word "ultimate" about mathematicians, as follows: "But why on earth have `ultimate´ tests, `final authority´? Why foundations, if they are admittedly subjective?  Why not honestly admit mathematical fallibility, and try to defend the dignity of fallible knowledge from cynical scepticism, rather than delude ourselves that we can invisibly mend the latest tear in the fabric of our "ultimate" intuitions?" As I have learned from Nick, Peirce is also committed to the defense of "the dignity of fallible knowledge" (at least, I *think* I've learned that from Nick; but I might be wrong...).

 

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Marcus G. Daniels]

<  1- Refusal to "know your enemy" and insistence on erroneous straw man characterizations of that enemy is exactly what will allow Trump to be re-elected. >

This is like going to a store with a child psychopath who screams that you are "putting hands on them" until you consent to buy them the toy (wall) they want.   

Is there a meaningful conversation to have?  Insight to be gained from empathy?  I don't think so.   Perhaps it is time for a cot at Juvie, so to speak.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove