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Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

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Nick Thompson

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

All right. I admit it. I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.

Frank, can you help me out here? My concession here was that in Peirce's world, the relation of belief to action is analytical .... i.e. arises directly from the definitions of terms. I thought this was a big concession, because propositions that arise analystically aren't very interesting, and I was confessing to having said something not very interesting. Unfortunately, this crowd does not want me to get a way EVEN with that concession.

I was TRYING to write a tautology. So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y. Is THAT a tautology. I know you have tried to explain this to me before.

I have CLEARLY gotten myself WAY in over my head, here.

Thanks,

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 ?glen?
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 6:17 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

On 09/21/2017 08:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> */[NST==> Is there any logic in which, “Let X be Y; therefore X is Y”
> is not entailed. If a belief is defined as that upon which one is
> prepared to act, is there any logic in which acting does not imply
> belief? <==nst] /*

Of course. E.g. modal logics allow different types of "therefore", say ⊨_a and ⊨_b. Then it might be true that "Let X be Y ⊨_a X is Y" but false that "Let X be Y ⊨_b X is Y". Similarly, I can imagine a logic where "be" and "is" mean different things.

> On 09/21/2017 05:00 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ wrote:
> Yes, of course. E.g. Since most of my actions involve very tight feedback loops, something like tossing a ball to a friend can be launched and then I can make attempts to abort it if, say, I notice the friend has looked away.
>
> */[NST==>Wouldn’t the best way to analyze this be as a series of
> “micro” beliefs? <==nst] /*

What is a "micro" belief? The whole point of my response was that you are over-simplifying both belief and action in order to tell a "just so story" and force the story to fit your philosophy. It seems reasonable to me that if actions are decomposable, then so would be beliefs because there's no difference between beliefs and actions.

But you are saying something different. Somehow, to you, beliefs are different from actions.

> */[NST==>I think a body can enact conflicting beliefs at the same
> time, but that is because I am comfortable with the idea that that the
> same body can simultaneously act on two different belief systems. CF
> Freud, slips of the tongue, hysteria, etc. Frank will correct me. /*

You're implying that, although bodies are composite, belief systems are unitary. If the same body can do 2 conflicting things, why can't the same belief system be composed of 2 conflicting things? This is why I raised the idea of paraconsistent, defeasible, and higher order logics. Specifically _those_ types.

Why do you treat belief systems as fundamentally different from physical systems?

--
␦glen?

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Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2

You should read my erstwhile boss's book. It goes beyond tennis players:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/minds-arrows

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sep 22, 2017 7:51 AM, "Roger Critchlow" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Simulation, hmm. As I read a cover article in Nature several years ago, a study of tennis players established that their nervous systems implemented a Bayesian model of where the tennis ball was going in order to prepare for the possible return actions that might be necessary. This reminds me of the mythical martial artist who is quietly waiting for the adversary to commit to one branch of the ensemble of possible attacks. So when the actor believes in a probabilistic network of possible futures, updates those expectations according to each iota of evidence as it is received, and acts accordingly, is that belief or skepticism?

-- rec --

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 9:32 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Eric writes:

"But at least one of the reasons to have a mind is to simulate many more actions than one can take. I guess I would say that concepts like belief refer to very materially instantiated patterns in those contexts of simulation. But again, that is a topic that has been raised and jousted over in hundreds of FRIAM pages by now, so I am not adding anything new to it here."

More than fifteen years ago, one of my colleagues roped me into teaching a complexity summer school where we were tasked to teach agent based modelling. Absolutely dreading this task, I instead wrote a quick simulation of such jousting -- the projection of personality down to a lower dimensional space. At that time, the tradition was a 2-d representation with time iteration, not a 1-d with time iteration. I think a model of this forum should at least have two dimensions, as the jousters will often be on oblique angles and miss one another, intentionally or not. In any case, this was _my_ idea and don't steal it! I will dig up the Java code to prove it!

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 4:14:01 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Thanks Nick,

Yes, I understand the distinctions below. I am glad I opened with “Some how I imagine that…”, giving me enough wiggle room to have been wrong in the imagination to almost any degree. Small larding below, because I too have been under the gun to do something I don’t want to do, but there will be hell to pay for my stalling now.

> As a behaviorist, I have to concede that it is possible to act tentatively. When I am meeting a dog for the first time, I extend the back of my hand into the danger zone near its muzzle, rather than putting out my hand confidently and stroking its neck, head, or flank. This allows the dog a chance to smell my hand and me a chance to gauge its intentions. Am I acting in doubt. I guess it depends on what the proposition is. If the proposition is that I am safe to reach out and pet the dog, I definitely doubt that. If the proposition is that no dog is safe to touch on the first meeting, then my tentative behavior affirms that belief.
>
> Peirce defined belief as that upon which we act and doubt as the absence of belief. It follows logically that anything we act on affirms some belief and, therefore, at the moment of action, extinguishes all contrary beliefs. If you follow me here, I may appear to win the argument, but only on sophistic points.

I think I understand the alliance between the position you represent as Peirce’s, and behaviorism. With a lot of effort to stay in the discipline, and not slip back into reflecting my own intuitions, I could perhaps even mimic the kinds of arguments that this alliance makes.

As you probably already know, I am comfortable enough working with even sometimes vaguely-understood terms that this position bothers me as bleaching language. If there were never a value-difference between what one was (or could have been) seen to do, and what was afterwards characterized as one’s beliefs at the time, then it is questionable whether there is any reason to have two words in the language. I imagine (again) that the adamant behaviorists would like to see the word “belief” expunged, though perhaps there is room in their lexicon to have to words that always take (as a matter of logic, or of construction) the same values, but which are allowed to carry different names because they are interfaces of those selfsame values to contexts or environments of different kinds. To me it seems more plausible that mental-state terms such as “belief” exist in the informal lexicon, as distinct from taken-action, not only because whatever our inner life is makes it appealing for us to use such terms, but also because there is an empirical, inter-subjectively available structure in tentativeness that the notion of beliefs as something with an independent existence from realized actions does a good job capturing. So not only are we inclined to use the word, but nature and discourse reinforce us to some extent in doing so. But at the same time as you probably know this is my preferred assumption, I read you as having energetically argued that it is invalid, against any number of opponents, so we let that stand.

> Allow me to go for a KO.

but that requires so little….

> When you are interacting with humans, how exactly DO you decide what they believe?

If this were the only frame for such a question, would it not say that there is no referent for Ontology apart from a mirror of Epistemology? The important thing here being the extreme corner into which it tries to push the argument: we are not talking about all angles from which there might be grounds to use such a word, but that the question of the _existence_ of a referent for it is to be nothing more than a reflection of the epistemological means to assign _values_ to particular instances. I can think of cases where this was the right thing to do (getting rid of Newtonian time), but also cases where it amounts to insisting that the most restricted forms of evidence are the only ones to be admitted, and that much larger bodies of pattern that are not thoroughly analyzed are to be dismissed out of hand (historical linguistics in the old Germanic practice from before the age of probabilistic reasoning), which I think I can show were wrong.

Perhaps because there is so much that I not only don’t know, but am poorly suited to being able to “get”, it is congenial to me to think that deciding what values something has, or even what something “is” as the referent for a word, can be very hard even if the value and the referent exist. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, etc.

> What are the practices you would engage in to test the belief of somebody. Can you imagine a test of some belief that would allow you to infer that I believe something even though my actions are inconsistent with that belief? Would that be rational on your part, or just evidence of your Christian good nature? Or your belief in a non-material mind?

Not non-material. But at least one of the reasons to have a mind is to simulate many more actions than one can take. I guess I would say that concepts like belief refer to very materially instantiated patterns in those contexts of simulation. But again, that is a topic that has been raised and jousted over in hundreds of FRIAM pages by now, so I am not adding anything new to it here.

Moriturus te saluto,

Eric

>
> All the best,
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 4:44 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia
>
> Somehow I imagine that Nick means to say there are costly signals in this game — that motor action is thicker than conversation or reflection.
>
> If I am walking across a snowfield that I know to be filled with crevasses, and I know I can’t tell which snow holds weight and which doesn’t, my movement is really different than it is putting my feet on the floor beside the bed in the morning.
>
> To take a different example that is counterfactual but easier to use in invoking the real physiological paralysis, if Thank God Ledge on halfdome were not actually a solid ledge, but a fragile bridge, or if there had been a rockfall that left part of it missing and I were blindfolded, or if I were a prisoner of pirates blindfolded and made to walk the plank, my steps would land differently than they do when I get out of bed in the morning.
>
> There I didn’t say what anyone else would do in any circumstance, but did claim that my own motions have different regimes that are viscerally _very_ distinct. I’m not sure I can think about whether I would fight for air when being drowned. It might be atavistic and beyond anything I normally refer to as “thought”. I certainly have had people claim to me that that is the case.
>
> Those distinctions may occupy a different plane than the distinction between reasonableness and dogmatism all in the world of conversation and the social exchange.
>
> But I should not speak for others. Only for myself as a spectator.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>> On Sep 21, 2017, at 4:32 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> No regrets or apology are needed. And even if we are about to "argue about words" ... I forget what famous dead white guy said that ... it's still useful to me.
>>
>> You say: "if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one cannot be said to really doubt it" The answer is clarified by reading Marcus' post. If you act with assurance, then you're not open to changing your mind. So, you've simply moved the goal posts or passed the buck.
>>
>> I *never* act with assurance, as far as I can tell. Every thing I do seems plagued with doubt. I can force myself out of this state with some activities. Running more than 3 miles does it. Math sometimes does it. Beer does it. Etc. But for almost every other action, I do doubt it. So, I don't think we're having the discussion James and Peirce might have. I think we're talking about two different types of people, those with a tendency to believe their own beliefs and those who tend to disbelieve their own beliefs.
>>
>> Maybe it's because people who act with assurance are just smarter than people like me? I don't know. It's important in this modern world, what with our affirmation bubbles, fake news, and whatnot. What is it that makes people prefer to associate with people whose beliefs they share? What makes some people prefer the company of people different from them? Etc.
>>
>>
>> On 09/21/2017 01:20 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>> I am afraid this discussion is about to dissolve into a quibble about the meaning of the words "doubt" and "belief", but let's take it one more round. In my use of the words ... and I think Peirce's ... one can entertain a doubt without "really" having one. Knowledge of perception tells us that every perceived "fact" is an inference subject to doubt and yet, if one acts in the assurance that some fact is the case, one cannot be said to really doubt it, can one? It follows, then, that to the extent that we act on our perceptions, we act without doubt on expectations that are doubtable.
>>>
>>> Eric Charles may be able to help me with this: there is some debate between William James and Peirce about whether the man, being chased by the bear who pauses at the edge of the chasm, and then leaps across it, doubted at the moment of leaping that he could make the jump. I think James says Yes and Peirce says No. If that is the argument we are having, then I am satisfied we have wrung everything we can out of it.
>>>
>>> Anyway. I regret being cranky, but I can't seem to stop. Is that another example of what we are talking about here?
>>
>> --
>> ☣ gⅼеɳ
>>
>> ============================================================
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>> at St. John's College to unsubscribe
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>
>
> ============================================================
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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
> 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
> 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
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
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
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.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
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

gepr

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

On 09/22/2017 07:20 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> All right. I admit it. I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.

And that's not true, either. 8^) You know more about logic than an overwhelming majority of people. The trick is you're convinced of the unitarity and hegemony of some particular type of logic. Lots of people feel that way, including many metamathematicians. But lots of people also disagree. C'est la vie?

> I was TRYING to write a tautology. So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y. Is THAT a tautology. I know you have tried to explain this to me before.

Yes. But I don't think this is a fruitful path for the conversation. The fruitful path was seized upon by Eric, Marcus, and Roger. I'd be interested to hear how you (and others) answer Roger's question: "So when the actor believes in a probabilistic network of possible futures, updates those expectations according to each iota of evidence as it is received, and acts accordingly, is that belief or skepticism?"

--
␦glen?

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

Frank Wimberly-2

Fwd: RE: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]>
Date: Sep 22, 2017 8:55 AM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia
To: "Thompson, Nicholas" <[hidden email]>
Cc:

OK, more seriously.

If "is" means "=" then it's symmetric and you are correct. But if it means subset of then not. For example a man is a human but a human isn't necessarily a man.

Beyond that, there are problems with statements that are apparently analytic. Every black dog is a dog but is every iron horse a horse? Even "black dog" may mean something other than a dog in some context. Human language is very ambiguous. That's why mathematicians use formal logic, sometimes. In one of his books, John Baez says a 1x1 matrix is a number I pointed out that it wasn't and he said that all mathematicians would say it is except logicians. He said he would lash himself with a wet noodle.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="+15056709918" target="_blank">(505) 670-9918

On Sep 22, 2017 8:25 AM, "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]> wrote:

It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

Seriously, I'll attempt a better answer soon.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="+15056709918" target="_blank">(505) 670-9918

On Sep 22, 2017 8:20 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:
All right. I admit it. I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.

Frank, can you help me out here? My concession here was that in Peirce's world, the relation of belief to action is analytical .... i.e. arises directly from the definitions of terms. I thought this was a big concession, because propositions that arise analystically aren't very interesting, and I was confessing to having said something not very interesting. Unfortunately, this crowd does not want me to get a way EVEN with that concession.

I was TRYING to write a tautology. So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y. Is THAT a tautology. I know you have tried to explain this to me before.

I have CLEARLY gotten myself WAY in over my head, here.

Thanks,

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 ?glen?
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 6:17 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

On 09/21/2017 08:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> */[NST==> Is there any logic in which, “Let X be Y; therefore X is Y”
> is not entailed. If a belief is defined as that upon which one is
> prepared to act, is there any logic in which acting does not imply
> belief? <==nst] /*

Of course. E.g. modal logics allow different types of "therefore", say ⊨_a and ⊨_b. Then it might be true that "Let X be Y ⊨_a X is Y" but false that "Let X be Y ⊨_b X is Y". Similarly, I can imagine a logic where "be" and "is" mean different things.

> On 09/21/2017 05:00 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ wrote:
> Yes, of course. E.g. Since most of my actions involve very tight feedback loops, something like tossing a ball to a friend can be launched and then I can make attempts to abort it if, say, I notice the friend has looked away.
>
> */[NST==>Wouldn’t the best way to analyze this be as a series of
> “micro” beliefs? <==nst] /*

What is a "micro" belief? The whole point of my response was that you are over-simplifying both belief and action in order to tell a "just so story" and force the story to fit your philosophy. It seems reasonable to me that if actions are decomposable, then so would be beliefs because there's no difference between beliefs and actions.

But you are saying something different. Somehow, to you, beliefs are different from actions.

> */[NST==>I think a body can enact conflicting beliefs at the same
> time, but that is because I am comfortable with the idea that that the
> same body can simultaneously act on two different belief systems. CF
> Freud, slips of the tongue, hysteria, etc. Frank will correct me. /*

You're implying that, although bodies are composite, belief systems are unitary. If the same body can do 2 conflicting things, why can't the same belief system be composed of 2 conflicting things? This is why I raised the idea of paraconsistent, defeasible, and higher order logics. Specifically _those_ types.

Why do you treat belief systems as fundamentally different from physical systems?

--
␦glen?

============================================================
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
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Frank Wimberly-2

Fwd: RE: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Frank Wimberly" <[hidden email]>
Date: Sep 22, 2017 8:25 AM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia
To: "Thompson, Nicholas" <[hidden email]>
Cc:

It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

Seriously, I'll attempt a better answer soon.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="+15056709918" target="_blank">(505) 670-9918

On Sep 22, 2017 8:20 AM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

All right. I admit it. I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.

Frank, can you help me out here? My concession here was that in Peirce's world, the relation of belief to action is analytical .... i.e. arises directly from the definitions of terms. I thought this was a big concession, because propositions that arise analystically aren't very interesting, and I was confessing to having said something not very interesting. Unfortunately, this crowd does not want me to get a way EVEN with that concession.

I was TRYING to write a tautology. So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y. Is THAT a tautology. I know you have tried to explain this to me before.

I have CLEARLY gotten myself WAY in over my head, here.

Thanks,

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 ?glen?
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 6:17 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

On 09/21/2017 08:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> */[NST==> Is there any logic in which, “Let X be Y; therefore X is Y”
> is not entailed. If a belief is defined as that upon which one is
> prepared to act, is there any logic in which acting does not imply
> belief? <==nst] /*

Of course. E.g. modal logics allow different types of "therefore", say ⊨_a and ⊨_b. Then it might be true that "Let X be Y ⊨_a X is Y" but false that "Let X be Y ⊨_b X is Y". Similarly, I can imagine a logic where "be" and "is" mean different things.

> On 09/21/2017 05:00 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ wrote:
> Yes, of course. E.g. Since most of my actions involve very tight feedback loops, something like tossing a ball to a friend can be launched and then I can make attempts to abort it if, say, I notice the friend has looked away.
>
> */[NST==>Wouldn’t the best way to analyze this be as a series of
> “micro” beliefs? <==nst] /*

What is a "micro" belief? The whole point of my response was that you are over-simplifying both belief and action in order to tell a "just so story" and force the story to fit your philosophy. It seems reasonable to me that if actions are decomposable, then so would be beliefs because there's no difference between beliefs and actions.

But you are saying something different. Somehow, to you, beliefs are different from actions.

> */[NST==>I think a body can enact conflicting beliefs at the same
> time, but that is because I am comfortable with the idea that that the
> same body can simultaneously act on two different belief systems. CF
> Freud, slips of the tongue, hysteria, etc. Frank will correct me. /*

You're implying that, although bodies are composite, belief systems are unitary. If the same body can do 2 conflicting things, why can't the same belief system be composed of 2 conflicting things? This is why I raised the idea of paraconsistent, defeasible, and higher order logics. Specifically _those_ types.

Why do you treat belief systems as fundamentally different from physical systems?

--
␦glen?

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

Nick Thompson

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by gepr

Yes, I agree. That IS the interesting question. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.

So I leap across the chasm believing that I have a 70 percent chance of making the jump but knowing that I have a 30 percent chance of not making it. I think James would argue that to the extent that one paid attention to the 30 percent, it is actually increased. I.E., if you jump ambivalently, you are less likely to make the jump. And that would be because an ambivalent jump is functionally different from a confident one. For instance, to the extent that you prepare yourself to grab at the cliff as you miss, you ill-prepare yourself to make the jump cleanly.

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 ?glen?
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 10:56 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

On 09/22/2017 07:20 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> All right. I admit it. I know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about logic.

And that's not true, either. 8^) You know more about logic than an overwhelming majority of people. The trick is you're convinced of the unitarity and hegemony of some particular type of logic. Lots of people feel that way, including many metamathematicians. But lots of people also disagree. C'est la vie?

> I was TRYING to write a tautology. So I guess I should have written, "X is Y; therefore, X is Y. Is THAT a tautology. I know you have tried to explain this to me before.

Yes. But I don't think this is a fruitful path for the conversation. The fruitful path was seized upon by Eric, Marcus, and Roger. I'd be interested to hear how you (and others) answer Roger's question: "So when the actor believes in a probabilistic network of possible futures, updates those expectations according to each iota of evidence as it is received, and acts accordingly, is that belief or skepticism?"

--
␦glen?

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen writes:

< I'd be interested to hear how you (and others) answer Roger's question: "So when the actor believes in a probabilistic network of possible futures, updates those expectations according to each iota of evidence as it is received, and acts accordingly, is that belief or skepticism?" >

Underlying such a network is some generating process, and the belief is about that ongoing process, as tabulated by joint and conditional probabilities. Some of the imagined degrees of freedom may not be relevant in an applied setting (e.g. pilot waves or a multiverse) and are acceptable reasons for having probabilities, but others can and should be explained by hidden or external variables. The more these variables are made explicit, the more precise and falsifiable the predictions can be. Ideally, one would have a network of logical predicates that deterministically lead to one or a degenerate set of equivalent solutions.

Marcus

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gepr

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

My answer to Roger's question is "both", FWIW. But my concern seems slightly different from both Marcus' and Nick's answers. I'm more concerned with the granularity of the updates/iota. Nick's 70/30-clean/scramble is pretty fscking coarse. As I said early on, my beliefs/skepticism is *never* that coarse. Marcus' set of equivalent solutions gets closer to what I care about... a kind of measure of how many options one has at any given *instant* in the action process. And I also care about the boundary of that set. Which course corrections can I make that still lead to a satisficing objective (like crashing my bike without brain damage), which lead to failure (brain damage), which lead to optimal outcome (dodging the left-turning old lady completely), etc.

I maintain that some of this complicated problem solving is conscious and some is subconscious (muscle memory as well as the lizard brain). And I tend to believe that the spectrum between the two is fine-grained. I.e. there is no disjoint, binary, distinction between "things I do with full belief" versus "things I (don't) do with full skepticism."

On 09/22/2017 08:26 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> So I leap across the chasm believing that I have a 70 percent chance of making the jump but knowing that I have a 30 percent chance of not making it. I think James would argue that to the extent that one paid attention to the 30 percent, it is actually increased. I.E., if you jump ambivalently, you are less likely to make the jump. And that would be because an ambivalent jump is functionally different from a confident one. For instance, to the extent that you prepare yourself to grab at the cliff as you miss, you ill-prepare yourself to make the jump cleanly.

On 09/22/2017 08:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Underlying such a network is some generating process, and the belief is about that ongoing process, as tabulated by joint and conditional probabilities. Some of the imagined degrees of freedom may not be relevant in an applied setting (e.g. pilot waves or a multiverse) and are acceptable reasons for having probabilities, but others can and should be explained by hidden or external variables. The more these variables are made explicit, the more precise and falsifiable the predictions can be. Ideally, one would have a network of logical predicates that deterministically lead to one or a degenerate set of equivalent solutions.

--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Glen writes:

"Which course corrections can I make that still lead to a satisficing objective (like crashing my bike without brain damage), which lead to failure (brain damage), which lead to optimal outcome (dodging the left-turning old lady completely), etc."

In one universe there's brain damage, in another universe the old lady doesn't know anything happened. Little did you know that the old lady is charge of a human trafficking operation and you `should' have just pointed right at her. Hmm, maybe I'm not helping here? :-)

Marcus
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gepr

Re: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Ha! Yeah, the conference I went to a few months ago was _ripe_ (no, not rife, RIPE) with this stuff ... mostly in the context of automatic cars. I really appreciated one attendee trashing the Trolley Problem as so ideal as to be useless. I heard an interview with the creator of Wolverine the other morning ... something about him being one of the first anti-heroes to really make it. Good stories always have evil protagonists, like the Godfather. Narcos is a good series. But they demonize the leaders too much, I think ... just like our lefties demonize the banksters a little too much.

On 09/22/2017 09:14 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> In one universe there's brain damage, in another universe the old lady doesn't know anything happened. Little did you know that the old lady is charge of a human trafficking operation and you `should' have just pointed right at her. Hmm, maybe I'm not helping here? :-)

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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Fwd: RE: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

[ ... ]

Beyond that, there are problems with statements that are apparently analytic. Every black dog is a dog but is every iron horse a horse? Even "black dog" may mean something other than a dog in some context. Human language is very ambiguous. That's why mathematicians use formal logic, sometimes. In one of his books, John Baez says a 1x1 matrix is a number I pointed out that it wasn't and he said that all mathematicians would say it is except logicians. He said he would lash himself with a wet noodle.

https://www.theblackdog.com

Can an AI learn logic googling the internets or will it end up as confused as I am?

-- rec --

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Fwd: RE: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

“Black” can serve as an adjective or it can be part of a proper noun that happens to involve two glyphs (or three if you count the icon of the dog).

It could be convenient to ground the referent of “black dog” either earlier or later in a logic program or constraint solving procedure or NLP code.

That search can be constrained by other context like the purchase of brand name clothing or varieties of canids. It’s just a question of having a sufficient short term memory and time to do that combinatorial disambiguation and a complete enough database of all the usages.

Merriam Webster has this funny tweet about how many so people are searching for dotard.

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 12:21 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: RE: Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

[ ... ]

Beyond that, there are problems with statements that are apparently analytic. Every black dog is a dog but is every iron horse a horse? Even "black dog" may mean something other than a dog in some context. Human language is very ambiguous. That's why mathematicians use formal logic, sometimes. In one of his books, John Baez says a 1x1 matrix is a number I pointed out that it wasn't and he said that all mathematicians would say it is except logicians. He said he would lash himself with a wet noodle.

https://www.theblackdog.com

Can an AI learn logic googling the internets or will it end up as confused as I am?

-- rec --

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