Just as a bye-the-way

[David Eric Smith]

<base href="x-msg://9/">Thanks greatly Nick,

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

Interesting, always interesting,

Eric

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

>

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

>

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

>

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Nick Thompson]

<base href="x-msg://9/">

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Russ Abbott]

Nick,  

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act. Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

Also, you say that true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition. As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother? And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).
• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
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[Eric Charles]

Russ,
I would like to hazard a partial answer to your question about belief:

Peirce is not quite a behaviorist, but he is creating the ground work that will lead to philosophically sophisticated behaviorism (ala Wittgenstein or the American Realists... who you can, as of this week, read about in ebook format ;- ) I leave aside the issue of whether this trajectory is one of correct or incorrect interpretation.

More or less, for Peirce to believe something is to act in a certain way. Someone calls from the other room, you respond in a certain way - to respond in that way is to believe that it was you who was called. The believe is not something that occurs before the act and is causal relation with the act, they are one and the same.

As with other behaviorist, or behaviorist leaning world views, this understanding is most easily sustained with regards to more mundane seeming beliefs: That the bird searches for food in a certain place is that the bird believes the food is there, etc. Or to drop to physiology (maybe a bad move on my part): That the bird is built such that food-searching occurs in particular places is that the bird is built such that it believes the food is in those places. This understanding is more difficult to sustain when dealing with the "higher" mental functions, or more abstracted beliefs.

While I am confident that Peirce and the behaviorists are similar regarding the mundane beliefs, I am not at all sure how Peirce would handle the abstracted beliefs, and so I will not speculate on the details he would add. I do know, however, that he will (somehow) claim that there is no clear divide between the mundane and the abstracted beliefs, and that (somehow) the same principles will be used in both cases.

As for the question of truth, I will only mention you could read Peirce as simply laying out the way a world must be for belief in science to make sense as a philosophy. If there is n! ot such a thing as honest inquiry, and if people who engage in that process will not converge upon an answer eventually, then there is no reason to believe that science is actually going anywhere. If there is such a thing as honest inquiry, and if it does converge, then (clearly?) the result of such a process is what we are babbling on about when we set about our daily business of trying to determine what is or is not "true".

Please don't judge Peirce's sophistication based on these little pattelings, but I hope they are still helpful. Are they at all?

Eric



On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 11:54 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,  

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act. Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

Also, you say that true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition. As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother? And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).
• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: <a href="https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/" target="" onclick="window.open('https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/');return false;">https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/" style="font-style:italic" target="" onclick="window.open('http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/');return false;">http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthompson@...> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, lrudolph@... wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> <a href="http://www.friam.org" target="" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

 

 

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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

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[Russ Abbott]

Thanks, Eric,

I remember some discussions related to this we had a while ago. It's one thing not to want to talk about internal (subjective) states, which is what I guess you are getting at. It's another to use a word (like belief) that explicitly implies a subjective state. If someone wants to use that word to mean something defined behaviorally, that's all well and good, but those of us who still think(!) we have subjective experience deserve a warning that that's what's happening.

Regarding truth and science: even if one posits that there won't be two answers that two groups both pursuing honest inquiry converge to, there is still the problem that science itself often takes the position that all theories are provisional and are eventually likely to be found to be wrong in some particular -- which leads to a new theory. The old theory may be an approximation of the new, in which case convergence in an intuitive sense makes sense, e.g., Newtonian and relativistic mechanics. But the old may be nothing like the new, e.g, Newtonian and quantum physics, in which case convergence doesn't seem like the right word.

 

-- Russ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:48 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:

Russ,
I would like to hazard a partial answer to your question about belief:

Peirce is not quite a behaviorist, but he is creating the ground work that will lead to philosophically sophisticated behaviorism (ala Wittgenstein or the American Realists... who you can, as of this week, read about in ebook format ;- ) I leave aside the issue of whether this trajectory is one of correct or incorrect interpretation.

More or less, for Peirce to believe something is to act in a certain way. Someone calls from the other room, you respond in a certain way - to respond in that way is to believe that it was you who was called. The believe is not something that occurs before the act and is causal relation with the act, they are one and the same.

As with other behaviorist, or behaviorist leaning world views, this understanding is most easily sustained with regards to more mundane seeming beliefs: That the bird searches for food in a certain place is that the bird believes the fo! od is there, etc. Or to drop to physiology (maybe a bad move on my part): That the bird is built such that food-searching occurs in particular places is that the bird is built such that it believes the food is in those places. This understanding is more difficult to sustain when dealing with the "higher" mental functions, or more abstracted beliefs.

While I am confident that Peirce and the behaviorists are similar regarding the mundane beliefs, I am not at all sure how Peirce would handle the abstracted beliefs, and so I will not speculate on the details he would add. I do know, however, that he will (somehow) claim that there is no clear divide between the mundane and the abstracted beliefs, and that (somehow) the same principles will be used in both cases.

As for the question of truth, I will only mention you could read Peirce as simply laying out the way a world must be for ! belief in science to make sense as a philosophy. If there is n! ot such a thing as honest inquiry, and if people who engage in that process will not converge upon an answer eventually, then there is no reason to believe that science is actually going anywhere. If there is such a thing as honest inquiry, and if it does converge, then (clearly?) the result of such a process is what we are babbling on about when we set about our daily business of trying to determine what is or is not "true".

Please don't judge Peirce's sophistication based on these little pattelings, but I hope they are still helpful. Are they at all?

Eric

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 11:54 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,  

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act. Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

Also, you say that true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition. As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother? And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).
• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthompson@...> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- e! xperiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, lrudolph@... wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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============================================================
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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

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[John Kennison]

It seems that we instinctively believe in induction –that patterns which have been repeated will continue to repeat. It seems natural to justify this belief by saying it has worked before, except, as Eric Charles has pointed out, this is circular.

 Eric Smith has suggested an alternative justification: If induction were false, our instinctive belief in induction would not have evolved. Is it possible to imagine a world that would favor anti-induction (or the tendency to believe that patterns which have repeated will stop repeating)?

This suggests a mathematical question: Suppose a natural phenomenon can either perform action A or action B. Further suppose that organisms which can correctly predict whether A or B will happen have an evolutionary advantage. Suppose that organisms can remember whether an occurrence of A was more often followed by another A or more often by another B (or whether the next action was A exactly as many times as it was B). One type of organism is inductive. If the action A is more often followed by another A, the organism predicts A whenever the previous action was A. If the action A is more often followed by an action B, the organism predicts B and makes no prediction if A and B are equally likely to follow after an A. The organism uses a similar strategy if the previous action was B.  Another organism is anti-inductive. It predicts the opposite of what an inductive organism would predict.
It is easy to devise a sequence of A's and B's that would favor the inductive organism. For example the sequence (A, A, A, A, A, . . .) which is always A, will greatly favor the inductivist, who always makes correct predictions, over the anti-inductivist who always predicts incorrectly. Even the alternating sequence (A, B, A, B, . . .) will greatly favor the inductivist. But, can we find a sequence which favors the anti-inductivist?

Yes. Start the sequence with any action, say A. In the absence of any experience with what happens after an A, both the inductivist and the anti-inductivist will make no prediction. So we can choose another A. Now the inductivist will predict a third A, but the anti-inductivist will predict B. So make the next action B and so forth. But such ani0inductivist sequences must be rare else we would not have evolved as inductivists. (Or did we --some people seem to be anti-inductivists, saying that after two A's it must be the case that we are due for action B.)

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas  Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 8:17 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thanks, Eric.

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

Have to fix dinner.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thanks greatly Nick,

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

Interesting, always interesting,

Eric



On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:


Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act.

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

(3) The real world consists of all that is true.

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal.

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.

 
(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences.

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00.

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00.

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

Nick

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy.

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference.


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]]<mailto:[mailto:[hidden email]]> On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

Yes, I could not disagree.

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth.

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

All best,

Eric


On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> wrote:

> Eric Smith:
>
>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not
>> predicated on the availability of infinities.
>
> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off
> but will try to get back to this later.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
> http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Eric Charles]

Russ,
Quite right!

Because of Peirce place in history, this is similar (though not identical) to things that have come up on this list before. However, the issue at play seems to me even more serious (?even deeper?) than your reply would indicate. Your assertion that the word "belief" indicates something inherently "subjective" is a very era-dependent assertion, and something that could certainly be wrong. If Peirce, and those who (at least vaguely) followed in his footsteps are correct, then there might be a category error inherent in your assertion, a mistaking of the happenings properly described by the word "belief" with a hypothesized explanation for those happenings. ("Happenings" is my term, and is intended in the broadest possible sense.) If Peirce is right, than, more or less, the idea that we needed a 'dualistic subjective' to explain 'belief' was analogous to a scientific hypothesis, which it turns out was wrong. The common claim that 'belief' and 'subjective' are neigh synonymous explains why people do not recognize that the relationship was, originally, hypothetical, and is at least potentially falsifiable. Peirce may have been acting largely on faith, but 100 years of science since evidences that we can, it would seem, explain the existence of 'belief' through several other means.

This success at explaining  the existence of 'belief ' is possible, because any concrete claim about 'belief' always has, when the speaker examines their actions carefully, refered to a natural, observable and experimentally study-able phenomenon --- 'Belief' does not differ in kind from the other things scientists investigate, in anything like the usually implied distinction between "subjective" and "objective".

Note, that this is a different way of trying to show what is Peirce is up to. In particular, this direction has left the type of natural phenomenon open; from this perspective, it is not yet specified what type of natural phenomenon a belief is. One can appreciate, however, why some people thought the best bet was 'something about behavior'. 

Eric



On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 03:00 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric,

I remember some discussions related to this we had a while ago. It's one thing not to want to talk about internal (subjective) states, which is what I guess you are getting at. It's another to use a word (like belief) that explicitly implies a subjective state. If someone wants to use that word to mean something defined behaviorally, that's all well and good, but those of us who still think(!) we have subjective experience deserve a warning that that's what's happening.

Regarding truth and science: even if one posits that there won't be two answers that two groups both pursuing honest inquiry converge to, there is still the problem that science itself often takes the position that all theories are provisional and are eventually likely to be found to be wrong in some particular -- which leads to a new theory. The old theory may be an approximation of the new, in which case convergence in an intuitive sense makes sense, e.g., Newtonian and relativistic mechanics. But the old may be nothing like the new, e.g, Newtonian and quantum physics, in which case convergence doesn't seem like the right word.

 

-- Russ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:48 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <epc2@...> wrote:

Russ,
I would like to hazard a partial answer to your question about belief:

Peirce is not quite a behaviorist, but he is creating the ground work that will lead to philosophically sophisticated behaviorism (ala Wittgenstein or the American Realists... who you can, as of this week, read about in <a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=_YjwH2TPIDYC&amp;rdid=book-_YjwH2TPIDYC&amp;rdot=1&amp;source=gbs_atb" target="" onclick="window.open('https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=_YjwH2TPIDYC&amp;rdid=book-_YjwH2TPIDYC&amp;rdot=1&amp;source=gbs_atb');return false;">ebook format ;- ) I leave aside the issue of whether this trajectory is one of correct or incorrect interpretation.

More or less, for Peirce to believe something is to act in a certain way. Someone calls from the other room, you respond in a certain way - to respond in that way is to believe that it was you who was called. The believe is not something that occurs before the act and is causal relation with the act, they are one and the same.

As with other behaviorist, or behaviorist leaning world views, this understanding is most easily sustained with regards to more mundane seeming beliefs: That the bird searches for food in a certain place is that the bird believes the fo! od is there, etc. Or to drop to physiology (maybe a bad move on my part): That the bird is built such that food-searching occurs in particular places is that the bird is built such that it believes the food is in those places. This understanding is more difficult to sustain when dealing with the "higher" mental functions, or more abstracted beliefs.

While I am confident that Peirce and the behaviorists are similar regarding the mundane beliefs, I am not at all sure how Peirce would handle the abstracted beliefs, and so I will not speculate on the details he would add. I do know, however, that he will (somehow) claim that there is no clear divide between the mundane and the abstracted beliefs, and that (somehow) the same principles will be used in both cases.

As for the question of truth, I will only mention you could read Peirce as simply laying out the way a world must be for ! belief in science to make sense as a philosophy. If there is n! ot such a thing as honest inquiry, and if people who engage in that process will not converge upon an answer eventually, then there is no reason to believe that science is actually going anywhere. If there is such a thing as honest inquiry, and if it does converge, then (clearly?) the result of such a process is what we are babbling on about when we set about our daily business of trying to determine what is or is not "true".

Please don't judge Peirce's sophistication based on these little pattelings, but I hope they are still helpful. Are they at all?

Eric

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 11:54 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott@...> wrote:

Nick,  

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act. Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

Also, you say that true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition. As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother? And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).
• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: <a href="https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/" target="" onclick="window.open('https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/');return false;">https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/" style="font-style:italic" target="" onclick="window.open('http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/');return false;">http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <nickthompson@...> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- e! xperiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: friam-bounces@... [mailto:friam-bounces@...] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, lrudolph@... wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> <a href="http://www.friam.org" target="" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

 

 

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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Russ,

 

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Nick,  

 

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.

[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.

 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact. 

 

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.

[NST ==>] YEP!

As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?

[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future. 

 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.

[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry. 

I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

 

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Lakkaraju, Kiran]

T
 

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads
 

Hi, Russ,

 

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Nick,  

 

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.

[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.

 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact. 

 

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.

[NST ==>] YEP!

As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?

[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future. 

 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.

[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry. 

I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

 

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Russ Abbott]

The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as the number of tails. Therefore, when one count grows larger than the other, predict that the other will occur to even things out.  Many people think that way.

 

-- Russ 

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:15 AM, Lakkaraju, Kiran <[hidden email]> wrote:

T
 

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads
 

Hi, Russ,

 

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Nick,  

 

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.

[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.

 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact. 

 

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.

[NST ==>] YEP!

As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?

[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future. 

 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.

[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry. 

I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: <a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

 

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Nick Thompson]

Kiran,  Was there more?  Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Lakkaraju, Kiran
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 9:16 AM
To: '[hidden email]'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads

 

T
 

From: Nicholas Thompson [hidden email]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads
 

Hi, Russ,

 

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

 

From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Nick,  

 

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.

[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.

 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?

[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact. 

 

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.  

• This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.

[NST ==>] YEP!

As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?

[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future. 

 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

• One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
• If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.

[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

• Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
• Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be? 

[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry. 

I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.

-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________

  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105

  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/

  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________ 

 

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Eric.

 

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

 

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

 

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

 

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

 

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

 

Have to fix dinner.

 

Nick

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thanks greatly Nick,

 

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.  

 

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.  

 

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

 

Interesting, always interesting,

 

Eric

 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

 

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

 

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

 

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

 

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act. 

 

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

 

(3) The real world consists of all that is true. 

 

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal. 

 

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.  

 

 

(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.  

 

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences. 

 

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00. 

 

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00. 

 

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

 

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.  

 

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

 

Nick

 

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy. 

 

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference. 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [hidden email] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

 

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

 

Yes, I could not disagree. 

 

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth. 

 

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

 

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

 

All best,

 

Eric

 

 

On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

 

> Eric Smith: 

> 

>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not

>> predicated on the availability of infinities.

> 

> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off

> but will try to get back to this later.

> 

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe

> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at

> http://www.friam.org

 

 

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

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[John Kennison]

I agree. People who think that a fair coin is "due" to come up tails after a string of heads are not so much anti-inductivist (or whatever term might be used) as naive in applying the rule that over the long run, the percentage difference between the the number of heads and number of tails rends towards zero.  If we replace a coin by a person trying to give a random sequence of H's and T's, the claim that the sequence is "due" for a T after a string of H's might be valid.

---John

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 1:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads

The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as the number of tails. Therefore, when one count grows larger than the other, predict that the other will occur to even things out.  Many people think that way.

-- Russ



On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:15 AM, Lakkaraju, Kiran <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
T

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Hi, Russ,

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Nick,

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.
[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.
 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?
[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact.

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.

 *   This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.
[NST ==>] YEP!
As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?
[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future.
 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

 *   One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
 *   If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

 *   Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
 *   Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be?
[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry.
I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.
-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________
  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105<tel:[phone]>
  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________


On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks, Eric.

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

Have to fix dinner.

Nick

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thanks greatly Nick,

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

Interesting, always interesting,

Eric



On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act.

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

(3) The real world consists of all that is true.

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal.

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.

 
(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences.

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00.

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00.

(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

Nick

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy.

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference.


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]]<mailto:[mailto:[hidden email]]> On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

Yes, I could not disagree.

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth.

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

All best,

Eric


On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> wrote:

> Eric Smith:
>
>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not
>> predicated on the availability of infinities.
>
> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off
> but will try to get back to this later.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
> http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Arlo Barnes]

But there are a lot more strings that will have a tail in it (infinite, or infinite minus one if you like) than there are strings that are all heads, randomly generated or otherwise. If randomly generated, we assume all strings are equally likely, so the chance of never getting a tail gets it's fair but minimal chance 1/infinity, which is a small number and therefore an unlikely occurence.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[Owen Densmore]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as the number of tails. Therefore, when one count grows larger than the other, predict that the other will occur to even things out.  Many people think that way.

 

-- Russ 

Just to make sure I'm up with the conversation:

The point you're making is that someone following the "predict the least occurring  value" strategy would indeed even things out but not because of their strategy, but because of the nature of binomial distributions, i.e. strings of H/T with the same number of each are more probable.

But the impact on the individual is to falsely deduce that they had an effective strategy, rather than a good understanding of probability.

And worse, there is no way to prove them wrong .. well maybe by simply choosing the "all heads" strategy and showing it to be equally effective.

   -- Owen

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[Nick Thompson]

Wait a minute, folks.  Aren't we talking about Deduction here.  Our theory that the coin "should" be fair comes not from our experience but from probability theory.  To relate coin flipping to induction, don't we have to talk about a coin of unknown fairness.  How many heads do we have to flip of such a coin before we are led to the conclusion that the coin has two heads.   Isn't that the analogue to the problem of inducition?

N

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 3:07 PM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads



I agree. People who think that a fair coin is "due" to come up tails after a string of heads are not so much anti-inductivist (or whatever term might be used) as naive in applying the rule that over the long run, the percentage difference between the the number of heads and number of tails rends towards zero.  If we replace a coin by a person trying to give a random sequence of H's and T's, the claim that the sequence is "due" for a T after a string of H's might be valid.

---John

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 1:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads

The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as the number of tails. Therefore, when one count grows larger than the other, predict that the other will occur to even things out.  Many people think that way.

-- Russ



On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:15 AM, Lakkaraju, Kiran <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
T

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Hi, Russ,

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Nick,

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.
[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.
 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?
[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact.

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.

 *   This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.
[NST ==>] YEP!
As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?
[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future.
 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

 *   One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
 *   If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

 *   Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
 *   Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be?
[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry.
I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.
-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________
  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105<tel:[phone]>
  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________


On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks, Eric.

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

Have to fix dinner.

Nick

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thanks greatly Nick,

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

Interesting, always interesting,

Eric



On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act.

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

(3) The real world consists of all that is true.

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal.

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.

 
(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences.

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00.

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00.


(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

Nick

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy.

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference.


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]]<mailto:[mailto:[hidden email]]> On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

Yes, I could not disagree.

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth.

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

All best,

Eric


On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> wrote:

> Eric Smith:
>
>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not
>> predicated on the availability of infinities.
>
> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off
> but will try to get back to this later.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
> http://www.friam.org

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org ============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
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[Arlo Barnes]

To put another point of perspective on this, all coins are of unknown fairness.
-Arlo James Barnes

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[John Kennison]

Probability theory gives us an answer if we believe that the coin has heads on one side and tails on the other and further that the two sides "come up" with equal probability. These beliefs can be tested empirically, so induction is involved.

But there is another issue in the case of a coin that has produced a string of heads. As often happens, the simple probability formulas, that might appear in an elementary text, assume independence. That is, that whatever happens on the first few tosses has is independent of (has no effect on) the outcome of a subsequent toss. I have read that for automatic coin tossing machines, this seems not to be true. For example, assume the tossing mechanism gathers up the coin and tosses it again. The outcome might depend on the position of the coin after the first toss. There could be special positions P with the property that when the coin is in position P then the tossing mechanism returns it to position P (after the toss). This could lead to long strings of heads, more likely than what theory would predict, because independence (which the theory assumes) would not be true.  This is also the case with a person trying to simulate a series of Hs and Ts  that make look like the series of Heads and Tails of a fair (and independently functioning coin tossing operation)
If the person guesses a few heads, this influences the person's subsequent choices.

--John
________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas  Thompson [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 8:39 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads

Wait a minute, folks.  Aren't we talking about Deduction here.  Our theory that the coin "should" be fair comes not from our experience but from probability theory.  To relate coin flipping to induction, don't we have to talk about a coin of unknown fairness.  How many heads do we have to flip of such a coin before we are led to the conclusion that the coin has two heads.   Isn't that the analogue to the problem of inducition?

N

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 3:07 PM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads



I agree. People who think that a fair coin is "due" to come up tails after a string of heads are not so much anti-inductivist (or whatever term might be used) as naive in applying the rule that over the long run, the percentage difference between the the number of heads and number of tails rends towards zero.  If we replace a coin by a person trying to give a random sequence of H's and T's, the claim that the sequence is "due" for a T after a string of H's might be valid.

---John

________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 1:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying Induction Threads

The naive strategy for predicting coin tosses is anti-reductionist in John Kennison's terms. There is even a rationale. We "know" that in the long run (given a fair coin) the number of heads will be approximately the same as the number of tails. Therefore, when one count grows larger than the other, predict that the other will occur to even things out.  Many people think that way.

-- Russ



On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:15 AM, Lakkaraju, Kiran <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
T

From: Nicholas Thompson [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>]
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2012 08:26 AM
To: [hidden email] <[hidden email]>; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Hi, Russ,

I will answer between the lines below.  Two cautions: I am rushing to Friam and these are Peirce’s views, not necessarily mine. :

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Nick,

Would you explain further your notion that belief is that on which we act.
[NST ==>]  Please be clear:  I am trying to channel Peirce, here, although, as you already know, I am, myself, a behaviorist.
 Does this imply for you that a lack of action implies a lack of belief? For example, I believe that the earth is round, but I don't act on that belief. Does that mean I do't really have that belief? How does this work in your framework?
[NST ==>]  In Peirce’s framework, exactly!  Although, come to think of it, I cannot think where he has worried about the problem of latent beliefs …. i.e., I would do X if Y, but Y hasn’t happened yet.  Given his emphasis on the long term in his definition of truth, I think he would probably take such dispositions as equivalent to the fact.

Also, you say that[NST ==>]  PEIRCE SAYS! true propositions are those on which the human species as a community of inquiry will ultimately (in the infinite future) converge. That bothers me in a number of ways.

 *   This is such a remote definition that it hardly seems worth bothering with in the first place. There is no operational test to determine whether something is the truth under this definition.
[NST ==>] YEP!
As you say, this is really just a definition, but it's not even a definition of one concept in terms of others. It simply labels "the propositions on which ... " as the truth.  But giving a label to a set of things doesn't add anything new. It just adds a label. So why bother?
[NST ==>] Well, I think there is a lot of sneaky meta-induction going in in Peirce.  Our communities of systematic inquiry have done well for us in the past and so I infer that they will do well for us in the future.
 And especially why other when the term "the truth" has some meaning to most people. Why say that we should forget about that meaning and use the term as a label for some set of things -- if that set even exists (see below).

 *   One doesn't know that it will ever refer to anything.  We won't converge on anything in the infinite future since there is no end to the infinite future and hence no convergence.
 *   If you are using converge as in mathematics as in the convergence of an infinite series (where there is convergence to infinity), then, as in mathematics, one may be able to determine at this moment what the series (or truth) will converge to. But that's probably not what you (or Peirce) have in mind. But if you reject that, then as in the previous point, there is no convergence since one never reaches infinity. So there is no such set.
[NST ==>] Well, Peirce was a sophisticated mathematician and I am not, so far be it from me ….. .  But, I would say his view was something like communities of systematic inquiry are more likely to be closer to the truth at any point in than those who fix opinion by any other method.

 *   Some series don't ever converge. How do we know that the truth in your sense is not one of those? The community of inquiry may split with one part of it converging (assuming there is convergence) on one truth and another part of it converging on another truth. Then what?
 *   Most importantly, why bother attempting to define what you mean by the truth at all? If you had such a definition, what would you do with it? What good would it be?
[NST ==>] It would lead me to assemble and trust communities of systematic inquiry.
I think the salient point about Peirce is that he is unafraid of the Cartesian foundationalist boogey=man.  He think’s Descartes understanding of “doubt” is absurd.  He asserts that you cannot be said to doubt what you act upon resolutely.  Almost everything that Descartes doubts at the beginning of his “reflections” is something that we all act upon routinely every day.  To say that you cannot PROVE the existence of an outside world is a long way from saying that you doubt it.
-- Russ Abbott
_____________________________________________
  Professor, Computer Science
  California State University, Los Angeles

  Google voice: 747-999-5105<tel:[phone]>
  Google+: https://plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/
  vita:  http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/
_____________________________________________


On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Thanks, Eric.

I am sure Bayes and and Peirce would have got on famously. Unfortunately, this can only be surmise for me, because despite attempts by many kind people to explain Bayes to me, nothing has ever stuck.  I am ever hopeful, but afraid I am demonstrably not worth further investment by others.

In connection with your other comments below, there are passages in Pierce that are eerily reminiscent of Schroedinger’s what is life and like things that Kaufmann wrote.  From his MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE, I give you …

Protoplasm, when quiescent, is broadly speaking, solid; but when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking liquid.  A moner in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its matter.  … Long-continued or frequently  repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call fatigue.”

He relates this fatigue to the formation of habits.  After a few pages, he reveals where he is headed:

“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for.  The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.  There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements: and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.  No doubt, then, it would feel.  To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. “

Have to fix dinner.

Nick

From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2012 3:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thanks greatly Nick,

It is very helpful to me to see these premises laid out in a systematic way, since I am nowhere near having the resources of either time or brain to try to read this material myself.

As you say, it fits well as a description of the events that make up a problem-solver's practical day.

I think it leaves me with more unsatisfied questions perhaps than I had before, or maybe just a larger urge to try to formalize.  I think of Vygotsky (Thought and Language) and "family relations" as precursor to predicates, when I read your description of abduction.  I think of Bayesian inference when I read your description of his notions of validity in weak form, as an alternative to Popper.  Each of these seems to be an attempt by one or another worker to get at rules that could be used to build a machine -- of which we knew all the internal parts -- that would commit these acts.  Then we could study the overlap and differences with our own choices, and perhaps update our categories.

Interesting, always interesting,

Eric



On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Dear Eric Smith (and other patient people),

I have been trying to get the chance to lay this out for three days, and have just not had the time.  I am enthralled at the moment by the scientific philosophy of Charles Saunders Peirce because, weird as it is, it seems to capture a lot of what I think about a lot of things.  It also, it stands at the root of many of our institutions.  You can access this connection through Menand's, The Metaphysical Club.  Many of the foundational beliefs we hold about education and science and even jurisprudence are partly due to Peirce.

I am not sure Peirce thought he needed (1) below,  but I need it to get him started, so I will attribute it to him.

(1) Humans are a knowledge-gathering species by nature. Darwinism tells us that humans have survived both as communities and as a species because their cognitive processes have brought their beliefs into concert with the world.  (Peirce is a bit of a group Selectionist.) A belief is that on which I act.  There are no latent beliefs in Peirce.  Doubt is an incapacity to act.

(2) True propositions and the best methods for discovering them are those on which the human species, as a community of inquiry, will converge ULTIMATELY.  By ultimately, I mean the infinite future.   Note that this is a definition of "true."  There is no other truth in Peirce, no correspondence theory, except possibly that inferred by me in (1 ) . The current views of contemporary communities of inquiry may be our best shot at the truth, but they are NOT true, by definition, unless they happen to be that on which the human community of inquiry will ultimately converge. Peirce was a chemist, a mathematician and an expert in measurement.  There was no doubt in his mind that the best methods for producing enduring convergence of opinion were what we think of as Scientific methods -- experiments and mathematical analysis .

(3) The real world consists of all that is true.

(4) Our knowledge of the world is through a stream of logical inferences. All human beings are informal scientists by nature.  All human belief is arrived at, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether by scientist or by layman, whether by infant or mature adult, by the application of forms of inference and by experiments and observations whether formal or informal.

(5) Contrary to what many of us were taught in graduate school, there are three forms of valid inference.  Communities of inquiry (principally “Sciences” to Peirce) use all three forms of inference, to produce networks of inference.

 
(6) Deductive inferences such as "A. All Swans are White; B. this bird is a swan; C. This bird is white." are categorically true.  However, those who taught us in Graduate School that only deductive inferences are valid, failed to tell us how we come by either the Major (A) or the Minor (B) premise of such inferences.   Popper, who influenced many of the scientists in my generation, used to tell us that they were "bold conjectures."  Big lot of help THAT is!  One of the great strengths of Peirce’s work is that he gives an account of the origin of “bold conjectures”.

(7)  Peirce honors two additional forms of valid logical inference, which he calls forms of "probable" inference. .  A probable inference is one whose strength improves with the multiplication of concordant cases.  Probably inference can supply the major (A) and minor (B) premises of deductive inferences from empirical observations. Much of scientists’ daily work consists in improving the strength of our probable inferences.

(8) The first of these types is induction.  “C. This bird is white; B. This bird is a swan; A.  All Swans are White.”  It generates the major premise of the deductive inference above (A), but needs other inferences to supply C. and B.  With a single case, an inductive inference is valid, but extremely weak.  With the discovery of larger and larger numbers of swans that are white, the strength (probability) of the inference approaches 1.00.

(9) The second of these types of probable inference is “abduction”.  “C. This bird is white; A. All Swans are White; B. This bird is a swan.”   Abductions can generate the minor premise of the deductive inference above (B) but need other inferences to supply A and C.  An abductive inference based on the discovery of a single concordant property between swans and the bird at hand is valid but extremely weak. As more concordant properties are discovered, our certainty that the bird is a swan approaches 1.00.


(10) The beliefs in the self and in an inner private world are all arrived at in this manner.  They are the result of inferences (“signs, Peirce would say”) arising from our experience with the world.   The self’s view of the self is no more privileged an inference than the other’s view of the self. In fact, on Peirce’s account, the former is probably based upon the latter by abductive inference.

(11)  On the account of Many Wise Persons, all the above is based upon Peirce’s theory of signs.  I confess I don’t really understand that theory, and tried very hard to get to this point without invoking it.  Your skepticism should be heightened by this admission.

I will send this off to some people who know Peirce better than I in the hope that they will correct me.  I will send along any corrections I receive.

Nick

FN#1. Yes, I know that all swans are not white.  I know my ornithology, my childhood literature and my chaotic economics as well as the next guy.

FN#2.  Some readers may struggle with the idea that calling a bird “white” is itself an inference.  But, think about how you would go about deciding the color of something.  You would observe it over time, you would observe it in various lights, etc., and then DECIDE that it was white.  Whether that process is conscious or unconscious, systematic or unsystematic, is irrelevant to Peirce.  It is still an inference.


-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> [mailto:[hidden email]]<mailto:[mailto:[hidden email]]> On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Clarifying Induction Threads

Thank you Lee and Glen both,

Yes, I could not disagree.

There is an interesting question, Glen, on which I don't have a dog in the fight either way.  Is the worry about induction only (or even mostly) about the origin of conjectures, or is it (equally much, or even mostly) about the source of confidence in conjectures?  The issue of what we would like to regard as truth values seems to me to suggest at least large weight on the latter.  I think, "truth" descending from a common root of "trust" and so forth.

I look forward to Lee's particular refutation, because I was wondering whether I would argue against the same point myself, say for flipping coins where there are only two possibilities, and trying to decide whether it is better to expect that the next one will be the same as previous ones, or not.  But even there, I might niggle with something on algorithm complexity and description length, and argue that it is "harder" to expect a violation of a long string of repeats, than it is for a short string.

But, I look forward to listening to Lee's refutation.

All best,

Eric


On Mar 28, 2012, at 4:06 PM, [hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]> wrote:

> Eric Smith:
>
>> every child knows there can be no discussion of induction that is not
>> predicated on the availability of infinities.
>
> Not so (independent of what every child knows)!  I have to rush off
> but will try to get back to this later.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe
> at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
> http://www.friam.org

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org ============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org