Posted by
lrudolph on
Mar 25, 2012; 12:34am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Just-as-a-bye-the-way-tp7397553p7402264.html
Nick,
> I sent this response at 9.39. did you not get it. I think the
server
> throws away one in five of my messages, just for fun.
FWIW, I also didn't get it then. Do you know Auden's "Domesday
Song"? It begins,
Jumbled in the common box
Of their dumb mortality,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie.
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.
Now, back to your (of course very standard) definition:
> Inductive reasoning consists of inferring general principles or
rules from
> specific facts.
I wish to use this discussion to give another brief push to a new
item on my agenda, viz., plugging my new catchphrase "evolutionary
ontology" (which is supposed to be part of a matched pair with the
"evolutionary epistemology" that has been getting a bit of a run
lately, and which was arguably presaged by Konrad Lorenz in that
hard-to-find article on "Kantian A-Priorism in the Light of
Contemporary [i.e., c. 1944] Biology" that I sent you--in the vain
hope of eliciting a response--months and months ago).
One of the traditional problems in justifying "inductive reasoning"
(sometimes explicitly observed to be a problem, sometimes hidden
under the rug) is that (seemingly) to have *any* hope of *validly*
(even in the sense of "it's a good bet") "inferring general
principles or rules from specific facts", the (necessarily, I think,
several) "specific facts" have to be recognized (by the inferring
agent) as "specific facts" that are 'of the same kind' (or 'about
things of the same kind', or 'about events of the same kind', etc.).
But it is very, very hard (which doesn't stop some philosophers and
others from trying) to make serious sense of any notion of 'sameness
of kind' (or 'kind' itself) that is at all independent of an
observing/inferring agent. The simple-minded solution (which I am
entitled to propose because I am *not* a philosopher, or even trying
to do philosophy) is to embrace the observing/inferring agent and
declare that 'kinds' (and 'sameness' or difference thereof) are
properties, not of 'things' or 'events', but of a *system* that
comprises 'things'/'events'/'environments' together with an
observing/inferring agent.
The "evolutionary ontology" slogan now comes in as a catchy way to
summarize a hypothesis (which seems eminently reasonable to me)
that, in an uncatchy and confused way, should run something like "an
organism recognizes [or tends to recognize] *as* 'things'/'events'
that which it has evolved to so recognize; it recognizes *as*
'things'/'events' 'of the same kind' those collections of
'things'/'events' which it has evolved to so recognize; etc." In
the William James version of pragmatism, this is a sort of converse
to the notion that "a difference that makes no difference is no
difference"--that is, it says "differences are differences because
they make differences". Theories of "reasoning by induction" then
begin to look like, at worst, _post hoc_ rationalizations of the
favorable outcomes of evolved behaviors, and, at best, as attempts
to emulate (and if possible improve the ratio of favorable to
unfavorable outcomes) such behavior in a (more or less) formal, or
formalizable, way (that might possibly be performed by an artificial
agent or algorithm).
Coming back to Auden, "orchid, swan, and Caesar lie" "jumbled in the
common box of their dumb stupidity" only because Auden (disguising
himself, as he often did at that period in his poetic career, as
Time) has put them their: they are not (absent his agency) members
of a 'natural kind'; no one would apply "inductive reasoning" to
them (until Auden has provided the prompt).
Lee Rudolph
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