Glen,
I missed Steve's reference to "abduction". I found one in one of your messages wherein you mentioned a book, Gabbay & Woods in "The Reach of Abduction", and a bunch of bafflegab quoted therefrom. In my experience, Abduction has been used to refer to two quite different things. A very specific logical move, as laid out in Peirce's early work OR as others, used it, including the later Peirce, any old sloppy thinking that scientists use that sometimes proves fruitful in the generation of useful hypotheses. What Popper might have called “bold conjectures”. I guess I should look at the Gabbay and Woods book, but from the sample of their prose given, I would suspect it is from that latter tradition. But if you think I ought to have a look at it, I will. In general, I am a fan of Peirce’s earlier usage, that seemed to give hope that we could work out in some detail the right thinking by which fruitful conjectures are arrived at. In short, I don’t think that abduction is a post-modernist crap shoot.
You have nailed me on a misuse of the term tautological. I should have written "quasi-circular". Indeed, as you summarize, Tautological relations are only those circular arguments that are true by definition. If an MA student proposed to you to do a piece of research to demonstrate that all bachelors are unmarried, you would advise the student that no research on his part was necessary because his assertion, while true, is analytical, and therefore above any facts that the student might discover. I have a long history with this tautology business, and always screw it up. I was brought into it because early in my career, it was often asserted that the Law of Effect in experimental psychology (that reinforcement strengthens learning) and the principle of natural selection in biology (that natural selection favors adapted organisms) were tautologies. I fell for it. A marvelous philosopher, Peter Lipton, took me under his wing and helped me straighten all of this out. I attach a copy of our paper. It argues that a form of quasi-circular thinking, “recursive theory,” is useful in the development of a science so long is one is scrupulous in avoiding its pitfalls. Both natural selection and reinforcement theory are examples of what Peter called “filter” theories, in which the thing to be explained appears in a filter frame. So, we might say that the coffee has no grounds in it because it went through a “grounds-filter”. If we stopped there, it would be stupid; but in wise hands, we would be led to explore exactly that it is that the filter is excluding … say, particles larger than the size of the smallest coffee ground particle. At the early stages of development, many scientific theories have that character … think about how in the history of aids research, the description of the cause of aids has metamorphosed from an unknown cause to a virus to a particular virus. The problem with this sort of circularity arises when people stop, a fault we called Molierizing a theory. In the play, Malade Imaginaire, somebody explains the sleep inducing effects of morphine by its having a dormative virtue. Notice that this is circular, because the word “sleep” appears both in the explanation and the thing to be explained. But the explanation is not empty because the word “virtue” rules out many possible reasons for morphine’s putting people to sleep … placebo effects, for instance. So, in the right hands, this quasi circular explanation would lead to a more precise description of the properties of morphine that put people to sleep.
Peter died last year, despite being many years my junior, and since I cannot be trusted, on my own, to get these things right, I attach a link to the abstract . Once you have the abstract on your screen, clicking on it will download the paper.
But thanks for catching the error.
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2013 3:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: [FRIAM] scientific evidence
Steve's mention of Peirce and abduction reminded me that I intended to respond to this.
I'm intrigued by your use of "quasi-tautological". I'm not a big fan of consensus, obviously. So, I could criticize that, even pragmatically, if you'd like. But I care more about the (truly) tautological nature of justificationism and why you identify a convergence onto what we "do"
doubt and what we have confidence in as quasi-tautological.
To be clear, I usually claim that all deduction is tautology, a constructive, reversible walk from premise to conclusion. (This disallows proof by contradiction, which requires getting at least one's toes wet with meta concepts like paradox, consistency, completeness, abduction, etc.) A convergence like the consensus you lay out, however, requires an inductive extrapolation from what the many of us do/think to what is trustworthy (if not true).
Why is this quasi-tautological rather than (truly) tautological? Is it because you give some credit to the complicatedness of deduction (i.e.
that we can walk from premises to conclusion doesn't automatically imply that the conclusions are the same as the premises)? Or is it because induction somehow injects something more into the result, over and above whatever info was embedded/implied in the premises? Or is there some other reason?
Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/05/2013 12:10 PM:
> Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical
> pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that
> has had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have
> gotten trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years,
> and therefore, I think, worth digging up and dusting off.
>
> I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be,
> whatever produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as
> glen would point out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ...
> experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds.
> But Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early
> 19th centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ...
> a consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus
> that mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to
> turn to the methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to
> conduct our search for the truth in the future. He would agree that
> such advice is provisional ... fallible is the term he would use ...
> but he is contemptible of anything that smacked of Cartesian skeptism.
> Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a matter of fact. Doubt is not
> something we entertain (except as sophists); it is something that is
> forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try to resolve in
> favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what we "can"
> doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look at
> which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we
> will see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological.
>
> Nick
> The Village Pragmatist
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that
> the TED Controversy is Sending
>
> Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM:
>> Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would
>> assert that science is the only procedure capable of producing
>> lasting consensus. The other methods .... various forms of torture,
>> mostly ... do not produce such enduring results. N
>
> While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the
> meaning of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance
> exhibited by the many meanings of evidence within science is wide
> enough to cast doubt on the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science.
>
> And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific
> evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ...
> deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even
> personal epiphany.
>
> Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional
> partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence
> as there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an
> orthogonal partial ordering in each dimension.
--
=><= glen e. p. ropella
But now I'm living on the profits of pride
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