all thinking about design is rational. I am almost done with a book on
rationalizing one after the fact. I don't know if the list accepts
attachments, but I have put Parnas' paper on this email.
> Good question, John,
>
> It wouldn't surprise me if we could reconstruct artistic work as forms of
> deduction, induction, and abduction. I know of at least one article that
> tries to do that. But rational reconstruction is like that bubble in
> the
> kingfisher's head that gives the formula for refraction by the surface of
> the water. Lord knows how it is actually done.
>
> I guess I have no idea what kinds of procedures one would have to do to
> settle the matter. I wouldn't trust asking the artist because that would
> almost demand a rationalization. I would have to watch a painting
> develop.
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John Kennison
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 4:49 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "rational"
>
> Concerning the statement:
>
> >> My intuition tells me that all thinking is rational - it's just that most
> of it is weak or founded on truly crazy premises.
>
> I think this is one of the issues to be explored. It seems to work for
> the
> person who believes that every statement in the bible is literally true.
> (And maybe has a further belief ambiguities and apparent contradictions
> can
> be resolved by contacting God through prayer.) My own tendency to believe
> what I see seems to require that I don't have hallucinations --or could
> distinguish them from true visual perceptions.
>
> But what about the thinking done by an artist when creating a work of
> art.
> Is it rational but based on strange axioms, or it is a different type of
> thinking which is non-rational And if the former, how does the artist
> come
> up with the strange hypotheses?
> What about intuition, including the intuition that all thinking is
> rational
> but possibly with crazy hypotheses?
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Friam [
[hidden email]] on behalf of Nick Thompson
> [
[hidden email]]
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 5:02 PM
> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "rational"
>
> This is the kind of discussion that a Newly Minted Peircean, such as
> myself,
> should be all over, but I find myself oddly (thankfully?) reticient. My
> intuition tells me that all thinking is rational - it's just that most of
> it
> is weak or founded on truly crazy premises. Among valid inferences,
> Peirce
> made a distinction between strong inferences (All ravens are black, this
> bird is a raven, this bird is black) and weak ones such as "this bird is
> a
> raven, this bird is black, all ravens are black" (induction) and "this
> bird
> is black, all ravens are black, this bird is a raven"(abduction). But
> he
> regarded all three as valid forms of inference. In this spirit, I might
> argue that right wing thinking is not irrational, but exceedingly weak.
> But we should beware of falling for the syllogism, "This guy is wrong,
> all
> right-wingers are wrong, this guy is a right winger" which is valid, but
> horribly weak.
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University
>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
> From: Friam [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger
> Critchlow
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 12:20 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "rational"
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:41 AM, glen
> <
[hidden email]<mailto:
[hidden email]>> wrote:
> [ ... ]
> Now, that carries us to how/whether/why humans would use irrational
> inference procedures. But I think we would _need_ some evidence that
> people
> actually use irrational reasoning procedures. I think even so-called
> "irrational" things like _emotions_ are, somewhere deep down, rational.
> Those emotions are an evolutionarily selected decision-making ability
> that
> has its own calculus.
>
> Bob Altemeyer's research on right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities
> --
> pdf at
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ -- finds that high scoring
> RWAs
> suffer from severe cognitive disabilities which essentially render them
> immune to reason. (Note that "right-wing" here is a technical term
> meaning
> "adherent of the status quo".)
>
> But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life
> under
> the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do,
> exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double
> standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to
> top
> it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could
> ever
> change their minds with evidence or logic.
>
> There's an article in today's Times,
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/media/banished-for-questioning-th> e-gospel-of-guns.html, which unintentionally makes the case that the gun
> rights lobby is essentially a coalition of right-wing authoritarians and
> gun
> manufacturers. They cannot tolerate any discussion of the dogma because
> they are incapable of reasoning on the subject, only able to distinguish
> the
> party line from apostasy so they can attack the enemies.
>
> Just because there is a reason to be a lynch mob doesn't make a lynch mob
> reasonable. I think you're confounding the rationality of explanation
> with
> the rationality of the explained.
>
> -- rec --
>
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