[FRIAM] Downward causation

Wed Nov 22 23:42:41 EST 2017

Hi, Eric, 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground.  

Nick  

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> > wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class. 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times. 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern). 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus. 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place. 

Did that get anywhere? 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi, Eric, 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery.  

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick. 

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres). 

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down. 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations. 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.

--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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