[FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

[Marcus Daniels]

In a design, I think it is useful to tolerate confusion about some things (e.g. not identifying some types or their domains, or whether certain propositions are true) even though other parts are clear.   It involves ratcheting things down in a breadth-first or depth-first way, depending on the situation.   From a fitness perspective, it is not useful to have just true and false.  That does not guide selection in a useful way.   And late binding just sweeps the problem under the rug by allowing for a little more measurement of fitness (before a paradox or crash).   Evolving designs need that English teacher that can mark-up an essay end-to-end and advise that some parts need to be thrown away and other parts just need minor tweaks – multi-criteria fitness for sure.  Logic by itself does not accomplish that.   Some of these species of reasoners are better at synthesis than the `accurate reasoner’.

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 3:51 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Doxastic logic - Wikipedia

Tangentially on the topic of Philosophy v. Physics,  in my review of Dempster-Shaffer (to avoid making too stupid of misrepresentations on my bumper-sticker) I was fascinated to find Raymond Smullyan's "Types of Reasoners" reduced to formal logic (but also couched in natural language explanations).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxastic_logic#Types_of_reasoners
FWIW, I contend that *LOGIC* is used (critical to) in the natural sciences but does not *arise from* them... it arises from Philosophy (Epistemology) and is formalized in Mathematics and merely USED by Science.

I don't know if someone already quoted Feynman on the topic:
    "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

I suspect that if birds had the type of consciousness that included self-image/awareness and the abstractions of language, that *some* would at least find ornithology *interesting* and might even find some practical ways to apply what they learn from "the study of birds".    But no, for the first part it wouldn't make them better fliers, predators, foragers, scavengers, etc.   And most *good* Scientists I know don't know much about or care about the larger roles of Epistemology and Metaphysics, which *sometimes* leads them to believe they have answered the hard questions outside of the bounds of Empirical Science *with* Empirical Science?   Like the "spherical cow", they just "assume away" the features that their measurements and models don't/can't address (much less answer).

Mumble,
 - Steve
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