[FRIAM] Abduction

Mon Dec 24 08:42:34 EST 2018

Eric and Nick et al.

May I ask a question as someone who wonders about this topic as a “general knowledge” user but without a commitment to try to do serious work in it?

I often, in a hope of staying oriented in the complicated world, try to think of how many of the informally used language concepts I think have a decent, at least approximate, formalization within some system we know how to manipulate mechanically, and which is thus much less complicated.  Abstraction has been one of these.  The formalizations to which I tend to assimilate it are that of equivalence relations in mathematics and predicates in logic — of particular types.

Following Dave W., a good first-approximation cartoon of the person in the world is that of a necessarily finite-state entity in a world that can create indefinitely many situations.  So I don’t need either to be formally finite or infinite; what I care about is that the world is so much bigger than the small person that I need to deal with the different orders between them.  There is nothing a finite-state small system can do in an arbitrarily larger-number-of-states world than create equivalence classes, responding to many situations in which some difference could be found with the same state of its own.  One could go on with how the equivalence classes are indexed, but Dave’s email already gave many good examples so I won’t digress further in that direction.

In a slightly different garb, the kind of predicate I am thinking of is a classifier that, given a large set lf elements, will assign them to one set or another, but never to two sets that the predicate treats as distinct.  The importance for living or doing science is that the predicate is operationalized in some kind of behavioral recipe: interact with your world in such-and-such a way, and on the basis of what the world delivers back to you through the channel of the interaction, make your classification as X or Y.  So it is not only a premise that an equivalence relation exists, but some algorithm for generating an instance of it for the situations you happen to experience.  As I read your description of what “water” means re. electrolysis, I am internally parsing it in these terms.  This solvent is water, that one is formamide, the other is liquid methane, etc. 

It seems that the abstracitons (~ equivalence relations ~ predicates) we want in science are by some criteria “good” or “useful” ones, meaning that it is possible to make propositions using them which have consistent truth assignments, despite the fact that the propositions are indexed by the equivalence classes while the world is a collection of indefinitely more potential instances.  The updating of science is an ongoing process of looking for ways in which the equivalence relations could be adjusted to make using them more reliable, or ways in which they could be refined so that new propositions could be found for the refinements that respect the propositions for the coarser partitions.  This solvent is H2O, that one is D2O, and tardigrades don’t care, but Quincy can sleuth out that a human victim was assassinated by feeding him D2O instead of H2O, (an ancient television show for which Harold Morowitz consulted on one episode) etc.

For this too, there are lots of names, which seem to have less difference as formalisms than as tags for how they are meant to be applied to situations.  Coarse-grainings in thermodynamics a la Gell-Mann et el., or successive approximations as have been used in mechanics for nearly two centuries, come to mind, but one can surely think of many others.

Is my semantic association of these different terms okay with the point you want us to take from your post?  (Meaning, doesn’t violate it, even if it is not aiming to emphasize exactly the same point.)

Thanks,

Eric

> On Dec 23, 2018, at 6:01 PM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think Peirce is getting at something a bit different. When Peirce is on good behavior, he is laying out The World According to The Scientist. When a Scientist says that some claim is "true" she means that future studies will continue to support the claim. Perhaps even a bit more than that, as she means all investigations that could be made into the claim would support the claim, whether they happen or not. Peirce also tells us that "real" is our funny way of talking about the object of a true belief. If "I believe X" is a statement about a true belief, then future investigations will not reveal anything contradicting X, and... as a simple matter of definition... X is real. 
> 
> When Peirce is first getting started, he seems to think that you could work that logic through with just about any claim (and either find confirmation or not). Did my aunt Myrtle screw up the salad dressing recipe back on June 1st, 1972? Maybe we could descend upon that question using the scientific method and figure it out! Why rule out that future generations could find a method to perform the necessary studies?
> 
> However, at some later point, I think Peirce really starts to get deeper into his notion of the communal activity of science, as embodied by his beloved early chemists. Did the honorable Mr. Durston really succeed in isolating oxygen that one winter day, by exposing water to electricity under such and such circumstances? Isn't that the thing Scientists argue over? Well, it might be the type of thing people argue over, but is has little to do with the doing of science. Individual events are simply not the type of thing that scientists actually converge to agreement about using the scientific method; the type of thing they converge upon is an agreement over whether or not the described procedures contain some crucial aspect that would be necessary to claim the described result. "Water" as an abstraction of sorts, under certain abstract circumstances, with an abstracted amount of electricity applied, will produce some (abstract) result. And by "abstract" I mean "not particular".  Scientists aren't arguing over whether some exact flow of electrons, applied in this exact way, will turn this exact bit of water into some exact bit of gas. They want to know if a flow of electrons with some properties, applied in a principled fashion, will turn water-in-general into some predictable amount of gas-with-particular-properties. We can tell this when things go wrong: Were it found that some bit of water worked in a unique seeming way, the scientists would descend upon it with experimental methods until they found something about the water that allowed them to make an abstract claim regarding water of such-and-such type.   
> 
> I suspect most on this list would agree, at least roughly, with what is written above. 
> 
> Now, however, we must work our way backwards: 
> *  The types of beliefs about which a community of Scientists coverage upon are abstractions, 
> *  the scientists converge upon those beliefs because the evidence bears them out, 
> *  that the evidence bears out an idea is what we mean when we claim the object of an idea is real. 
> *  Thus, at least for The Scientist, the only things that are "real" are abstractions. 
> 
> In the very, very long run of intellectual activity, the ideas that are stable are ideas about abstractions, which means that the object of those ideas, the abstractions themselves, must be "real." 
> 
> (I feel like that was starting to get repetitive. I'll stop.) 
> 
> 
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
> 
> 
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:38 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Nick,
> 
> Alas, I was not present to hear the inchoate discussion. Please allow me to do some deconstruction and speculation on what you might be asking about.
> 
> Imagine a vertical line and assume, metaphorically, that this is a 'membrane' consisting of tiny devices that emit signals (electrical impulses) into that which we presume to be 'inside that membrane'. I am trying to abstract the common sense notion of an individual's 5 senses generating signals that go to the brain — without making too many assumptions about the signal generators and or the recipient of same.
> 
> We tend to assume that the signal generators are not just randomly sending off signals. Instead we assume that somewhere on the left side of the line is a source of stimuli, each of which triggers a discrete signal generator which we rename as a sensor.
> 
> First question: do you assume / assert / argue that the "source" of each stimulus (e.g. the Sun) and the means of conveying the stimulus (e.g. a Photon) are "Real?"
> 
> Signals are generated at the membrane and sent off somewhere towards the right. 
> 
> Second question: do you assume a receiver of those signals, e.g. a 'brain-body', and do you assume / argue / assert that the receiving entity is "Real."
> 
> If a signal is received by a brain-body and it reacts, e.g. a muscle contraction; there are least two possible assumptions you can make:
> 
>    -  some sort of 'hard wiring' exists that routes the signal to a set of muscle cells which contract; and nothing has happened except the completion of a circuit. Or,
>    -  the signal is "interpreted" in some fashion and the response to it is at least quasi-voluntary. (Yogis and fakirs have demonstrated that very little of what most of us would assume to be involuntary reactions, are, in fact, beyond conscious control.)
> 
> Third question: are both the 'interpretation' and the 'response' Real things?
> 
> Depending on your answers, we might have a model of interacting "Real" things: Source, Stimulus, Membrane, Signal, Interpretation, and Response. Or, you might still wish to assert that all of these are "abstractions," but if so, I really do not understand at all what you would mean by the term.
> 
> But, you are an amenable chap and might assent to considering these things "Real" in some sense, so we can proceed.
> 
> The next step would be to question the existence of some entity receiving the signals, effecting the interpretation, and instigating the response. Let's call it a Mind or Consciousness. [Please keep the frustrated screaming to a minimum.]
> 
> It seems to me that this step is necessary, as it is only "inside" the mind that we encounter abstractions. The abstractions might be unvoiced behaviors — interpretations of an aggregate of stimuli as a "pattern" with a reflexive response, both of which were non-consciously learned, e.g. 'flight or fight'.  Or, they might be basic naming; simple assertions using the verb to-be; or complicated and convoluted constructs resulting from judicious, or egregious, application of induction, deduction, and abduction.
> 
> Fourth question: are these in-the-mind abstractions "Real?"
> 
> At the core, your question seems to be an ontological / metaphysical one. Are there two kinds of Thing: Real and Abstract? If so what criteria is used to define membership in the two sets? It seems like your anti-dualism is leading you to assert that there are not two sets, but one and that membership in that set is defined by some criteria/characteristic of 'abstract-ness'.
> 
> Please correct my failings at discerning the true nature of your question.
> 
> dave west
> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2018, at 10:00 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Hi, Everybody,
>>  
>> Yes.  St. Johns Coffee Shop WILL be open this Friday.  And then, not again until the 3rd of January.  I am hoping Frank will have some ideas for what we do on the Friday between the two holidays. 
>>  
>> Attached please find the copy of an article you helped me write.  Thanks to all of you who listened patiently and probed insistently as I worked though the issues of this piece.
>>  
>> I need help with another article I am working with.  Last week I found myself making, and defending against your uproarious laughter, the proposition that all real things are abstract.  Some of you were prepared to declare the opposite, No real things are abstract.  However, it was late in the morning and the argument never developed. 
>>  
>> I would argue the point in the following way:  Let us say that we go along with your objections and agree that “you can never step in the same river twice.”  This is to say, that what we call “The River” changes every time we step in it.  Wouldn’t it follow that any conversation we might have about The River is precluded?  We could not argue, for instance, about whether the river is so deep that we cannot cross o’er because there is no abstract fact, “The River” that connects my crossing with yours. 
>>  
>> Let’s say, then, that you agree with me that implicit in our discussions of the river is the abstract conception of The River.  But, you object, that we assume it, does not make it true.  Fair enough.  But why then, do we engage in the measurement of anything? 
>>  
>> I realize this is not everybody’s cup of tea for a conversation, but I wanted to put it on the table.
>>  
>> Nick
>>  
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>> Clark University
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>  
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> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove