[FRIAM] Abduction

[Eric Smith]

Thanks for this Glen,

To your points below:

I don’t want to sound like I am propounding some totalizing system, or even the position that one exists, much less that I could say what it is.  I am very strongly on the side of heterarchy, and I fully concur with the arguments you put behind the preference for “layers” over “levels”.  

My hope — which never comes across well because when one tries to make a point about a particular finite thing, leaving out all the other things that are also present in the world, it sounds as if those were not also valued — was to offer examples of the “why would a discourse about what is ‘real’ need to mostly invoke abstractions?” question.  Typically, just because they are what I understand most and what physics has a pretty good formal system built around, I have hierarchies of equilibrium phase transitions in the theory of matter in the back of my mind, and the renormalization-group understanding of how they fit together as a conceptually consistent system.  To me they are the best explanation physics currently has of how a finite closed analytical system can be applied to a description that is by construction coarse-grained.  Moreover they provide an argument that any closed analytical system should _only_ ever be expected to be possible for entities that are coarse-grained.  

I think before the renormalization group had been mostly understood through 1954 (Gell-Mann + Low), 1974 (Wilson and Kogut) and 1984 (Polchinski), a careful physicist should have worried whether it would be possible to speak concreately about anything when it was not possible to know about everything.  Writers like Fermi (1930s) were at pains to emphasize that classical thermodynamics of state variables should be learned and used as a self-consistent system without reference to the statistical mechanics that is now used to justify it.  However, when Fermi was writing, it was at best an empirical description of his toolkit, and a hope, that such closed systems were really reliable in a formal sense.  

Having said that, however, I would not want to claim that the hierarchy of matter is a framework subordinate to whose levels all other descriptions can be nested, or that it addresses all questions of pattern that are as fundamental even in physics as the equilibrium hierarchy of the vacuum and matter within it.  There can be many other hierarchies that are, each for its own set of patterns, real hierarchies worth recognizing, but which cross-cut the equilibrium matter hierarchy, and many other patterns that exist (metaphorically speaking) at “points” in the question space, maybe not embedded within hierarchies.  Again, my mental metaphor for thinking about their role in the landscape of sense-making is the work by (I think) Cris Moore and Mark Newman of characterizing networks that are not treelike by giving a list of which trees can be overprinted on them, each of which accounts for some part of the overall connectivity.  The levels within each tree are by construction nested, but multiple trees are needed for reticulated networks because no single nesting hierarchy can describe a reticulated topology.


A second thing, re. Nick and Eric(C).  I understand what is plain on the face of it, too: my comments about relations between “abstraction” and either equivalence relations or predicates doesn’t even address the question of “what is ‘real’ “ which is where the main conversation is being carried out.  In most of my speech, if I were a phenomenologist (philosophical sense, not the physicist’s sense) I would have to admit that “real” in sentences is a structural placeholder for certain semantic and syntactic conventions.  The substantivev content of the sentence is mostly concentrated at other points, where there is some operational description of what one does and what one expects to see as a result.  The role of “reality” in those constructions is often an uninterpreted shorthand for the fact that I am willing to act without too much doubt in certain ways, using my attention and worry on other things than second-guessing that action.  I don’t even try to lift that placeholder term to something that could carry philosophical weight.  

Best to all,

Eric(S)

> On Dec 27, 2018, at 12:58 PM, ∄ uǝʃƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> First, by saying you and Eric(C) *attribute* so-and-so to Peirce, I'm not suggesting you're wrong.  I'm expressing my ignorance.  But I don't want to (falsely) accuse Peirce of anything, since he's not here to defend himself.  So, I can only respond to what you say about what he said.  I'm very grateful for your attempts to suss it all out and serve it on a platter for people like me.
> 
> Second, in that same vane (Ha!), I haven't put in the effort to grok your "Natural Designs".  So, when I'm wrong, feel free to simply call me ignorant and move on.  I'm cool with that.
> 
> But on to the meat: When you say 
> 
> On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk.  In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things 'of' us"
> 
> I believe you're (implicitly) committing an error.  I've failed to call it out before.  You're asserting that the hierarchy is *strict*, which MAY be wrong.  As Eric(S)'s post reflects (I think), higher order comprehensions (in the sense of "set comprehension" or quantifications like ∃ and ∀) are context-dependent and *may* even be dynamic.  That was my point about the inadequacy of "levels" (where N is stable but N+1 is unstable).  This is why "layer" is a better concept, because it's *softer*, weaker.
> 
> If you imagine an onion, some of the layers are like levels, thick and impenetrable.  And some of them (in some regions on the surface) are thin and mixed with the layers just inside or just outside.  The layers are heterarchical, not hierarchical.  If you really must use "level", we can say that some things in the level N comprehension are also contained in the level N+1 comprehension ... perhaps it helps to think of multiplying a scalar against a matrix, where the scalar is multiplied by each element of the matrix.  The scalar is of level 1, but the matrix is of level N+1 and it still makes sense to combine the two into something like a level 0.5 (or 1.5 ... or whatever) ... a fractional leveling.
> 
> Eric(S)'s discussion of equivalence, as dynamically regenerable coarse comprehensions of finer grained elements allows for this, whereas I'm not sure your "convergence to the real" does.
> 
> But my layer prejudice criticism of both your and Eric(S)'s conceptions applies, I think, because it's direction-independent.  While Eric(S) seems prejudiced to the fine-grain (inferred from his idea that the coarse equivalences should be robust to refinement), yours seems prejudiced to the coarse-grain (inferred from your "convergence to the real", and bolstered by your statement below about Natural Designs).  Which direction one is biased toward is less relevant to me than the assumption of a strict hierarchy.
> 
> And particular responses below:
> 
> On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> On 12/25/18 7:02 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>>>  Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.
>> 
>> */[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up.  I think it’s possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without there ever having been a unicorn.  Obviously, a unicorn is a white horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a garland crown, and a white gown.  Obviously.  We all agree on THAT, don’t we?  <==nst] /*
> 
> You forgot the sparkles and the rainbows!
> 
>> [...]
> 
>>> And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?
>> 
>> */[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT.  But I don’t think Peirce, or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us to be.  I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a supermarket window.  See my Nesting and Chaining <http://www.behavior.org/resources/146.pdf> paper, if you can stand it.  <==nst] /*
> 
> But both your treatment of 1) statements about unicorns and 2) convergence to the real *seem* to imply that this isn't true, that you *are* layer prejudiced in the way I infer you are.  With (1) why would comprehensions be more or less real/true than their components? Are matrices more or less real than scalars?  Why wouldn't we eventually settle out that unicorns are just as real as statements about unicorns?  With (2) why can't temporary things be just as real as permanent things ... or perhaps more accurately, why can't intermediate states (stepping stones) be just as primary as the limit points they approach?  Considering a furniture maker, is the chair any more real than the hammer?  What if, after the chair is finished, on a lark, she nails the hammer she used to make the chair, to the back of that chair?  The time-ignorant compositional circularity should be obvious, here.
> 
> -- 
> ∄ uǝʃƃ
> 
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