[FRIAM] Abduction

Fri Dec 28 19:43:04 EST 2018

Hi, Everybody, 

I have been writing this email for most of the last week.

While I am loath to argue with Frank on matters of logic and mathematics, I think his solution violates Peirce’s project by making our understanding of truth dependent on our understanding of Real, rather than, as Peirce would have it, the other way around.   So Frank is surely correct on his own terms, but not Peircean, if you see what I mean.  

So, let me take a step back.  Here is Thompson’s History of Modern Philosophy.  Once upon a time there was God.  All-seeing, all-knowing God.  What God  saw was Real and the Real was real whether or not anything, anybody, other than God could see it.  Then God died.  “Sad”, as Trump would say.  But still there was Descartes’s (pronounced “day cart sez”) brain in a vat.  Everything that we experience could be like phantom limb experiences.  Phantom legs, phantom hands, phantom, sounds, phantom sights, phantom me, phantom you, phantom thoughts, phantom WORLD.  So, here we sit, you and I, two brains in two vats, side by side.  The devil tickles your nerves and you see something you call, “horse”.  So your motor nerves are excited and you stimulate my auditory nerves with “horse”.   Now unless the Devil happens to simulate my nerves with exactly the same pattern as he stimulated yours before you said “horse”, there is no possible way we could know if we are talking about the same thing.  And remember, that’s the thing about The Devil (as we have recently learned), he has no commitment to the Truth.  (Notice how in this story God dies, yet the devil lives on; interesting; very sad) .  

Ok.  What to do?  Well, we could admit that we are screwed and define truth as that which is beyond all experience.  But this is nonsense, right?  If truth is beyond all experience, how do we come to be talking about it.  If Truth is that which we cannot talk about, then and any statement that we make about it is necessarily untrue.  What to do?  Well, we could sneak a little God back in.  We could talk about true intuitions that come from the spirit world, etc.  Many people talk like that.  Sometimes,  I think of some of you talk like that, tho I won’t name names.  For me, that’s not a starter.  

So, Truth must be defined in terms of experience.  Some kinds of experiences are more enduring than others.  They are the sorts of experiences that repeat themselves day after day.  They are the sorts of experiences that when you tell them to other person, that person says, “Oh yeah, that happened to me.”  More formally, they are the sort of experiences that survive experiments, both formal experiments and the little day to day experiments we try on the world around us.  Does the computer run on battery even when it is plugged in? Run the battery down to zero, plug it in, and the computer won’t start right away. Hmmm. Seems like.  Does my love still love me?  Oh, I will come home from a business trip a day early and see if her eyes light up.  Or perhaps if a foreign car is parked in the driveway and the lights are out.  Love, power supplies, it’s all the same.  It’s T.O.T.E, all the way down.  The most enduring experiences are those generated by communities of inquiry, working at the same questions through rigorous experimentation and debate and concerning themselves with abstract realities, force, momentum, lithium, etc.  After all, look at how the 19th Century produced the periodic table!  Let’s define Truth as the asymptote of that convergence.  Truth is where the community of inquiry will converge in the very long run.  And real objects can be something like, anything that is taken for granted by a true proposition.   The existence of unicorns is definitely NOT taken for granted by the proposition, “No Unicorn Exists”, so that let’s us out of that box.  

Now nothing about this implies that there is a truth concerning all matters.  Peirce’s notion of truth is ultimately statistical and based on the central limit theorem.  He cheerfully admits that the world we live in is essentially random.  However, if some things are not random, if there is systematic pattern in our experience with regard to some things (such as, say, saber-toothed tigers) then it would be extraordinarily useful to know it, and the cognitive systems around today would tend to be those that had not been eaten by tigers, right?  

Ach! You protest!  What kind of a lilly-livered reality is this?! We can never know for sure whether some particular string of experiences is real or not, whether it will endure to the endtimes, or whatever!  Yup.  That’s right.  The day you decide the stock is a good bet is the day it may fall 20 percent.  That’s pragmatism for you.  We start in the middle, there are no firm foundations, and everything is fallible.  But what pragmatism tells you is what Darwinian experience tells you:  you bet your life everyday, and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  Those that bet right tend to be the ones who are here to tell the story.  And science is privileged because, on the whole, over the long run, it has proved itself to be the best at making those sorts of bets. 

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 Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, December 24, 2018 6:29 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

I suspect that either begs the question or becomes a tautology.  Compare: Wouldn't it make more sense to say green things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is green".

Though it seems convoluted,  I think "Unicorns are not real" is best understood as the assertion "Beliefs about unicorns are not true", which unpacks to something like: "Beliefs about the category 'unicorns' will not converge," which itself means,  "if a community was to investigate claims about unicorns,  they would not evidence support of those claims over the long haul." 

For that to work,  we can't allow "nonexist" to be "a property." That is,  we have to distinguish ideas about unicorns from ideas about not-unicorns. 

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 11:06 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>  wrote:

Thanks, Frank.  I thought at first that was a cheat, but it seems to work, actually.  It makes The Real dependent on The True, which is how Peirce thinks it should be.  

I guess that’s why they paid you the big bucis. 

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: <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 5:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < <mailto:friam at redfish.com> friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

Wouldn't it make more sense to say real things are subjects of true propositions of the form "x is real".

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018, 4:57 PM Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>  wrote:

Thanks, Eric, 

I think you have everything right here, and it is very well laid out.  Thank you. 

One point that nobody seems to quite want to help me get a grip on is the grammar of the two terms.  True seems to apply only to propositions, while real only to nouns.  Now the way we get around that is by saying that the real things are the objects of true proposition.  But that leads to what I call the unicorn problem.  “Unicorns don’t exist” is a true proposition that does not, however, make “unicorns” real.  

This seems like the kind of problem a sophomore might go crazy ab0ut in an introductory philosophy course, so I am a bit embarrassed to be raising it.  For my philosophical mentors, it is beneath their contempt.  

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: <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group < <mailto:friam at redfish.com> friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction

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

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