[FRIAM] Abduction

[Eric Charles]

Glen said " In all my posts, I've tried to push for "True as far as it
goes" ... or "true for now, maybe not true later", "true over here but not
over there", etc. "

This leads me to believe that we have lost track of Peirce being a well
established scientist, making contributions to several fields. "True as far
as it goes" is a crappy place for a scientist's work to end, but "True as
far as it goes, *and let me tell you how far it goes*" is a an ideal place
for the the scientist to end up!

That is: The progression of a series of scientific claims is often movement
towards claims of exactly the type Glen mentions. Chemical X mixed with
chemical Y makes chemical Z. No, that's not quite right. Chemical X mixed
with three parts chemical Y makes one part chemical Z. No, that isn't quite
right either, the stated reaction takes place only when we use a solution
that has in it a certain amount of oxygen (oxy-gen meaning the
acid-generating chemical). No, actually, oxygen isn't crucial after all,
that Lavoisier has acid stuff all wrong; any solvent within a certain range
of PH will do. Also, the reaction is dependent upon the addition of heat.
Well, pressure works to, so let's create an equation to specify the
necessary range of heat-pressure combinations. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And by just such a series of discoveries (Peirce believes), the scientific
method progresses us towards beliefs that are ever-more stable, and...
least some of the time... towards a belief that will hold up across all
potential tests. When a belief is found wanting, we call it "not true". As
such, it follows, that "true" is what we call beliefs that are not be found
wanting. In practice, the labeling of something as "true" is more of a bald
assertion, or expression of hope, or bold conjecture, or something like
that --- as in practice it cannot be an expression of having completely
established the truth of the belief --- but however you want to phrase
that: To believe that something is true (with a high degree of clarity
about the belief) is to believe that it will ultimately not be found
wanting.

To believe that it is "locally true", without further elaboration, should
therefore means something like: It will not be found wanting here, and
though that suggests a larger relationship to be discovered, frankly I'm
comfortable not trying to figuring out what the relevant properties of "*here"
*are.

But, of course, the game of science is largely a game of being deeply
unsatisfied with beliefs that we have noticed are "merely" of local
utility; the science game is a quest to find the higher-order belief that
connects the "locally true" beliefs into a "closer to globally true"
belief.



-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>


On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 3:28 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> The link doesn't work for me.  But I suspect: Yes!  In all my posts, I've
> tried to push for "True as far as it goes" ... or "true for now, maybe not
> true later", "true over here but not over there", etc.  Time is an
> important, but not the only factor.  Feedback often assumes time.  But all
> it really needs is some monotonically increasing parameter.  If Perician
> metaphysics hinges on the stability and uniqueness of the limit points,
> then it seems a lot like ToEs in physics, it may explain some very
> persnickety parts of reality, but it'll struggle with things like unicorns
> or, say, racism.
>
> On 12/31/18 12:15 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> > At CMU I implemented an algorithm called CCD (cyclic causal discovery)
> > which could infer feedback in causal graphs from observational data.  Is
> > that relevant?
> >
> > Spirtes, P., Glymour, C., and Scheines, R. Kauffman, S.,Aimale, V., &
> > Wimberly, F. (2001). Constructing Bayesian Network Models of Gene
> > Expression Networks from Microarray Data
> > <http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/scheines/bnforgenes.pdf>, in
> *Proceedings
> > of the Atlantic Symposium on Computational Biology, Genome Information
> > Systems and Technology*, Duke University, March.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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