[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[uǝlƃ ☣]

But isn't this precisely what Nick and Eric's rendition of Peirce (NEP) is arguing *against*?  By analogy, if we take a schematic structure like "if p, then q", it literally does not matter what p or q is bound to, what values they may or may not take on.  (In NEP, we're talking more about statistical patterns than logical schema.  But that shouldn't matter.)

So, if a lion suddenly spoke logic and could say "if boogle, then pinkle", NEP tells us there is *something* in that expression we can expect to converge over time.  And the human, hearing it can be completely ignorant of what boogle and pinkle mean, yet still grok the implication.  If that's NOT the case, then the lion isn't actually speaking logic.

Now, if we take a stance that language is embodied-situated and is directly derived from human physiology, evo-devo, fingers/toes, bipedal locomotion, etc. Then a lion speaking English would, literally, imply that the lion was instantly transformed into a human, including all their semantic bindings ... so you'd simply have 2 humans speaking English together.

Another tack against the conclusion Wittgenstein draws lies in the (relative) success of Eddington typewriters like Deep Blue and Watson.  Based on the structure by which inferences are made, we can build machines that reason successfully, even though they have no semantic grounding (no concrete experience of the atoms boogle or pinkle, but definitely have concrete experience of *inferring* pinkle from boogle).

On 1/8/19 10:07 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
> This seems to be an issue of Wittgenstein's Lion <http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245>

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