[FRIAM] Downward causation

Wed Nov 22 21:10:00 EST 2017

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the
moon....

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>
wrote:

> "Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing
> and the misattribution thing? "
>
> I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does
> the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part,
> the history of scientific *method *is a history of determining the
> conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach,
> I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.
>
> That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis
> (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their
> behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is
> that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a)
> child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion
> that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain
> the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of
> increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which
> the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then
> removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away,
> and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is *causing
> *the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that
> some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.
>
> Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the
> sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or,
> perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity
> of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them.
> Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify
> domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely
> justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence
> (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).
>
> Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I
> would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of
> information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that
> the crucial bit of information brought into focus.
>
> With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would
> narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial
> clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain
> the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the
> clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it
> was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution
> by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.
>
> Did that get anywhere?
>
>
>
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
> <echarles at american.edu>
>
> On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi, Eric,
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you
>> for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as
>> a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself,
>> if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of
>> speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of
>> something that didn’t happen
>>
>>
>>
>> Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A
>> mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is
>> applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions
>> are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the
>> motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.
>> But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of
>> relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When
>> we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears,
>> doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when
>> experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of
>> type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.
>> But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an
>> abuse of language, a mystery.
>>
>>
>>
>> Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing
>> and the misattribution thing?
>>
>>
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>>
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>>
>> Clark University
>>
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Eric
>> Charles
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
>> friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation
>>
>>
>>
>> What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now
>> is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation."
>> Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/c
>> omic/212
>>
>> I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall
>> back on my role of scolding Nick.
>>
>> Nick *should *be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard
>> ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table,
>> unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the
>> other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion *caused
>> *the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle
>> relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been
>> doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't
>> simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an *abduction*) regarding
>> broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many
>> other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those
>> constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not
>> observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not
>> ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also
>> aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto
>> the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).
>>
>> So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the
>> billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work.
>> There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is
>> that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any
>> attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking *different *metaphors,
>> which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no
>> foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's
>> errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.
>>
>>
>>
>> ** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where
>> Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the
>> complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together
>> and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the
>> cluster of similar situations.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----------
>> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
>> Supervisory Survey Statistician
>>
>> U.S. Marine Corps
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.
>>
>> On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> > Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure
>> something then it doesn't exist.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ☣ gⅼеɳ
>>
>>
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>>
>>
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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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