[FRIAM] AI and argument

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

 

Well, unless you understand Peirce as a fallibilist, I have described him wrongly or you have misunderstood me.  To Peirce, there is only one kind of stuff ... experience.  He would not understand what on earth you meant by "out there", unless you were clear that you meant only that some experiences have a character of "out there ness" which you are obligated to define.  Peirce starts with his pragmatic understanding of meaning as the conequences of an conception to experience, and by experience he means scientific experience ... almost "experiments".  He  deploys this pragmatic understanding of meaning on the word truth and ends up with the truth as that stable opinion toward which we all strive.  But nothing in that definition of truth implies necessarily that the truth is ever known.  Hence Peirce’s fallibilism is at least as profound as your own.  Imagining that there is a truth of the matter has the [pragmatic] effect of forcing us all into a convergent discourse and this effect is for Peirce the central meaning of the word truth.  He has great contempt for styles and fashions of criticism precisely because there is no commitment to convergence in such discourses.  Screw pluralism. 

 

I think you ARE a Peircean. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of g??? ?
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2017 10:07 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] AI and argument

 

There is an "out there" reality.  But the map between it and me (or a bee or a tree) is plectic, with all that entails including far-from-equilibrium, polyphenism, robustness, sensitivity to initial conditions, multi-scale, etc.  That implies that my understanding of what's out there can be stuck in only 1 of many attractors for a very long time, perhaps from birth to death.

 

Further, because other humans have similar physiology to me, some, many, or all other humans can find themselves stuck in a stable attractor for a very long time, perhaps over an infinite number of generations.

 

Hence, if Peirce's definition of truth is that which endures indefinitely, then I disagree fundamentally.  I, you, and all of us, can easily persist in complete delusion forever.  The question becomes whether that delusion is satisficing.  Do we care that our sense of truth could switch from one attractor to another at any moment?  Is it OK that our models of reality aren't general enough to be full (or complete) models?  My guess is that most of us don't care and are happy to assume their concept of truth is actually true.

 

In this conception, (if you've characterized him right) Peirce would merely be another pluralist, admitting there can be many truths and I would be a monist, insisting there is only 1 truth, but many ways to interact with it.

 

 

On 10/04/2017 08:51 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> What, on your various accounts is the relationship between “logic”,  

> “right thinking”, “right reasoning”, and “truth”?  As I understand Peirce, a true opinion is one that is likely to endure indefinitely, unchallenged by any new experiences, “right reasoning and thinking” are methods of inference that lead (fallibly] to such true opinions, and logic is the distillation and formalization of such methods of inference.  Peirce was the premier logician of his time and the origin of much of our modern statistical method and scientific logic.  Am I wrong about his views on right thinking and truth?  Or do you guys hold different views?   Is this just some sort of semantic food fight that we can tidy up with a few quick definitions and move on?  Or are we really arguing about something, here?   Am not interested in the fine points of your thought, right now.  What is it that */you all agree/* on that I don’t understand?

 

--

☣ gⅼеɳ

 

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