[FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

[Eric Charles]

That is indeed fascinating!

I think, using your terms, that Peirce is only interested in coherence.
Strong coherence indicates belief whether the relevant situation arises
once a decade or several times a day. The man who doubts the ground exists
might look and poke, then decide never to get out of bed. In contrast, the
man who fully believes in the ground will interact with it thousands of
times a day. That those thousands of interactions occur "without a thought"
is testament to the coherence of the system.

(Though nothing is completely "coherent" in Peirce's world, because he
understands probability and statistics perfectly well. Sometimes people
with the strongest ground-coherence still slip and fall, or stick their
feet in a whole.)








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

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 3:13 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very cool!  We disagree completely on the meaning of the word "coupling".
> 8^)  Having grown up (intellectually) building component-based systems, I
> think of "coupling" in the same sense as "coupler" and interface cables.
> The thicker the cable, the more coupled.  The thinner the cable, the less
> coupled. The more cables, the more coupled. The same applies to bandwidth,
> the higher the bandwidth (used), the more coupled.
>
> The word I use for what you seem to mean is "coherence".  It's the sense
> of operating under the same assumptions as others ... or operating in the
> same "world".  It's a kind of logical consistency.  E.g. if 2 people "speak
> the same language", then they're likely to cohere quicker upon their 1st
> meeting.  The more a couple holds hands as they go about their day, the
> more of a couple they are. 8^)  By contrast, identical twins, separated at
> birth, one living in Australia and the other in Canada are not coupled at
> all.
>
> So if you have 2 androids on tables, if Android A was designed so that it
> can get off tables 4 feet high and Android B was designed so that it can
> get off tables 6 feet high, then the extent to which the Android *couples*
> with its environment determines whether it will be capable of exiting a
> table for which it was not designed.  They are equally capable of exiting
> the table heights they were designed for.  So, a lab with all 4 foot high
> tables *coheres* with Android A (is logically consistent with), but not
> Android B.
>
> So, Peircian belief means less coupling and more coherence.  Peircian
> doubt means more coupling, less coherence.
>
> ###
>
> On 03/29/2018 11:49 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > Number of interactions shouldn't determine whether it is tight or loose,
> should it?
> >
> > My behavior could be tightly coupled to a thing rarely encountered, and
> loosely coupled to things commonly encountered, couldn't it? For example,
> my standing could be tightly coupled to the rank of the person who just
> walked in the room, even if there is almost never a person of sufficient
> rank to generate the response. In contrast, my use of foul language is only
> loosely coupled to the sensibilities of those around me, though I am around
> people with various sensibilities quite often.
> >
> > To take behavior out of it for a second: The melting of steel is tightly
> coupled to temperature, but the conditions under which the melting occurs
> are rarely encountered on the earth's surface. In contrast, during many
> points in human history the functional quality of ancient blades was only
> loosely coupled to the quality of the blacksmith, because it was much more
> tightly coupled with the quality of the ore. The number of interactions
> isn't really what's relevant.
> >
> > To return to the floor... the tightness is in the definitive and
> unhesitating nature of the interaction. The look of someone who wonders if
> the floor is there, and the non-committal nature of their feet going down
> is what is contrasted with the committed action of the person who believes
> the floor is there. You can, if you want, translate the psychological
> language of "committed" with the dynamic-systems language of "tightly
> coupled."
> >
> > For fresher example: The behavior of an expert dart thrower is tightly
> coupled to the state of the game and the scores on the target, while the
> behavior of an amateur dart thrower is not. And that is true even if the
> expert is resting on laurels and rarely practices, while the amateur is
> obsessed and practices constantly.
> >
> > For another: A professional poker-tournament player's level of
> aggression is tightly coupled to the phase of the tournament, the relative
> size of his chip stack, and his position at the table. That is what it
> means to say that the professional tournament player "believes" that
> varying betting based on those factors is important to good play. The
> casual player does not believe those are all important, as one can see by
> the loose coupling of his behavior to those factors. Once again, rate of
> action or number of actions isn't really what is at play.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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