[FRIAM] description - explanation - metaphor - model

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

Well found.   I am digging into it now.  Thanks to both you and Eric S.
for this acute but interesting/relevant bend to the thread at hand.

A fascinating twist in our "Climate Complexity Summit" in Stockholm
earlier this month (thanks Merle for instigating/organizing) was what
felt to me was an emergent awareness that the core of "Endogenous
Existential Threat" (my term)  Responsefrom a Complexity Science
standpoint is at least partly (if not centrally) the question OF morality. 

Whence arises morality?   Our tribal (e.g. judeo-christian, etc)
precedent said these things came down from (the) God(esses) or possibly
"the Ancestors", and modern Sociology, Psychology, Spirituality seem to
appeal to the idea(l) that it comes from deep within us (humans).   This
(sub)thread advances the contemplation I have been trying to worm my way
into about how such a human-centric abstraction as "morality" might be
rooted in fact in our heritage as complex adaptive systems amongst
complex adaptive systems, roughly (illusorily?) decomposable into  a CAS
of CASes as it were.

Before I start rattling my dentures in all directions at once, I'll try
to read Rescher and maybe even follow some of the loose threads he might
leave exposed for tugging on.

- Steve 

> Heh... ask and ye shall receive!
>
> https://fewd.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/Rescher__Nicholas__2008_Moral_Objectivity.pdf
>
> Rescher, seemingly a Peircian pragmatist, goes through a hypothetical in an attempt to argue that for a moral principle to be objective, the community to which it applies must have some (accurate) conception of morality. By the parenthetical "accurate", I mean those moral principles they hold must, in some definition, benefit that community. 
>
> But what's interesting in relation to EricS's question about higher order structures is his assertion that moral principles are *schematic*, with some variables bound to context. And he develops, then, a hierarchy of moral principles where:
> "At this highest level alone is there absoluteness:the rejection of appropriate moral contentions at this level involves alapse of rational cogency. But at the lower levels there is almost always some room for variation, and dispute as well."
>
> Such a nesting of schema bears a striking resemblance to what EricS is asking for in the context of the biosphere or the higher order attributes of dynamic systems. The *trick*, of course, that Rescher doesn't seem to cover (perhaps I missed it), is whether the *schema* evolve, whether it's a strict hierarchy, etc. hearkening back to EricC's post about whether or not a Peircian "convergence" assumes stationarity.
>
> Regardless, I'm pretty skeptical of Rescher's setup because it hinges on this ability to predicate/define groups and define what's beneficial for those groups. But that's orthogonal to the rather nice idea of schematic principles.
>
> On 12/26/19 3:43 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
>> It would be fantastic to read some treatment of higher order structures like social justice issues from Peirce or one of his intellectual descendants. 
>>
>> On 12/26/19 2:47 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>>> Eric (Smith), Peirce has extensive writings on probability and VERY extensive writings on logic. I suspect he has much of what you are looking for, we just don't focus on that part of his work as much. While he didn't have a full modern understanding of all that stuff, he was massively ahead of his time.