[FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?
David Eric Smith
desmith at santafe.edu
Wed Dec 30 14:24:16 EST 2020
These are good corrections, Glen, thank you, w.r.t to trying to speak carefully.
> On Dec 30, 2020, at 1:18 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That seems a bit strange. EricS seems to *assume* there is a truth (consistent network of things that hang together) to be converged upon. But I thought Peirce was not metaphysically committed to the idea that a final opinion was inevitably possible, only that *if* it's there, it can be converged upon.
Yes, it’s in danger of getting so meta or vague, that one can object there isn’t anything real to talk about.
Here I should speak only for the position I am trying to form, and let Nick or EricC speak for how Peirce would have handled these problems. The way you put the question also makes sense to me in relation to ways they have described his position on the list.
I don’t think I want to assume as a foundation tenet that there is a true position w.r.t. any particular hypothesis or proposition. That would be committing the error of supposing that a premise is well-formed, after we have said that the ways we form premises could be part of an erroneous way of cognizing.
The “too-meta” position I want to take, in the best way I can figure to say it, is that we suppose there is a “truth-notion”, or a referent for the word “truth”, characterized by its consistency in the face of the most extended system of tests we can bring to it, and that the collective of “what is true” will be non-empty as a set of targets toward which assertions can converge.
It seems to me that to say “a final opinion” entails the proposition about which the opinion is cast. Agreeing with you on the point that any given proposition might be judged as consistent with truth, in any given state of knowledge, or might be found to be “not even wrong” (meaning, not really resolvable to a meaning), I would not want to cast the proposition itself as part of the truth-notion.
That is why, more in the earlier version of this harangue than in the one thisAM, I wanted to argue that, as mental models, “truth” and “state of knowledge” are concepts of two different kinds, roughly in analogy to the “actual” state of a coin w.r.t. flipping bias, versus sample estimators for the bias computed from sets of flips. I want a way to think about truth versus states of knowledge that makes it natural to envision them as things of distinct types. Probably I am motivated by an analogy to the shift from classical to quantum mechanics, in which the hard move was to go from thinking of observables and states as the same types of concept, one just being a set of the other (in classical), versus conceiving states and observables as quite distinctly formalized in math (in quantum), so it would be non-problematic for them to have the disconnects they must to be empirically valid, while remaining thinkable.
Of course, if a state of knowledge is fairly good, we would hope that its structure is somehow a good model for “what is true”, perceived through some frame. Over time we can hope to progressively shed older “questions” that turn out to be “unanswerable”, meaning that they weren’t actually questions and we just didn’t know that.
> And given Peirce's work in alternative logics, it seems completely reasonable that he would allow for different types of consistency and, perhaps even, multiple sets of different networks, each of which may be self-consistent, but perhaps not connected to other networks. And if *that's* right, then there could be >2 final opinions converged upon by >2 collections of seekers, yet who disagree about what is real/true.
Yes. I would hope that these mutually-incompatible positions are features of a state of knowledge, and not the refutation that there is any possible referent-notion for the term “truth”.
Again, I have mental images that to me make this comfortable, but they aren’t good models in any literal sense. I think of stochastic processes with multiple basins of attraction, which on the short term can lead to distributions of fluctuations entirely within one basin or another, with the basin determined by initial conditions. On the longer term, however, the process has an ergodic distribution, within which either of the former distributions can be contextualized as a conditional distribution, relative to the ergodic which is unconditioned.
The generator for the underlying process would stand in analogy to what I am looking for as the truth to be represented, and the various conditioned or unconditioned distributions would be outputs from sample estimators in any state of investigation or characterization. As we build up more and more ways to situate the conditioned distributions within the unconditional, our state of knowledge reflects more of the properties of the underlying generator, and leaves fewer opportunities for incommensurate distributions or unexplained differences in moments. But all these states of knowledge (the various distributions) remain different kinds of things from the underlying generator (the true generator of the process), and the states of knowledge are of the same type as each other even as the knowledge is refined.
> And even further, because the real and the extant might be somewhat decoupled, the >2 truths might be able to interact (exist) without requiring them to merge into 1 truth.
>
> So it seems odd that you'd say EricS' description is Peircian. Maybe it's only part of it (weaker)? Maybe it's stronger? But is it really the same?
>
> Thanks in advance for any corrections.
Yes, from me too. Careful people have probably thought through how much of this one can do before it all just evaporates into a fog.
Eric
>
>
> On 12/30/20 8:53 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>> What you wrote here is one of the most succinct, persuasive, and all around nifty explications of Peircean Pragmati[ci]sm I have ever read. Complete with the ricochet shot to the heart of Rorty. Thanks.
>
>> On 12/30/20 3:12 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> All points here good to know, Stephen, and many premises I agree with.
>>>
>>> It seems to me that, if this conversation is ever to do more than have people talk past each other, all discussants need to find it valuable to use restricted scopes for words, to remain within each other’s scopes along the track of a discussion to figure out what premises are common and what follows from them, and to operate on however many tracks in parallel are needed to include the things people want to talk about.
>>>
>>> Here is a concrete example. In the Rights of Nature article, I find:
>>>
>>> “Christianity and science, the legitimising powers of the western society, have been in agreement on this fundamental tenet."
>>>
>>> Well, that’s one thing the word “science” can stand for in a conversation: one of the two legitimizing powers of ’the western society’, together with Christianity (what lovely bedfellows).
>>>
>>>
>>> When Nick uses the word science in the sense his original objection, I am willing to recast it in my language as a label for what many of us believe is a new domain of linguistic, behavioral, and social cognitive practice distinguished by the following premises (or tenets):
>>>
>>> — there is some truth-notion characterized above and before all else by internal consistency, allowing it to be converged toward by a suitable body of practice which we aspire to build. One could even say that this premise of a stable truth-notion is put forth as the replacement for Descartes’s Cogito, as a starting point on which to build commitments, even if all subsequent steps are fluid and subject to update and overhaul
>>>
>>> — the state of knowledge (so, recipes, propositions, lexicons, etc.) is something like a very elaborate sample estimator for the values that make up “what is true”. It’s very fluid, if every instance of the adoption of a term, the commitment to rules of language or logic, interpretations of experiments, and every other habit is considered potentially in error and subject to overhaul; so it is essential to what one means here by “science” that this premise of a stable truth-notion is its starting tenet
>>>
>>> — all the methods traditionally invoked as constituting “scientific method” could be seen as some first finite components in an open-ended toolbox for trying to recursively find and identify errors by classes of family resemblances they have, in the expectation that correcting the error makes the state of knowledge a better reflection of whatever is true. So, intersubjectivity or rigorous rules of argument to overcome sample omissions, observation bias, deluded thinking, etc.; empiricism as a corrective to delusions that can persist in group levels of any size, etc. But unlike the Encyclopedists, the body of method for error discovery is just as open-ended as the state of knowledge it has produced at any given time. Since errors tend to propagate recursively, we probably have to assume that the tools to detect them can be expended indefinitely, else the premise that one can converge on true assertions would be implausible
>>>
>>> (Apologies that these first three reiterate something I wrote here a couple of months ago. I don’t like repeating oneself either.)
>>>
>>> — that the above criteria separate out some propositions at any given time from everything we might be capable of thinking or feeling at that time, making it not all equivalent. Thus the unhappiness of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each according to its own fashion, is not really a pattern for what a “true assertion” looks like. Or more neurologically, synaesthesics may see the letters of the alphabet in colors. However, each synaesthesic may see a each of the letters in a different color than the other synaesthesics do. Do I deny that they experience the letters with colors? No, of course I don’t. However, do I expect science to arrive at a conclusion that it is in the nature of a printed letter to _have_ a particular color, or to have any color at all? Also No. And so on. If no state of belief a person can sincerely hold can ever be batshit crazy, then there can’t be category distinctions, and the true assertions don’t actually exist in the sense the scientific tenet
>>> supposes.
>>>
>>>
>>> I would argue that any good-faith person has to recognize that these two operationalizations of the word “science” simply are not referring to the same thing. Having recognized it, what can one then do?
>>>
>>> 1. You can argue, like Richard Rorty, that it is the nature of people that they cannot possess the truth-version of “science” without having it coopted into the “legitimizing power” version, and therefore we should try to exterminate the truth-version in a kind of totalitarianistic PC, William James’s pragmatism-as-social-utilitarianism taken to its limit, which is the annihilation of Peirce’s pragmatism. To me this is only a stone’s throw from the Unabomber argument. One can make and then debate the quality of such arguments. They can be insightful about how the various aspects that are simultaneously present in human life and thought affect each other, and thus can contribute to solving problems and righting wrongs even if one doesn’t think the original arguments hang together as wholes.
>>>
>>> 2. One could, instead (also like Rorty), insist on changing the subject, but not acknowledge that that is what is being done. Whenever a discussant tries argues for keeping the truth-version, one can act as if the legitimizing-power version was intended, and then give the counterargument for dismantling the latter. That could be done, I guess, innocently, or obstinately, or maliciously. But it doesn’t seem like it resolves to anything.
>>>
>>> Anyway,
>>>
>>> Eric
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