Edwina, thanks for pursuing this significant realm of study.
As complexity grows, coordination and collaboration become more
significant, especially for "intelligence capable of learning by
experience" (as Peirce defines us). You observe:
How does mediation differentiate between valid and invalid conclusions?
Induction is one method....But, entropic rejection of data as 'noise' is
another....Both can lead to problems.
Peirce's theory of inquiry proposes *abduction, deduction, and induction*
as the stages required for effective inquiry (or learning) — and these are
to be repeated indefinitely.
Humans are well equipped (with perception) for guessing, and we can test
those possibilities by induction. But to resolve many possibilities into a
good guess (worth testing), we need deduction.
You might think of this as "reducing noise." The idea is to find *testable
hypotheses, *and to test them in order of how easy they are to test (a
process of "reducing noise").
That is just where logical formulation and the deduction of computers can
help. And graphical logic could help humans observe this process.
But of course I agree with your broader applicability of Peirce's framework!
Mary
P.S. Are you receiving 3 copies of the notes I send to the List?
On Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 6:48 AM Edwina Taborsky <taborsky(a)primus.ca> wrote:
Mary- further to your extension of the concept of CAS
[complex adaptive
systems] to CAR [complex adaptive reasoning] - I certainly agree and
consider such a framework to be a basic semiosic triadic process.
That is, complex systems are self-organized in order to be adaptive [aka
pragmatic], and this requires a method for such pragmatic activity. This
method is the triadic reasoning process, where, given input sensate data,
the System can reference this input to its mediative analytic system
[Peirce's Representamen/sign] wich acts as an If-Then analytic process.
That is, this nodal site holds generalities and input sensate data is
referenced to these generalities to produce a conclusion.
I think the triadic method is a vital morphology in the development of CAS
..
On another note, the mediative nodal site holds multiple possibilities for
use to analyze input data. A simple system will have very few of these
possibilities and therefore, a limited conclusion. This, frankly, provides
the larger system with stability -you can't have atoms and molecules
changing their format every two minutes]. A more complex system provides
many more possibilities - but this can be problematic....How does mediation
differentiate between valid and invalid conclusions? Induction is one
method....But, entropic rejection of data as 'noise' is another....Both can
lead to problems..
Edwina
On Wed 24/11/21 7:04 PM , Mary Keeler mkeeler(a)uw.edu sent:
[Let's see if this goes to the list?]
Thank you, Edwina, I have similar interests and agree with your conclusion
about the applicability of the Peircean framework.
I met John Holland before he died, and explained my extension of his CAS
to CAR, leading to the idea of the "game of pragmatism" — which he called
"a flight simulator for the mind"!
Here are a couple of papers that might help to explain (see more at the
Revelator site, below)?
Complex Adaptive Reasoning:
Knowledge Emergence in the Revelator Game
http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/papers/keelerkcap09.pdf
Games of Inquiry
for Collaborative Concept Structuring
<http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/papers/iccs05.pdf>
http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/papers/iccs05.pdf
Revelator: Game of Complex Adaptive Reasoning
http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/research/Papers.php
If pragmatism is essentially the scientific method, and we need that
method for experimenting with ideas in order to develop Normative Science
as the study of habit-change, then that game might give us a
collaborative way to proceed? It could (and should) incorporate graphical
logic so that players can keep track of the development of effective
arguments.
Here are just a few paragraphs from Peirce in support of this idea
(selected from many more).
Mary
CP Vol 8 (1891)
Chapter 6: To Christine Ladd-Franklin, On Cosmology†1
316. My work in philosophy has consisted in an accurate analysis of
concepts, showing what is and what is not essential to the subject of
analysis. Particularly, in logic, my motive for studying the algebra of the
subject, has been the desire to find out with accuracy what are the
essential ingredients of reasoning in general and of its principal kinds.
To make a powerful calculus has not been my care.
317. I may mention that my chief avocation in the last ten years has been
to develop my cosmology.†2 This theory is that the evolution of the world
is hyperbolic, that is, proceeds from one state of things in the infinite
past, to a different state of things in the infinite future. The state of
things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu, the nothingness of which
consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the
infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete
triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity.†3 Between these, we have on
our side a state of things in which there is some absolute spontaneity
counter to all law, and some degree of conformity to law, which is
constantly on the increase owing to the growth of habit. The tendency to
form habits or tendency to generalize, is something which grows by its own
action, by the habit of taking habits itself growing. Its first germs arose
from pure chance. There were slight tendencies to obey rules that had been
followed, and these tendencies were rules which were more and more obeyed
by their own action. There were also slight tendencies to do otherwise than
previously, and these destroyed themselves. To be sure, they would
sometimes be strengthened by the opposite tendency, but the stronger they
became the more they would tend to destroy themselves. As to the part of
time on the further side of eternity which leads back from the infinite
future to the infinite past, it evidently proceeds by contraries.
318. I believe the law of habit to be purely psychical. But then I suppose
matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit. While every
physical process can be reversed without violation of the law of mechanics,
the law of habit forbids such reversal. Accordingly, time may have been
evolved by the action of habit. At first sight, it seems absurd or
mysterious to speak of time being evolved, for evolution presupposes time.
But after all, this is no serious objection, and nothing can be simpler.
Time consists in a regularity in the relations of interacting feelings. The
first chaos consisted in an infinite multitude of unrelated feelings. As
there was no continuity about them, it was, as it were, a powder of
feelings. It was worse than that, for of particles of powder some are
nearer together, others farther apart, while these feelings had no
relations, for relations are general. Now you must not ask me what happened
first. This would be as absurd as to ask what is the smallest finite
number. But springing away from the infinitely distant past to a very very
distant past, we find already evolution had been going on for an infinitely
long time. But this "time" is only our way of saying that something had
been going on. There was no real time so far as there was no regularity,
but there is no more falsity in using the language of time than in saying
that a quantity is zero. In this chaos of feelings, bits of similitude had
appeared, been swallowed up again. Had reappeared by chance. A slight
tendency to generalization had here and there lighted up and been quenched.
Had reappeared, had strengthened itself. Like had begun to produce like.
Then even pairs of unlike feelings had begun to have similars, and then
these had begun to generalize. And thus relations of contiguity, that is
connections other than similarities, had sprung up. All this went on in
ways I cannot now detail till the feelings were so bound together that a
passable approximation to a real time was established. It is not to be
supposed that the ideally perfect time has even yet been realized. There
are no doubt occasional lacunae and derailments.†4
Supposing matter to be but mind under the slavery of inveterate habit, the
law of mind still applies to it. According to that law, consciousness
subsides as habit becomes established, and is excited again at the breaking
up of habit. But the highest quality of mind involves a great readiness to
take habits, and a great readiness to lose them [(CP 6.613) 1893].
Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in
a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only
meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding
practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis
in the imperative mood [CP 5.18, Lecture 1, “Pragmatism: The Normative
Sciences” (1903)].
CP Vol. 5
What Pragmatism Is [First of three Monist articles, 1905]
1. Experimentalist’s View of Assertion
. . .
412. … The laboratory life did not prevent the writer (who here and in
what follows simply exemplifies the experimentalist type) from becoming
interested in methods of thinking; and when he came to read metaphysics,
although much of it seemed to him loosely reasoned and determined by
accidental prepossessions, yet in the writings of some philosophers,
especially Kant, Berkeley, and Spinoza, he sometimes came upon strains of
thought that recalled the ways of thinking of the laboratory, so that he
felt he might trust to them; all of which has been true of other
laboratory-men.
Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he
so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational
purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable
bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that
might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct,
if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena
which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have
therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely
nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism. Some
of his friends wished him to call it practicism or practicalism (perhaps on
the ground that {praktikos} is better Greek than {pragmatikos}. But for one
who had learned philosophy out of Kant, as the writer, along with nineteen
out of every twenty experimentalists who have turned to philosophy, had
done, and who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and
pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging in a
region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make
sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some
definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new
theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational
cognition and rational purpose; and that consideration it was which
determined the preference for the name pragmatism.
---------------------
He explains pragmatism as a method that helps us to know what we think,
the meaning of which is interpreted as our willingness to act on that
thought—in terms of its conceived consequences.
Modern science, with its microscopes and telescopes, with its chemistry
and electricity, and with its entirely new appliances of life, has put us
into quite another world; almost as much so as if it had transported our
race to another planet. Some of the old beliefs have no application except
in extended senses, and in such extended senses they are sometimes
dubitable and subject to just criticism. It is above all the normative
sciences (esthetics, ethics, and logic) that men are in dire need of having
severely criticized, in their relation to the new world created by
science. Unfortunately, this need is as unconscious as it is great. [CP
5.513 (c.1905) "Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism"]
“Pragmatism is not a system of philosophy. It is only a method of thinking
...” (CP 8.206, c. 1905).
On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 9:08 AM Edwina Taborsky <taborsky(a)primus.ca>
wrote:
With the opening of this new site for the open
and exploratory discussion
of, among other things, the use of Peirce in the analysis of the modern
world, I'd like to outline, briefly, my interests in this area.
I consider that the triadic semiosis is both a continuous process in the
generation of matter on this planet - and- can also be understood as the
morphological form of discrete entities. That is, a cell is both a triadic
semiosic unit and an active process of the semiosic processing of
matter...connected and networked to other semiosic units/processes. I
consider this outline well-documented within Peircean texts.
This view also goes along with my understanding that Peirce's 'objective
idealism' is a view that neither Mind nor Matter are primordial but that
both are co-evolving correlates. {See 6.24 and other texts].
And as such - I am interested in examining the world as a Complex
Adaptive System, which means that both variety and stability are correlates
in this generative, adaptive, 'far-from-equilibrium' world - with no final
state.
These are major areas of my interest, which means that I consider that
the Peircean framework is applicable to the physic-chemical, biological and
societal/conceptual realms.
Edwina Taborsky
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