Kirsti, List: A few controversial comments are interlaced within your text.
(But first, I would like to point CSP students to an important paper on the current state of modern logics. “13 Questions about universal logic”. Study of the 13 questions asked in this paper serves to compare the past to the present in seeking to understand just what the many many “logics” of today is all about.) www.jyb-logic.org/Universallogic13-bsl-sept.pdf >> <Universallogic13-bsl-sept.pdf> > On Apr 8, 2016, at 1:27 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > Jerry, list, > My comments are inserted. > > Jerry LR Chandler kirjoitti 8.4.2016 03:28: >> List, Kirsti: >>> On Apr 7, 2016, at 3:15 AM, [email protected] wrote: >>> But let me first ask you some questions, to help me formulate my >>> answer. >>> 1) You concentrate on chemical symbols. - How about chemical >>> reactions? >> JLRC: My interest for several decades has been on the >> antecedent-consequent relation between a mutation and the change in an >> organism. How does it happen? > > KiM: Well, well. Antecedent-consequent pair belongs to the realm of logical > inferences. CSP, brilliantly, summarized it as an IF - THEN relation. The IF > part consist in ALL presuppositions, facts as well as fancy. Current, common > beliefs forming the major part of presuppositions. A considerable part of > common beliefs being, at any particular time, out of reach of (current) > criticism. The relation between antecedent-consequence and “IF-THEN” terminology in logic is substantially richer than this. Historically, "antecedent-consequent” is pre-Aristotelian and lies at the root of most but not all Western logics. The critical issue is the nature of a “symbolic” relation between some prior symbols (in a sentence) and the consequences (as a conclusion or a conjecture or a belief or some form of closure; some termination of the sentence. Before one can speak of “IF-THEN”, one must first introduce the notion of logical terms as well as notion of necessity or an analogous percept. (I am skeptical that CSP introduced the material conditional into logic, but this fact can be checked out. Areader may have the answer to this historical question.) > > What you are really asking is to connect all kinds of locical inferences > (including abduction) to all too simplistic cause - effect sequence. - I do > not believe you truly mean to ask that. I meant to state exactly what I stated. I am skeptical that the following discussion will alter your beliefs, but I will offer you options to consider, alternatives to ponder, concepts outside your percepts. (CSP’s notion of logic is significantly narrower that modern logics. See the reference given at the top of this message.) I agree with you that a biological cause-effect sequence includes a large numbers of pre-suppositions. But, your dis-belief appears to arise from philosophy, not from science. My belief arises directly from the experimental methods used to quantify experiments in our laboratory. The essential philosophical argument that serves as a base is that of reproducibility of experiments. In other words, a properly designed experiment provides the consistency, the completeness and the decidability necessary to draw certain local conclusions. If… then relations. If an experiment can be reproduced consistently, then the consequences are natural consequences. Thus, the critical scientific method is to form the material antecedent conditions such that the same consequences result. The analogous common belief is cooking / food preparation. If.. then… (Roughly speaking) If one starts with the same ingredients and use the same recipe, then the same results obtain. The conclusions from both biological and chemical experiments are ALWAYS local conclusions, local denotations of facts of measurement. The connotations of such experimentations are subject to philosophical conjectures, connotations subject to the values of the philosopher. This is a “difference that makes as different” between “X” and “Y”. >From decades of first hand experience, CSP understood how to conduct >experiments, to evaluate the meaning of them and based both his philosophy of >inquiry and logic upon these experiences. The tri-triads of Qualisigns, Sinsigns, Legisigns, Icons, Indices, Symbols, Rhema, Dicisigns and Arguments can be viewed as a chemical-based rhetoric for a consistent evaluation of experimental antecedent-consequent relations among relative terms expressed in consistent, complete, decidable and well-organized propositions. Pragmatism: What happens, happens. Temporality: The experimentalist proposes, mother nature disposes. Natural Inquiry: A question asked in the antecedent conditions is in the form of the initial conditions of the experiment, the consequences are the terminal conditions of the experiment, Mother Nature’s answer to the question asked. No elaborate mathematical or logical theory is essential for doing either ordinary chemical or biological experimentation. This is a fact that is not true for physics. > > What you do in posing your question, is (FIRST) singling out A mutation, when > you should be stating your question in terms of ANY mutation, or ALL > mutations, or SOME mutations/ MAJORITY of mutations. Then (SECONDLY) you > single out an organism. - That won't do, as you very well know. - Some > mutations may be such, that they can be reasonably sigled out, although all I > know & appreciate of genetics today, questions even that. Even the concept of > isolating A gene. -It is all about ordinality and sequential order. Your analysis is basically correct, in so far as it goes. The underlying philosophy of molecular biology that guides the design and conduct of the experiment is that genes serve as source of internal information AS WELL AS hereditary factors. (By the way, it is this duality of function of DNA as a singular source of both antecedent of internal information and consequence of external information that puzzles philosophers.) The method used to measure the specific gene involved a bacterial strain of E.coli that was constrained in one particular attribute. A mutation was known to remove the constraint. Thus, the measurement was a count of number of organisms in which the constraint was removed. Our experiments showed a direct PROPORTIONAL relationship between the amount of mutagen added to the culture and the number of mutations observed (after the mutations expressed themselves). The calculations estimated that the probability of a single molecule causing a mutation under these particular experiments conditions was about one in ten to the minus 17 th power. (1 x 10 ^17). The experiments were done in the Fall of 1971 in Freiburg, Germany. And I have been thinking about the mathematical, physical and chemical consequences ever since! > As is well illustrated in CPS's cyclical arithmetics. - But, in order to > truly get the mental knack of it, one has to actually perform, with a pack of > playing cards at least some of the actual operations CSP recommends (eg. for > several thousands of times, as I have done in my pasttime). - I heartily > recommend! The causal process for inducing mutations is a path from the pre-mutational state to the post-mutational state. I described these results as a sequence of probabilities in a paper (1983.) in a biomedical journal. > > Not only have most surprising facts about cyclicity been revealed to my mind > & thoughts, but also, by carefully planned and tested, seemingly trifle, > modifications in the rules of playing my favourite patience (learned when a > child), but also the mysteries of probability have become a kind of second > nature in my thus acquired habits of thought. (no statistical tests can any > longer fool me, let alone pooling them together in an utterly confused way). > These revelations I do take as empirically proven facts. There are very few > biological experiments repeated over thousands of times with such > indisputable results. - Partly from economical reasons, mental & manual > experimentation comes cheap, compared with ... Just as CSP points out in > order to defend philosophy and to open public purses for giving philosophers > their due funding. > > No organism is possible without a proper living environment, as you also very > well know. Any change in any organism & environment acts as part of their > future changes. Some changes are reversible, at least seemingly so, some are > most clearly not. I concur. > > With any prosesses, time is involved. But time has many facets. Between any > past and future, there is the present, which does not wait to be captured. - > It is a moment instantaneously passed through. - In order to handle with it, > you need mathematical tools of thought. And not just any theory of limits, > but both mathematically & logically valid theory of continuity, with change. > - One may be presented as the inside, while the other may be presnted as the > outside, the main point being that they continuously change into each other, > as pictured in the stripe of Moebius as well as the bottle of Klein. Of course time is involved. The question is how does time influence the icons and indices and symbolic calculations? This leads to TWO categories of chemical and biological experiments: 1. Start with a fixed population of known count and end all counting at some future time. The duration of the experiment is from T(0) to T(n) for all members of the population. 2. Start with a fixed population and measure results at discrete temporal intervals. ((T(0), T(1), T(2), … (T(n)). The first method give a single consequence from the antecedent conditions. The second method gives a temporal sequence of consequences. A priori, neither method 1 or 2 assumes continuity of either time or matter. A very interesting example of the role of time in biological experimental is the case of “Controlled Clinical Trials” for vaccines and pharmaceuticals. Very, very elaborate methods are being developed which ANY philosopher of biology should very very carefully study BECAUSE they illuminate the extremely difficulty in determining cause - effect relationships in living systems. > > Still, both diagrams depict just one aspect on the nature of continuity with > change. - > Which is only the point real troubles start. > > I guess this did not help at all. > > Nor does this, I assume: > > Any statements CSP proposed on identity, are and remain embedded in his > philosophy. Triadicity & triadic thinking were his Grand Ideas, he tested all > his life, succesfully, for that matter. Triadic thinking was to him THE > method of inventing methods (for any kinds of research). I agree that the nature of the philosophy of identity and the logic of the particular are stressed by CSP. His emphasis on these two primitive terms appear to emerge directly from his training as a chemist and as an experimentalist. Roughly speaking, physicists, do not hold these two points of views to be of primary importance. For natural philosophers, evaluation of CSP's philosophy of triadicity is an issue of the consistency of his philosophy with nature. In general, the meaning of triadicity is extremely controversial and is widely ignored in the general scientific community. Mathematics uses the notion of a function without constraints on counts. The logic of Whitehead and Russell uses the notion of propositional functions (rather than triadicity) in an attempt to bridge the gap between count and continuity. Of course, they also failed. Cheers Jerry > What is to be done? was his way of posing scientific questions. - Not that I > think I have answered your questions in any proper way, but neither did you, > stricly speaking, answer mine. > > With sequences of questions and answers, questions deserve much more > attention than is usually given. > > Well, well, this is enough for tonight. > > Cheers, > > Kirsti > > Which is what you'll have to do. And have been doing, with success. > > > > > > > > >
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