Re: [PEIRCE-L] Possible Article of Interest - CSP's "Mindset" from AI perspective

[Mike Bergman]

Hi Jerry, Thanks for your comments, though I did not honestly understand what you were trying to tell me from the perspective of trans-disciplinarity. I'd like to better understand what this perspective means from your own perspective. I take ideas and all generals to be real, including the idea of concepts to represent ideas. I think this is supported by Peirce. I also take the fictional to be real, but not actual. But I also take all names and labels to be indexicals, about which they refer. This is also Peirce's view, I believe. Indexes can be analyzed, but not reasoned over via inference. Peirce's arguments against nominalism were, I think, undercut by his prissiness about terminology. He invested too much into the label. But, whatever. My key point in my "strong assertion" is that it is the underlying realness that is the appropriate focus in our quest for truth. Names and labels are merely pointers, though with perhaps some informational value. Again, in the sem Web, those who see it this way call it "things, not strings". That is the sense to which I "concurred". It was clear that Peirce lived through words (okay, right, actually symbols), especially given his thousands of hours spent on definitions. I think his metaphysics were definitely on the side of realism, but his love of words (I suspect a stimulus for his sign interests in part) caused him to take pride in nomen. There is maybe a little irony there. The logic of realism that I have found closest to my own experience and thinking is Peirce's pragmatism. Like many scientists, I worship at the altar of the scientific method. I probably should have better defined "mindset" from my perspective. Peirce maintained that what we know is based on what we believe, which is fed by information. I think this insight is forceful. Mindset is perhaps the ultimate of Thirdness with respect to thought, also an ultimate of Thirdness, and it is comprised of the universe of beliefs held by the agent. Some may be believed more strongly than others, and thus win out when there are conflicts for what we perceive. One needs to try to "live" within the ideas of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (note I used different predicates) in order to find the processes and belief that then allow them to contribute some different sets of beliefs and processes to a revised mindset. I believe we can learn to think with different perspectives, and Peirce's universal categories are a powerful lens. All thinking and reasoning is symbolic. By virtue of thinking at all, we have already proceeded through the other necessary signs. Like I said in the article, I don't know if Peirce would necessarily buy everything I was saying or not, here or in my article. But, in the true sense of Thirdness, there is a process underlying pragmatic thinking that is much deserving of inspection. Thanks, Mike On 2/8/2017 11:31 AM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote: List, Mike: Your essay is framed in the context of “AI” (computations), a very wide framework indeed!  Nothing is excluded from AI is it? I will be only slightly more focal in responding to your call for comments.  You write in your article: "Concepts attempt to embody ideas, and while it is useful to express those concepts with clear, precise and correct terminology, it is the idea that is real, not the label. In Peirce’s worldview, the label is only an index. I concur." My questions emerge from considerations of your essay from the perspective of trans-disciplinarity (multiple symbol systems).  I will make four relevant comments before coming to the questions about your essay. 1. The three triads of CSP,  qualisign, sinsign, legisign; icon, index, symbol; rhema, dicisign, argument, can be, in my opinion, a “recipe” for realism; that is, the logical association of antecedent observations (Qualisigns with logical consequences (legisigns))  What I find exceedingly curious about the (strange) words of this table is that only the last word, “argument” is used in logic. The other eight words are merely dictionary words.  Clearly, some similarity with 21 st Century AI exists in these three 19th Century triads.  2.  I strongly suspect that CSP arranged these words in such a manner that his meaning very loosely corresponded with his understanding of chemical ‘proof of structures’ (graph theory) as it existed in the second half of the 19th Century.  I had earlier posts on some chemical aspects of the meanings in selected subsets of the terms.  And, I have posted critical comments on non-chemical interpretations of the meaning of these three triads, for example, that proposed by Frederik Stjernfelt.   3. Yet, CSP’s “mindset” is such that he asserts that the eight semantic objects are NECESSARY to form an argument. It is as if the three triads are an antecedent to the concept of induction and modality. This approach to generating conclusions (scientific knowledge) has not been widely accepted.  I further note that the eight words do not denote mathematical concepts. One wonders why CSP’s three triads have not been adopted.  4. Five of these nine terms are introduced from CSP’s “mindset”, whatever that may have been.  Returning to your very strong assertion, it is unclear to me what you are concurring with.  More specifically, how does your essay relate the the logics of realism? For example, consider an index of species. Is it real?    Or, ideal? Allow me to rephrase this extremely convoluted issue that is related to several perplex disciplines.  In what sense is a "mindset" illative of representational competencies?  Is an individual mindset generated and maintained by the knowledge of the symbol systems that one knows?   Cheers jerry On Feb 7, 2017, at 11:29 PM, Mike Bergman <m...@mkbergman.com> wrote: Hi List, I thought perhaps some on the list might be interested in my latest article on Peirce and knowledge representation: http://www.mkbergman.com/2020/being-informed-by-peirce/ Thanks! (and feel free to also give me comments offline).

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