Listers,
Although this slow read has spun off some interesting side discussions, there
has been no activity in the slow read itself since I posted the segment below.
I am going to attribute this inactivity to the busyness of the season, rather
than to any lack of general interest. I am therefore going to break now for the
holidays and move on to the second half of Joe's paper in the first week of
January.
Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf of
Skagestad, Peter [peter_skages...@uml.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 3:15 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
I want to move on to what I see as the second main part of Joe’s paper,
covering pages 8-14. I do not intend to rush anyone or stifle discussion, so
anyone who wants to pursue extant themes should feel free to do so, but I also
want to enable us to progress towards what I take to be the heart of Joe’s
paper.
Having ascertained that thinking is inherently dialogic and communicational in
nature, Joe posits that “the development of intelligence is at least in part a
matter of the development of critical control practices that conform go
communicational norms which make discourse more efficient and effective
relative to whatever ends it may have.”
This perspective sets the task for IA as follows:
JR: “The sort of Intelligence Augmentation I am chiefly concerned with, then,
is that which would be achieved by devising mechanisms and programs that would
increase the effectiveness of the communicational norms which encourage
successful inquiry as these have developed in research traditions whose
ancestral forms sometimes go back more than two and a half millennia ago… The
project of development of any computational devices that could be helpful in
this would qualify as a contribution to IA research of this special kind.”
PS: So, the type of IA that Joe is interested in is not the kind that augments
individual intelligence, but the kind that augments the collective intelligence
exhibited by processes of inquiry within research traditions. Here, as noted
earlier, Joe’s concern is close to Engelbart’s project of “Boosting Collective
IQ”. Now, Joe goes on to delineate a Peircean/Deweyan account of inquiry, in
which he finds a central feature to be the claim of a finding or a discovery, a
claim which is expected to be found persuasive by the community, and which
therefore places the claimant under certain obligations. Joe also characterizes
a claim of this kind as a “serious assertion”, also known as “primary
publication:
JR: “ For present purposes, let me characterize serious assertion as obtaining
whenever the person making the assertion takes full responsibility for making a
claim which, taken seriously by the others in the research community, will put
upon them the obligation to take what has been claimed seriously enough to
allow themselves to be persuaded to the conclusion which the claimant has
already come to, if the claimant has actually made the case for it in the claim
in a way that is found to be rationally persuasive. (Found to be so by whom? By
each member of the given research community taken distributively, i.e. taken
one by one, as distinct from the membership regarded as a collectively
constituted individual. The research community is not to be regarded as a
collective entity.)”
PS: I take the parenthetical comment here to be especially Peircean: The
community of inquirers is not a democracy, where majority rules; its goal is
ultimate unanimity, which means that each dissenting voice must be allowed to
be heard and must be allowed weight, and taken seriously by the claimant and
the other participants. Dialogic or communicational intelligence is augmented
by the development and enforcement of communicational norms which enable this
give-and-take to happen efficiently and effectively.
This is so far rather abstract, and, and no doubt Joe is setting the stage for
his presentation of the Ginsparg publication system as a paradigm case of the
type of IA he is concerned with, which I would suggest we move on to as soon as
feasible. In the process he has two pages on “nonserious assertion” , to set it
off from serious assertion, which are well worth reading, but which I am not
going to go into unless there is a special interest in discussing them.
Having touched what I take to be the high points in pages 8 to 14, I am going
to pause for comments and discussion. And please, if I have skipped important
points, please do not hesitate to let me know.
Cheers,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf of
Skagestad, Peter [peter_skages...@uml.edu]
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 9:29 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Thank you, Gary. This is definitely the direction in which I would like the
conversation to go. There are, however, some housekeeping tasks I need to
attend to, and hope to be able to do so this afternoon.
Cheers,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf of
Gary Fuhrman [g...@gnusystems.ca]
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 7:39 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
I'd like to bring this conversation a little closer to the aspect of IA that
Joe Ransdell devoted most of his paper to, namely the process of genuine peer
review that is facilitated by Ginsparg's innovation in physics, which amounts
to cutting the gatekeepers out of the publication process, and thus
democratizing it.
Gary mentioned "flying to international conferences" as one of the benefits of
technology generally. Personally i would very much like to see an alternative
to air travel -- which is, after all, a major contributor to climate change --
in the form of a system that would allow conferencing over the internet, for
groups of (say) a dozen peers who could all meet (i.e. see and hear each other)
without leaving home, and without any special equipment beyond their laptops.
Surely the software and hardware to do this can't be far away, if it doesn't
exist in cycberspace already. Conferences usually have to "break into groups"
(or break for lunch) in order to have really good, productive conversations
anyway.
I think genuine dialogue among peers (in Joe's sense) takes place all the time
on peirce-l, but there are definite advantages to doing it in "real time", and
i think those advantages can be realized without having to move our bodies
thousands of air miles. I'm sure it would augment the intellligence of the
participants.
Gary F.
} Real time is the wheel reinventing itself. [gnox] {
www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm }{ gnoxic studies: Peirce
-----Original Message-----
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf
Of Gary Richmond
Sent: December-16-11 5:52 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Steven, Gene, Ben, Peter, List,
IA as contributing to the possibility of actual intelligence augmentation is a
mere goal of such visionary thinkers as Engelbart, Technology is a tool that
can be used wisely or poorly, as several have already noted. My friends who
teach in some of the better educated countries in Europe do not seem to have as
much of a problem with new technologies as is being expressed in this thread.
"The book" is itself the result of a new technology of the time, the printing
press, and its dissemination to many in especially the 19th and 20th centuries
was the result of the further advancement of that and other, related
technologies. Pre-computer/internet reading of books resulted in a very well
educated European population, but that did not keep Europe from falling into
two disastrous, finally, world wars.
The total dumbing down of, for example, the American population, I mean, the
American education system, also pre-dates computers. The 1%, it appears,
benefits from a dumbed-down population, the better to manipulate it through,
admittedly, especially the television media (think Fox "news"). That "vast
wasteland" of idiotic television programming was also a conscious decision by
corporate interests in the interest of making big profits. The principles and
practices of a hunter-gather society (which Gene has so beautifully articulated
in his books and articles) is nothing that we are going to regain as desirable
as it might seem to want to do so. It ain't gonna happen.
Meanwhile, many of us on this list enjoy our technological advances (I
especially am fond of modern plumbing), use the web rather well for research
purposes, enjoy flying to international conferences, etc., etc.--and regret
that some of these 'conveniences' are paid for at a cost which, in a vaguely
poetic way, I sometimes make equivalent to the suffering of much of the
population of Africa. The point for me is NOT to stop using these tools, but to
try to find ways to make educational, political-economic, infra-structural, and
other changes in the interest of benefiting individuals and society. I would
think that Peirce would have celebrated the new technologies, possibly have
contributed to them; but he would have deplored their misuse. On that point, at
least, I think we are all in agreement.
Best,
Gary
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