John,
thank for your response. I believe you are seeing this from a very
different viewpoint. I am interested in the sociology and history of
knowledge. That's why i am thinking in a different diagram.
On 8/16/2017 6:29 PM, sb wrote:
in my opinion the diagram should contain two cycles. A "habit" cycle
and a "something unexpected happens" cycle. The diagram should also
address the fact, that the stock of knowledge changes with every turn
on the "something unexpected happens" cycle.
All those options can be represented by a single kind of cycle
that may be traversed at different speeds and may include nested
cycles of cycles.
Yes , of course it can be represented in a single cycle. But it isn't
useful if i want to point out that there are possible differences in the
kind of abduction and the kind of induction used and if i want to point
out that there is difference between guessing a word one hasn't clearly
understood from context and guessing whether saturn has "ears", moons or
rings.
As Peirce said, every perception is an abduction:
the abductive faculty, whereby we divine the secrets of nature,
is, as we may say, a shading off, a gradation of that which we
call a perception. (EP 2.224)
An if-then rule is a generalization of a habit. In fact, if we
simulate human reasoning in a computer, we would represent a habit
by an if-then rule:
Just a sidenote: I never believed that computers are very good at
simulating human reasoning. That is the reason why the future of AI is
since 60 years what it used to be: In ten years we will have a computer
that... What we see today in AI is brute force statistics and as far as
my knowledge goes there is no computer with abductive skills.
1. Anything perceptible by any means in any species or with any
technical aid (microscopes, telescopes, microphones, chemical
detectors...) is a mark.
2. Every percept is a general pattern (or predicate in logic),
which may be used to classify an open ended variety of marks
as tokens of the type -- and with varying degrees of fidelity.
3. The act of perception may interpret the same mark in different
ways. Therefore, any choice of type is a potentially fallible
abduction.
4. Any habit (if-then rule) may be used in deduction to make
a prediction from the chosen type in the given context.
5. Then the prediction must be tested by some action followed by
another observation. If the prediction is correct, the cycle
may stop (reach a satisfactory conclusion).
6. If the prediction is false, that is a surprise. Then the cycle
must continue with more observations, inductions, abductions,
belief revisions, deductions, and testing.
The levels are not divided by a sharp border, they are more like
the extremes of a continuum.
Yes. The world is a continuum, and all our methods of perception
and reasoning must deal with it. Following is an article I wrote
on "What is the source of fuzziness?" This was published in a
Festschrift for Lotfi Zadeh -- but it uses Peircean ideas to
analyze and explain fuzziness: http://jfsowa.com/pubs/fuzzy.pdf
Just wrote that to make clear, that i don't think this in a dichotomy.
Nevertheless thanks for the tip!
when something becomes a habit we (can) forget existing doubts,
premisses or rare results - the stock of knowledge shrinks.
No. I would say that it becomes better organized. Whitehead said
that intellectual progress can be measured by the amount of reasoning
we can do without thinking about it. Whitehead was talking about
mathematics. But just compare a child who is learning to play the
piano and professional musicians who have all the patterns at their
fingertips (actually, in their cerebellum instead of the cerebrum).
Here we are really on different pages. If we don't forget the reasons
why we do something, why did then Wassermann try to detect syphillis in
the "blood"?
see: Ludwik Fleck: /Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact/,
transl. by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn, Thaddeus J. Trenn and
Robert K. Merton (eds.), “Foreword” by Thomas S. Kuhn, Chicago: Chicago
University Press 1979.
But i don't want to waste your time with things you are maybe not
interested in. How to think sociology and history of knowledge with
Peirce is just the way i roll...
Best,
Stefan
John
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