Nick, May I offend you by proposing a dualism to challenge your behavioral monism?
Using Cohen as illustration. If we state the problem other than it has been so far: Given a Context X, the probability of Cohen's Behavior (verbal utterances) being inconsistent with the "Truth" of that context is Q. "Truth" is as Pierce would have it — including the statistics. The dualism is Behavior and Context. Context is not reducible to behavior even though it may be grounded in behavior, because the "patterns" and the "Truth"are emergent. [BTW, I have *"slogged through all those texts for years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under the watchful eye of pros"* but only with regard non-Western philosophies. Does that count?] dave west On Thu, Feb 28, 2019, at 9:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Glen, > > Goaded by Lee, I feel some sort of response is now necessary. But only > because I was goaded by Lee. (};-)]. Glen, please forgive me. You have been > driven wild in the past by the presumptuousness with which I use the word > “you”. Honest. I don’t mean YOU you. Well, except in the first sentence > below. > > The point you raise is at the very core of what I have been thinking about > for the last two months -- not very productively, I might add. Perhaps your > intervention will unstick me. I am grateful for the provocation. > > First off, let me just say that I agree with the subject line. We ARE what we > do. > > Ok, what about Cohen. Cohen's problem relates to the problem of induction. If > certainty is what you crave, induction does not provide it. "I have been a > liar all my life but now I am telling the truth" is a possibility. “Everybody > lies,” Dr. House used to say; and everybody tells the truth, depending on the > immediate pressures of the situation. And there are many (fallible) rules > that we apply when trying to decide whether a particular person we are > dealing with is under heavy pressure to lie or to tell the truth. Similarly, > the more history we have with a particular individual in all these contexts, > the better is our intuition about whether that individual is telling the > truth at any one time. So I would argue that the behavioral rule that > dictates Cohen's lying is of a higher order than "is he a liar or is he not". > So our inference as to whether he is lying now is a subtle judgement about > whether a man who has lied repeatedly in the past when it profits him is now > carrying on with that pattern or is now NOT lying because it no longer > profits him. And THAT would relate to what kind of incentives the SDNY is > offering him. My guess is that his first stance with SDNY was "I will tell > you anything." and that didn't fly with the SDNY. In fact, the first time he > tried in on for them, they threatened to add another charge to the complaint > on the spot. So with that dope slap, he suddenly realizes that he's in a > situation in which even a habitual liar will tell the truth, because the > prosecutor he might lie to really cares about the truth and knows the truth > of most matters that the liar might lie about. So he goes for redemption. You > do get the feeling from watching him that truth-telling under duress is a new > kind of lie for him and that he finds it quite exhilarating. So much for > Cohen. > > Now we get to the really thorny issue, which you raise, the ghoul of > essentialism. Once you have described the behavior, is there anything else to > be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to say less! Repeating all of the > above every time you want to say what Cohen is would be at least cumbersome. > Wouldn't be much easier to say, "Cohens a liar!", meaning that, more than > most people, what he says has more to do with what saying will get him than > with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with > what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be? > > But can you say this much less without saying a lot more. To apply the word > LIAR to that complex pattern above is to imply that liar has a MEANING, that > [a person whose utterances have more to do with what saying will get him than > with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with > what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be] is what a > liar IS. Why else say it? When you put a dollar across the counter at the > candy’s store it is because you believe a dollar is worth a dollar’s worth of > candy. If you thought the person across the counter didn’t share that belief, > you would not let go of your dollar. What if he only took credit cards > because he thought dollars were scraps of paper to be thrown in the trash. > The same is with words. When you speak a word, it is with the expectation > that the other person, will to some degree, at least, *understand it as you > understand it. *This, in turn, implies that there is something behind the > word, beyond the word, beneath the word, that exists whether or not you, or > I, speak it. We should remain mute otherwise. > > I am guessing that this is the notion that you regard as dangerously close to > “essentialism.” Now I am no philosopher. Philosophy is just as much a geekery > as ethology, or software engineering, or mathematics, or physics, or > chemistry, or … or….. or. If you have not slogged through all those texts for > years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under > the watchful eye of pros, you are not a philosopher. I am a philosophical > tourist. I like to visit but I sure wouldn’t like to live there. And my > suspicion is that no FRIAM member is actually a proper philosopher, either. > (Please contradict me if I am wrong; we REALLY need you.) So, I assume that > none of us actually knows what essentialism IS. But I will take it to mean, a > belief that behind every word use and every particular to which a word > points, despite all the variety in usages and pointings, is a real something > that infuses all the objects to which a term correctly points. > > Now here is where Peirce comes in. Peirce has great faith in cognitive > systems, systems that are trying to discern the truth of any matter. He > believes that experience is mostly random, but if there are any patterns in > experience, cognitive systems will seek them out. Why, because knowing > patterns helps a cognitive system (such as an organism) avoid ugly surprises. > [You can feel Darwin lurking in the background, but Peirce does not > explicitly trot him out in the way I just did.] Peirce’s favorite “cognitive > system” is the community of scientific inquiry. Sciences collect evidence of > “generals”—of laws, of entities, of processes, categories, of beings, etc. > that have existence beyond the individual case. How do we know that? Because > each bit of evidence is taken to be evidence relating to the same thing. If > they were not, we would have to suppose them as a miscellaneous accidental > pile of experiences. But we don’t do that; even in their individuality we > suppose them to stand for something other than what they are. So, scientific > research necessarily postulates the reality of some things, those > postulations are true if they are the postulations upon which we will agree > in the very long run. > > I have talked before here about Peirce’s strange notion of truth – that upon > which the community of inquiry will agree on the very long run – and the Real > – that which is taken for granted by the truth. At first blush, those notions > seem hardly more tangible than asserting that the truth is what God thinks > and the Real is what he thinks about. But Peirce was, among many other > things, a statistician, and he had, in the end, a statistical model of the > truth. If there is some pattern in the world, if , say, a coin is biased > toward heads, we will of course never know for sure because any random > process can conceivably a string of heads for as long as you care to flip. > But the longer a string of heads we obtain, the less likely it is that it is > drawn from a population of flips of a fair coin. Similarly, while the local > and temporal convergences of living communities of inquiry can never give > absolute assurance that something is true, the make it increasingly likely > that a Real Pattern exists. > > That’s the best I can do with essence. > > Don’t blame me. This was all Lee’s fault. All thousand words of it. > > Nick > > > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology > Clark University > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen > Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2019 9:24 AM > To: friam@redfish.com > Subject: [FRIAM] are we how we behave? > > I found this article interesting. > > Michael Cohen’s verbal somersault, ‘I lied, but I’m not a liar,’ translated > by a rhetoric expert > https://theconversation.com/michael-cohens-verbal-somersault-i-lied-but-im-not-a-liar-translated-by-a-rhetoric-expert-112670 > > On the one hand, it's common sense (if it quacks like a duck...). But having > spent a fair amount of time simulating complex things (like cells), the > patterns one might induce from past behaviors don't often (completely) > capture the mechanisms generating those behaviors. If this is true of, say, > hepatocytes, then it's likely also true of whole animals. But this seems like > a slippery slope into essentialism. At the end of the day, we have to fish or > cut bait despite large swaths of uncertainty. > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
