Dear Ben, lists -
I've gone back and read Howard's post "RE: [biosemiotics:6635] Re: [PEIRCE-L] Natural Propositions" Sat, 06 Sep 2014 20:59:06 -0400https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2014-09/msg00124.html . I just don't see much psychologism in Howard's views, even though he claims that psychologism has its place and seems to regard himself as at least partly psychologistic. He doesn't claim that psychology establishes the validity of a deductive inference or the ampliative character of a non-deductive inference (its conclusion's claiming something that its premisses do not claim). That would be psychologism. Agreed. Very often I find myself agreeing with Howard in the detail while we may seem opposed in the headlines (which are less important, of course) Instead mostly Howard focuses on heuristics, creativity in inference, etc., as the place for psychological understanding of inference. I just wouldn't call that psychologism. It's not the traditional meaning of the word 'psychologism.' Certainly not. I do not think Howard suffers from psychologism. Inferential statistics is a field that focuses on induction. I don't think that there will be such a field focusing on abductive inference except for the special sciences themselves; they are where abductive hypothetical explanations are explicitly formalized (key heuristical guesses in the processes of more general classes of research are often not made explicit at all). So, for example, chemistry is the place to learn the particulars of plausible chemical hypothesis generation. Deductions _from_ hypotheses - those are mathematical. The methodeutical level, the selection and strategizing of hypotheses for testability and actual testing, is complex and not strictly abductive. The special science concerned with mind or intelligent behavior is psychology, and it does seem to be the most general place for the riddles of _how_ one generates cogent guesses, plausible hypotheses, etc., which generation is heavily context-dependent, belief-laden, etc., thus lending itself more to idioscopic study than to cenoscopic or mathematical study. Still, I think the disctinction holds here as well: what holds for abduction in any possible reasoning mind - and what holds for it in the particular human implementations of it. In "Logical Machines" Peirce wrote: "Every reasoning machine, that is to say, every machine, has two inherent impotencies. In the first place, it is destitute of all originality, of all initiative. It cannot find its own problems; it cannot feed itself. It cannot direct itself between different possible procedures." (I should note that Peirce here does not use the word "reasoning" in the sense that he gives it elsewhere, that of conscious deliberate inference.) I prefer Peirce's description in terms of "self-control". Not every single phase of reasoning needs to be self-controlled, but self-control must act as a gatekeeper now and then in the process … But the issue of computer intelligence vs. human intelligence I would guess is orthogonal to the distinction between logic and psychology. Computers and human beings are two different instantiations of logical structure, the former (until now) deficient as related to the latter in certain respects (creativity) while superior in others (speed, precision, etc.). Of course now there are computer programs that learn. These of course are not mere implementations of propositional logic. So far I've hard of no computer programs that do creative mathematics. What general way would there be for a computer program to recognize that a deductive result is surprising or nontivial? There could be specific algorithms of course, that would work up to a point. The traditional categorical syllogisms are ways to ensure a modicum of seeming novelty in a valid deduction. But my book is not or only marginally about propositional logic. It is about the physiology, meaning, reference and semiotic instantiation of propositions (which may appear, btw, in other speech acts than assertions …). I'm not aware of any general useful mathematization of the new aspect or the nontrivial aspect which a worthwhile deduction's conclusion brings to its premisses, aspects in whose universal absence no mind would bother with deduction. Right - the interesting deductions are those P called "theorematic" because in some sense creative - I discuss those in ch. 11. The 'novel' aspect has sometimes been called psychological. Why? - and by whom? Peirce expected there to be no way to quantify verisimilitude in the sense of the likeness of the inductive conclusion to the sample data, the sense in which the conclusion seems a more veteran version of the sample, the opposite of seeming novel. Now, I'm not saying that nontriviality, novelty, and verisimilitude are, like Peirce's version of natural simplicity, forms of appeal to inborn instinct. Instinct plays some role, cf. our discussions about abduction - but it far from exhausts the versions of abductions accessible to the human mind … They seem forms of appeal to something that has come to be called 'intuition' - not in Peirce's sense of 'intuition', but rather in a loosened sense of 'instinct' - developable but not necessarily inborn in a particular form attuned to idiosocopic nature. I don't know what Peirce would have thought of this, but I would not rule out that psychology in Peirce's broad sense, also called by him psychognosy, may have something essential to contribute to the understanding, for example, of the "aspectual" or perspectival nontriviality or 'depth' (in the sense of the diametrical opposite of triviality) that guides pure mathematical research. One might further note that each of these seemingly psychological aspects seems to _compensate_ for the formal character of its respective mode of inference. I don't think there's any psychologism in my views. Probably not. I think the psychology of mathematical invention in human beings is fascinating, and it might provide material for the purely logical (or semiotic) study of mathematical reasoning as such. In other words, I'm granting as much of Howard's claims as I can understand of them (he obviously knows a great deal more about things like AI than I do), and arguing that they're not psychologistic, and that Howard may be mistaken in regarding himself as having tendency properly called 'psychologistic'. We may be arguing over words, as Jon Awbrey worries. But it is good to discover when we do that so we can turn to arguing over concepts instead … In his above-cited post, Howard says, "The evidence so far leads me to think embodied cognition is most important." I'd say, important for what? There are different objectives of research, different guiding research interests, especially across classes of research that differ vastly in scope, and various people value objectives variously. Frederik is pursuing the very idea of application of cenoscopic semiotics to biology. This requires him to discuss semiotics at a very cenoscopic level, more general in scope than reflects the usual interests of biologists. The development and application of some of mathematical analysis to physics requires some pure-mathematical work and understanding of mathematical analysis more general in scope than reflects the usual interests of physicists. A better example might be work in theoretical statistics for the purpose of application in special sciences. Where these examples that I've offered seem to fall shortest is that they don't reflect complications arising from the reflexivity involved in philosophy and psychology, complications that vaguely seem to me to be playing a role in the present discussion. Best F
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