Dear Ben Novak, list,
As regards an explanation A's implying the surprising phenomenon C, that
seems more on the level of implication than of an actual inference,
which would be the mind's moving from A as an accepted premiss to
conclude at least tentatively C. The mind already believes C and does
not yet believe or suspect A (that happens instead in the abductive
conclusion). I'm not sure that Peirce always thought that that
implication had to be strictly deductive (he just says "a matter of
course") but I'll have to dig into "On the Logic of Drawing History from
Ancient Documents" where he goes into that relation in some detail if I
recall correctly.
But let's say that it _/is/_ deductive, and that it is a deductive
implication even if not an actual deduction. Sometimes one needs to do a
kind of proof of concept. One thinks roughly that a certain hypothesis
would entail the phenomenon, but one needs to show the entailment
clearly. This proof may take mathematical form, and so on. It won't
always be so comfortable and easy.
In the deduction of further implications of the hypothesis once accepted
(albeit on probation), it is not always so easy to find distinctive
implications unimplied by competing explanations or by accepted theory.
Anyway, generally, the challenge of a heuristically worthwhile deduction
is to reach a new (or nontrivial) perspective without actually
concluding in a claim new to, i.e., unentailed by, the premisses. In
seeking a new perspective, one is trying to get something like
information, news, even though the deduction is uninformative in the
Shannon sense. It is this sense of seeking news that I'm magnifying into
an (mild) emotion of impatience or suspense.
That's very easy in the case of categorical syllogisms, and the novelty
is minimal there, but still observable:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Ergo———Socrates is mortal.
Of course there are all kinds of logic problems where the solution is
not so obvious.
You wrote,
Therefore, I ask: If one assumed that "If A, then C would be a
matter of course," and then deduced from A that one should find not
only C, but also D and F, then when one checked and found that D or
F were not found in the circumstances in which one found C, would
then one have an attenuative deduction situation? Or would one only
have the falsification of hypothesis A?
If, from A one attenuatively deduces D, and next finds D false upon
observation, then from not-D one attenuatively deduces not-A; A is
disproven (i.e., falsified).
I should add that I've found only one place where Peirce wrote of a new
aspect as part of deduction's function. See Appendix below.
Best, Ben
Appendix: Peirce wrote in his 1905 letter draft to Mario Calderoni (CP
8.209)
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-letter-draft-mario-calderoni-0
[....] The second kind of reasoning is deduction, or necessary
reasoning. It is applicable only to an ideal state of things, or to
a state of things in so far as it may conform to an ideal. It merely
gives a new aspect to the premisses. [.... End quote]
In mentioning the "new aspect," Peirce was stating something that many
have noticed. Technically it doesn't apply to all deduction (a deduction
with the form /pq/ ergo /p/ is valid but brings no new aspect to the
premisses), but just to deduction with some heuristic value (and, I'd
say, among such deductions, more to attenuative deduction than to
equipollential deduction).
On 10/21/2015 10:46 PM, Ben Novak wrote:
Dear Ben Udell:
Please rest assured that I did not take any of your comments as
criticism.
Rather, I am very interested in the issues that you have raised, and
eager to understand them. I therefore appreciate very much your
explanatory emails, both in response to me and to others, as well as
of all those others who have contributed to this thread.
I find your puzzlement about the "emotion belonging to occasion of
(attenuative) deduction" to be fascinating, at least as you describe
the problem:
It's true, 'impatience' and 'suspense' seem strong words for the
emotion belonging to the occasion of (attenuative) deduction. I'm
thinking of a feeling of curiosity about the future such that one
wishes to shorten by deduction the wait till discovery. You
suggest the word 'dissatisfaction'. One could think of a feeling
of dissatisfaction with the facts known or hypothesized so far, as
if they seemed coy, or insufficient for a worthwhile conclusion,
to which one responds by managing to deduce a worthwhile
conclusion. Yet "dissatisfaction" as the occasion of deduction
seems too vague. Surprise and perplexity could also be taken as
kinds of dissatisfaction. If we take seriously Peirce's idea that
deduction _predicts_, then the idea of at least some mild feeling
of suspense or impatience seems to follow logically enough as
belonging to deduction's occasion. If one has abduced a hypothesis
about which one cares, and can't think of a deductive, distinctive
testable prediction, one is left to feel impatient for time's
eventual confirmation or overturning of one's hypothesis in the
natural course of events. Note also the nice opposition between
surprise, perplexity, etc., and suspense. Well, I guess there's to
brood on the question some more.
Previously, I had thought that deduction, at least insofar as it was
the second stage of abductive reasoning after a hypothesis was found,
was the "comfortable"stage of the process, where after the irritation
of the "surprising fact C is observed," comes the comfortable
hypothesis that "But if A were true, C would be a matter of course."
The next step is to apply what one knows of A, again presumably
comfortably, in order to trace out the known consequences of A, so
that one could then switch to induction to observe whether all the
known consequences are found, so that if one of the known consequences
is not found, then the hypothesis must be rejected, and then one must
go back to one's initial irritation to find another hypothesis.
However, I have just read your blog on "Deduction vs, Apliative; also
Repletive vs Attenuative" at
http://tetrast.blogspot.com/2015/08/idara.html
where you define attenuative as *Something*(explicit or entailed)*in
the premisses is not*(explicit or entailed)*in the conclusion.*
Therefore, I ask: If one assumed that "If A, then C would be a matter
of course," and then deduced from A that one should find not only C,
but also D and F, then when one checked and found that D or F were not
found in the circumstances in which one found C, would then one have
an attenuative deduction situation? Or would one only have the
falsification of hypothesis A?
Ben Novak
*Ben Novak <http://bennovak.net>*
5129 Taylor Drive, Ave Maria, FL 34142
Telephones:
Magic Jack: (717) 826-5224 /*Best to call and leave messages.*/
Landline: 239-455-4200 */My brother's main phone line./*
Mobile (202) 509-2655*/I use this only on trips--and in any event
messages arrive days late./*
Skype: BenNovak2
/"All art is mortal, //not merely the individual artifacts, but the
arts themselves./ /One day the last portrait of Rembrandt/ /and the
last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — //though possibly a
colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain — //because the last
eye and the last ear accessible to their message //will have gone."
/Oswald Spengler
On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com
<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote:
Clark, list,
I think that the relevance of the classification of research is in
the light shed on the logical supports among fields in the
build-up of knowledge. Physics doesn't decide which math is
mathematically right, which combined mathematical postulates are
consistent and nontrivial, and so on, instead it decides which
maths are applicable to, and illuminating in, physics. How far can
one trace such structures of logical dependence and independence?
Sometimes physical research leads to mathematical discovery.
Conical refraction was simultaneously a discovery in physics and
in mathematics. But even if it hadn't proved applicable in
physics, it still would have been mathematically valuable. If one
thinks that mathematics depends logically on biology or
psychology, one will start asking mathematicians to study biology
or psychology to really get to the bottom of their subject. While
they might find some inspiration and deep examples of math there,
it still seems like a more refined and polite version of sending
the mathematicians out to work in the collective farms. I think
that mathematicians would already be studying a lot more biology
or psychology if they thought that such studies could support
their mathematical findings.
Moreover, one may suppose (as Peirce did) that the most general
classifications will bear out logical structure, and that the
layout of the city of research will come to reflect the collective
structure of the subject matters like constellations above. One
likes to see what that 'total population' of subject matters
shapes up to look like in terms of parameters. I imagine that
Peirce liked that. It seems philosophical enough. Peirce put such
classification into 'Science of Review', which he also called
'Synthetic Philosophy'. At any rate such classification applies
cenoscopic philosophy. If one extends parameters from a number of
sample cases, one may even predict that there ought to be, or come
to be, a certain field of study.
***
It's true, 'impatience' and 'suspense' seem strong words for the
emotion belonging to the occasion of (attenuative) deduction. I'm
thinking of a feeling of curiosity about the future such that one
wishes to shorten by deduction the wait till discovery. You
suggest the word 'dissatisfaction'. One could think of a feeling
of dissatisfaction with the facts known or hypothesized so far, as
if they seemed coy, or insufficient for a worthwhile conclusion,
to which one responds by managing to deduce a worthwhile
conclusion. Yet "dissatisfaction" as the occasion of deduction
seems too vague. Surprise and perplexity could also be taken as
kinds of dissatisfaction. If we take seriously Peirce's idea that
deduction _/predicts/_, then the idea of at least some mild
feeling of suspense or impatience seems to follow logically enough
as belonging to deduction's occasion. If one has abduced a
hypothesis about which one cares, and can't think of a deductive,
distinctive testable prediction, one is left to feel impatient for
time's eventual confirmation or overturning of one's hypothesis in
the natural course of events. Note also the nice opposition
between surprise, perplexity, etc., and suspense. Well, I guess
there's to brood on the question some more.
Best, Ben
On 10/21/2015 2:28 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Oct 21, 2015, at 11:25 AM, Benjamin Udell wrote:
The positivists divided sciences into formal (i.e., mathematics
and deductive logic) and factual. I never got clear on where
they put philosophy, I suspect they hoped to make it into a
formal science.
I think they differed among themselves on this, although I’m not
an expert on the Vienna circle. (And especially not the 19th
century positivists) It seemed that the spirit of the mid-20th
century was to attempt to reduce philosophy to other matters.
Either becoming clear on our semantics that would dissolve most
problems or to reduce it to a kind of foundationalist
epistemology of judgments with the rest being clear formalism. It
was in most ways a rather bad dead end for philosophy IMO.
Fortunately people drug themselves out of it while (hopefully)
taking what was useful from both critiques.
I’ll confess that I’ve never quite understood the drive to
taxonomy on these matters. (This is one Peircean drive I’ve never
been able to quite embrace) If for only the reason that any
practical analysis seems such a mix of different taxonomies. I
just never quite was clear what the point was. Certainly keeping
clear what one is doing (semantics vs. ontology) and so forth is
important. But one can become clear on the parts one is doing
while acknowledging that the item under analysis is usually a mix.
Perhaps I’m wrong in this though.
As to my question, I think I was getting myself into some
contortions about deduction because in some half-conscious way I
was still introducing the idea of conflict. Now, Peirce said
that deduction is for prediction. That by itself is enough to
suggest that an emotion of impatience belongs to the occasion of
deduction — an impatience with the vagueness of the future, or
the coyness of the present in telling us it — one doesn't want
to wait for nature to take its course, one wants to find out
ahead of time, on the basis of accumulated data, what is the
fate, for example of the Milky Way. (It turns out to be on a
collision course with the Andromeda galaxy.)
I think you’re right although I’m not sure impatience gets at the
feeling quite right. I think dissatisfaction is perhaps more apt
since impatience implies a time component that’s not always present.
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