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>*
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/"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.
