Peircers, These days it takes me a web search to discover what I was thinking and writing the month before. I went looking for the passage in McCulloch where he uses Case, Fact, Rule and it led me through hill and dale and back to my own post here on March 11. See McCulloch's paper with the Bardic title “What's In The Brain That Ink May Character?” (pdf below, but watch out for a few typos).
Abductive reasoning was one of the first topics that pulled me into the briar patch of AI many years ago. There were early papers by Harry Pople that I recall, partly because they came up again when I was working at the University of Texas Medical Branch and folks there were just beginning to explore computer-aided medical diagnosis. At any rate, my search did turn up this copy of one of Pople's early papers (1972). https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1972/5079/00/50791125.pdf There have been 4 or 5 distinct waves of AI literature on so-called “abduction” since that time but, as I indicated earlier, almost all of it takes off from the same over-simplifications of Peirce's more complex model of abductive inference as it performs its role within the process of inquiry, and so I have largely lost interest in it. Regards, Jon On 3/11/2016 10:45 PM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
Post : Abduction, Deduction, Induction, Analogy, Inquiry : 15 http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2016/03/11/abduction-deduction-induction-analogy-inquiry-15/ Date : March 11, 2016 at 7:30 pm Peircers, There's a couple of phrases that have stuck in my mind from my earliest days of reading about abductive inference and hypothesis formation. One has to do with the problem of “giving a rule to abduction” and the other alludes to “the reticular formation that marshals our abductions”. The first derives from Peirce, of course, but I've been trying to remember the details of when and where I first encountered it, as I think it was another writer who first impressed its significance on me. The second is clearly Warren S. McCulloch but there was something about the context that kept eluding me. After a few days rummaging through link and library I was lucky enough to find several old volumes with my original notes on the texts, so I think I've got the passages in question pinned down to the following places. To my way of thinking, no one writing in the last century understood Peirce's treatment of hypothesis and its applications to cognitive and cybernetic systems better than Chomsky and McCulloch. Charles S. Peirce ================= • “The Logic of Abduction”, Chapter 13 in ''Essays in the Philosophy of Science'', Vincent Tomas (ed.), Bobbs–Merrill, 1957. Selections originally published in ''Collected Papers'', “Hume on Miracles” (CP 6.522–536), “Eighth Lowell Lecture of 1903” (CP 5.590–604), “Seventh Harvard Lecture of 1903” (CP 5.195–200) = ( http://www.textlog.de/7663.html ). Warren S. McCulloch =================== • “What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number?”, Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, General Semantics Bulletin, Nos. 26 & 27, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT, 1961, pp. 7–18. Reprinted in ''Embodiments of Mind'', pp. 1–18. = ( http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/gsb-26-27-mcculloch.pdf ). • “What's in the Brain That Ink May Character?”, International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Israel, Aug 28, 1964. Reprinted in ''Embodiments of Mind'', pp. 387–397. = ( http://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcculloch_whats-in-the-brain.pdf ). • ''Embodiments of Mind'', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965. Noam Chomsky ============ • “Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind : Future”, in ''Language and Mind'', Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, CA. First edition 1968. Enlarged edition 1972. = ( https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/chomsky.htm ). Regards, Jon
-- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
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