Re: [PEIRCE-L] Possible Article of Interest - CSP's "Mindset" from AI perspective

[Mike Bergman]

Hi Jon, Thanks for commenting. Please see below: On 2/9/2017 8:28 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote: Mike, List: I read your linked article and the earlier one that it referenced, and found them very interesting, especially the whole notion of "mindset."  My first introduction to Peirce's thought was a doctoral dissertation that used it to identify and explicate a distinctively Lutheran way of thinking, which appealed to me not only because I am a Lutheran myself, but also because I have long desired to identify and explicate the distinctive way of thinking that we engineers employ in doing our jobs.  My series of articles on "The Logic of Ingenuity" was the outcome, and the final installment (Part 4, "Beyond Engineering") is now scheduled to appear next month. However, I disagree with a couple of things that you mentioned in your last message. MB:  I take ideas and all generals to be real, including the idea of concepts to represent ideas. I think this is supported by Peirce. I also take the fictional to be real, but not actual. While Peirce certainly held Ideas to be real--"the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality" (CP 6.455; 1908)--his position was not that all generals are real, only that some of them are. CSP:  Consequently, some general objects are real. (Of course, nobody ever thought that all generals were real; but the scholastics used to assume that generals were real when they had hardly any, or quite no, experiential evidence to support their assumption; and their fault lay just there, and not in holding that generals could be real.) (CP 5.430; 1905) Good point, and thanks for this reference. However, I have to say, I'm not sure I either understand or agree with why some generals are real while others are not. As best as I can tell, Peirce maintains that certain (undefined or unspecified) opinions are the ones that are not real. That strikes me as arbitrary, and an argument of degree not kind. My thinking has been that all thoughts, once thought, become instantiated and thus real. Types, which Peirce described as subjective generalities, I think he considers to be real. Are you aware of any better bright lines that Peirce offers for when some generals are not real? My logic is that anything that can be conceived becomes real once thought of or considered, including how we naturally class individual particulars into types. All thoughts have characters. I understand the arguments Peirce makes for why some (his qualifier) generals are real, but I don't see where the converse gets argued (that is, that some generals are not real) and why. I also have a hard time squaring the assertion that some generals are not real with these two statements: "Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity." (CP 5.431) "That which any true proposition asserts is real, in the sense of being as it is regardless of what you or I may think about it." (CP 5.432) If I try to tease out what CSP is trying to say in these sections, I interpret he is saying that only generals that are true, are destined, or have ultimate fixity (perhaps all saying the same thing) are real. Generals not meeting those conditions would therefore not be real. But this is hard to square with fallibilism since we can not know absolute truth, only approach it as a limit function. When does the determination occur that one opinion is real while another is not? Perhaps under this calculus we could say that false or disproven assertions are not real, but that also seems a slippery yardstick to me. Again, if anyone on the list can help on this question I'd love to see the CSP citations or hear the arguments. From these passages, I'm not sure that Peirce has made the compelling counter argument that some generals are not real. Peirce also made a sharp distinction between the real and the fictional. CSP:  That is real which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not. At any rate, that is the sense in which the pragmaticist uses the word. (CP 5.430; 1905) CSP:  For the fictive is that whose characters depend upon what characters somebody attributes to it; and the story is, of course, the mere creation of the poet's thought. Nevertheless, once he has imagined Scherherazade and made her young, beautiful, and endowed with a gift of spinning stories, it becomes a real fact that so he has imagined her, which fact he cannot destroy by pretending or thinking that he imagined her to be otherwise. (CP 5.152; 1903) Perhaps all you meant is what Peirce says in that last sentence--the fictional is not itself real, because it depends entirely on what characters its author attributes to it; but the fact that the fictional has the characters that the author attributed to them is real from that time forward. Well, Jon, I'm not sure how sharp a distinction Peirce is making here. I see his reference to fictive similar to other qualia. Once conceived, a fictional thing is real, though it does have the character of not being actual, not having existence, and being fictive. So, yes, by definition the fictive is not actual or tangible, but any fictional instantiation is real. MB:  But I also take all names and labels to be indexicals, about which they refer. This is also Peirce's view, I believe. Indexes can be analyzed, but not reasoned over via inference. Peirce certainly came to see all proper names as indexes, and I think that there is merit in exploring your suggestion that "all names and labels" are, as well.  Would you (or anyone else) care to elaborate on that?  Perhaps you could begin by saying more about that last sentence. I understand indexicals to include proper names, class (or type or general) names, definitions, indices, abstracts, synonyms, jargon, acronyms, links (URLs and URIs), seeAlsos, citations, references, and icons, amongst similar pointers. This grouping of things is known as annotation properties in the semantic Web data models and languages of RDF and OWL. I actually think there is a pretty good overlap with Peirce. In OWL, one can not inference over annotation properties, which I think is the right choice. As CSP says, "Icons and indices assert nothing." (CP 2.291) However, as types it may be possible to do some reasoning over labels (proper names and common names are subsumed under labels, for example) and it is also possible to do real analytic work (such as word embeddings or other NLP tasks) over definitions and the like. So, analysis can be employed over indexicals. Ultimately, these kinds of inspections get back to how to establish a grammar and then parsers for language in relation to Peirce's signs. I'm still trying to understand how this Peircean view dovetails (which I suspect it does) with other first-logic views of word symbols. What relations, then, are true relations (A:A, A:B) versus indexicals (re:A) is a question I am spending much time on at present. I would like to hear other views on these questions. Thanks for the good questions, Jon. Mike   Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 9:42 PM, Mike Bergman <m...@mkbergman.com> wrote: Hi Jerry, Thanks for your comments, though I did not honestly understand what you were trying to tell me from the perspective of trans-disciplinarity. I'd like to better understand what this perspective means from your own perspective. I take ideas and all generals to be real, including the idea of concepts to represent ideas. I think this is supported by Peirce. I also take the fictional to be real, but not actual. But I also take all names and labels to be indexicals, about which they refer. This is also Peirce's view, I believe. Indexes can be analyzed, but not reasoned over via inference. Peirce's arguments against nominalism were, I think, undercut by his prissiness about terminology. He invested too much into the label. But, whatever. My key point in my "strong assertion" is that it is the underlying realness that is the appropriate focus in our quest for truth. Names and labels are merely pointers, though with perhaps some informational value. Again, in the sem Web, those who see it this way call it "things, not strings". That is the sense to which I "concurred". It was clear that Peirce lived through words (okay, right, actually symbols), especially given his thousands of hours spent on definitions. I think his metaphysics were definitely on the side of realism, but his love of words (I suspect a stimulus for his sign interests in part) caused him to take pride in nomen. There is maybe a little irony there. The logic of realism that I have found closest to my own experience and thinking is Peirce's pragmatism. Like many scientists, I worship at the altar of the scientific method. I probably should have better defined "mindset" from my perspective. Peirce maintained that what we know is based on what we believe, which is fed by information. I think this insight is forceful. Mindset is perhaps the ultimate of Thirdness with respect to thought, also an ultimate of Thirdness, and it is comprised of the universe of beliefs held by the agent. Some may be believed more strongly than others, and thus win out when there are conflicts for what we perceive. One needs to try to "live" within the ideas of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (note I used different predicates) in order to find the processes and belief that then allow them to contribute some different sets of beliefs and processes to a revised mindset. I believe we can learn to think with different perspectives, and Peirce's universal categories are a powerful lens. All thinking and reasoning is symbolic. By virtue of thinking at all, we have already proceeded through the other necessary signs. Like I said in the article, I don't know if Peirce would necessarily buy everything I was saying or not, here or in my article. But, in the true sense of Thirdness, there is a process underlying pragmatic thinking that is much deserving of inspection. Thanks, Mike On 2/8/2017 11:31 AM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote: List, Mike: Your essay is framed in the context of “AI” (computations), a very wide framework indeed!  Nothing is excluded from AI is it? I will be only slightly more focal in responding to your call for comments.  You write in your article: "Concepts attempt to embody ideas, and while it is useful to express those concepts with clear, precise and correct terminology, it is the idea that is real, not the label. In Peirce’s worldview, the label is only an index. I concur." My questions emerge from considerations of your essay from the perspective of trans-disciplinarity (multiple symbol systems).  I will make four relevant comments before coming to the questions about your essay. 1. The three triads of CSP,  qualisign, sinsign, legisign; icon, index, symbol; rhema, dicisign, argument, can be, in my opinion, a “recipe” for realism; that is, the logical association of antecedent observations (Qualisigns with logical consequences (legisigns))  What I find exceedingly curious about the (strange) words of this table is that only the last word, “argument” is used in logic. The other eight words are merely dictionary words.  Clearly, some similarity with 21 st Century AI exists in these three 19th Century triads.  2.  I strongly suspect that CSP arranged these words in such a manner that his meaning very loosely corresponded with his understanding of chemical ‘proof of structures’ (graph theory) as it existed in the second half of the 19th Century.  I had earlier posts on some chemical aspects of the meanings in selected subsets of the terms.  And, I have posted critical comments on non-chemical interpretations of the meaning of these three triads, for example, that proposed by Frederik Stjernfelt.   3. Yet, CSP’s “mindset” is such that he asserts that the eight semantic objects are NECESSARY to form an argument. It is as if the three triads are an antecedent to the concept of induction and modality. This approach to generating conclusions (scientific knowledge) has not been widely accepted.  I further note that the eight words do not denote mathematical concepts. One wonders why CSP’s three triads have not been adopted.  4. Five of these nine terms are introduced from CSP’s “mindset”, whatever that may have been.  Returning to your very strong assertion, it is unclear to me what you are concurring with.  More specifically, how does your essay relate the the logics of realism? For example, consider an index of species. Is it real?    Or, ideal? Allow me to rephrase this extremely convoluted issue that is related to several perplex disciplines.  In what sense is a "mindset" illative of representational competencies?  Is an individual mindset generated and maintained by the knowledge of the symbol systems that one knows?   Cheers jerry On Feb 7, 2017, at 11:29 PM, Mike Bergman <m...@mkbergman.com> wrote: Hi List, I thought perhaps some on the list might be interested in my latest article on Peirce and knowledge representation: http://www.mkbergman.com/2020/being-informed-by-peirce/ Thanks! (and feel free to also give me comments offline). -- __________________________________________ Michael K. Bergman CEO Cognonto and Structured Dynamics 319.621.5225 skype:michaelkbergman http://cognonto.com http://structureddynamics.com http://mkbergman.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbergman __________________________________________

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