On 8/16/2017 6:29 PM, sb wrote:
in my opinion the diagram should contain two cycles. A "habit" cycle and
a "something unexpected happens" cycle. The diagram should also address
the fact, that the stock of knowledge changes with every turn on the
"something unexpected happens" cycle.
All those options can be represented by a single kind of cycle
that may be traversed at different speeds and may include nested
cycles of cycles. As Peirce said, every perception is an abduction:
the abductive faculty, whereby we divine the secrets of nature,
is, as we may say, a shading off, a gradation of that which we
call a perception. (EP 2.224)
An if-then rule is a generalization of a habit. In fact, if we
simulate human reasoning in a computer, we would represent a habit
by an if-then rule:
1. Anything perceptible by any means in any species or with any
technical aid (microscopes, telescopes, microphones, chemical
detectors...) is a mark.
2. Every percept is a general pattern (or predicate in logic),
which may be used to classify an open ended variety of marks
as tokens of the type -- and with varying degrees of fidelity.
3. The act of perception may interpret the same mark in different
ways. Therefore, any choice of type is a potentially fallible
abduction.
4. Any habit (if-then rule) may be used in deduction to make
a prediction from the chosen type in the given context.
5. Then the prediction must be tested by some action followed by
another observation. If the prediction is correct, the cycle
may stop (reach a satisfactory conclusion).
6. If the prediction is false, that is a surprise. Then the cycle
must continue with more observations, inductions, abductions,
belief revisions, deductions, and testing.
The levels are not divided by a sharp border, they are more like
the extremes of a continuum.
Yes. The world is a continuum, and all our methods of perception
and reasoning must deal with it. Following is an article I wrote
on "What is the source of fuzziness?" This was published in a
Festschrift for Lotfi Zadeh -- but it uses Peircean ideas to
analyze and explain fuzziness: http://jfsowa.com/pubs/fuzzy.pdf
when something becomes a habit we (can) forget existing doubts,
premisses or rare results - the stock of knowledge shrinks.
No. I would say that it becomes better organized. Whitehead said
that intellectual progress can be measured by the amount of reasoning
we can do without thinking about it. Whitehead was talking about
mathematics. But just compare a child who is learning to play the
piano and professional musicians who have all the patterns at their
fingertips (actually, in their cerebellum instead of the cerebrum).
John
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