User:Jon Awbrey/EOI

Note 1

The question arises whether simple programs can
emulate the proceedings of scientific inquiries --
that is, to what extent is inquiry algorithmic?

I will approach this question through simple examples.

Let us first consider John Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"
or "Sign of Rain" example, and this time put it under
the microscope and look at a few of its finer details.
In particular, I can use it to illustrate a couple of
important issues:

1.  The interpretive aspect of inquiry as a semiotic process.

2.  The differential aspect of inquiry as a dynamic process.

For ease of reference, I repeat here the original story:

| A man is walking on a warm day.
| The sky was clear the last time
| he observed it;  but presently he
| notes, while occupied primarily with
| other things, that the air is cooler.
| It occurs to him that it is probably
| going to rain;  looking up, he sees
| a dark cloud between him and the sun,
| and he then quickens his steps.
|
| What, if anything, in such a situation
| can be called thought?  Neither the act
| of walking nor the noting of the cold is
| a thought.  Walking is one direction of
| activity;  looking and noting are other
| modes of activity.  The likelihood that
| it will rain is, however, something
| 'suggested'. The pedestrian 'feels'
| the cold;  he 'thinks of' clouds
| and a coming shower.
|
| John Dewey, 'How We Think', 1910, pp. 6-7

I will let this example soak in a bit
before I wring to my present purposes.

Note 2

Susan Awbrey and I discussed Dewey's example of inquiry in our
article, "Interpretation as Action: The Risk of Inquiry", that
we gave at a Conference on "Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences"
in 1992, a revision of which was subsequently published in the
journal 'Inquiry:  Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines',
Volume 15, No. 1, pages 40-52, (Autumn 1995).  This paper is
available at the Arisbe Web Site or via the following links:

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/fall95/awbrey.html
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/aboutcsp.htm

Figure 1 indicates the "elementary sign relations" that are
involved in this fragment of inquiry.  In particular, we have
the following two triples of the form <Object, Sign, Interpretant>:

1.  <Rain, Cool Air, Thought of Rain>

2.  <Rain, Dark Cloud, Thought of Rain>

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                          o Sign (Cool Air, Dark Cloud)    |
|                         /                                 |
|                        /                                  |
| Object (Rain) o------<|                                   |
|                        \                                  |
|                         \                                 |
|                          o Interpretant (Thought of Rain) |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1.  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

Here is what we said about the sign-theoretic aspects
of the inquiry process that we were able to detect in
Dewey's example:

| In this narrative we can identify the characters of
| the sign relation as follows:  'coolness' is a Sign of
| the Object 'rain', and the Interpretant is 'the thought
| of the rain's likelihood'.  In his 1910 description of
| reflective thinking Dewey distinguishes two phases,
| "a state of perplexity, hesitation, doubt" and
| "an act of search or investigation" (Dewey 1991, 9),
| comprehensive stages which are further refined in his
| later model of inquiry.  In this example, reflection
| is the act of the interpreter which establishes a fund
| of connections between the sensory shock of coolness
| and the objective danger of rain, by way of his
| impression that rain is likely.  But reflection is
| more than irresponsible speculation.  In reflection
| the interpreter acts to charge or defuse the thought
| of rain (the probability of rain in thought) by seeking
| other signs which this thought implies and evaluating
| the thought according to the results of this search.
|
| Awbrey & Awbrey, 1992

Next time I will take up the differential aspect
of inquiry as a dynamic process of theory change.

Note 3

This time I will take up the differential aspect
of inquiry as a dynamic process of theory change.

Returning to the example in question, let me now draw
a more expansive picture of the "Rainy Day" situation,
one that augments the account with some consideration
of what our peripatetic/precipitate hero was probably
doing and thinking, however consciously or other-wise,
just slightly before the imaginary events in question.

It is clear that our hero did not begin his life
with the shock of cool air on his skin, at least,
not on this particular, late ambulatory occasion,
but probably had a prior distribution of default
beliefs about what this day was going to be like.

Just to extrapolate in a plausible vein of our imagination,
let us play along and say that the initial facts were thus:

   A_1  =  Air warm

   B_1  =  Balmy day

   C_1  =  Clear sky

Pulling the "conventional contingency" or "customary connection" trick,
let us then relativize the array of this data in the following fashion:

   C =  Current Situation

   C => A_1,  "Currently, the air is warm"

   C => B_1,  "Currently, the day is balmy"

   C => C_1,  "Currently, the sky is clear"

For the moment, let this figure of a "current situation" C
be one that is allowed to "go with the flow", letting its
letter be re-used to anchor whatever the case may become.

Now I do not know if it has to be the case that these three
features of the current situation had ever been entertained
by our ambler in any particular order, but we might suppose
their relative consistency as consisting in some such scene
as this:  The hiker has formed a prior assumption about the
case that applies to the current situation, let's say, that
the day is balmy, C => B_1, an assumption that he will keep
as a default to continue in the same way until there arises
a reason to think otherwise.  Further, we may imagine quite
plausibly that a rule of the form B_1 => A_1 can be applied
to the case C => B_1 to deduce the expectation of a certain
fact, namely, that the current situation will feature among
its phenomena the qualities of the air being warm, C => A_1.

So this logical set-up, or the likes of it, is what we may assume,
at least, plausibly enough for our currently illustrative purpose,
as the logical environ into which our soon to be inquiring ambler
strolls one fine and, for the moment, sunny day.

The rest you know.  The cooler air, A_2, sensually contests
and logically contradicts the continuing assumption of the
prior condition A_1, demanding a fresh evaluation of the
conditioning assumption B_1, altering it into the new
hypothesis B_2, boding rain, which abduced case is
corroborated to a moderate degree by looking up
and spying a cloud in the sky, C_2.

Figure 2 manages to sum it all up in a fairly consummate fashion:

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|    A_1         A_2                     C_1         C_2    |
|     o~~~~>>>~~~~o                       o~~~~>>>~~~~o     |
|      \                                             /      |
|       \*           *                 *           */       |
|        \                                         /        |
|         \ *           *           *           * /         |
|          \                                     /          |
|           \  *           *     *           *  /           |
|            \                                 /            |
|             \   *           *           *   /             |
|              \                             /              |
|               \    *     *     *     *    /               |
|                \                         /                |
|                 \ B_1 o~~~~>>>~~~~o B_2 /                 |
|                  \     *         *     /                  |
|                   \                   /                   |
|                    \    *       *    /                    |
|                     \               /                     |
|                      \   *     *   /                      |
|                       \           /                       |
|                        \  *   *  /                        |
|                         \       /                         |
|                          \ * * /                          |
|                           \   /                           |
|                            \*/                            |
|                             o                             |
|                             C                             |
|                                                           |
| A_1  =  Air warm                      A_2  =  Air cool    |
| B_1  =  Balmy day                     B_2  =  Bodes rain  |
| C_1  =  Clear sky                     C_2  =  Cloudy sky  |
|                                                           |
|                 C  =  Current situation                   |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 2.  Differential Signs of Rain

Note 4

Here is a definition of what Peirce meant by a sign relation:

| A sign is something, 'A', which brings something, 'B',
| its 'interpretant' sign determined or created by it,
| into the same sort of correspondence with something, 'C',
| its 'object', as that in which itself stands to 'C'.
|
| C.S. Peirce, NEM 4, pp. 20-21.
|
| NEM 4 = 'The New Elements of Mathematics', Vol. 4,
| Edited by Carolyn Eisele, Mouton, The Hague, 1976.
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/l75/l75.htm

So when I say "coolness is a Sign of the Object rain, and
the Interpretant is the thought of the rain's likelihood",
it is because I think that the coolness in question brings
the thought of the rain's likelihood into the same sort of
correspondence with the objective event of rain as that in
which the coolness itself stands to the same event of rain.

Note 5

For future reference -- if I may in fact refer
to a reference in the future -- here is a further
explanation of what Peirce meant by a sign relation:

| A 'Sign', or 'Representamen', is a First which stands
| in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called
| its 'Object', as to be capable of determining a Third,
| called its 'Interpretant', to assume the same triadic
| relation to its Object in which it stands itself to
| the same Object.
|
| The triadic relation is 'genuine', that is, its three members
| are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any
| complexus of dyadic relations.  That is the reason the Interpretant,
| or Third, cannot stand in a mere dyadic relation to the Object, but
| must stand in such a relation to it as the Representamen itself does.
|
| Nor can the triadic relation in which the Third stands be merely
| similar to that in which the First stands, for this would make the
| relation of the Third to the First a degenerate Secondness merely.
| The Third must indeed stand in such a relation, and thus must be
| capable of determining a Third of its own;  but besides that, it
| must have a second triadic relation in which the Representamen,
| or rather the relation thereof to its Object, shall be its own
| (the Third's) Object, and must be capable of determining a Third
| to this relation.  All this must equally be true of the Third's
| Third and so on endlessly;  and this, and more, is involved in
| the familiar idea of a Sign;  and as the term Representamen is
| here used, nothing more is implied.
|
| A 'Sign' is a Representamen with a mental Interpretant.
|
| Possibly there may be Representamens that are not Signs.
|
| Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun,
| becomes by that very act fully capable, without
| further condition, of reproducing a sunflower
| which turns in precisely corresponding ways
| toward the sun, and of doing so with the
| same reproductive power, the sunflower
| would become a Representamen of the sun.
|
| But 'thought' is the chief, if not
| the only, mode of representation.
|
| C.S. Peirce, "Syllabus" (c. 1902), 'Collected Papers', CP 2.274

Note 6

With this much background penciled in, let's revisit again
the contextualized picture or differential figure that we
derived from Dewey's "Sign of Rain" example:

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|  Air Warm    Air Cool              Clear Sky  Cloudy Sky  |
|    A_1         A_2                     C_1         C_2    |
|     o~~~~>>>~~~~o                       o~~~~>>>~~~~o     |
|      \                                             /      |
|       \*           *                 *           */       |
|        \                                         /        |
|         \ *           *           *           * /         |
|          \                                     /          |
|           \  *           *     *           *  /           |
|            \                                 /            |
|             \   *           *           *   /             |
|              \                             /              |
|               \    *     *     *     *    /               |
|                \ Balmy            Boding /                |
|                 \ B_1 o~~~~>>>~~~~o B_2 /                 |
|                  \     *         *     /                  |
|                   \                   /                   |
|                    \    *       *    /                    |
|                     \               /                     |
|                      \   *     *   /                      |
|                       \           /                       |
|                        \  *   *  /                        |
|                         \       /                         |
|                          \ * * /                          |
|                           \   /                           |
|                            \*/                            |
|                             o                             |
|                             C                             |
|                     Current Situation                     |
|                                                           |
| A_1  =  Air warm                      A_2  =  Air cool    |
| B_1  =  Balmy day                     B_2  =  Bodes rain  |
| C_1  =  Clear sky                     C_2  =  Cloudy sky  |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 3.  Signs of Rain Viewed in Their Natural Context

The question lingers:  What justifies our calling by the name
of inquiry Dewey's sample of a semiotic process, namely, the
sign relational transit from the fact of cool air, C => A_2,
to the case of rain, C => B_2, and from the thought of that
case to the ruly act of looking up for any further signs
of rain that might be in the sky?

Let's try to focus for a while on what we may see as
the "differential" or the "distributional" aspect of
inquiry.  If you follow the idea that inquiry begins
with a state of tension in the affected agent of the
process, then you are likely to recognize the legion
of diverse names for this annoyingly irritating mode
of being -- doubt, problem, surprise, uncertainty --
as forming variable manifestations of a differential
theme, for example, that a difference exists between
what an agent observes or accepts as actual and what
that agent either expects or intends to be the case.

Here, the agent has an initial expectation of fair weather,
due most likely to his initial observations of a clear sky,
but then discrepant sensations of significantly cooler air
cause him to pause, to reflect, and to update his forecast
of the imminent weather conditions to a foreboding of rain.

Note 7

The question that drives me to examine these examples of inquiry
is the relationship among signs, information, inference, and the
typical trajectories of inquiry.  At this point in the discussion,
we need a bit of background information about the pragmatic theory
of inquiry.  I am presenting the long version of that on a another
thread, stemming from either one of these alternative urlocations:

INTRO.  http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?threadid=598
INTRO.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1720

To keep from holding up this more concrete discussion of examples,
here is a short introduction to the principal ideas, as I see them:

It is frequently useful to approach the concept of an inquiry process
as a specialization of a sign relation, in the following three phases:

1.  Sign Relation

A "sign relation" simpliciter, L c O x S x I, could be just about any
3-adic relation on the arbitrary domains O, S, I, so long as it
satisfies one of the adequate definitions of a sign relation.

2.  Sign Process

A "sign process" is a sign relation plus a significant sense of transition.
This means that there is a definite, non-trivial sense in which a sign
determines its interpretant signs with respect to its objects.
We often find ourselves writing "<o, s, i>" as "<o, s, s'>"
in such cases, where the semiotic transition s ~> s'
takes place in respect of the object o.

3.  Inquiry Process

An "inquiry process" is a sign process that has value-directed
transitions.  This means that there is a property, a quality, or
a scalar value that can be associated with a sign in relation to
its objects, and that the transit from a sign to an interpretant
in regard to an object occurs in such a way that the value is
increased in the process.  For example, semiotic actions like
inquiry and computation are directed in such a way as to
increase the "aptness", "brevity", or "clarity" of the
signs on which they operate.

Note 8

Here's the "New List" text about the relations between
the types of signs and the types of inference, that is,
the morphological and temporal constituents of inquiry:

| In an argument, the premisses form a representation of
| the conclusion, because they indicate the interpretant
| of the argument, or representation representing it to
| represent its object.  The premisses may afford a
| likeness, index, or symbol of the conclusion.
|
| [Deduction of a Fact]
|
| In deductive argument, the conclusion is represented
| by the premisses as by a general sign under which it
| is contained.
|
| [Abduction of a Case]
|
| In hypotheses, something 'like' the conclusion is proved,
| that is, the premisses form a likeness of the conclusion.
| Take, for example, the following argument:--
|
|     M is, for instance, P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4;
|
|     S is P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4:
|
|     [Therefore], S is M.
|
| Here the first premiss amounts to this, that
| "P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4" is a likeness of M,
| and thus the premisses are or represent
| a likeness of the conclusion.
|
| [Induction of a Rule]
|
| That it is different with induction another example will show.
|
|     S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4 are taken as samples of the collection M;
|
|     S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4 are P:
|
|     [Therefore], All M is P.
|
| Hence the first premiss amounts to saying that "S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4"
| is an index of M.  Hence the premisses are an index of the conclusion.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers' CP 1.559, 'Chronological Edition' CE 2, p. 58.

Let the expression "P_1 & P_2 & P_3 & P_4"

denote the proposition Q = Conjunction (P_1, P_2, P_3, P_4).

Then we may draw the following Figure of Abduction:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|           P_1   P_2         P_3   P_4           |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|             \*    \         /    */|            |
|              \ *   \       /   * / |            |
|               \  *  \     /  *  /  |            |
|                \   * \   / *   /   |            |
|                 \    *\ /*    /    |            |
|                  .     Q     .     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  .     |     .     M            |
|                   \    |    /    *              |
|                    \   |   /   *                |
|                     \  |  /  * Case             |
|                      \ | / *   S=>M             |
|                       \|/*                      |
|                        o                        |
|                        S                        |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 4.  Abduction of the Case S => M

Let the expression "S_1 v S_2 v S_3 v S_4"

denote the proposition L = Disjunction (S_1, S_2, S_3, S_4).

Then we may draw the following Figure of Induction:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                        P                        |
|                        o                        |
|                       /|\*    Rule              |
|                      / | \ *  M=>P              |
|                     /  |  \  *                  |
|                    /   |   \   *                |
|                   /    |    \    *              |
|                  .     |     .     M            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  .     L     .     |            |
|                 /    */ \*    \    |            |
|                /   * /   \ *   \   |            |
|               /  *  /     \  *  \  |            |
|              / *   /       \   * \ |            |
|             /*    /         \    *\|            |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|           S_1   S_2         S_3   S_4           |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 5.  Induction to the Rule M => P

Reference:

| C.S. Peirce, "New List", CP 1.559, CE 2, p. 58.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "On a New List of Categories" (1867),
|'Collected Papers' CP 1.545-567, 'Chronological Edition' CE 2, pp. 49-59.
|
| http://www.peirce.org/writings/p32.html
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/newlist/nl-frame.htm

Note 9

Given the above background, concepts, and data, what
is the proper way of seeing the relationship between
the two trios that we have drawn for Dewey's example
of inquiry, specifically, the sign-theoretic 3-tuple
and the syllogistic 3-angle?  (See Figures 6 and 7).

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                          o Sign (Cool Air)                |
|                         /                                 |
|                        /                                  |
| Object (Rain) o------<|                                   |
|                        \                                  |
|                         \                                 |
|                          o Interpretant (Thought of Rain) |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 6.  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                    Air Cool                               |
|                       A                                   |
|                       o                                   |
|                       ^^                                  |
|                       | \                                 |
|                       |  \                                |
|                       |   \                               |
|                       |    \  Rule                        |
|                       |     \                             |
|                       |A     \                            |
|                       | b     \                           |
|                       |  d     \                          |
|                 Fact  |   u     o Before Rain             |
|                       |    c   ^                          |
|                       |     e /                           |
|                       |      /                            |
|                       |     /                             |
|                       |    /  Case                        |
|                       |   /                               |
|                       |  /                                |
|                       | /                                 |
|                       |/                                  |
|                       o                                   |
|                       C                                   |
|                Current Situation                          |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 7.  Abducing a Case from a Fact and a Rule

An immediately obvious difference between the two Figures
is that the sign triple has the "Thought of Rain" whereas
the syllogistic triple has the object state "Before Rain".
Is this a significant difference between the two diagrams?

I will think on it ...

Note 10

Cathy Legg's "Missing The Bus" Example

Here is another remarkably instructive example that can be tackled
moderately well by blocking it out as a "zeroth order theory (ZOT):

| I'm waiting for my morning bus and it doesn't arrive:  surprise.
| I then think -- in the past sometimes my bus hasn't arrived when
| it's a public holiday I've forgotten about:  this case should be
| the same (induction), I then form the hypothesis that it is
| a public holiday (abduction).
|
| Cathy Legg, "Missing the Bus", as posted to the Peirce List:
|
| Subj:  Re: Chomsky on Peirce on Abduction
| Date:  Fri, 28 Apr 2000, 15:39:25 +1000 (EST)
| From:  Cathy Legg <...>
|   To:  Peirce Discussion Forum <...>

Note 11

Cathy Legg's "Missing The Bus" Example (cont.)

Here is my analysis of Cathy Legg's "Missing the Bus" problem,
to the extent that it can be represented within the constraints
of propositional models, sentential logic, or zeroth order logic.

Let "C" represent the Current situation, that is,
the intinerant inquirer's current situation under
the circumstances of the problem in question, also
depicted by a "circle" in a venn diagram.  This is
just a cheap propositional gimmick for covering to
some extent the "indexical" characterisitics of the
situation in question, but without having to resort
to the use of variables that range over domains of
"individual situations".

Next, let us contemplate the alternative possibilities,
formulated here as Proposition X versus Proposition Y.

   X  =  [C => A]   =  [In the Current situation, the bus Arrives]

   Y  =  [C => ~A]  =  [In the Current situation, the bus does Not Arrive]

As it happens, X is one's expectation, while Y is one's observation.
This difference between one's expectation and one's observation is
what one affectively experience as a surprise.

Let me stress this.  The observed fact is Y, but what renders it
surprising is its difference from X, and this occurs on the point
of detaching the alternative consequents, A versus ~A.

Incidentally, it is this "differential" aspect of inquiry that led me,
starting about a decade ago, to begin to develop a "differential logic",
extending "propositional calculus" in almost precisely the same way that
differential calculus extends analytic geometry.

But let us get back to the situation at the bus stop.

The way that induction enters this situation
is as a component of previous cycles of inquiry
that led to the formation of a Rule, even if it is
only a "probable approximate rule", more or less as
formulated in Proposition K:

   K  =  [B => A]  =  [In the Best case scenario, the bus Arrives]

It does not affect the analysis at all if you have in mind another
sort of descriptor than "best", say, "normal", "ordinary", or so on,
so long as you acknowledge the conducive function or the mediating role
of any middle term like B.

When our traveller gets to the bus stop, it is most likely
that she is in a slightly confused, indeterminate, uncertain,
or vague state of mind, in the sense that she has probably not
even stopped to ask herself the question we'll call Question Q:

   Q  =  [Is it really true that J?], where:

   J  =  [C => B]  =  [The Current situation is a Best case scenario]

Consequently, she has walked, or ran, as is frequently the case,
right into the current situation, operating under the influence
of something like the following train of an automatic deduction:

   Case J:  C => B
   Rule K:  B => A
  -----------------
   Fact X:  C => A

And this is just where we came in, with the discrepancy between
the expected fact X : C => A and the observed fact Y : C => ~A.

The surprise that one meets with, instead of the bus,
might lead one to question all sorts of things.  Any
number of speculations might come to mind.  Among the
more rational possibilities, the surprise might cause
one to inquire into any and all of the premisses that
fed into the above deduction, if not the axioms of the
logic that one happens to be implementing at the moment.

But let's suppose that one lights on the Case C => B, as it is most
frequently the Case that is the cause of the problem, and therefore,
in accord with a higher order induction of the inquiry into inquiry,
it is most frequently the Case that empirical people consider first.

And so, after reflecting on the situation, and eliciting certain features
of how one's habitual reasoning processes fed into it, quasi modo intuitio,
one decides to vary the description of the Case, in this case, from saying
that C => B to asking whether it might not be true that C => ~B, that is,
asking oneself, "Can it be that the current situation is not actually the
best (modal, normal, ordinary, usual, ...) case, and that this may be the
cause of my expectation being disappointed?"

Note 12

Cathy Legg's "Missing The Bus" Example (cont.)

Let us now illustrate the particulars that we find
in "The Case of the Missing Bus" by using the sort
of "propositional logic in a lattice" diagram that
I used to articulate the basic brands of inference,
in what now must seem like so many long notes past.

Let me recap the story as we know it so far in the syllogistic
or "propositional constraint reasoning" (PCR) style of picture.

Figure 8 sketchily summarizes the first phase of the reconstruction.

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|    A                                                          (A)   |
|     o                                                         o     |
|      \                                                       /      |
|       \ *                                                 * /       |
|        \                                                   /        |
|         \   *                                         *   /         |
|          \                                               /          |
|           \     *                                 *     /           |
|            \                                           /            |
|             \       *                         *       /             |
|              \                                       /              |
|               \       B o                 o (B)     /               |
|                \                                   /                |
|                 \        *               *        /                 |
|                  \                               /                  |
|                   \       *             *       /                   |
|                    \                           /                    |
|                     \      *           *      /                     |
|                      \                       /                      |
|                       \     *         *     /                       |
|                        \                   /                        |
|                         \    *       *    /                         |
|                          \               /                          |
|                           \   *     *   /                           |
|                            \           /                            |
|                             \  *   *  /                             |
|                              \       /                              |
|                               \ * * /                               |
|                                \   /                                |
| A  =  Arriving bus situations   \*/                                 |
| B  =  Best case situations       o                                  |
| C  =  Current situation          C                                  |
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 8.  Cathy Legg's "Missing the Bus" Example

The point elements in these diagrams represent
the "propositions" that one is contemplating
with respect to a domain of objects, persons,
situations, and so on.  Another option is to
treat them as the "terms" of the description:
Major term, Middle term, Minor term, and so on.

The line elements in these diagrams represent the "logical relations"
that are being considered between certain pairs of propositions, or else
the "premisses" that are being contemplated between various pairs of terms,
where roughly vertical lines indicate "implications", the antecedent lower
and the consequent higher, and where roughly horizontal placements indicate
relationship of "alteration" (change) or "alternation" (diversity), that is,
the situation among a number of alternatives, exclusive or inclusive, that
are available for one to change or to choose among.

It is my guess that something like this style of geometric figure
was used by Aristotle, and may have been a common sort of picture
at the time, at least, this is the impression that I get from the
way that he uses two different styles of language for indicating
the various sorts of logical relationships that are relevant to
the fundamental types of reasoning situation that he discusses.
For instance, Aristotle often uses the geometric label of the
line segment AB to indicate the premiss B => A.  Of course,
this may just be a fluke of Greek grammar, or of its later
transcription.

There a convenient technical nomenclature that was added at a later date,
in which the various line elements depicting the premisses and relations
are customarily labeled as "Cases", "Facts", and "Rules", and I will use
this style of language rather freely to talk about the different roles
that different premisses may enjoy in the various forms of reasoning.

One other thing:  I often use the following equivalent notations:

   "(A)"   =   "~A"   =   "A'"   =   "Not A".

Among other things, this gives the following notational equality:

   "(A (B))"   =   "A => B"   =   "Not A without B".

I hope that will be enough of a set-up to get this show on the road.

Data of the Situation:

   Alternative Facts:  (C (A))  versus  ( C ((A))),  that is,  (C  A).

   Alternative Cases:  (C (B))  versus  ( C ((B))),  that is,  (C  B).

   Alternative Rules:  (B (A))  versus  ((B)((A))),  that is,  (A (B)).

We meet the surprising Fact : C => (A), depicted by the line segment (A)C.
The reason that this Fact is surprising is that we automatically expected
a different Fact, namely, C => A.  And, assuming the current situation C,
which we always do -- since this whole intervention of C is just a gimmick
for supplying a pivot to our thought -- we were led moreover to expect A,
the arrival of the bus.

If we stop to think about it, we come to realize that there is
a middle term that we have been taking for granted, say "B",
the "benign" situation, the "best case" scenario (assuming
that the best case means catching the bus), or maybe just
the modal, normal, ordinary, or usual case, if you like
those terms better.

The name "reflection" seems to fit the process by which
we can become aware of the previously automatic, implicit,
and probably unconscious deduction that led to a current
expectation, the one that is subject to conflict with
a current observation, thereby generating a dilemma,
a problem, or a surprise.

Nota Bene.  Actually, I use the word "problem" more specifically
to refer to a difference between an intention and an observation,
but that is another, yet related story.

In the process of reflecting on the "program" of a habitual deduction,
we become able to identify the intermediate and the middle terms that
go "into it", and at this point we become able to contemplate their
deliberate variation.  In this way, we become able to pass from the
class of propositions that are schematized by "B" to one or two in
the class of propositions that are summarized by "~B", and thereby
guessing a new Case, for example, that the current situation has
the marks of a public holiday, C => H, where H => ~B, and so is
not beneficial for our immediate purposes, tedious as they are.

Note 13

Cathy Legg's "Missing The Bus" Example (concl.)

I left off last time at the point where you were just beginning to
contemplate the possibility that your current situation might fall
under the case description of a public holiday, thereby explaining
the absence of the expected bus, and a hypothesis which, if true,
would reduce your affective sense of surprise at the accustomed
bus not being there at the place-time that you were accustomed
to observe it.

Now, if you're like me, you might eventually think to look up,
and then to look around your surrounding neighborhood, to see
if you can observe any further evidence or any other naturally
occurring signs that might bear on your new hypothesis one way
or another.

This, of course, brings us to the deductive phase of our present inquiry.
And, equally of course, our immedately present phase of deduction must
be distinguished from all of those previous deductions, not to mention
their Promethean and Epimethean (fore and aft) bracketings by all of
those previous bits of abductive and inductive reasoning that went
into making up what were no doubt many previous cycles, and a vast
host of parallel cycles, and a countless array of epicycles on
our deference to an inquiry that may be indefinitely deferred.

Well, after that importunate word from our spontaneity,
I think that it is due time to get back to our story.
We have all been waiting for this bus long enough!

[This essay was written just after Easter 2000.]

If I had been walking on a residential street hereabouts,
through most of last week, when this "missing of the bus"
caper was alleged to have happened, I could have looked up
and looked around and seen all the gaily colored balloons,
the flapping ribbons, and the many other festive decorations
that were decked out on many of the houses and the trees by
all of the neighborhood parents who were throwing together
to treat their collective broods to an Easter Egg Hunt.
So that would have served to confirm the hypothesis of
a holiday, and perhaps it may have even altered my sense
of what was "best", "benign", "beneficial" -- trudging off
on my accustomed way, in pursuit of my habitual goals, or
stopping to enjoy the signs of another custom, and even
to follow them -- but that's another story altogether!

Anyway, it behooves me to try and size up the present moment of inquiry.
Let me unfold the map again and make a few additional notations upon it.

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|    A                         D                                (A)   |
|     o                        o                                o     |
|      \                                                       /      |
|       \ *                     *                           * /       |
|        \                                                   /        |
|         \   *                  *                      *   /         |
|          \                                               /          |
|           \     *               *                 *     /           |
|            \                                           /            |
|             \       *            *            *       /             |
|              \                                       /              |
|               \       B o         *       o (B)     /               |
|                \                                   /                |
|                 \        *         *     *        /                 |
|                  \                               /                  |
|                   \       *         *   *       /                   |
|                    \                           /                    |
|                     \      *         * *      /                     |
|                      \                       /                      |
|                       \     *         o H   /                       |
|                        \                   /                        |
|                         \    *       *    /                         |
|                          \               /                          |
|                           \   *     *   /                           |
|                            \           /                            |
|                             \  *   *  /                             |
|                              \       /                              |
|                               \ * * /                               |
|                                \   /                                |
| A  =  Arriving bus situations   \*/                                 |
| B  =  Best case situations       o      D  =  Decorative situations |
| C  =  Current situation          C      H  =  Holiday situations    |
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 9.  Cathy Legg's "Busman's Holiday" Example

I think that this pretty graphically says what I've been striving to say
in the last thousand words or so, and I am tempted to leave it at that,
but temptations to desist, you will have observed, are the sorts of
temptations I can easily resist!  So let me attempt to sum it up
all over again, this time once again in schematic symbols and
in rather more verbose but slightly more descriptive phrases.

   Abduction of a Case:

   Fact:  C => (A),  In the current situation, the bus is not arriving.
   Rule:  H => (A),  If it is a holiday, the bus would not be arriving.
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Case:  C =>  H ,  Perhaps the current situation is a holiday.

The validity of this abduction as a form of reasoning, in the only way
that its particular form of non-demonstrative inference can be said to
be valid, depends on the validity of the corresponding deduction, from
the Case : C => H and the Rule : H => ~A to the Fact : C => ~A.  So it
needs to be remembered that the utility of this deduction, which only
concludes what has already been observed, is that it succeeds in its
aim to reduce the surprise of that observation.

   Deduction of a Fact:

   Case:  C => H ,  In the current situation, it is a holiday.
   Rule:  H => D ,  If it is a holiday, there will be decorations.
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Fact:  C => D ,  In the current situation, there will be decorations.

The inductive phase, in this situation, consists of looking up and testing
whether the prediction comes true.  I have been studying for few years now,
and still remain a bit puzzled, as to how exactly this sense of induction
fits in logically, if it does at all, with the other meaning of induction,
namely, of a non-demonstrative inference from a Case and a Fact to a Rule.

Note 14

Let's return to the question that I asked in EOI Note 9,
that had to do with the relationship between the semiotic
or sign-theoretic triad and the logical syzygy, for example:

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                          o Sign (Cool Air)                |
|                         /                                 |
|                        /                                  |
| Object (Rain) o------<|                                   |
|                        \                                  |
|                         \                                 |
|                          o Interpretant (Thought of Rain) |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 14.1  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                    Air Cool                               |
|                       A                                   |
|                       o                                   |
|                       ^^                                  |
|                       | \                                 |
|                       |  \                                |
|                       |   \                               |
|                       |    \  Rule                        |
|                       |     \                             |
|                       |A     \                            |
|                       | b     \                           |
|                       |  d     \                          |
|                 Fact  |   u     o Before Rain             |
|                       |    c   ^                          |
|                       |     e /                           |
|                       |      /                            |
|                       |     /                             |
|                       |    /  Case                        |
|                       |   /                               |
|                       |  /                                |
|                       | /                                 |
|                       |/                                  |
|                       o                                   |
|                       C                                   |
|                Current Situation                          |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 14.2  Abducing a Case from a Fact and a Rule

We need a word to cover all three uses of the later type of figure --
abductive, deductive, inductive -- since "syllogism" refers to the
deductive use alone, and so I will experiment with using the word
"syzygy" to cover all three ways of reading the same configuration.

Last time we looked at this situation I reflected as follows:

| An immediately obvious difference between the two Figures
| is that the sign triple has the "Thought of Rain" whereas
| the syllogistic triple has the object state "Before Rain".
| Is this a significant difference between the two diagrams?

For the sake of the NKS readers, there was some discussion of this point
on the Inquiry and Peirce Lists that they may find beneficial, and that
may yet come to fruition, but I will plod ahead on my own recognizance.

Here are the links to what record I was able to make of those discussions:

Peirce List:
http://lyris.acs.ttu.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?visit=peirce-l

Inquiry List:
http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

Note 15

In reviewing some of my previous writing on the issues in this area,
I came across the following collection of thoughts that seem of use.

For my part in this investigation, I have been
trying to resolve a couple of related problems:

   1.  What is the proper articulation of the inquiry process in terms
       of the various kinds of inference, apodictic and approximate,
       that various thinkers have identified as being relevant to it?

   2.  What is the proper placement of inquiry within a theory of signs?

My approach to this problem area has been to track back to the authors
of some of our initial ideas about signs and inquiry, to see if I could
work out for myself what they were thinking and how they moved from one
stage of their thought to the next, and maybe along the way to see if
I can see anything that they may have missed, or omitted to discuss
clearly enough.  I am especially interested in the transition that
C.S. Peirce made from syllogistic to relational forms of thinking
about signs and inquiry, as that corresponds to an important task
in what might be called "computational architectronics", that of
building adequate logical systems on a solid propositional layer.

I have spent a fair amount of time staring at the likes
of the following two structures and trying to figure out
how they fit together, figuratively speaking, of course:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                            o Sign               |
|                           /                     |
|                          /                      |
|                         /                       |
|       Object o---------O                        |
|                         \                       |
|                          \                      |
|                           \                     |
|                            o Interpretant       |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.1  Elementary Sign Relation

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   | Ab  > \                     |
|                   |  \ /   \                    |
|             Fact  | <-o-De  o Y                 |
|                   |  / \   /                    |
|                   | In  > /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.2  Three Kinds of Inference

After I had stared at the second picture a very long time,
I came to see that the two approximate forms of inference,
Abduction and Induction, have in common the property that
they bring a middle term into the immediate configuration.
Then I remembered that Aristotle is supposed to have said:
The essence of quick wit lies in grasping the middle term.

But where do these middle terms come from, anyway?  It is
conventional to say that they come in with the abductions
of the cases that first evidence any need to call on them,
and that this is what puts them in the pot for inductions
and deductions to bid for them on any subsequent occasion.
But maybe it would make sense to recognize an independent
process, solely dedicated to finding or making mediations.
Conceived in this way, this process would be a duction in
the opposite direction from Deduction, dub it "Adduction".

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   |       \                     |
|                   |        \                    |
|             Fact  | Ad ---> o Y                 |
|                   |        /                    |
|                   |       /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.3  Adduction of a Middle Term

I'm not too committed to this name for the action,
and it has been used on one or two rare occasions
as yet another name for abduction, but I will use
it until I come up with a name that I like better.

Note 16

medium = a set of middle terms

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                            o Sign               |
|                           /                     |
|                          /                      |
|                         /                       |
|       Object o---------O                        |
|                         \                       |
|                          \                      |
|                           \                     |
|                            o Interpretant       |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.1  Elementary Sign Relation

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   | Ab  > \                     |
|                   |  \ /   \                    |
|             Fact  | <-o-De  o Y                 |
|                   |  / \   /                    |
|                   | In  > /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.2  Three Kinds of Inference

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   |       \                     |
|                   |        \                    |
|             Fact  | Ad ---> o Y                 |
|                   |        /                    |
|                   |       /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 15.3  Adduction of a Middle Term

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|           P_1   P_2         P_3   P_4           |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|             \*    \         /    */|            |
|              \ *   \       /   * / |            |
|               \  *  \     /  *  /  |            |
|                \   * \   / *   /   |            |
|                 \    *\ /*    /    |            |
|                  .     Q     .     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  .     |     .     B  Before Rain          |
|                   \    |    /    *              |
|                    \   |   /   *                |
|                     \  |  /  * Case             |
|                      \ | / *   S=>M             |
|                       \|/*                      |
|                        o                        |
|                        S                        |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|           P_1    A           D    P_4           |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|             \*    \         /    */|            |
|              \ *   \       /   * / |            |
|               \  *  \     /  *  /  |            |
|                \   * \   / *   /   |            |
|                 \    *\ /*    /    |            |
|                  .     Q     .     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  .     |     .     M            |
|                   \    |    /    *              |
|                    \   |   /   *                |
|                     \  |  /  * Case             |
|                      \ | / *   S=>M             |
|                       \|/*                      |
|                        o                        |
|                        S                        |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o

Work Area

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|  Air Warm    Air Cool              Clear Sky  Cloudy Sky  |
|    A_1         A_2                     C_1         C_2    |
|     o~~~~>>>~~~~o                       o~~~~>>>~~~~o     |
|      \                                             /      |
|       \*           *                 *           */       |
|        \                                         /        |
|         \ *           *           *           * /         |
|          \                                     /          |
|           \  *           *     *           *  /           |
|            \                                 /            |
|             \   *           *           *   /             |
|              \                             /              |
|               \    *     *     *     *    /               |
|                \ Balmy            Boding /                |
|                 \ B_1 o~~~~>>>~~~~o B_2 /                 |
|                  \     *         *     /                  |
|                   \                   /                   |
|                    \    *       *    /                    |
|                     \               /                     |
|                      \   *     *   /                      |
|                       \           /                       |
|                        \  *   *  /                        |
|                         \       /                         |
|                          \ * * /                          |
|                           \   /                           |
|                            \*/                            |
|                             o                             |
|                             C                             |
|                     Current Situation                     |
|                                                           |
| A_1  =  Air warm                      A_2  =  Air cool    |
| B_1  =  Balmy day                     B_2  =  Bodes rain  |
| C_1  =  Clear sky                     C_2  =  Cloudy sky  |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 3.  Signs of Rain Viewed in Their Natural Context

Discussion Note 1

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI 2.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001705.html
In: EOI.   http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

The reason that I've returned to Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry",
for what seems like the umpteenth time, is that it marks one
of the many limits of my understanding with respect to the
relationship between signs and inquiry in Peirce's thought,
and especially as it developed, differentially or radically,
as the case may be, over his lifetime and on into our times.
So everything I say here is still very tentative in my mind.

TG: Why wouldn't your diagram look like this?

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|                  o Sign (Sensory Cool Air, Dark Cloud)              |
|                 /                                                   |
|                /                                                    |
| Object o-----<|                                                     |
|                \                                                    |
|                 \                                                   |
|                  o Interpretant (Mental Cool Air, Dark Cloud = Rain)|
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1'.  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

Before I answer I need to know what you have in mind for the object.
I took it to be the "future contingent" immanent/imminent rainstorm,
an objective state of affairs when it eventually comes to be actual.

Let's see if we can clear that up first.

P.S.  According to my custom, I will archive these
notes, queries, and replies at the Inquiry List, so
that I can remember what I've said in the contingent
future, so anybody who objects to my copying their
remarks there should please say so, and I won't.

TG: That is to say the "cool air and dark cloud"
    is indeed a sign just as the interpretant is
    also a sign including the same elements and
    relationships plus a conlusion formally drawn
    from them.  If nothing else, "rain" can't be
    the object because it hasn't rained yet in the
    example.  Actually, I would propose it as the
    "ground", the characteristic by which the elements
    and relations both the sign and the interpretant
    are linked to the object.  The object, however,
    would seem to me to be all the elements and/or
    relationships that might go into producing signs
    and interpretants about the weather, the walk 
    home, or whatever context we choose.

TG: Anyway, Jon, I'm glad to see you "flooding the bandwidth" for a
    change, although I'm sure there have been limits imposed.  How did
    that old song go? "We'll have fun 'til daddy takes the T-Bird away"?

Discussion Note 2

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Someday I'll tell you the story of how I came to have
such tunnel vision this week, but now that I've read
your whole note carefully enough I will try to make
a better reply.

TG: Why wouldn't you diagram look like this?

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|                  o Sign (Sensory Cool Air, Dark Cloud)              |
|                 /                                                   |
|                /                                                    |
| Object o-----<|                                                     |
|                \                                                    |
|                 \                                                   |
|                  o Interpretant (Mental Cool Air, Dark Cloud = Rain)|
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1'.  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

TG: That is to say the "cool air and dark cloud"
    is indeed a sign just as the interpretant is
    also a sign including the same elements and
    relationships plus a conlusion formally drawn
    from them.  If nothing else, "rain" can't be
    the object because it hasn't rained yet in the
    example.  Actually, I would propose it as the
    "ground", the characteristic by which the elements
    and relations both the sign and the interpretant
    are linked to the object.  The object, however,
    would seem to me to be all the elements and/or
    relationships that might go into producing signs
    and interpretants about the weather, the walk 
    home, or whatever context we choose.

I don't think that there's a unique way of assigning elements
to sign relational roles, in this example or any other, so I'd
only hope to argue that my choices are allowed by the definition
of a sign relation and that they explain some important aspects
of what is going on with regard to the inquiry in play.

The question that we come to once again is (1) whether
a sign relation necessarily involves causal components,
in the sense of 2-adic cause/effect relations between
some of its domains, or (2) whether it is essentially
a logical or information-theoretic relation among
three domains of elements.

If I read your above remark correctly, you seem to rule out
the possibility that a sign can come before its object in time,
perhaps on the basis that the denotative component is causal in
nature and directed from objects to their signs.

Let me know if I have read you right so far.

TG: Anyway, Jon, I'm glad to see you "flooding the bandwidth" for a
    change, although I'm sure there have been limits imposed.  How did
    that old song go? "We'll have fun 'til daddy takes the T-Bird away"?

It's fun^3, of course.

Discussion Note 3

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

TG: I'm looking at the sign and interpretant
    as "diagrams" such as are described at
    CP 2.227-228.

| The faculty which I call abstractive observation
| is one which ordinary people perfectly recognize,
| but for which the theories of philosophers sometimes
| hardly leave room.  It is a familiar experience to
| every human being to wish for something quite beyond
| his present means, and to follow that wish by the
| question, 'Should I wish for that thing just the same,
| if I had ample means to gratify it?'  To answer that
| question, he searches his heart, and in doing so makes
| what I term an abstractive observation.  He makes in his
| imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch,
| of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical
| state of things would require to be made in that picture,
| and then examines it, that is, 'observes' what he has
| imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire is
| there to be discerned (CP 2.227).

| A sign, or 'representamen', is something which stands to somebody for
| something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is,
| creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more
| developed sign.  That sign which it creates I call the 'interpretant' of
| the first sign.  The sign stands for something, its 'object'.  It stands
| for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea,
| which I have sometimes called the 'ground' of the representamen (CP 2.228).

You adduce a couple of very important passages, to which we two
and others have returned many times.  For future reference, let
me just connect to another context where they came up, and which
formed a critical turning point in my own understanding of them,
as I think that this whole question may rate another visitation:

Inquiry Into Inquiry:
III.  http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03077.html

Logic As Semiotic:
LAS.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-August/thread.html#844

TG: Thus, in the diagram:

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|                  o Sign (Sensory Cool Air, Dark Cloud)              |
|                 /                                                   |
|                /                                                    |
| Object o-----<|                                                     |
|                \                                                    |
|                 \                                                   |
|                  o Interpretant (Mental Cool Air, Dark Cloud = Rain)|
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1'. Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry" 

TG: both sign and interpretant are taken as diagrams with certain elements
    and relations between them based on the "ground" of, say, rain or the
    possibility of rain as the basis for abstractively observing the sign
    or imagining the interpretant.  If we ask, abstracted from what, or
    what is the object, that can only be the context or situation.
    If we try to specify the object in any more detail or exactness,
    we don't have an object at all but rather another sign. 

I detect a certain ambiguity in your use of the word "diagram" here.
Figures 1 and 1' are diagrammatic representations of sign relational
triples.  I would call them higher order signs of a particular type,
and have classified these sorts of HO signs elsewhere on the web.

Let me pause here, and see if we have an understanding on that point.

Discussion Note 4

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Assuming that we'll eventually be able to sort out
the different senses of the word "diagram" as Peirce
uses it, let me take up your comments piece by piece.

TG: I'm looking at the sign and interpretant
    as "diagrams" such as are described at
    CP 2.227-228.

Here is the whole of CP 2.227, in two pieces:

| Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown,
| only another name for 'semiotic' ([Greek: semeiotike]), the
| quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.  By describing
| the doctrine as "quasi-necessary", or formal, I mean that we
| observe the characters of such signs as we know, and from such
| an observation, by a process which I will not object to naming
| Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and
| therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what 'must be'
| the characters of all signs used by a "scientific" intelligence,
| that is to say, by an intelligence capable of learning by experience.
|
| As to that process of abstraction, it is itself a sort of observation.
| The faculty which I call abstractive observation is one which ordinary
| people perfectly recognize, but for which the theories of philosophers
| sometimes hardly leave room.  It is a familiar experience to every human
| being to wish for something quite beyond his present means, and to follow
| that wish by the question, "Should I wish for that thing just the same,
| if I had ample means to gratify it?"  To answer that question, he searches
| his heart, and in doing so makes what I term an abstractive observation.
| He makes in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch,
| of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical state of things
| would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is,
| 'observes' what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire
| is there to be discerned.  By such a process, which is at bottom very
| much like mathematical reasoning, we can reach conclusions as to what
| 'would be' true of signs in all cases, so long as the intelligence
| using them was scientific.  (CP 2.227).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
| Editors' Note: From an unidentified fragment, c. 1897.

I read this as a characterization of logic, which is
a critical reflection on signs, and thus a normative,
"quasi-necessary", or "formal" science, as Peirce
uses the words.  So there's a lot more going on
here at a reflective level than what we need
merely to define the sign relation itself.

| A sign, or 'representamen', is something which stands to somebody
| for something in some respect or capacity.  It addresses somebody,
| that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or
| perhaps a more developed sign.  That sign which it creates I call
| the 'interpretant' of the first sign.  The sign stands for something,
| its 'object'.  It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in
| reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the 'ground'
| of the representamen.  (CP 2.228).

This is another perfectly good definition of a sign relation,
provided that we take it with the necessary grain of salt that
is called for to season the sop of a psychologistic misreading.

I will tell you my personal way of understanding the "ground"
of a sign relation, perhaps on account of the fact that field
and gestalt theories were among my first loves in physics and
psychology.  The elements of all possible sign relations float
like dust motes in the air, or like iron filings on a plate of
glass, and the ground is that beam of sunlight or magnetic field
that constellates the patterned figures in the medium that we see.
Formally speaking, then, shorn of all metaphor as much as possible,
the ground is just that constraint which picks out certain triples
and chaffs the rest.  In short, it is but an alias for the entire
sign relation as a subset of a cartesian product, L c O x S x I.

Discussion Note 5

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Continuing from where I left off last time ...

TG: Thus, in the diagram:

o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                                     |
|                  o Sign (Sensory Cool Air, Dark Cloud)              |
|                 /                                                   |
|                /                                                    |
| Object o-----<|                                                     |
|                \                                                    |
|                 \                                                   |
|                  o Interpretant (Mental Cool Air, Dark Cloud = Rain)|
|                                                                     |
o---------------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1'. Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry" 

TG: both sign and interpretant are taken as diagrams with certain elements
    and relations between them based on the "ground" of, say, rain or the
    possibility of rain as the basis for abstractively observing the sign
    or imagining the interpretant.  If we ask, abstracted from what, or
    what is the object, that can only be the context or situation.
    If we try to specify the object in any more detail or exactness,
    we don't have an object at all but rather another sign.

I don't have any argument against taking the
sensation of coolness and the conception of
coolness as a sign/interpretant pair, but it
wasn't what Dewey highlighted in his example,
to which line of thinking I was trying to hew.
I cannot follow the identification of espied
dark clouds with the future contingent rain,
however.

As a general issue, it seems that Peirce's theory of signs
is robbed of much of its significance if we cannot take it
to speak of any conceivable objects of speech and thought,
including abstract, conjectural, contingent, hypothetical,
intentional, and potential objects.

Discussion Note 6

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Al fine ...

TG: Of course, this is where I always get hit with that
    "sign, sign, everything's a sign" refrain, and it's
    true the object can be represented by a sign.  That's
    what we're doing here.  If we represent it with another
    sign, it's own sign apart from the sign and interpretant
    of this diagram, then we just play the same game we're
    playing now with a different sign and its interpretant
    and its object.  That's not what seems to be going on
    with the "ordinary" guy in Dewey's example.  With him
    there's just the abstractive observation (sign) resulting
    in an imagined diagram (interpretant) from which he infers
    "rain".  The object, the context or situation, is indeed the
    third element, the one we are in fact making explicit only
    in this one respect with this sign and this interpretant.

I refrain from that refrain, as it seems beside the point to me.
But I think that you might be misled by CP 2.227 into thinking
that AO is involved in every sign process, instead of being
the peculiar feature of logical reflection.  Just my very
rough and chancey guess at this point, though.

TG: In short, I've always felt it's a cheap trick to pretend to solve
    the problems posed by the Kantian thing-in-itself by the citing the
    fact we do invent signs to represent it.  Geez, no problem there.
    And, I think when Peirce said objects are signs he had in mind more
    the way a diagram, such as our modern scientific view of the solar
    system, can come to take the place of the object itself.  If the
    guy in the example were abstracting the elements and relationships
    of this sign and interpretant from a fully developed scientific
    conception of weather, it elements and interactions, that had
    stood the inductive tests of time such that he would take that
    diagram for the object itself, then we might say that is the
    sign-object in the above diagram.  But that would be a different,
    more sophisticated example;  one that Peirce got to in the omitted
    part of 2.227, but one I don't think we should jump to too quickly.

Yes, at least, so far as I think I understand
some of what you are saying here.  Our hero's
observations are figured in relief against
the ground of his prior expectations.

Discussion Note 7

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

TG: I am indeed being led, or misled as the case may be, into 
    "thinking that AO [or a diagram] is involved in every sign 
    process".  But first, Peirce says: "All necessary reasoning 
    without exception is diagrammatic" [CP 5.162]. And, more
    broadly this would appear to apply to any kind of deductive
    reasoning or inferences, including the inference of "rain"
    in this example.  So it does seem to be a properly logical
    orientation for the analysis of this particular example.

The way I read them, the passages at CP 2.227-228 and NEM 4 pp. 20-21
are variations on the very same theme, to explain the relationship of
logic to semiotic, the differentia being that logic is formal semiotic,
by which Peirce means quasi-necessary or normative.  This leaves room
for a portion of semiotic to be contingent, empirical, or descriptive.
Also, the inference from coolness to rain is abductive not deductive.

TG: But if we're going to talk about the sign process in general, rather
    than just this example, it does seem to me that the "sign", as Peirce
    construes it, occupies that transitive ground of a middle term in what
    can be broadly considered "deductions".  And if that's correct, then
    what Peirce has to say about diagrams and necessary or mathematical
    reasoning would give us an internal view of the actual mechanics
    within a sign by which it applies to objects on the one side and
    produces interpretants on the other.

TG: It's just an hypothesis though, so am I being "misled" by it?

Too close to the whiching hour -- will have to save the rest for tomorrow.

Discussion Note 8

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Starting from where I left off ...

TG: But if we're going to talk about the sign process in general, rather
    than just this example, it does seem to me that the "sign", as Peirce
    construes it, occupies that transitive ground of a middle term in what
    can be broadly considered "deductions".  And if that's correct, then
    what Peirce has to say about diagrams and necessary or mathematical
    reasoning would give us an internal view of the actual mechanics
    within a sign by which it applies to objects on the one side and
    produces interpretants on the other.

TG: It's just an hypothesis though, so am I being "misled" by it?

In Peirce's early work, at least, the different kinds of signs were
associated with the different kinds of inferences, respectively.

Re: ICE 3ff.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000198.html
In: ICE.      http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/thread.html#196

To what extent this survives in his later work would take some
additional study.  Also, I'm not sure that all deductions are
apodictic, as there may be types of probable reasoning that
follow the deductive pattern, only less certainly.

Discussion Note 9

Here's the "New List" text about the relations between
the types of signs and the types of inference, that is,
the morphological and temporal constituents of inquiry:

| In an argument, the premisses form a representation of
| the conclusion, because they indicate the interpretant
| of the argument, or representation representing it to
| represent its object.  The premisses may afford a
| likeness, index, or symbol of the conclusion.
|
| [Deduction of a Fact]
|
| In deductive argument, the conclusion is represented
| by the premisses as by a general sign under which it
| is contained.
|
| [Abduction of a Case]
|
| In hypotheses, something 'like' the conclusion is proved,
| that is, the premisses form a likeness of the conclusion.
| Take, for example, the following argument:--
|
|     M is, for instance, P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4;
|
|     S is P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4:
|
|     [Therefore], S is M.
|
| Here the first premiss amounts to this, that
| "P_1, P_2, P_3, and P_4" is a likeness of M,
| and thus the premisses are or represent
| a likeness of the conclusion.
|
| [Induction of a Rule]
|
| That it is different with induction another example will show.
|
|     S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4 are taken as samples of the collection M;
|
|     S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4 are P:
|
|     [Therefore], All M is P.
|
| Hence the first premiss amounts to saying that "S_1, S_2, S_3, and S_4"
| is an index of M.  Hence the premisses are an index of the conclusion.
|
| Peirce, 'Collected Papers' CP 1.559, 'Chronological Edition' CE 2, p. 58.

Let the expression "P_1 & P_2 & P_3 & P_4"

denote the proposition Q = Conjunction (P_1, P_2, P_3, P_4).

Then we may draw the following Figure of Abduction:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|           P_1   P_2         P_3   P_4           |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|             \*    \         /    */|            |
|              \ *   \       /   * / |            |
|               \  *  \     /  *  /  |            |
|                \   * \   / *   /   |            |
|                 \    *\ /*    /    |            |
|                  .     Q     .     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  .     |     .     M            |
|                   \    |    /    *              |
|                    \   |   /   *                |
|                     \  |  /  * Case             |
|                      \ | / *   S=>M             |
|                       \|/*                      |
|                        o                        |
|                        S                        |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure A.  Abduction of the Case S => M

Let the expression "S_1 v S_2 v S_3 v S_4"

denote the proposition L = Disjunction (S_1, S_2, S_3, S_4).

Then we may draw the following Figure of Induction:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                        P                        |
|                        o                        |
|                       /|\*    Rule              |
|                      / | \ *  M=>P              |
|                     /  |  \  *                  |
|                    /   |   \   *                |
|                   /    |    \    *              |
|                  .     |     .     M            |
|                  |     |     |   * |            |
|                  |     |     | *   |            |
|                  |     |     |     |            |
|                  |     |   * |     |            |
|                  |     | *   |     |            |
|                  .     L     .     |            |
|                 /    */ \*    \    |            |
|                /   * /   \ *   \   |            |
|               /  *  /     \  *  \  |            |
|              / *   /       \   * \ |            |
|             /*    /         \    *\|            |
|            o     o           o     o            |
|           S_1   S_2         S_3   S_4           |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure B.  Induction to the Rule M => P

Reference:

| C.S. Peirce, "New List", CP 1.559, CE 2, p. 58.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "On a New List of Categories" (1867),
|'Collected Papers' CP 1.545-567, 'Chronological Edition' CE 2, pp. 49-59.
|
| http://www.peirce.org/writings/p32.html
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/newlist/nl-frame.htm

Discussion Note 10

JA = Jon Awbrey
JD = John Dewey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI-DIS 7.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001717.html
In: EOI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

TG: In Discussion Note 7 you write:

JA: Also, the inference from coolness to rain is abductive not deductive.

TG: This is rather hard for me to envision in terms of either your drawing
    or mine.  How is "rain" something that explains anything in either of
    our diagrams?  If we redo your drawing:

o------------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                            |
|                          o Sign (Thought of Rain)          |
|                         /                                  |
|                        /                                   |
| Object (Rain) o-------O                                    |
|                        \                                   |
|                         \                                  |
|                          o Interpretant (Quicken his pace) |
|                                                            |
o------------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 1".  Sign Relation in Dewey's "Rainy Day Inquiry"

TG: then "rain" would make sense as an abductive inference, for we would be
    abductively inferring that "rain" is the explanation of the man quickening
    his pace. This obviously changes the example, but I'm wondering if this
    is what you have in mind in saying "rain" is the product of an abductive
    inference?

This where the viscosity of the wicket has been bedeviling me
for the last 15 years or so, and I have this deja vu feeling
that we had this same discussion on the Peirce List 2 or 3
years ago, so I'll look up the notes of that time around
and see whether I've got any new ideas about it ...

The problem is that we have two styles of diagrams,
the sign relational and the syllogistic triagrams:

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                            o Sign               |
|                           /                     |
|                          /                      |
|                         /                       |
|       Object o---------O                        |
|                         \                       |
|                          \                      |
|                           \                     |
|                            o Interpretant       |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 10.1  Elementary Sign Relation

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                   Z                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   |\                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |      \                      |
|                   | Ab  > \                     |
|                   |  \ /   \                    |
|             Fact  | <-o-De  o Y                 |
|                   |  / \   /                    |
|                   | In  > /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   X                             |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 10.2  Three Kinds of Inference

The diagram that makes the abductive character of the
inference clear is the following syllogistic figure,
where the case that it's about to rain is abduced
from the fact that the air is cooler and the
rule that cooler air implies that it's
about to rain.

o-------------------------------------------------o
|                                                 |
|                Air Cool                         |
|                   A                             |
|                   o                             |
|                   ^^                            |
|                   | \                           |
|                   |  \                          |
|                   |   \                         |
|                   |    \  Rule                  |
|                   |     \                       |
|                   |A     \                      |
|                   | b     \                     |
|                   |  d     \                    |
|             Fact  |   u     o 'Bout To Rain     |
|                   |    c   ^                    |
|                   |     e /                     |
|                   |      /                      |
|                   |     /                       |
|                   |    /  Case                  |
|                   |   /                         |
|                   |  /                          |
|                   | /                           |
|                   |/                            |
|                   o                             |
|                   C                             |
|            Current Situation                    |
|                                                 |
o-------------------------------------------------o
Figure 10.3  Abduction of Case from Fact and Rule

TG: Dewey seems to exhibit the same aversion to looking at the
    original example as a form of deduction despite the fact he
    does what to distinguish it from just seeing the image of
    something in the clouds.  He writes in a footnote after
    listing "points to, tells of, betokens, prognosticates,
    represents, stands for, implies" as synonyms for what
    has occurred in the example example of inferring the
    possibility of rain.

JD: "*Implies* is more often used when a principle or general truth brings
    about belief in some other truth;  the other phrases are more frequently
    used to denote the cases in which one fact or event leads us to believe
    in something else."  [Fn 2, MW 6.187]

But our peripatetic protagonist is not certain it will rain,
neither on the data of cool air, nor on the evidence of
dark clouds, nor even on the cumulation of both facts,
so any notion of exact deductive inference would be
precipitous at best.  To say that we deduce the
possibility of rain is fudging the issue,
since the mere possibility of rain is
always present, in any case, dataful
or dataless.

TG: But, (1) I don't think Peirce would limit implication or deduction
    in that formalistic kind of way and (2) even inferring facts from
    facts to facts we still employ a diagrammatic representation
    transitively as a sign.  Thus, smoke "points to, tells of,
    betokens, prognosticates, represents, stands for" fire
    because we use a diagrammatic conjunction of those
    two facts, smoke and fire, to infer the one from
    the other. This may not be the stuff of
    "general truths", but it does seem to
    be generally "deductive" rather than
    abductive or inductive?

Dewey is invoking "implication" very loosely here,
more-ally or less-ally equivalent to "inference",
with respect to which we admit demonstrative
and non-demonstrative varieties, all tolled,
but the inferences to rain or fire are not
certain in these cases, so not deductive.

Discussion Note 11

AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: EOI 9.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001762.html
In: EOI.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

JA: An immediately obvious difference between the two Figures
    is that the sign triple has the "Thought of Rain" whereas
    the syllogistic triple has the object state "Before Rain".
    Is this a significant difference between the two diagrams?

AB: I am just reading 'Real Knowledge', by Jan Sleutels, 1994, Diss.
    It is about internalist and externalist accounts of knowledge in
    neural epistemics.  At first glance a difference between the sign
    triple and the syllogistic one is that the syllogistic one prohibits
    an internalist account whereas the sign triple diagram may or may not
    be externalistic.  (Just the Figures, without its Peircean or syllogistic
    context that is.  We know that it is externalistic.)

I confess that I've never quite understood this talk of
externalist versus internalist perspectives, much less
its application to Peirce.  Maybe this is my chance to
try again.  Could you lay out your reasoning here in
more detail for me?

Discussion Note 12

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI 9.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001762.html
In: EOI.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

TG: Even if we look at abduction as inferring this is a case of
    some rule rather than of an explanation (although those are
    just two ways of saying the same thing anyway), I don't see
    where "rain" is what is being adduced.  For the abduction
    according the way I would look at it would be that:

TG: - This is a case of air getting cool

As "Case", "Fact", "Rule" are used in this context, this is a Fact,
in effect, the deductive conclusion "C => A", paraphrased something
like "the current situation is one in which the air is cooler".
You can tell it's a Fact because it is taken as 100% certain,
a done deal, that the air is cooler.  If the ambler doubts
his senses, that is a horse of another cooler, and not
at all the situation that we are discussing here.

TG: And that this abduction, when combined with the rule that:

TG: - Cool air is an indication of rain

For this to be a Rule in the deductive sense, you would have to delete
the expletive fudge factor "indication" and state simply that A => B,
in other words, "If the Air is cooler then it's Bound to rain".

TG: allows our hero to deduce rain may very well be in the offing.

But the deductive inference is apodictic, bound, certain,
demonstrative, exact, and does not allow of the modality
that you admit as "may very well be" in your conclusion.

TG: But, then, looking at your diagram:

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                    Air Cool                               |
|                       A                                   |
|                       o                                   |
|                       ^^                                  |
|                       | \                                 |
|                       |  \                                |
|                       |   \                               |
|                       |    \  Rule                        |
|                       |     \                             |
|                       |A     \                            |
|                       | b     \                           |
|                       |  d     \                          |
|                 Fact  |   u     o Before Rain             |
|                       |    c   ^                          |
|                       |     e /                           |
|                       |      /                            |
|                       |     /                             |
|                       |    /  Case                        |
|                       |   /                               |
|                       |  /                                |
|                       | /                                 |
|                       |/                                  |
|                       o                                   |
|                       C                                   |
|                Current Situation                          |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 7.  Abducing a Case from a Fact and a Rule

TG: while it does have the "current situation" in the place of "rain" 
    as the object, it strangely reverses the "case" and the "fact". 
    It would seem the case (or minor premise) should tie the current 
    situation to the antecedent of the rule, or "cool air" in this
    case, while the fact (or conclusion) should link the current 
    situation to the consequent, rain or "before rain"?

The rule of thumb for telling a fact from a case
is that the fact is evident on the face of things,
while the case tends to be a more inobvious cause.

TG: I hope you're not tiring of this exercise,
    and remaining stuck on Notes 1 or 2 as it were,
    but I think it's important to take examples as
    concretely analyzable in their own right rather
    than abstract exemplifications of principles more
    abstract still.  To me it's the difference Dewey
    makes between inferring rain from the clouds
    and seeing faces in them.

No, the hike has been healthy exercise so far.
I think that a satisfactory analysis of this
humble excursion would go a long way toward
understanding the true relationship between
signs and inquiry, and also the development
that Peirce and much later Dewey underwent.

Discussion Note 13

AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: EOI-DIS 11.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001767.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

[NB.  I use links like the above to avoid long quotations of previous discussions.]

JA: I confess that I've never quite understood this talk of
    externalist versus internalist perspectives, much less
    its application to Peirce.  Maybe this is my chance to
    try again.  Could you lay out your reasoning here
    in more detail for me?

AB: With  regard to application it may be wise to apply Peirce to the
    internal-external perspectives instead of the other way around.

I think I can agree with that.

AB: I saw myself confronted with neural epistemic while trying
    to decide whether a detailed analysis of a sign must take
    care of the processes that occur in the brain or whether
    we can do without it.  This is part of an exchange of
    thought with Francis about sign processes.  So I am
    not primarily interested in the opposition between
    internal and external itself.

This may sound like an overly free association,
but have you read Freud's 1895 'Project'?
Here are some excerpts from the last time
that I happened to return to it:

PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/thread.html#1633
PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/thread.html#1661
PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-March/thread.html#1720

AB: At bottom it seems that the distinction arises as a consequences of
    making an opposition between subject and world.  Probably your remark
    about individuals being made, not born is relevant here.

AB: (The pages refer to Sleutels work.  I do not give his position
    but some remarks concerning his picture of the opposition.
    The language is definitely not Peircean.)

AB: [Sleutels, p. 205]
    Internalist thinking:  "Mental symbols served a clear purpose.
    They were needed to go proxy for states of affairs in the external
    world:  the world as such is inaccessible to the subject, but its
    mental symbols are immediately present to consciousness, affording
    to the subject mediate (inferential access to the world)."

AB: Externalist thinking:  "the primary relation is not between subject
    and symbol, but between subject and world.  Hence it would seem that
    the world is immediately 'given' to the subject.  Therefore mental
    representations are no longer needed:  they do not ass [?] to our
    understanding of cognition."

I guess I consider that a false dilemma,
the very sort of aporia that the theory
of 3-adic sign relations is designed to
bypass.  A very similar sort of thing
happens with the animadversions of
coherentists versus objectivists.

AB: Sleutels wants to have best of both worlds.  (p. 204).
    The present externalist account takes the exact opposite stance
    [regarding the superfluous character of mental representations]:
    its project is to understand internal computational structure from
    differences in content, defined in terms of the subject's different
    relations to external states of events.

AB: Much more can be said of course.  But in regard to your diagrams.
    The mental 'thought of rain' vs the object state 'before rain'
    differ in that the former is more easily appropriated by
    internalist thinking, than the object state.

AB: Of course we know this problematic from the Questions series,
    from later dealings with the perceptual judgement and lots of
    other occasions.  In my opinion Sleutels in taking the best
    of both is approaching a Peircean perspective, but falls for
    interesting reasons short.  I will not dwell on that now.

AB: A relevance of that dispute for peircean philosophy
    might be the help by thinking about details.
 
AB: In the Question series Peirce hit upon the unknowable rock of pure,
    atomic individuality in the stimulation of a single nerve cell.
    The unknowable that runs in a continuous stream through our
    lives, as he called it.

But our knowledge of neurons,
like our knowledge of egos,
is inferential and mediated,
is it not?

AB: Later he reworks this in ideas about the percept and perceptual
    judgement.  The over all picture is that in an out of our control
    process by the stimulation of nerves a percept is generated [all
    individual receptor excitations being indexicaly connected with
    the object], the perceptual judgement takes a bundle of them as
    iconical related with a dynamical object (recognizes it as such
    through the abductive reduction of the manifold to unity and
    transforming the resulting iconical rhematic percept into
    a proposition by recognizing, as it were, the indexical
    relation of the constituent qualia with the dynmical object).
    Thus a perceptual fact is made.  It is tempting to look at the
    relation between percept and perceptual fact as the relation
    between token and type or replica sinsign and legisign.

This looks a bit too much like
Quine's concoction to mix well
with Peirce's solution.

AB: I hope this will do as a first answer.
    I am working on an exposition of this
    matter in sign diagrams.  Comment is
    welcome.

Many thanks for the explanations ...

Discussion Note 14

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI-DIS 12.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001772.html
As Amended At:   http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001773.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

TG: Ah hah!  At last I think I see where our disagreement is arising.  But I also think
    you're catching some of that schizo-speak that has been going around to call a fact
    that's 100% certain a "conclusion".  If it's 100% certain, we don't need any argument,
    and if it's a conclusion, it's not 100% certain.  After all, *modus tollens* is always
    just as valid as *modus ponens* in any given argument.

Yes, I was undermind by a colloquial phrasing,
but I mean that it's 100% certain relative to
the certainty of the major and minor surmises.
Incidentally, this does serve to bring up the
analogy between exact and probable deduction.

TG: But I have to admit, even though I knew it wasn't "case, rule,
    and fact", I was too lazy to look it up.  And besides, the thing
    I like about Peirce (along with Dewey) is the view that the result
    or conclusion is a fact, just a fact predicted or otherwise not
    present at the moment.  Anyway, to be clearer about the diagram,
    I think it should be more like:

o-----------------------------------------------------------o
|                                                           |
|                    Air Cool                               |
|                       A                                   |
|                       o                                   |
|                       |\                                  |
|                       | \                                 |
|                       |  \                                |
|                       |   \                               |
|                       |    \  Rule                        |
|                       |     \                             |
|                       |      \                            |
|                       |       \                           |
|                       |        \                          |
|                 Case  | ecudbA  o Rain                    |
|                       |        /                          |
|                       |       /                           |
|                       |      /                            |
|                       |     /                             |
|                       |    /  Result                      |
|                       |   /                               |
|                       |  /                                |
|                       | /                                 |
|                       |/                                  |
|                       o                                   |
|                       C                                   |
|                Current Situation                          |
|                                                           |
o-----------------------------------------------------------o
Figure 7'.  Abducing a Case from a Rule and a Result

TG: I doubt if this makes it anymore agreeable to you, but it's clearer 
    vis-a-vis the texts in Peirce.  And at least this way we don't have
    to worry about those mythological facts that are not true or false,
    but certain, creeping into the analysis.

The designations Case, Fact, Rule on this stage are more like roles that
statements play than anything essential about the statements themselves,
so I often capitalize them when intended as these peculiar terms of art.
The vertical dimension of the syllogistic diagrams is meant to indicate
the comparative order, if comparable, of concepts or terms in a lattice
or "partially ordered set" (more cutely referred to as a "poset").

Read under these conventions, Figure 7' indicates that
Rain => Air Cool, which is not a hard and fast fact,
in any sense of the word.

Of course, everybody knows that you can only go so far
whith these purely propositional or syllogistic forms,
but one of the reasons that I am pushing the edge of
the envelope as far as I can is to see how Peirce
was forced to develop the logic of relatives
in order to explain how explanation works.

Discussion Note 15

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI-DIS 12.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001772.html
As Amended At:   http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001773.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

TG: Sorry, I'm reading your messages backwards again.
    Maybe that's why they make sense to me?  Anyway:

TG: - Cool air is an indication of rain

JA: For this to be a Rule in the deductive sense, you would have to delete
    the expletive fudge factor "indication" and state simply that A => B,
    in other words, "If the Air is cooler then it's Bound to rain".

TG: allows our hero to deduce rain may very well be in the offing.

JA: But the deductive inference is apodictic, bound, certain,
    demonstrative, exact, and does not allow of the modality
    that you admit as "may very well be" in your conclusion.

TG: What a narrow, formalistic view of deduction.  But yet our pace quickens, no?
    Well actually not mine in these situations, because I also believe in the old
    gambling maxim that scared money never wins, so if I quicken my pace, I'm going
    to get rained on for sure.  But they sure seem like deductions -- applications
    of a case to a rule so as to produce a predicted fact/result -- to me.

I see this another way.  Logic is the "theory of inquiry" (TOI).  Catchy title, no?
And deduction is the straight and narrow arrow (=>=> = =>).  It would be myopic of
me if I identified deduction with the whole of inquiry, the whole of reasoning,
but I do not, there is the whole world of abductive and inductive reasoning,
at the very least, else wise.  Abductive and inductive inference play and
work by their own rules, which joy and job is ours to articulate as best
we can.

And so it goes ...

Discussion Note 16

AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Maattanen

Re: EOI-DIS 13.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001784.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

I took a Master's in Psych in 1989, for which I read
a lot of behaviorist, clinical, cognitive, neuropsych,
quantitative/stats, and systems/cybernetic literature.
Aside from teaching math, my grad asst jobs were mostly
as a comp/data/stat asst in biosci/med school settings,
so I kept up with the literature enough to have a feel
for the datasets that I had to work with in those areas.

I put Peirce and Freud in comparison as keen observers of
persistent psychological phenomena, with the speculative
power to anticipate explanatory mechanisms of a complexity
that many of our more reductionist thinkers hardly match
to the present day.  It may be that Ockham's razor will
always shave as close to the spinal cord as possible,
but there are treasures yet to be explored in both
of these prescient but not pre-scientific lights.

KM: Just some comments on your latest discussion on "neural epistemic": 

KM: I was left wondering on the interest on what Peirce,
    as well as Freud in his 'Project', wrote on neurons
    and the brain.  Surely that has only historical
    relevance, serving mainly critical purposes.
    (There is a wealth of empirical findings
    nowadays, although I don't find the
    approaches in main-stream brain
    research reconcilable with
    a Peircean approach).

KM: I personally do not find what Peirce -- very tentatively -- wrote on
    neurons etc something to rely on, nor do I think Peirce meant it to
    be taken.  Still, I do not recognize the overall picture you, Auke,
    gave in the following -- if I understood correctly -- as Peirce's
    view.  Do you really mean that this is what Peirce had in mind?
    (I have underlined the sentences I find most problematic) 

AB: In the Question series Peirce hit upon the unknowable
    rock of pure, atomic individuality in the stimulation
    of a single nerve cell.  [...] 

JA: But our knowledge of neurons, 
    like our knowledge of egos, 
    is inferential and mediated, 
    is it not? 

AB: Later he reworks this in ideas about the percept
    and perceptual judgement.  The over all picture
    is that in an out of our control process by the
    stimulation of nerves a percept is generated
    [all individual receptor excitations being
    indexicaly connected with the object], the
    perceptual judgement takes a bundle of them
    as iconical related with a dynamical object
    (recognizes it as such through the abductive
    reduction of the manifold to unity and
    transforming the resulting iconical
    rhematic percept into a proposition
    by recognizing, as it were, the
    indexical relation of the
    constituent qualia with
    the dynmical object). 
    Thus a perceptual
    fact is made. 

KM: I haven't been following the discussions in the list
    for quite some time, and catching up with the huge
    amount of mails has been somewhat overwhelming.
    So, my apologies in probable failings to take
    into account earlier relevant messages. 

Discussion Note 17

JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Maattanen

Re: EOI-DIS 16.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001841.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

KM: Thanks, Jon, for providing a context for bringing up Freud's Project. 

KM: In the main I can agree with the following: 

JA: I put Peirce and Freud in comparison as keen observers of 
    persistent psychological phenomena, with the speculative 
    power to anticipate explanatory mechanisms of a complexity 
    that many of our more reductionist thinkers hardly match 
    to the present day. 

KM: But why do you say "our MORE reductionist thinkers"?
    Do you consider Peirce a reductionist?
    Freud certainly was, but not Peirce.

Freud in 1895 was still reductionist, of the old Helmholtz school,
but already beginning his transition to another order of thinking.
But my point is this:  A criterion of scientific thinking is that
our theoretical models be adequate to the phenomenon in question.
Freud's 'Project' contains the seeds of many ideas that we do not
see prevalent in mainstream psychological and psychiatric thought
until after the cognitive revolution on the one hand and the rise
of object relations theories on the other.

KM: The main issue, however, is about the relationship between the
    mind and the brain, or psychological phenomena and neural processes.
    Freud explicates with admirable clarity his reductionistic aim and
    his devotion to the (outdated) ideals of natural science of his time
    in the introduction to the Project (see below an excerpt from the link
    you provided).

Once again, the feature of principal interest to me is whether the
theoretical models are adequate to the complexity of the phenomena.
It is the form and function of these models that gives them their
explanatory power, and not the labels that we pin to their parts,
whether we call them "physical" or "psychical".  The fact is that
Freud was articulating models of a recognizably cybernetic cast,
with neural structures that were complex enough to serve much
in the way that dynamic data structures do in current AI work,
that is, sufficient to the tasks of knowledge representation,
plus a markedly recursive analysis of psycho-social functions.

KM: With the following I cannot agree: 

JA: there are treasures yet to be explored in both 
    of these prescient but not pre-scientific lights. 

KM: I can't see any treasures following from Freud's aim
    to "represent psychical processes as quantitatively
    determined states of material particles" [= neurons].
    This is not what is valuable in Freud's work;  the
    treasures to be cherished are to be found elsewhere.
    (Unfortunately it's not uncommon to find the errors
    and limitations of eminent and famous scientists
    cherished as much or more than the treasures.)

Again, I do not care if a thinker thinks that all the cosmos
is made of water, or fire, or whatever -- it is the form and
the functioning of that substance that makes the explanation
explain phenomena, if it does at all.

I'll pick out some of my more
treasured nuggests tomorrow,
but I have to break for today.

Discussion Note 18

Auke, Kirsti, List,

I'm preparing to return to this more systematically,
but here is one incidental, rather more interesting
point of comparison between Peirce and Freud that I
had been studying:

Cf: ESD 1.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/001628.html

Copied here:

===================================================

Expectation, Satisfaction, Disappointment

Compare and Contrast:

Exhibit 1

| Reasoning and Expectation
|
| But since you propose to study logic, you have more or less faith
| in reasoning, as affording knowledge of the truth.  Now reasoning
| is a very different thing indeed from the percept, or even from
| perceptual facts.  For reasoning is essentially a voluntary act,
| over which we exercise control.  If it were not so, logic would
| be of no use at all.  For logic is, in the main, criticism of
| reasoning as good or bad.  Now it is idle so to criticize
| an operation which is beyond all control, correction,
| or improvement.  (CP 2.144).
|
| You have, therefore, to inquire, first, in what sense you have
| any faith in reasoning, seeing that its conclusions cannot in
| the least resemble the percepts, upon which alone implicit
| reliance is warranted.  Conclusions of reasoning can little
| resemble even the 'perceptual facts'.  For besides being
| involuntary, these latter are strictly memories of what
| has taken place in the recent past, while all conclusions
| of reasoning partake of the general nature of expectations
| of the future.  What two things can be more disparate than
| a memory and an expectation?  (CP 2.145).
|
| The second branch of the question, when you have decided in what
| your faith in reasoning consists, will inquire just what it is
| that justifies that faith.  The stimulation of doubt about things
| indubitable or not really doubted is no more wholesome than is
| any other humbug;  yet the precise specification of the evidence
| for an undoubted truth often in logic throws a brilliant light
| in one direction or in another, now pointing to a corrected
| formulation of the proposition, now to a better comprehension
| of its relations to other truths, again to some valuable
| distinctions, etc.  (CP 2.147).
|
| As to the former branch of this question, it will be found
| upon consideration that it is precisely the analogy of an
| inferential conclusion to an expectation which furnishes the
| key to the matter.  An expectation is a habit of imagining.
| A habit is not an affection of consciousness;  it is a general
| law of action, such that on a certain general kind of occasion
| a man will be more or less apt to act in a certain general way.
| An imagination is an affection of consciousness which can be
| directly compared with a percept in some special feature, and
| be pronounced to accord or disaccord with it.  Suppose for
| example that I slip a cent into a slot, and expect on pulling
| a knob to see a little cake of chocolate appear.  My expectation
| consists in, or at least involves, such a habit that when I think
| of pulling the knob, I imagine I see a chocolate coming into view.
| When the perceptual chocolate comes into view, my imagination of it
| is a feeling of such a nature that the percept can be compared with
| it as to size, shape, the nature of the wrapper, the color, taste,
| flavor, hardness and grain of what is within.  Of course, every
| expectation is a matter of inference.  What an inference is we
| shall soon see more exactly than we need just now to consider.
| For our present purpose it is sufficient to say that the
| inferential process involves the formation of a habit.
| For it produces a belief, or opinion;  and a genuine
| belief, or opinion, is something on which a man is
| prepared to act, and is therefore, in a general sense,
| a habit.  A belief need not be conscious.  (CP 2.148).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.144-148.

Exhibit 2

| The Experience of Satisfaction
|
| The filling of the nuclear neurones in Psi has as its
| consequence an effort to discharge, an impetus which is
| released along motor pathways.  Experience shows that the
| first path to be followed is that leading to 'internal change'
| (e.g., emotional expression, screaming, or vascular innervation).
| But, as we showed at the beginning of the discussion, no discharge
| of this kind can bring about any relief of tension, because endogenous
| stimuli continue to be received in spite of it and the Psi-tension is
| re-established.  Here a removal of the stimulus can only be effected
| by an intervention which will temporarily stop the release of quantity
| (Q-eta) in the interior of the body, and an intervention of this kind
| requires an alteration in the external world (e.g., the supply of
| nourishment or the proximity of the sexual object), and this, as
| a "specific action", can only be brought about in particular ways.
| At early stages the human organism is incapable of achieving this
| specific action.  It is brought about by extraneous help, when the
| attention of an experienced person has been drawn to the child's
| condition by a discharge taking place along the path of internal
| change [e.g., by the child's screaming].  This path of discharge
| thus acquires an extremely important secondary function -- viz.,
| of bringing about an understanding with other people;  and the
| original helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source
| of all moral motives.
|
| When the extraneous helper has carried out the specific action in
| the external world on behalf of the helpless subject, the latter
| is in a position, by means of reflex contrivances, immediately
| to perform what is necessary in the interior of his body in
| order to remove the endogenous stimulus.  This total event
| then constitutes an "experience of satisfaction", which
| has the most momentous consequences in the functional
| development of the individual.  ...
|
| Thus the experience of satisfaction leads to a facilitation between
| the two memory-images [of the object wished-for and of the reflex
| movement] and the nuclear neurones which had been cathected during
| the state of urgency.  (No doubt, during [the actual course of]
| the discharge brought about by the satisfaction, the quantity
| (Q-eta) flows out of the memory-images as well.)  Now, when
| the state of urgency or wishing re-appears, the cathexis
| will pass also to the two memories and will activate
| 'them'.  And in all probability the memory-image of
| the object will be the first to experience this
| wishful activation.
|
| I have no doubt that the wishful activation will in the first
| instance produce something similar to a perception -- namely,
| a hallucination.  And if this leads to the performance of the
| reflex action, disappointment will inevitably follow.
|
| Sigmund Freud, "Project", pages 379-381.
|
| Sigmund Freud,
|"Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895),
| pages 347-445 in 'The Origins of Psycho-Analysis:
| Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes:  1887-1902',
| ed. by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris,
| trans. by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey,
| intro. by Ernst Kris, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1954.

Discussion Note 19

JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Maattanen

Re: EOI-DIS 16.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001841.html
In: EOI-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

Continuing from where I left off ...

KM: As I see it, what Freud in his early work (The Project)
    wrote extensively, as well as what little Peirce did say
    on the relation between psychological phenomena and neural
    processes, need to be critically examined and, if they seem
    to serve some reasonable purpose, updated and reformulated.
    (The extremely rare occasions I have made a note "outdated"
    or something like that in the margins of CP have been with
    paragraphs dealing with the nervous system.  Once or twice,
    if I remember correctly.)  Updating, however, I do not see
    anything like an easy task, main-stream neuroscience having
    not much to offer, especially in terms of a Peircean frame.

KM: You mentioned behaviorism when describing your studies in psychology.
    I'll take it as an example:  Behaviorism is based on the work of I.P. Pavlov.
    The founding fathers of behaviorism, however, took the notion of conditional
    reflex, isolated it from its context, the general theoretical framework of
    I.P. Pavlov.  They ignored the concept of dynamical stereotypes, which for
    Pavlov was the neural correlate (this may not be an adequate term to use
    here) of a habit.  On this basis the behaviorists then developed their
    notion of habit, which became both predominant and popular, to the
    degree of being ingrained in ordinary every-day western ways of
    thinking.  Compared to the notion of habit in Pavlov's works,
    the behaviorist variant is one-sided, skewed and simplistic. 

KM: Here I want to add:  Why I want to bring all this up in the list is not
    so just to give a response to Jon, but because -- to my mind -- the ways
    Peirce's conception of habit has been understood and interpreted seems to
    be continuously muddled with the behaviorist heritage. -- This, of course,
    applies to what I'm familiar with.  (Recommendations for further reading
    are welcome).

Yes, James and Dewey had their infatuations with the young behaviorism,
and the fact is that focusing on behavior is healthy and interesting,
but again the criterion is anti-procrustean:  Do we fit our models
to the actual phenomena of action, behavior, conduct -- or do we
lop off nature's givens to to fit the models we can handle?

KM: Then, back to behaviorism and Pavlov: 

KM: What behaviorism left out as well from I.P.Pavlov's theory was
    the basic approach of viewing the nervous system as a whole.
    Exemplified in Pavlov's principle:  Any pattern of activation
    induces a correlated pattern of inhibition in the system (as
    a whole).  One of the consequences -- if this is accepted as
    a starting point -- for philosophical considerations on the
    mind-body problem (or its now popular reductionist variant:
    mind-brain problem) is that any attempt based on activation
    of single neurons or bundles of neurons and linking them
    with -say- a mental image are futile.

I think we are mainly on the same plane here.

KM: We all know that the activity of the nervous system is electro-magnetic
    activity. (c.f. Pavlov's principle above).  Approaches based on the idea
    of single neurons (then to be added up to bundles) take into consideration
    electrical impulse passing (or rather hopping) through the neuron and its
    synaptical transmission to other neurons. -- What is left out of consideration,
    then, is the magnetic "side" of electro-magnetic phenomena.  Quite unlegitimate
    use of Ockham's razor, I'd say, no matter how common. 

KM: I'm not sure I understood the following: 

JA: It may be that Ockham's razor will always
    shave as close to the spinal cord as possible.

KM: but if I did, I do hope it does not hold.
    (Pardon me for saying, but did you notice
    that your metaphor limps -- "shaving" sounds
    an inadequate here, isn't it a euphemism?)

It connotes the microtome, and anatomical "preparations".

KM: Anyway, it seems to me that the most common and long-standing misuse
    of Ockham's razor is that instead of carefully and meticulously shaving
    the beard criss-crossing all over the essential features, it is used in
    a much simpler and quicker way:  to cut the throat.  Not taking notice
    that if you cut the throat, you cut out life.  By this I mean ways of
    philosophizing as if the head with the brain inside were all that is
    essential in human beings, for epistemological purposes, for instance.
    E.g. all epistemologies based on vision, that is:  almost all through
    the modern era. It does not take very much caricaturing to say that
    all that quite often seems to be taken as essential in human body
    is one eye (more specifically the dominant eye) and the brain.
    Or, in modern neuroscience it is not uncommon to meet with
    explicit considerations of how "the brain interacts with
    the world".  Which is simply nonsense and in dire need
    of philosophical criticism. 

KM: Well, well, well.  It has been quite a while since I read
    Pavlov's 'Selected Works' (in German translation).  I was
    an undergraduate student then, planning my master's thesis.
    By then I had read my share of behaviorism, as part of the
    psychology curriculum, and I.P. Pavlov was familiar from
    those sources.  I still vividly remember my astonishment
    when I started to read his own writings, none of which
    was included in the curriculum. -- And now that I came
    to think about it, I don't remember having ever actually
    met anyone else who had read Pavlov's own writings, not
    even amongs the neuropsychologists I've discussed with
    over the years. 

KM: Now that I have dwelled this much on Pavlov's work,
    my anticipation is that some listers draw the hasty
    conclusion that I am an adherent to his theory.  That
    is not the case.  I appreciate and even admire him as
    a devoted and original researcher and theorist in his
    field, still unequalled in many respects.  I took him
    up here as an example of a theorist in neuroscience,
    whose treasures have been left behind, and a caricature
    passed on to future generations.

So you understand how that happens.

KM: To restate my main point here:  There is no way out in philosophy
    of the trouble of taking into account in general outlines all that
    is essential in life.  Peirce was exceptional in his capability to
    do this, as well as minute work in logic, formal and informal. 

KM: To end with a more casual key, I want to tell an story from the writings
    of Pavlov.  He came to the conclusion that the period of optimal activity
    in the brain occurs for some 20-30 minutes after waking up in the morning.
    He then bemoans how people usually waste this precious time by getting
    dressed and brushing their teeth, whereas he always stays in bed
    contemplating the most difficult and pressing scientific problems. 

Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology" --

I am re-locating and extending these excepts here:

PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1869

Discussion Note 20

KM = Kirsti Määttänen

I am pre-occupied at the moment with other issues,
but I want to flag the following paragraph for
possible future discussion:

KM: The inertia in change is not so much because "the findings are not yet conclusive",
    which is usually offered as the reason why.  The real issue is about habit change,
    both personal and institutional.  For a shift to be paradigmatic, it necessarily
    involves changes in habits of thinking and acting.  This is especially where I
    feel that Peircean philosophy of science may have enormous human significance.
    But, in order for that to happen, there should be real interdisciplinary
    dialogue.  Is there, really?

Discussion Note 21

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI 14.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001908.html
In: EOI.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

TG: I think you've caught the nub of our prior disagreements when you write:

JA: We need a word to cover all three uses of the later type of figure -- 
    abductive, deductive, inductive -- since "syllogism" refers to the 
    deductive use alone, and so I will experiment with using the word 
    "syzygy" to cover all three ways of reading the same configuration. 

TG: For, to my way of thinking it is precisely the syllogistic or deductive
    element that puts the teeth, such as they have any, in all the means of
    inference.  Thus, what makes abduction valid to the extent it is is the
    fact it provides an explanation.  What makes induction valid to the
    extent it is is not analogy (or an inane repetition of white swans)
    but the fact the middle term or mediating concept can function
    deductively and successfully with all sorts of consequents and
    applied in all sorts of situations.  Thus, to come up with a
    word [that] eliminates deduction, or to restrict deductions
    to formal systems only marginally related to the actual
    experience, effectively pulls Peirce's teeth.

No, I think that you sum up the situation quite well, and I concur with
the way that you derive the approximate validity of Ab- and In- duction
from the exact validity of the corresponding Deduction.  More important,
I think that Peirce, and so far as I remember, Aristotle, would roughly
agree with your derivation.  So no root canals are in the offing so far.
I simply found that I had a recurring need for a word that referred to
a particular set of premisses, while being equipotential or neutral in
regard to its reading as an Ab-, or a De-, or an In- ductive inference.

Once again you have caught me just before it's time to go to dinner ---
But I promise to come back re-victualized for your questings ...

Discussion Note 22

JA = Jon Awbrey
TG = Tom Gollier

Re: EOI 14.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001908.html
In: EOI.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

I continue from where I left off ...

TG: Unfortunately, I think making rain the object
    in the one diagram and switching the the case
    and result/fact in the other has precisely
    the same effect.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here.

TG: The elements and inferences are being illustrated by a the [?] diagram
    that resembles faces in the clouds.  The mediating aspect of any sign
    is lost with rain on the one side as object and rain (as thought) on
    the other side as interpretant;  while reversing the case and result
    renders the deductive inference (from antecedent to consequent) into
    an invalid one from consequent to antecedent.

TG: Meanwhile, you seem to insist that "deduction" be sacredly
    apodictic, and I guess, not applicable at all until we have
    retired to the diagram itself, divorced from any kind of
    experiential relevance.

TG: But, all this also explains why I've never been too good at
    the scholarly pursuit of philosophy.  If you disagree with
    the basic presuppositions, how can you keep on trying to
    follow all the reasoning that can continues to be piled
    on top of them.  Philosophers should stick to short,
    article- or even email-length, writings.

I guess I don't understand what you want here.
The phenomena of rain and walking and surprise
and thinking and choosing a course of action are
the primary appearances of reality, and it's up to
us to describe them how we may, in ways that explain
what we think needs explaining.  All these theories of
weather or signs or inquiry and all these terms of art
are only meant for that.  Peirce's mansion has rooms
for all the things that we seem to want, only there
are plaques on the doors, not on our teeth, that
have funny names peculiar to his line of thought
and the tradition of thinking that he carries
not caries forward.

The name "deduction" is pinned on an ideal limiting form
of exact explicative inference that would be what it is
under any name.  There are even forms of approximate,
modal, and probable explicative inference where
you can have less than 100% certainty weighing
on the various premisses.  If you seek forms
of reasoning to account for the sorts of
approximate amplicative suggestions
that we use everyday, then you
find them described under the
headings of "abductive" and
"inductive" reasoning.
It's all there.

Document History

Inquiry List (Nov 2004), “Examples of Inquiry”

• http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1704

1. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001704.html
2. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001705.html
3. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001706.html
4. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001709.html
5. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001714.html
6. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001715.html
7. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001732.html
8. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001749.html
9. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001762.html
10. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001808.html
11. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001809.html
12. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001810.html
13. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001811.html
14. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001908.html
15. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001912.html

NKS Forum (Nov 2004), “Examples of Inquiry”

• http://forum.wolframscience.com/archive/topic/595.html
• http://forum.wolframscience.com/printthread.php?threadid=595
• http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?threadid=595

1. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1896#post1896
2. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1897#post1897
3. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1898#post1898
4. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1899#post1899
5. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1900#post1900
6. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1909#post1909
7. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1923#post1923
8. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1948#post1948
9. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1952#post1952
10. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1969#post1969
11. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1970#post1970
12. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1971#post1971
13. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1973#post1973
14. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1991#post1991
15. http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?postid=1993#post1993

Inquiry List (Nov 2004), “Examples of Inquiry : Discussion”

• http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

1. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001707.html
2. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001708.html
3. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001710.html
4. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001711.html
5. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001712.html
6. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001713.html
7. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001717.html
8. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001718.html
9. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001719.html
10. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001737.html
11. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001767.html
12. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001772.html
13. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001784.html
14. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001806.html
15. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001807.html
16. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001841.html
17. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001865.html
18. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001866.html
19. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001903.html
20. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001909.html
21. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001916.html
22. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001923.html