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Saturday, February 11, 2017

Aspects of reason and reasoning

Speranza

In his interesting "Deep Learning Eternal Truth," R. B. Jones "thought" (and rightly so) that "it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it."

Of course there may be more than two (one of which is him) who read this if not follow the yellow brick road (to the City of course!)

"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason".  It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again."

Blame the sand -- but I love the phrase, 'automation of reason', which of course reminds me of Grice's John Locke Lectures on Aspects of reason and reasoning (previously given as the Immanuel Kant lectures, under the same title, at Stanford -- trust Grice to turn from rationalist to empiricist as he crossed the pond!)

"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth. For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."

Well, for Cicero, 'ratio' was a problem. The Grecian (as in "Ode on a Grecian urn") keyword is merely "logic".

Jones:

"Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head. A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas. The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering.  To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning",  beyond Von Neumann).  An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations.  The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture.  On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical,"

Grice and Carnap would be delighted to hear that!

"the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake."

Jones:

"One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth)."

Not to mention ("when why do you?", I can imagine Jones retorting) Derrida and all the continental irrationalists!

Jones:

"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspctive on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical. This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth".

This reminds me of Grice's bootstrap principle ("try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps", in "Reply to Richards"): the less metaphysical the metalanguage, the less problems for the morrow!

Jones:

"I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io),"

which everybody should check, not just two followers!

"where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science  found in Aristotle's  Organon, taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena. Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code.  It's a dream" but one worth pursuing.

That's the stuff that dreams are made of, as the refrain to that catchy song goes!



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