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Saturday, February 11, 2017

Reason and Reasoning -- and Grice's Bootstrap

-- as it combines with Carnapian tolerance!

Speranza

R. B. Jones has shared with us (that's R. B. Jones and Speranza -- and all the other followers of the yellow brick road to the City of the Eternal Truth) some comments under "Deep Learning Eternal Truth".

Jones notes:

"I thought 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."

Good. I love 'pre-occupations'. They contrast of course, Carnapian pre-occupations, with Griceian post-occupations. Which reminds me of the Roman occupation, as satirised by Sellars and Yeatman in "1066 and all that" -- nice figure!

Jones goes on

"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". "

Lovely title. Jones of course is aware of Comte's positivism, and the new logical positivism. He prefers the mere 'positive', as applied to 'philosophy'. "The automation of reason" is a genial turn of phrase.

Jones:

"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."

The keyword, though, remains, 'automation of reason', and we should use that phrase more frequently!

Jones:

"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth."

While Grice uses 'eternal' truth -- as applied to the city thereof -- the phrase also occurs in Quine. I think it's ultimately 'metaphorical', "eternal" -- Grice's 'timeless' won't do here either.

i. Either it will rain or it won't.

is possibly NOT a 'so-called' "eternal" truth, in that in trivalent logics, is not even tautologous!

Jones:

"For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."

Indeed, if 'rational' and 'logical' are interchangeable, there's also the possibility to play with 'analytic a priori' truths, as Ayer (or Freddie to his friends) calls them in his Gollancz book -- a classic of logical positivism. Ayer however notes that 'a priori' is otiose, and 'analytic truth' will just do.

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."

Beautiful. But cfr. Cole Porter, "Don't fence me in"!

Jones:

"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). "

Hence the title of his post, with "deep learning" as yet another keyword.

Jones:

"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. "

Hence the first part of his conjunctive title, "Positive philosophy AND the automation of reason". The implicature being that only positive philosophy can provide such a foundation. This reminds me of Husserl who said that he dreamed of a philosophy without foundations!

Jones:

"On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical, the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake. 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)."

Indeed, not to mention ("then why do you?") Derrida and all the irrationalists. There is some remarks by Grice on the analytic-synthetic distinction on his Valediction (to his life, almost), in "Retrospective Epilogue" to WoW. He notes that one should indeed take a pragmatist approach to the notion of analyticity.

Jones:

"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspective 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."

Indeed. Which brings us back to Grice's Bootstrap ("Try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps"). He is (in "Reply to Richards") considering

L1

and

L2

or object-language and meta-language. And he is saying that if L1 is first-order predicate calculus, L2 should NOT contain too much metaphysical jargon; for the idea is that L2 should be reduced to L1, as far as terminology is concerned. So the less technical one is with one's L2, the fewer problems with the morrow, he hopes.

Jones:

"This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth". 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 -- where 'everybody' is a universal non-substitutional quantifier, if you must!

Jones:

"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."

Good. I like the idea of 'demonstrative' science alla Kantotle. Grice used to lecture on the Organon, if you can believe it! And, to me, the most important thing of his seminars on Aristotle's Organon at Oxford is that J. L. Ackrill attended them! (And credits Grice as having taught him Aristotle "so well" -- In Oxford, Plato is almost non-existant, unless you are Hegelian or Bradleyian).

Jones:

"Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code.  It's a dream..."

worth pursuing.

"Code" is perhaps not a Griceian word. There is usually the distinction between a code-based model of communication and an inference-based model of communication. The idea is that codes tend to be otiose if we can provide a 'rationale' in terms of inference patterns for them.

Grice said, "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity", and I don't think there is a necessity to multiply the senses of 'code', which is UNI-guous, or monosemous. But Jones uses it alla Jones, and I use it alla Grice.

The code relates to the automation of reason, that Hobbes would have loved!

Cheers

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