Re: virus: The Trouble With Science

zaimoni@ksu.edu
Wed, 6 Nov 1996 22:49:11 -0600 (CST)


On Tue, 28 Aug 1956, David Leeper wrote:

> David McFadzean wrote:
>
> > At 03:03 PM 02/11/96 -0600, zaimoni@ksu.edu wrote:
> >
> > >Social reasoning and logical reasoning are mutually incoherent. The
> > >methods for generating conclusions in one domain often generate
> > >automatically wrong conclusions in the other domain.
> >
> > What is social reasoning and how is it different from logical
> > reasoning?
>
> Here's my take on this:
>
> Social Reasoning accepts the types of arguments that Logic rejects.
> Examples: Personal attacks, appeals to power or charisma, democracy.
>
> Social Reasoning rejects the types of arguments that Logic accepts.
> Example: Logic, math, et. al. seen as boring, deceptive and out of
> touch with one's day to day life.

Those are merely phenotypic/evinced effects of something much more drastic.

The major differences stem from what the primitive evaluation values used
are. {I may blunder a bit here. One of the few advantages of logical
reasoning is that logical reasoning can emulate social reasoning
(painfully!!), while social reasoning is hopeless at emulating logical
reasoning.]

I know what statements ultimately evaluate to in logical reasoning: truth
values [choose your logic!]. Derivation rules ["manipulation rules"] are
viewable as structure-preserving (sometimes with loss of information)
maps for truth values.

I'm not so certain what statements evaluate to in social reasoning.
Leeper's examples are definitely valid "manipulation rules" in social
reasoning. I'm in a bind here, since asking me to explain the
distinction is like asking a blind man [with hearing] the difference
between sight and hearing as senses. [I'm analogizing typical relative
dominance here.]

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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
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/ Kenneth Boyd
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