On the fallacy that science is the pursuit of universal truths

It can be tempting to think that science is the pursuit of universal truths. A hypothetical fact would then only be scientific when it describes some (nearly) universal pattern. And indeed some of the best examples of good science are of this kind; the paradigmatic one is of course Newton’s laws that unified the falling of apples and the circling of planets. Universal indeed! (If you read Dutch: I found Floris Cohen’s Isaac Newton en het ware weten worth my while.)

But one should not give in to this temptation. Universals are scarce, while defeasibles are ubiquitous.

Science is the pursuit of interesting truths. And interesting truths can be very specific. The discovery of the coelacanth is one example; another is the building of a computer that can beat the chess world champion, or more recently, also by IBM, a program that can play the strange game of Jeopardy well. In such cases it seems to even matter less how well the result is described in a peer reviewed highly ranked journal. Some results are just interesting in themselves.

Of course greater universality can make a truth more interesting. But more often it is the defeasibles that are the most interesting: defeasibles have the power to describe patterns as they exist in their relevant context, including a specification of how they depend on circumstances.

The here-and-now character of many interesting truths is (in my interpretation of his work) one of the themes of Stephen Toulmin; e.g., in his book Return to reason.

Arguments and choice (and the weighing of reasons)

On the [ARGTHRY] mailing list the plan was posted (by David Hitchcock) to aim for the translation of Harald Wohlrapp‘s Der Begriff des Arguments. I read the interesting review by Christian Kock. Here is a segment of the review that struck me, in particular the last couple of sentences:

Wohlrapp is an independent and original thinker who wants to belong to no school, but has a broader intellectual scope than existing schools. In true Aristotelian manner, he presents a sane and balanced theory based on observation and reflection rather than on axioms. But I question his desire to present a unified theory that downplays the distinction between facts and norms; while an individual cannot have his own individual facts that differ from other people’s facts, he can have his own individual norms which in turn dispose him for his individual choices. In his attempt to counter what he sees as ‘rampant relativism’ of our time Wohlrapp sometimes seems to me to throw out the baby, choice, with the relativistic bath water. What alarms him about the relativism he sees around him is “the belief that, at the end of the day, arguing is useless” (6). But there is no need to believe that arguing is useless even if we abandon the idea that argumentation theory can dictate our moral and political choices. There has always been and always will be argument about issues where choice is possible. That kind of argument is what I understand by ‘rhetoric’. We need thinkers like Wohlrapp to theorize such argument.

(In passing Kock mentions that only Trudy Govier studied the weighing of pros and cons. In AI & law there is more. See Jaap Hage‘s work on this and my own, often coauthored with Jaap.)

Stephen Toulmin has died

And now also Stephen Toulmin has died … See this in memoriam and this one.) In 2009 we have lost two groundbreaking thinkers about defeasible argumentation (see the post on John Pollock).

His 1958 argument model has influenced many AI researchers (and others) although often indirectly (see e.g. this text). For me his much more recent Return to reason was also very stimulating.

Wigmore’s evidence charts in 1913

Wigmore’s 1000+ pages work on the principles of judicial proof (including his charting method) is publicly available online: The principles of judicial proof as given by logic, psychology, and general experience, and illustrated in judicial trials. This is the 1913 version, not the second edition from 1931.

Two excerpts:

• the charting method (large file; 50 MB);
• the chart for the Umilian case.

John Pollock has died

John Pollock, a founding father of the area of defeasible argumentation, has died. He combined theoretical, computational and practical considerations in his design of an ‘artificial person’, OSCAR (see, e.g., his Cognitive carpentry). In this high ambition, he has had no followers.

See, e.g., his influential paper Defeasible reasoning (in Cognitive Science, 11:481–518, 1987; also available in full text). A – too brief – one page introduction to his influential ideas on undercutting and rebutting defeaters is in this text (p. 229) on that other founding father of defeasible argumentation Stephen Toulmin.

Coincidence by association

I came across a message that I sent to Ron Loui a while ago (November 2007):

In Saint Louis, Missouri, (home of the renowned dialectician RPLoui) there is an apparently renowned restaurant The Seventh Inn owned by Else Barth, who shares the name of another renowned dialectician. And the association net is densified further since this was discovered by Bart Verheij (another dialectician who visited RPL) who lives in Paterswolde (near Groningen) where also Else Barth used to live.

The web says there was a fire in the restaurant so perhaps it no longer exists.

A typical blog entry to be tagged ‘leisure, argumentation’.

Argumentation, mathematics, Lakatos

I have been reading in a special issue of Foundations of Science on the connections between argumentation and mathematics (Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2, 2009); guest editors Andrew Aberdein and Ian J. Dove. There is Andrew’s useful introduction to the issue, and also a paper by Alison Pease and colleagues on the computational representation of Lakatos‘s proofs and refutations (see also Mandy Haggith’s ‘A meta-level argumentation framework for representing and reasoning about disagreement‘). Nice! Andrew gives pointers to Wilfrid Hodges’ text ‘An editor recalls some hopeless papers‘ on journal submissions disproving Cantor’s diagonal argument and to recent work by Erik Krabbe connecting pragmadialectics, argumentation and mathematics (‘Strategic Maneuvering in Mathematical Proofs‘; with a comment by Sally Jackson). Hodges refers to psychological work by Rips and also by Johnson-Laird and Byrne – about whose Deduction he is interestingly critical (“I know I am not alone in finding its accounts of logical theory almost incomprehensible”). Krabbe quotes Goethe:

Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen: redet man zu ihnen, so übersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anders.

Krabbe also discusses a ‘proof’ by mathematical induction that all horses have the same color.

Interesting, and simply: good fun.

Empirical logic, the principle of distributivity and quantum phenomena

In his paper Is logic empirical? Putnam has defended (Wikipedia:  “at one point in his career”) that quantum logic is the ‘right’ logic from an empirical point of view. Quantum logic fails the principle of distributivity: p & (q v r) <=> (p & q) v (p & r).

French argumentation

In French, ‘argumenter’ never means to quarrel, but ‘to give reasons, ‘un argument’ is a logical argument, not a quarrel, but it can also refer to the whole discourse. The uncommon verb ‘arguer (de)’ can be used to distance oneself from a point of view: ‘M. Le Pen argue de …’

See a 2002 paper entitled Argumentation studies and discourse analysis: the French situation and global perspectives by Christian Plantin.

Unnamed Wunderkind

I read a Nature review of Nowak’s 2006 Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. It ends with a reference to an unnamed Wunderkind, who recently wrote a book full of cellular automata pictures aiming at revolutionizing science, and who – as Nowak – ‘trod the Oxford-Princeton trail’. It rung a bell; but I needed the internet to find who this was: Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, Mathworld) and his criticized 2002 A New Kind of Science. In the Wikipedia entry about that book, there is a reference to the work of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, especially his 1917 On Growth and Form. Wikipedia:

The central theme of On Growth and Form is that biologists of its author’s day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphasized the roles of physical laws and mechanics. He advocated structuralism as an alternative to survival of the fittest in governing the form of species.

It turns out that D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson is a University of Dundee alumnus, where Chris Reed works on argumentation software.