Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: Problems In Philosophy 9 • Richard Saunders

RS:

BTW I’m not sure I really see a distinction between descriptive and normative (prescriptive?) science except in the set of aims, goals, etc. that are entertained.  It might be useful to try to characterize some distinctions in the goals of each.

Re: Problems In Philosophy 10 • Richard Saunders

RS:

Jon, the philosophy of science is all about the aims of science good ways of achieving them.  I’m still not seeing a clear distinction, traditions notwithstanding, between descriptive and normative science.  I do see the recursive entanglement though, and I’m still wondering if we can find common axioms that underlie both.

Dear Richard,

Sue and I will be downing some bubbly and sleeping it off till the dawn’s early light, but Sue was into this Policy-Theory Reunion stuff well before I clued into it, so here’s one of her earlier papers you might find of interest in the interim.

• Scott, David K., and Awbrey, Susan M. (1993), “Transforming Scholarship”, Change : The Magazine of Higher Learning, 25(4), 38–43.  Online (1) (2) (3).

I am still trying to unscramble my brains after the week’s events but I’m surprised to see so much difficulty over the difference between descriptive sciences, the special sciences as Peirce called them, and normative sciences like aesthetics, ethics, and logic.  I deferred to common idiom and conventional wisdom regarding the irreducibility of “Ought” to “Is” but roughly the same dimension and tension is recognized under a legion of names — policy vs. theory, procedural vs. declarative, deontic vs. ontic, and many others.

A pragmatic semiotician’s ears will naturally perk up at reading the word irreducibility above and lead to wondering whether the irreducibility of normative to descriptive has anything to do with the irreducibility of triadic relations to dyadic relations.

To my way of thinking, yes, it does.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Descriptive Science
• Normative Science
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems • Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: Ontolog Forum • David Whitten

DW:

Why does classical tradition or any tradition consider logic to be a normative science?

Dear David,

A science is called that because it deals in knowledge (Latin scientia).  Knowing what is the case in a given domain of experience may be distinguished from knowing what ought to be in a given set of circumstances, and people who think in threes, like Kant and Peirce and me, add knowing what may be hoped to the mix.

In the quest to understand how science works a praxis/pragmatist like myself gives the process, inquiry, equal billing with the product, knowledge.  People have gotten used to seeing sciences as bodies of ostensible knowledge (BOOKs) and taking their analysis as a matter of assigning them distinctive catalogue numbers and sorting them to the indicated library shelves.  That is all well and good but it leaves an all too static impression of science if we settle for that.

Here are capsule summaries on the Sciences of Is and the Sciences of Ought from the Wikiversity articles on Descriptive Science and Normative Science.

Descriptive Science

A descriptive science, or a special science, is a form of inquiry, typically involving a community of inquiry and its accumulated body of provisional knowledge, which seeks to discover what is true about a recognized domain of phenomena.

Normative Science

A normative science is a form of inquiry, typically involving a community of inquiry and its accumulated body of provisional knowledge, which seeks to discover good ways of achieving recognized aims, ends, goals, objectives, or purposes.

The three normative sciences, according to traditional conceptions in philosophy, are aesthetics, ethics, and logic.

Resources

• Inquiry
• Descriptive Science
• Normative Science
• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems • Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: FB | Ecology Of Systems Thinking • Richard Saunders

RS:

Hume’s is/ought dichotomy:  are these as Gould said “non-overlapping magisteria” or are they concentric domains?  Is a science of aesthetics at the core?  If memory serves it seems like that was what Wittgenstein suggested at the end of Tractatus.  In The Moral Landscape, Harris narrows the aesthetic focus to a distinction between the minimum and maximum suffering of all sentient beings.  Maximum suffering is bad or ugly and minimum suffering is good or beautiful.  The relationship of conduct to result is the subject of consequentialism, isn’t it?  Isn’t that also the subject of science?

I know a lot of people see a cut and dried dichotomy here and conventional wit says you can’t derive Ought from Is.  My tracings of the boundaries though tend to find them recursively entangled.

RS:

Recursively entangled is a nice phrase, like the the chicken and the egg.  But I’m still wondering about the catch-22.  On what general axiom is aesthetics/ethics/logic based?  Harris suggests it’s minimizing net suffering.  (That doesn’t imply the elimination of suffering, because some suffering has a net positive result.)

I got no absolutes here.  I have my personal aesthetic, but a personal aesthetic is the moral equivalent of a religion, and folks are pretty free about that.

I’ll have more to say about my personal aesthetic … all in good time.

Resources

• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems • Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics
• Wikiversity • Descriptive Science • Normative Science

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: Ontolog Forum • David Whitten

Dear David,

I’ll extend this post tomorrow, apocalypse permitting, but while I wait for the election returns I’ll post just a pair of links to the Wikiversity articles on Descriptive Science and Normative Science, forked over from the Wikipedia articles as I left them a decade and a half ago.  I have no idea what, if anything exists on Wikipedia itself these days but this much gives the basic ideas in a couple of nutshells.

• Descriptive Science
• Normative Science

Resource

• Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems • Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Re: FB | Charles S. Peirce Society
(a) John Corcoran • Cosmic Justice Hypotheses
(b) John Corcoran • The Inseparability of Logic and Ethics

Peirce emphasized the intricate relationships among the Big Three Normative Sciences — Aesthetics, Ethics, Logic — a topic early and often discussed in the secondary literature and on the Peirce List.  One might also compare Theodore Parker’s well-known thesis:

Questions about the interdependence of the principal normative sciences — Aesthetics, Ethics, Logic — just came up on another blog and prompted me to go looking for some of my earlier grapplings with the subject.  There’s an initial fragment of that harvest in the following post.

• Problems In Philosophy • 6

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science

Another one of those recurring questions I’m constantly forgetting what I wrote about or where before just came up again on the Gödel’s Lost Letter blog.

Re: R.J. Lipton and K.W. Regan • The Night Of The Ethical Algorithm

Classical tradition views logic as a normative science, one whose object is truth.  This puts logic on a par with ethics, whose object is justice or morality in action, and aesthetics, whose object is beauty or the admirable for its own sake.

The pragmatic spin on this line of thinking treats logic, ethics, aesthetics as a concentric series of normative sciences, each a subdiscipline of the next.  Logic tells us how we ought to conduct our reasoning in order to achieve the goals of reasoning in general.  Thus logic is a special case of ethics.  Ethics tells us how we ought to conduct our activities in general in order to achieve the good appropriate to each enterprise.  What makes the difference between a normative science and a prescriptive dogma is whether this telling is based on actual inquiry into the relationship of conduct to result, or not.

Here’s a bit I wrote on this a long time ago in a galaxy not far away —

• Logic, Ethics, Aesthetics

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Peirce List • Structural Modeling • Systems Science