Annotated Philosophy and Theory of Design List
Sakol Teeravarunyou, Peter K. Storkerson, Chujit Jeamsinkul, Napawan Sawasdichai · Visible Language · 2002
1 Abductive Inference - Computation, Philosophy,Technology Josephson, John R. and Josephson, Susan G. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 Based on the work of the logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-- 1914), the authors develop abductive inference. In informal terms, abductive reasoning involves inferring the best or most plausible explanation from a given set of facts or data.The authors argue that knowledge arises from experience by processes of abductive inference in contrast to the view that it arises non-inferentially or that deduction and inductive generalization are enough to account for knowledge. Confidence in an abductive conclusion depends on how decisively the best explanation surpasses the alternatives. Abductive inference is a procedure: collect knowledge from data, match hypothesis, classify and assemble hypothesis. The authors discriminate qualitatively among hypotheses as: belief, guess, potential explanation, explanatorily useless and unbelievable. A common occurrence in everyday life, it is present in such diverse areas as medical diagnosis, scientific theory formation, accident investigation, language understanding and jury deliberation. The artificial intelligence community has found abduction to be a fruitful research topic. Much Al research is hypothetical so part of the importance of this book is that it reports key discoveries about abduction that have been made as a result of designing, building, testing and analyzing actual working knowledge-based systems for medical diagnosis and other abductive tasks. The book tells the story of six generations of increasingly sophisticated generic abduction machines.The final chapter argues that perception is logically abductive and presents a layered-abduction computational model of perceptual information processing.This book will be of great interest to researchers in Al, cognitive science and philosophy of science. Sakol Teeravarunyou 2 Autopoiesis and Cognition:The Realization of the Living Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1980 Autopoiesis and Cognition is the most fundamental, clear and direct explication of constructivism available. It follows Piaget's psychology. The thesis is that organism's cognitive systems construct the world around them according to their sensory systems. Such organisms operate by actively seeking homeostasis or equilibrium, and alter their interna structure (adapt) according to internal disturbances. Those disturbances are the basis of perception, projection of an outside world, and of self-reorganization, cognitive change, learning and development. Autopoiesis develops a general theory of ontology and epistemology for individuals and for social systems. It seeks to radically solve problems of truth and knowledge in terms of evolutionary elaboration and pragmatism. For example, meaning is not problematic among participants. It becomes problematic for observers, those who do not share the common context. The theory is of development and discovery as creative processes. Knowledge is always synthetic - it is constructed by the organism. Thus, knowledge is a historic product. But, because it is based on common neural and physiologic structures, it-is not merely culturally relative,but embedded in cognitive structure.This view is called 'critical constructivism.'It underlies Piaget,Vygotsky, and Michael Mahoney, among others. It links cognitivism, Peircian semiotics, symbolic interactionism,and ethnomethodology. Peter Storkerson 3 Communication, Action and Meaning: The Creation of Social Realities Pearce, W. Barnett New York: Praeger, 1980 Pearce starts from: 1) the paradox of recursion that results from stepwise thought and its unintended consequences, e.g.,All cretans are liars and I am a cretan.Therefore, I am a liar,and, 2) from Suzanne Langer's formulation of Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. …