Wouldn't a 3D script/alphabet kind of release us from restrictions inherent in 2D scripts? — TheMadFool

I would question your presumption that extra dimensions would increase the information content of a message. Instead it works the other way round.

A code gains power by a constraint on dimensionality. DNA, neurones, speech and computation show that by the way they reduce syntactical structure to a one dimensional sequence of zero dimensional bits.

You can't get more minimal than binary code - a mark and its absence. Yet in representing the least amount of physics, it has the fewest limits when it comes to encoding physical states.

One has to step outside the world that one wants to describe. So reducing representation towards zero dimensionality is the natural trend, not seeking to increase it so that the message has to physically occupy more of the world.

As usual with pragmatism, the proof is in the pudding. The right ideas measurably work.

Did you have some other criteria in mind?

You might have missed it, but the Metaphysical hypothesis of Peircean semiotics is that existence is explained as "the general growth of reasonableness".

So epistemology is ontology. The triadic sign relation explains the development of the Cosmos as well as accounting for the human observer.

You lost me round about where we have to embrace the logic of solipsisms, regressions and the necessity of relations, but then beware of falling metaphysically into precisely the same triad.

Shome mishtake shurely?

So you accept the irreducible triadicity of relations ... and now want to change the subject. Sweet.

I just think your confidence is unwarranted as your theory isn't sufficient. — darthbarracuda

Again, just show how a relation can be reduced to less than three parts even under reductionism. So far you have failed to make your case.

So then describe to me how a relation could involve less that three different component parts or aspects. And in particular, a hierarchical relation.

Sure you can count three things. But none of these things are the same thing, nor can exist without the other two. So your reply is pretty flippant.

Physics gives us different intuitive ways of imagining parts. What do you think is different when you switch from a mental image of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum field excitations?

At least I know who Pattee agrees with.

I don't have to defend theistic versions of naturalistic metaphysics. But sure, the good would equate to notions of balance, equilbrium and optimality. Good is what works best to achieve the long run aim of a self-sustaining structure of flow.

And while you say the one was talking about a oneness of quality, that quality was still being quantified in a way that justified it as special.

If everything else is counted in terms of "many", then being counted as "one" is clearly an argument for how the one is to be measurably distinguished.

Again, it is simply a requirement of intelligibility that we form ideas of qualities in terms of quantities we might measure. The two aspects of epistemology go together automatically. The question then becomes, is this also the way we find reality to be organised?

So YOU can only understand a relation as another part. Yet how many things must you have to have a relation? I count a minimum of three ... even for the reductionist.

And if the job is to reduce complexity to something, surely it is simplicity. And the triadic modelling relation is the simplest possible story. Less than three things makes no sense in an ontology founded on dynamical relations.

What Pattee does, is take this right back to the most primitive form of messaging, molecular switching, and claims that this switching must have come into existence within the context of a pre-existing "language" — Metaphysician Undercover

You have it back to front. The primitive condition would have to be some kind of self activating network of connections - like an autocatalytic network.

So the point is that it would start with an accidental physical situation - like an ocean floor geothermal vent reducing sulphur in a biochemical series of steps. And then the physics would happen also to represent a simplest form of computational network - one that naturally generates cycling patterns that connect end states back to inputs.

In this pansemiotic fashion, the separate realms of Platonic form and material dynamics would be accidentally connected, the blue touch paper on biological development would be lit, and the rest becomes history.

So a language - in the sense Pattee employs - is about this happy conjunction of symbol and matter. The precondition is that computation is a form always in waiting. And that likewise, materiality could be patterned enough to accept yet further restrictions on its degrees of freedom.

So material dynamics is already organised by nature to run down biochemical gradients. But it then takes the addition of negentropic information - computational mechanism - to keep returning a cycle to its initial conditions, ready to repeat.

These conclusion, again, makes quality metaphysically prior to quantity — javra

Not really. It makes possibility prior to actuality. And if you then give pure possibility a name like Apeiron, you seem to be pointing to a quality - and saying I count just one of these.

That's why Plotinus did call his version "the one". The quality was named after its quantity, as it seemed it's most essential characteristic to him - the undivided that logically must stand at the end of a trail of divisions.

I know you call the relation irreducibly complex and triadic, but this means that existence is not basic, that there is "something more", "below" existence, that makes up the relation. A relation without parts makes no sense. — darthbarracuda

But that is just immediately denying the irreducible triadicity that you just cited.

To start searching for the monism that is "beneath"', or to start trying to decompose a relation into parts, is simply to go at a holistic answer in usual pig headed reductionist fashion.

Your complaint is that it is not coherent with your own ontic commitments. And we already know that.

So when you say that existence itself is a modelling relation, this is using an ontic phenomenon to explain all ontic phenomenons. It's just ontic all the way down. That doesn't make sense. — darthbarracuda

It doesn't make reductionist sense you mean. So ... great!

You have a lot more in common with speculative realism than you might think. — darthbarracuda

Well if Aristotle, Peirce, systems science, etc, hadn't already figured it out in far more complete fashion, then I guess I might be impressed by speculative realism.

If the apeiron is perfect symmetry, then it—in and of itself--would by definition be a non-quantity. It would thereby also be immeasurable. Despite this, it would yet be qualitatively different than anything non-symmetrical. As I understand it, to the extent that symmetry occurs within space and time, this same non-quantitative quality would also be present within realms of existence. — javra

Yep. A Metaphysical dichotomy like quantity~quality is not an either/or story but about mutually dependent origination. They would be the two complementary faces of a process of symmetry breaking or coming to be.

But then logically, as the grounding symmetry that could beget such a division, the Apeiron, or a state of vagueness, would have to lack both quality and quantity in any definite or actual sense. The Apeiron is the potential for both those things, but cant be considered as iteself one of those things in any determinate fashion.

So on the one hand we want to characterise vagueness in a way that is useful for reasoning. And the maths of symmetry is the obvious way to get started. So we can say the Apeiron has the quality of perfect symmetry ... and hey, the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking then allows us to talk about the degrees of any departure from that symmetry state. So in fact by talking of the quality of perfect symmetry, we also bring with that the tools to make justifiable measurements.

It's a negative space or constraints based argument. We define perfection in terms of the observable absence of imperfection. But it does mean that we can treat the Apeiron as a quality which we know how to quantify.

You are a funny one. Let me know when you realise that the only way out of a state of deep ignorance is to get reading.

Measurement is experience. But it grows in rational sophistication as we go from the firstness of naming some brute quality - exclaiming "I see red" - to the thirdness of some habit like reading numbers off the dial of an instrument.

Ontic investigations are inherently tied to a human-world relation. But surely the human-world relation is "not all there is". Surely we must go "beyond" the human-world interaction and investigate what the world is actually like independent of perceivers, — darthbarracuda

Well remember that Peircean pragmatism is distinguished by the fact that it does indeed generalise the notion of the perceived. So existence itself becomes a modelling relation - a kind of pansemiotic state of mind.

So pansemiosis is the ontic argument that there is no such thing as "unperceived existence". And thus it fits with quantum physics and it's demand for "someone" to collapse the wavefunction.

So your natural presumption - the standard reductionist position - is that reality could be observer independent. Acts of measurement don't disturb what they claim to exist.

But Peircean metaphysics says all that can happen is a separation of indeterminate possibility towards the complementary poles of the observer and the observables - the interpretation and its sign. It is a very different ontology.

And the proof of which ontology is right is in how fundamental science is turning out. Observeless worlds don't make much sense.

Given you admit you don't understand the first thing about holism or hierarchy theory, you show surprising confidence in your scattergun replies then.

Or say we want to study the aesthetic under scientific means. In order to even study the aesthetic, we have to know what the hell the aesthetic even is. Thus ontology is fundamentally necessary to any other mode of inquiry. Attempting to do ontology purely by empirical means would be an exercise in wastefulness and tedium - surely it's conceivably possible, but practically impossible. — darthbarracuda

But really, you make my point. We don't know what the aesthetic is unless we have some concept that seems measurable. It is airy fairy meaningless talk until we can at least do something as primitively quantitative as point at a Picasso and exclaim that's what I'm talking about.

So the ontic commitment is to counterfactual definiteness in fact. One has to be able to say that this is a particular instance of that general idea.

Thus conception is inherently empirical. Unless an idea can be cashed out in an act of measurement, we would have to ascribe to it the dismal status of being an idea that is "not even wrong".

I'd just clarify that it's a matter of dynamic organization. — Terrapin Station

I think you miss the holist point that emergence proper is about the emergence of new global boundary conditions that don't interact dynamically but act hierarchically.

So the reductionist just imagines a blur of parts in interaction and - somehow - an organisation emerges.

But holism says emergence is about dynamism becoming isolated by becoming stretched across different spatiotemporal scales. So the higher level order effectively "freezes out" from the point of view of the lower level dynamics. It becomes the stability creating ambience or backdrop - the boundary conditions, as I say.

Or, alternatively, we could just go the Deleuzean route and call philosophy the study and assimilation of concepts. — darthbarracuda

The problem with this is that even concepts make no real sense except when defined in ways that permit acts of measurement. Or in Peircean terms, you can't have habits of interpretance if you can't recognise the signs that are the subject of interpretation.

So it all keeps coming back to the "scientific method of reasoning". Or the modelling relation. We conceive of qualities. But that only makes sense if we are able to carry out acts of quantification. There is no such thing as a quality that can't be quantified. And so empiricism - for some reason much derided - is basic to philosophical thought. You can't talk intelligibly about the general if you can't successfully point to its proper instances.

It seems that the parts and their organization must exhaust what constitutes the whole, and therefore are equivalent to the whole. — Real Gone Cat

Yep. Even a trivial version of the argument says you have to add the further thing of "the organisation". Summing the parts ain't enough.

And I note you just avoid my point that proper holism stresses the way wholes shape their parts to make them the right stuff.

Wholes have the causal power of constraint or limitation. It is what the organisation can subtract by way of local degrees of freedom that needs to be part of your Metaphysical maths.

Vagueness is in the messages, not in the language itself, which pre-exists the messages. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not exactly. The physical constraints that might in retrospect be recognised as the "primeval ecosystem" can be "crisply informational" for purely accidental reasons. So in the beginning there is spontaneity and contingency. Later develops the regularity of a habit whereby a system of symbols takes on some necessary interpretation.

So - remembering that we are talking about the development of the coding side of the biosemiotic relation - the syntax might seem physically definite in the primeval condition, but the semantics is still maximally contingent. And being uncertain or indeterminate, that makes it spontaneous or vague.

Although vagueness proper speaks to the primeval conditions of the whole semiotic relation of course - both code and dynamics.

In making this type of analogy you must be sure to maintain a proper temporal order so as not to confuse cause with effect. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. Hence my point that it is only in retrospective fashion that we see "accidents" in terms of "necessities".

As we have discussed before, finality acts retrocausally from the future. It is the principle that determines in the long run exactly what are the necessary formal regularities of nature - its structural attractors - and what remains, even at the end of time, just "accidents. Contingencies which continue to be ignorable as they are differences that never make a difference.

So the messaging system comes into existence, and is formed in such a way as to fulfill the requirements of the pre-existing language, but what the child learns is rules which are derived from messaging system. The former is truly prescriptive, while the latter is descriptive. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. You are missing the point again.

What comes first is a vague state of semiotic relations. So chimps grunting in contextually meaningful, yet ungrammatical fashion, is at least some kind of messaging system.

And then the relation develops dichotomistically - each side of the equation strengthening in mutually co-arising fashion.

In human language evolution, we have the development by separation into words and rules. The more that speech becomes syntactically divisible, the more speech also becomes syntactically composable. Developing the syntactic habit of adding suffixes allows the development of a wide variety of semantic categories - like a variety of tenses.

So sure, you do have a division into syntax and semantics - or prescription and description, in your jargon. But the two are still aspects of the one developing dichotomy. And this co-evolutionary logic is why an organic systems perspective (such as Pattee's) never fits your own mechanistic understanding of time and causality.

A listing of the parts (the sum of the parts) is a whole no less so than any other arrangement of the parts. And no arrangement carries any more value than any other, accept that the observer chooses to make it so. — Real Gone Cat

It's just not the same thing to list a set of components in a way that leaves out the further fact that is their organisation. Especially when my claim is that the parts rely on such active constraints to even be what they are.

Another familiar illustration of the holistic point is try scooping a swirling eddy out of the river in a bucket. Look in the bucket, and the vortex has gone. Proof it only existed as a local feature in a living context.

So you are arguing from a point of view that the whole of nature is composed of substantial entities. And modern physics shows how every such thing is simply the local feature of a dissipative process - an excititation in a field, as they say.

what exactly is meant by the phrase "the sum of the parts"? Is it a listing of the parts as I've suggested, or something else? — Real Gone Cat

No, its not a listing of entities in fact. It is the claim that causality can be reduced to bottom-up construction - a tale of efficient/material causes. So the summing is about the way simple things can construct complex things in purely additive fashion. And then - so this reductionist view goes - you get secondary emergent states with their own properties when there is so much of some stuff that it undergoes a further phase transition. So get enough water molecules at the right temperature and pressure and - voila - liquidity pops out.

But true holism is arguing something much stronger than mere emergentism.

Emergence is already saying the organisation that emerges is more than what can be found in the parts themselves. But my kind of systems holism says wholes - representing mathematical forms and entropic purposes - actually reach down to shape the materiality by which their existence can gain crisp expression.

So even reductionists have their (semi-mystical) notions about emergence (which they try to sooth away by switching to talk about supervenience).

I'm happy to argue the way more radical holism of a systems thinker where there just couldn't even be a cosmos without the limitations that formal and final cause are able to impose on vague material potential.

Aristotle's hylomorphism is essentially correct when understood through the lens of modern symmetry breaking maths. (Ie: the premise behind the latest metaphysical bandwagon of ontic structural realism.)

Now the aphorism is not entirely without meaning - when properly understood. It actually means, "One arrangement is valued above other arrangements." — Real Gone Cat

So you are basically trying to apply a set theoretic point of view - and set theory is famously deficient in being able to account for the rules by which collections could be considered meaningful.

To value some arrangement over other arrangements is to add some rule that gives the collection meaning. So again the whole is more than the sum of its parts. You have your chosen collection in a bag tied up with a bow - and then the further thing of "its value".

Again essence has escaped your attempts at reduction. Again you have ended up with value (or final cause) made a property of the human observer and not a fact accounted for as part of the observable.

Magicians call this misdirection. The hand is quicker than the eye. Reductionists employ the same trick all the time ... on themselves, without realising it. One minute they are talking about explaining the meaning of a collection, the next, they are just pointing to a collection.

I would be glad to know how a naturalist approach might enable philosophy to deal with subjects for which the scientific method seems to me wide of the mark like aesthetics, ethics, politics and meta-science. — mcdoodle

In keeping with the OP, I am dealing with the meta-theoretic level issues. And you don't seem "glad" at all. ;)

So it should be clear that I am talking about the "scientific method" from the perspective of a Peircean semiotician and systems thinker. I am sure that you are thinking of scientific inquiry in terms of analytic or reductionist traditions where a full "four causes" approach is normally rejected.

Reductionism only wants to concern itself with the modelling of material and efficient cause (as formal and final cause is "naturally" eschewed, being what self-interested human modellers want to freely bring to the table themselves). But pragmatism - in treating formal and final cause as real, fully part of nature - has a way of putting human modellers in their proper place.

So there is not a lot of point attacking me for the sins of reductionist Scientism when I am in fact a natural philosopher in the four causes Aristotelean tradition.

I just came here from listening to some (bracing !) Schoenberg: there is a kind of knowledge, for example, in the way those notes are constructed and sung played. Perhaps there is in the spirituality Wayfarer is interested in too, or in love between people. — mcdoodle

The usual move - trying to suggest the "scientist" is somehow deficient in spirit, unable to enjoy life like a regular person.

The tropes of Romanticism are perfectly familiar. The issue is getting folk like yourself to actually question the grounds of such beliefs.

But of course rejecting analysis absolves one of the need to ever respond to a demand for actual intelligibility. Catch 22, or the escape via mystical paradox.

The issue is, where does this primeval ecosystem come from, within which the switching systems can emerge, — Metaphysician Undercover

Hate to say it, but Pattee is just talking about the necessity of vague beginnings. Where you have the "mystery" of a dichotomy - in this case, the abiogenetic chicken and egg question of which came first, genetic codes or metabolic processes - then the riddle has to be solved using a logic of vagueness.

So the argument is that the primeval "ecosystem language" (and note Pattee is talking specifically about the code half of the dichotomy here) would have condensed out of vaguer, analog, conditions in the same way that the formal grammar that (used to be) taught every kid in school is a "written down" distillation or idealisation of the more informal habits to be found in spoken language.

So Pattee is simply making the usual argument. Where we find a sharply dichotomised reality, we can then know that it could only have developed out of a vaguer version of itself. And if we reverse a history of symmetry breaking, logic says we arrive back at a state of perfect symmetry - a vagueness, a firstness, an apeiron.

Thus to the Chinese speaker, the whole (the arrangement of the brush strokes) may be greater (carry more information) than the parts (the brush strokes themselves). But to the English speaker ...?

Saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts" has poetic value, but is not technically correct. — Real Gone Cat

But your own argument just showed that the whole has meaning, the parts are meaningless. So the whole has something more (unless you can show how meaning arises purely by the summation of brushstrokes such that an English speaker can understand Chinese by that method).

As a general example, analytic philosophy about aesthetics often seems risible to me, trying to utilise pseudo-scientific or quasi-logical concepts to describe facets of human life that need a different broader faculty of understanding. In what way can a scientising philosophy march on into these areas? — mcdoodle

But doesn't the "scientific" or "analytic" approach to nature have the advantage of being suitably modest? At least under the pragmatic or modelling relations approach to intelligibility, there is a clear demarcation between what the models can and can't achieve by way of "explaining things".

So it is understood, for example, that explanatory ambitions must be limited by the exhaustion of counterfactuality. You can't explain the ineffable redness of red, or the fundamental absurdity of existence, if there is no counterfactual observation to justify some theory.

And theory, on the whole, relies on the informality of acts of measurement. So the model can be completely formalised - the world can be described in terms of a closed tale of causal entailment. But measuring the values to plug into the equations always involves a free choice by the observer. Quantum mechanics merely illustrates how real this issue is in general for science.

Likewise pragmatism in particular stresses that modelling also includes the modeller's purpose. So that is another active limitation on "explanatory completeness".

Thus being a "scientist" involves great epistemic humility. It means understanding the limits of knowledge and developing a method of inquiry accordingly.

And it is because pragmatism doesn't fudge things that it can then inquire into any natural phenomenon with great confidence.

Say what you like about those Continentals, but quite a few of them know how to talk about poetry and symphonies. — mcdoodle

It might be useful to consider the standard tropes by which continentalism operates.

A primary one is an attempt to use the principle tool of intelligible analysis - the dialectic - against itself. So the continental strives to show that dichotomies are paradoxes and such reasonings are circular.

Metaphysical analysis aims to discover nature's dichotomous limits. Pure possibility is separated into its "otherness". So if flux is one extreme of possibility, then stasis is its other. And so on through all the familiar categories of nature.

And then dichotomies give rise to hierarchies as the divided then mix. So the logic of nature is hierarchical - not circular, chasing its tail on a single scale of being, but itself dichotomised into the whole and the part, the global and the local, the constraints and the freedoms.

So proper scientific naturalism (which recognises all four Aristotelean causes) has its ur-model of intelligibility. Dialectical reasoning works because existence is shaped by the self-organising logic of dichotomies and hierarchies.

And then along comes Continentalism which attempts to establish itself by twisting this naturalism to say its very opposite.

So now every dichotomy must be turned into a paradox. The continentalist says look, we have two contradictory things - like flux vs stasis. Well which is it going to be? And if it must be both, well then nature is fundamentally "unintelligible".

Likewise the continentalist seeks to make a muddle out of the hierarchical outcomes that result from dichotomies reaching equilibrium balances (that is, the broken symmetries being equilibrated by being fully broken over all possible scales of being).

The continentalist - citing Marxism or political correctness - wants to reject hierarchy as a political choice. It is just not right that power structures could be natural. It is only democratic that all existence is on the same level. Fluid networks of relations are fine, but concrete hierarchical order is coercive and abhorrent.

So there is no coincidence that continentalism chooses the play of paradox and the virtue of relativism as two principle tools of argument. If the pragmatic/analytic approach is managing to explain the world in terms of the rational inevitability of dichotomies and hierarchies, continentalism has to define itself as the unintelligible "other" to that.

So in Bizarro world fashion, continentalism exists in a way that simply only confirms what it seeks to deny. Dichotomies and hierarchies are what make rational sense of nature. Paradox and relativism then become the natural tools when mounting Romanticism's inevitable riposte to the triumph of Enlightenment reasoning.

If you are not onboard the pragmatic/analytic juggernaut, it is essential to create the fiction that dialectical metaphysics leads to mystification rather than intelligibility. It is the only way to seize back cultural control of the conversation.

I may try to demonstrate this on any example you will choose. — miosim

Great. Start with consciousness.

In that article, I see "switches" spoken of, which are just parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what shapes a switch? Is binary logic "real" in your book? (I say yes - as real as any physical circuitry it engenders.)

Where is this background environment of "language" supposed to have come from, God? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, not God. That would be stupid.

I highly suspect it is wrong and I don't particularly believe it, but only because I doubt that such a truly holistic scientism would even be possible to attain (the idea of achieving such a feat would be literally supra-human). However it does raise the question as to what makes something "philosophical" and what does not, and asks us to consider the nature of and relationship between science and philosophy. — darthbarracuda

At the core of philosophy is the assumption that nature is intelligible. Rational inquiry can thus produce some kind of answer.

But from there, you get a major divergence. The very position that nature is intelligible leads "philosophically" - by the same dialectic method - to the counter position that existence is fundamentally irrational. Or contingent. Or whatever else is the rationally contradictory position that could be thus put forward as the stark alternative.

So I think the accurate way to understand philosophy is as a pragmatic core - the broadly scientific method of reasoning described by Peirce - surrounded by its flotilla of splinter projects, the various "reactions" that the stately advance of that core engenders.

So yes. The core can aim at its "truly holistic scientism". And all the reactions to that core can remain part of philosophy to the extent which they are properly engaged as reactions. In that way, philosophy can be both a broad church and a productive trajectory of inquiry.

I think you want a more mechanistic definition - one that rules the wrong stuff out. But I would prefer an organic approach that only cares about the general "growth of reasonableness" in human models of existence.

The only way information can be represented are by parts, no? — darthbarracuda

http://www.academia.edu/863859/How_does_a_molecule_become_a_message

Again - for the nth time - the how is explained semiotically,

Wholes carry the memory or information. Life and mind have coding machinery - words, neurons and genes, principally - that are "physical stuff", and yet not physical in the ordinary way. Information - states of constraint - can be represented symbolically. That is, in a way that is not subject to the usual dictates of entropification but instead which can swim in the opposite direction, upstream or negentropically.

So it is simple to see "the how" of biological, neurological and cultural complexity. There is more going on than just material dynamics. There is also the very different thing of symbolic regulation.

The tricky new thing is pan-semiosis - extending this metaphysics to existence in general. But it is hardly a secret that physics is undergoing its information theoretic revolution.

I mean what do you think an event horizon actually is? Is it matter? Is it information? Or is it really about a habitual relation between these two disjunct aspects of reality?

Change the parts and the system changes. — darthbarracuda

Yep. So that is why a functioning whole needs the power of constraint over its parts. It must limit the freedom or indeterminism of its components to ensure they remain "the right kind of stuff".

We are familiar with this principle in biology and sociology.

Societies fall apart if they don't produce the right kind of people. Bodies fall apart if they don't regulate their cells.

You've got a problem if your skin cells decide to start expressing their genetic potential to be bone, or liver, or heart tissue.

So what are you evidences in favor of emergence? — miosim

I was talking about self-organisation and not merely emergence. And I gave evidence. I said parts "emerge" via holistic constraint in hierarchically organised systems.

So it is not just emergence in the usual sense of new global properties popping out of collective behaviour. Instead it is the argument that global forms and purposes act downwards to limit material possibility in fruitful fashion. The whole simplifies messy reality to shape the very parts that compose it.

I am strongly oppose the ontological emergence and believe that any theory based on emergence is wrong. Therefore I don't see much sense not accept or even discuss the definitions provided by such theory. — miosim

Yep. You gotta stick to what you believe and avoid all evidence to the contrary in this life.

That so even without human involvement. So, what's the issue here? — TheMadFool

This time around, its humans who have to survive it.

...while 'I' am the self organized system. — miosim

So what is "self-organisation"?

In systems theory, it is the limitations that wholes can impose to turn chaos into order, noise into signal. And that is why there is a metaphysical-strength contrast with the parts.

The parts can only construct a state of organisation. The whole has the opposite kind of causality in that it can constrain the state of organisation.

And that is why the whole is greater that the sum of its parts. It represents the other kind of causality involved in creating the kind of organisation we call systematic or purposeful.

Quantum entanglement provides a straight-forward example. What series of observations resulted in the induction of the theory? What was the "surprising observation" that resulted in its abduction? — tom

It is a puzzle that you don't see this as an exemplar of the Peircean account of scientific reasoning.

Schrodinger cites the surprising fact that demands an abductive leap - the EPR paper:

Attention has recently* been called to the obvious but very disconcerting fact
that even though we restrict the disentangling measurements to one system, the
representative obtained for the other system is by no means independent of the
particular choice of observations which we select for that purpose...

And then he offers "entanglement" as his abductive leap to the best retroductive explanation. As Schrodinger says, his hypothesis is based on a holistic or constraints-based take on reality, as opposed to EPR's more conventional deterministic (and nominalistic) metaphysics.

Another way of expressing the peculiar situation is: the best possible knowledge
of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts,
even though they may be entirely separated and therefore virtually capable of
being " best possibly known ", i.e. of possessing, each of them, a representative of
its own. The lack of knowledge is by no means due to the interaction being insufficiently
known—at least not in the way that it could possibly be known more
completely—it is due to the interaction itself.

And then from this abductive leap to a different viewpoint, Schrodinger fleshes out the deductive consequences that might allow inductive corroboration of his position.

So what we have here is a classic example of the scientific imagination at work - there were none better at this than Einstein and Schrodinger.

But there maybe a "mystery" about abduction itself when it is seen in a typical reductionist light as a constructive, and non-creative, mental exercise.

It is indeed a problem how "induction" - of the bit by bit, step by step, variety - could ever get started. But that computational view of generalisation is simply wrong because it depends on a reductionist view of epistemology.

Actual brains work differently - naturally. They operate using a holistic Peircean logic.

So it is no surprise that abduction is not induction in any simple sense. It is instead all about the ability to relax states of constraint, ease up on existing habits of conception, so as to enter a suitable state of vagueness - a state in which the whole of a different story can pop out as a hierarchical symmetry breaking.

Creative thought starts with an inkling that this new generic principle could explain these particular kinds of observable particulars. You suddenly have the right kind of whole in mind. And the test of that is whether it has sturdy enough deductive structure to produce the right kind of inductive measurables.

So - ironically given the OP - Schrodinger's abductive leap regarding entanglement as a hypothesis was a break with the old nomimalistic order.

Einstein was all for retaining local determinism or nominalistic realism at all costs. (Not because he lacked imagination but because it was a principle that had served physics so well for so long - so inductively it ought to hold.)

But Schrodinger was willing to imagine a reality in which wholes are more than their parts because wholes shape their parts. Reality is at base indeterministic or vague. Existence is only crisply actual to the degree it has been collapsed or decohered by the universality of some global form.

Since the shock of quantum mechanics, the whole of physics has got used to thinking about existence in terms of this kind of top-down constraints logic. It is the new normal. Which is why Peirce has really started to catch on as the guy who pretty much got it all before the 20th century got going.