A. Isaac writes on Suppes.
Here, a commentary.
Isaac writes:
"The facts of Patrick [Colonel] Suppes’ career read like tall-tales of some 17th century polymath."
"In addition to philosophy, Suppes held appointments in psychology, education, and statistics."
"Suppes also made major contributions in the foundations of physics, linguistics, and the social sciences."
And he wrote brilliantly on H. P. Grice for the P. G. R. I. C. E. festschrift ("Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends.").
The essay is entitled "The primacy of utterer's meaning" and quotes from Chomsky, Yu, and Biro, only to criticize them and defend the Griceian view.
Isaac goes on:
"Although best known in philosophy for his work on philosophy of science, Suppes wrote on topics as diverse as free will, liberty, meaning in poetry, corporal punishment, hylomorphism, and virtue ethics.[1]"
Not to mention MY favourite topice, affine and congruent geometry of utterer's meaning!
"Suppes was also an entrepreneur, using the business of education—he taught with computers as soon as there were computers, and the internet as soon as there was an internet—to gather data for the science of education."
Grice didn't. He never understood why his spell-check could not have 'pirot' or 'sticky wicket'.
"Suppes occupied the same office in Ventura Hall for 60 years, eventually taking over the entire building, filling it with his collaborators."
Grice occupied a smaller room across the bay ("Hands across the bay"), plus a Colonial mansion overlooking the bay (on Keeler Ave.) that Suppes would visit.
"When university expansion threatened it, Suppes had Ventura Hall physically relocated rather than vacate."
"When the (Suppes founded) Stanford Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) Online High School took off, there was no longer room for all his collaborators, so he turned architect and designed Nora Suppes Hall next door to house the OHS."
"In the 2000s much of Ventura Hall was dedicated to Suppes’s quest to understand computation in the brain."
Meanwhile, Haugeland was proceeding along Griceian lines to criticize what Haugeland saw as some kind of reductionism.
"Suppes's project combined physics (physically modeling the impedance of the skull), engineering (he was on the committee of a PhD student who designed new skull contacts for EEG recording), statistics (literally years of subtle data analysis), the psychology of language (developing associationistic semantic models), and, of course, methodology (including an epic defense of the theoretical importance of invariants across EEG and perceptual data.[2]"
The field of 'philosophy of language' of course interacts with 'associationistic semantic models'. -- Grice may have heard about them when he gave the Kant lectures at Stanford in 1977 -- cfr. Moravsik.
"By 2012, Suppes had embarked on an ambitious new project to collect EEG signals from couples in therapy, with an eye toward understanding the neuroscience of “insight.”"
"Suppes’ bibliography includes almost 500 articles and books, averaging 7 per year throughout the 2000s and 4 per year through the 2010s."
The Grice Club's favourite being "The primacy of utterer's meaning", in P. G. R. I. C. E. Suppes quotes from Chomsky's "Reflections on language" (Suppes dislikes Chomsky's sloppy treatment of Grice's detailed argument in the "Foundations of Language" essay), Yu (in "Philosophy and Linguistics", and Yu's tirade for 'literal meaning') and most philosophically of all, Biro's critique of intentionalism in "The Monist". As it happens, Biro responded to Suppes.
"Suppes's last single-author, peer-reviewed paper appeared in 2014 in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology and proved the conceptual independence of our qualitative notions of probability, uncertainty, and probabilistic independence—demonstrating that no one can be defined in terms of the other two."
Isaac: "Whether this result turns out to be significant or not (opinions were divided when Suppes presented it informally to peers at Stanford), it shows Suppes’s commitment until the end to the methods he became known for: the characterization of basic concepts with qualitative axioms, and the proof of precise results about them."
"Suppes is probably best known in contemporary philosophy for initiating the “semantic” approach in philosophy of science with two seminal papers from 1960."
"On the canonical interpretation, the semantic view identifies scientific theories with the models that satisfy them, where “model” is understood in the logical sense of set-theoretic structure."
The idea of 'model' relates to that of Max Black.
"As the influence of the logical positivists has waned, formal methods in philosophy have fallen out of favor, and philosophers of science have turned from physics to BIOLOGY for paradigmatic examples, Suppes has grown to represent an archaic and confused age."
As he shouldn't, of course! -- but then I think his initial education was in physics rather than philosophy?
Isaac:
"Models in science are not set-theoretical."
"Logical proofs tell us nothing about scientific practice."
"And metaphysics must not be sacrificed behind a smokescreen of empty formalisms!"
------ Suppes might, but then again might not, had Grice's and George Myro's formalisms in mind here. Grice always said that if he moved from the city of dreaming spires (Oxford) to Berkeley (where Empire strikes its way) was the need of a more formal approach to thing.
Grice was fascinated by Bay-Area formalists like Benson Mates, and later, George Myro ("Rudiments of Logic"), and he designed a system or two to prove this. Famously, System Q, in honour of Quine, that Myro later relabeled System G ('in gratitude to Grice').
Isaac goes on:
"This popular reading of Suppes and his project misses its aims, its pedigree, and, perhaps also, its value."
"Suppes is typically read as a half-hearted reaction against (or even within) logical positivism."
-- and perhaps R. B. Jones should sympathise here! (vide KEYWORD: POSITIVISM, in Jones/Speranza, "Carnap/Grice").
"Suppes accepted its general project (the formalization of the epistemic question of how observation relates to theory through the techniques of logic), while merely rejecting its strict adherence to first- order languages."
O. T. O. H., Grice was frightened by higher order languages, and he devised a bootstrap to get rid of them ("Do not include in the metalanguage anything that you can't describe in the object-language, so to avoid problems for the morrow. More simply: pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.")
Isaac:
"Yet, Suppes’ project had independent motivation as a development of the pragmatist tradition he inherited from William James via John Dewey and Morris Cohen, advisors to his own advisor Ernest Nagel."
Oddly, I like to believe that if Grice cared to write his "Meaning", it was because he was teaching his undergraduates the rudiments of the krypto-technical, as he calls it, pragmatics of Peirce. "Who needs symbols, indexes and signs when English has that lovely euphonic verb, 'to mean'?").
Isaac goes on:
"Suppes’ pragmatism shaped his project in two ways."
"First, it drove him to reject the very possibility of the logical positivist program succeeding in its strong form."
Carnap has a paper on pragmatics that might relate, as Jones might testify.
"Suppes believed that actual, day-to-day scientific practice (whether in the lab, or at the blackboard) is too nuanced and complex to convey in language—apprenticeship is essentially required in order to gain expertise in science. Or indeed any complex activity: here Suppes loved to draw comparisons to tennis and shoe-making, and to lambast the possibility of axiomatizing those activities, or treating them in a “detailed” formal manner."
The same point is argued for in "The primacy of utterer's meaning": utterer's meaning is too complex to try to provide a 'model' for, since the idiosyncrasies of the utterer convey too many variables to bother!
"If science in the lab cannot be formalized, then no amount of formal analysis can bridge the gap between observation and theory."
"On the canonical interpretation, the semantic view identifies scientific theories with the models that satisfy them, where “model” is understood in the logical sense of set-theoretic structure."
The idea of 'model' relates to that of Max Black.
"As the influence of the logical positivists has waned, formal methods in philosophy have fallen out of favor, and philosophers of science have turned from physics to BIOLOGY for paradigmatic examples, Suppes has grown to represent an archaic and confused age."
As he shouldn't, of course! -- but then I think his initial education was in physics rather than philosophy?
Isaac:
"Models in science are not set-theoretical."
"Logical proofs tell us nothing about scientific practice."
"And metaphysics must not be sacrificed behind a smokescreen of empty formalisms!"
------ Suppes might, but then again might not, had Grice's and George Myro's formalisms in mind here. Grice always said that if he moved from the city of dreaming spires (Oxford) to Berkeley (where Empire strikes its way) was the need of a more formal approach to thing.
Grice was fascinated by Bay-Area formalists like Benson Mates, and later, George Myro ("Rudiments of Logic"), and he designed a system or two to prove this. Famously, System Q, in honour of Quine, that Myro later relabeled System G ('in gratitude to Grice').
Isaac goes on:
"This popular reading of Suppes and his project misses its aims, its pedigree, and, perhaps also, its value."
"Suppes is typically read as a half-hearted reaction against (or even within) logical positivism."
-- and perhaps R. B. Jones should sympathise here! (vide KEYWORD: POSITIVISM, in Jones/Speranza, "Carnap/Grice").
"Suppes accepted its general project (the formalization of the epistemic question of how observation relates to theory through the techniques of logic), while merely rejecting its strict adherence to first- order languages."
O. T. O. H., Grice was frightened by higher order languages, and he devised a bootstrap to get rid of them ("Do not include in the metalanguage anything that you can't describe in the object-language, so to avoid problems for the morrow. More simply: pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.")
Isaac:
"Yet, Suppes’ project had independent motivation as a development of the pragmatist tradition he inherited from William James via John Dewey and Morris Cohen, advisors to his own advisor Ernest Nagel."
Oddly, I like to believe that if Grice cared to write his "Meaning", it was because he was teaching his undergraduates the rudiments of the krypto-technical, as he calls it, pragmatics of Peirce. "Who needs symbols, indexes and signs when English has that lovely euphonic verb, 'to mean'?").
Isaac goes on:
"Suppes’ pragmatism shaped his project in two ways."
"First, it drove him to reject the very possibility of the logical positivist program succeeding in its strong form."
Carnap has a paper on pragmatics that might relate, as Jones might testify.
"Suppes believed that actual, day-to-day scientific practice (whether in the lab, or at the blackboard) is too nuanced and complex to convey in language—apprenticeship is essentially required in order to gain expertise in science. Or indeed any complex activity: here Suppes loved to draw comparisons to tennis and shoe-making, and to lambast the possibility of axiomatizing those activities, or treating them in a “detailed” formal manner."
The same point is argued for in "The primacy of utterer's meaning": utterer's meaning is too complex to try to provide a 'model' for, since the idiosyncrasies of the utterer convey too many variables to bother!
"If science in the lab cannot be formalized, then no amount of formal analysis can bridge the gap between observation and theory."
"Here also, Suppes practiced what he preached throughout his career."
"Those who were sucked into his projects in Ventura Hall received close hands-on training—their regular meetings with him amounting to apprenticeship in the old style."
"This extended even to philosophy: for instance, Suppes organized a reading group on topics of his active research for his graduate students, and roped us into designing philosophy courses for the EPGY Online High School, developing their contents in close collaboration with him."
"Those who were sucked into his projects in Ventura Hall received close hands-on training—their regular meetings with him amounting to apprenticeship in the old style."
"This extended even to philosophy: for instance, Suppes organized a reading group on topics of his active research for his graduate students, and roped us into designing philosophy courses for the EPGY Online High School, developing their contents in close collaboration with him."
"So, criticisms of Suppes’ project as insufficiently sensitive to actual scientific practice misconstrue it in the extreme. "
"The problem here was Suppes’ own reticence. "
"Recognizing the subtlety of day-to-day scientific practice, he stayed silent on it in most of his publications."
"His understanding of apprenticeship, and the vast chasm between his formal project and the nuance of actual practice, has only been made known to those outside his circle of acquaintance very recently in the form of numerous informal interviews."
"But if Suppes’s formal project is not meant to connect theory to observation (as 1962’s admonishment to examine the relationship between models of theory and “models of data” has often been interpreted), what was its point?"
"One interpretation might be conceptual clarification—and here the second strand of Suppes’ pragmatism shows itself."
And recall: Clarity is not enough: Lewis's caveat against 'conceptual analysis' of the type Grice practiced.
"The problem here was Suppes’ own reticence. "
"Recognizing the subtlety of day-to-day scientific practice, he stayed silent on it in most of his publications."
"His understanding of apprenticeship, and the vast chasm between his formal project and the nuance of actual practice, has only been made known to those outside his circle of acquaintance very recently in the form of numerous informal interviews."
"But if Suppes’s formal project is not meant to connect theory to observation (as 1962’s admonishment to examine the relationship between models of theory and “models of data” has often been interpreted), what was its point?"
"One interpretation might be conceptual clarification—and here the second strand of Suppes’ pragmatism shows itself."
And recall: Clarity is not enough: Lewis's caveat against 'conceptual analysis' of the type Grice practiced.
"Most of Suppes’s actual work with models of theories consists in proofs of representation theorems."
"A representation theorem shows that all models of a theory are equivalent to some model in a distinguished subset, e.g. that any finite automaton may be represented by a stimulus-response model.)"
"In his magnum opus, Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures, 2002, Suppes argues that one of the points of representation is “improving our understanding of the object represented” (just as blueprints help us to better understand the layout of a building) and claims “the formal or mathematical theory of representation has as its primary goal an enrichment of the understanding.”"
"Showing that two apparently distinct concepts (as translated into some precise form, e.g. sets of axioms or set-theoretical structures) are in a precise sense “the same” (through a representation theorem), clarifies our understanding of those concepts."
"A representation theorem shows that all models of a theory are equivalent to some model in a distinguished subset, e.g. that any finite automaton may be represented by a stimulus-response model.)"
"In his magnum opus, Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures, 2002, Suppes argues that one of the points of representation is “improving our understanding of the object represented” (just as blueprints help us to better understand the layout of a building) and claims “the formal or mathematical theory of representation has as its primary goal an enrichment of the understanding.”"
"Showing that two apparently distinct concepts (as translated into some precise form, e.g. sets of axioms or set-theoretical structures) are in a precise sense “the same” (through a representation theorem), clarifies our understanding of those concepts."
"This project of "conceptual clarification" connects closely to the pragmatist idea that concepts should be identified with their effects on action—two concepts that do not motivate different actions, are not in fact different."
"This core pragmatist idea was introduced by Peirce as an elaboration of Kant’s analysis of the antinomies—apparent contradictory claims are reconciled by showing they involve reason’s attempt to employ concepts beyond their potential applicability to the phenomenal world."
But then again Grice found Peirce unnecessarily krypto-technical!
"So it is no accident that Suppes was also fascinated with the antinomies."
"His argument that the third antinomy (the apparent conflict between freedom and determinism) is resolved by a mathematical result (the in principle indistinguishability of discrete observations of deterministic and probabilistic systems satisfying the ergodic property) makes sense when viewed through the lens of his formalized pragmatism."
Grice lectured on this in his Kant lectures at Stanford that Suppes attended.
(We have discussed this elsewhere, "FREE WILL", the scandal!).
"Stepping back from Suppes’s contributions to philosophy as narrowly construed to the methodological foundations of science writ large, his most longstanding contributions will likely be in the foundations of measurement."
"Suppes and collaborators used qualitative axioms to characterize the assumptions of various empirical measurement procedures, then proved representation theorems for numerical (more generally, geometrical) structures."
"These theorems legitimate our practice of representing measured quantities with numbers, and they allow for a precise characterization of the meaningfulness of claims about those quantities, namely: meaningful claims are those invariant across transformations of scale which preserve the axioms."
"This core pragmatist idea was introduced by Peirce as an elaboration of Kant’s analysis of the antinomies—apparent contradictory claims are reconciled by showing they involve reason’s attempt to employ concepts beyond their potential applicability to the phenomenal world."
But then again Grice found Peirce unnecessarily krypto-technical!
"So it is no accident that Suppes was also fascinated with the antinomies."
"His argument that the third antinomy (the apparent conflict between freedom and determinism) is resolved by a mathematical result (the in principle indistinguishability of discrete observations of deterministic and probabilistic systems satisfying the ergodic property) makes sense when viewed through the lens of his formalized pragmatism."
Grice lectured on this in his Kant lectures at Stanford that Suppes attended.
(We have discussed this elsewhere, "FREE WILL", the scandal!).
"Stepping back from Suppes’s contributions to philosophy as narrowly construed to the methodological foundations of science writ large, his most longstanding contributions will likely be in the foundations of measurement."
"Suppes and collaborators used qualitative axioms to characterize the assumptions of various empirical measurement procedures, then proved representation theorems for numerical (more generally, geometrical) structures."
"These theorems legitimate our practice of representing measured quantities with numbers, and they allow for a precise characterization of the meaningfulness of claims about those quantities, namely: meaningful claims are those invariant across transformations of scale which preserve the axioms."
"The measurement results exemplify the general features of Suppes’s project."
"First, formal methods do not bridge the gap between observation and theory completely."
--- Grice lectured on this in his 1975 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, in particular with the idea of psychological notions as theoretical, and behavioural displays as observational. Characteristically, the title of Grice's paper reads ironically: "From the banal to the bizarre".
Isaac:
"Once the features of observation, in this case through measurement, are formalized qualitatively, however, we can precisely bridge the gap between those qualitative assumptions and our quantitative methods through a representation theorem."
"Furthermore, this formal analysis sheds light on the nature of (our concept of!) the measured quantity, by providing a precise delineation between those claims about it that are meaningful and those that are not."
Grice would distinguish, alla Hume, between a 'concept' and a 'conception'. Vide the opening remarks to his Carus lectures, "The conceptION of value" -- never concept!
"What Suppes proposed then was a method for doing philosophy, but not an actual overarching theory."
"Suppes", perhaps unlike Grice, "was not a systematic philosopher, as his work was not united by a set of coherent conclusions, but rather a dedication to the importance of particular concepts: representation, invariance, structure; as well as to the importance of detail."
"Suppes's most frequent remark after talks was to express “skepticism” that the speaker’s project could be carried through “in any detail.”"
"In many respects, Suppes’ obsession with detail paralyzed him, preventing him from moving beyond an (admittedly vast) array of specific results to the development of a systematic overarching view."
"At the end of Representation and Invariance, he confronts this paralysis in the context of scientific reduction, apologizing for the lack of reduction results in the book with the claim that “the problem was too difficult for me,” before going on to defend a pluralistic approach to the philosophy of science, where formal results of the limited sort achievable coexist happily with more qualitative analyses of the vast gap between scientific knowledge and the complexities of the everyday world."
"Suppes was “Pat” to all who knew him", while Grice kept using "H. P." for YEARS (It was against Oxford practice to have your Christian name known!), and the cold mathematical approach of his most influential papers belied a warm and generous personality."
"Suppes consistently made time for undergraduate teaching, even decades after his “retirement,” and was always generous with his graduate students."
"Suppes would never talk down to you, but was also happy to explain that which you did not understand."
"It’s true that Suppes did not “suffer fools,” but a fool to him was not one incapable of the kind of mathematical work he preferred—Suppes was well aware it was not for everyone, hence his pluralism—a fool was one who refused to acknowledge when he did not understand; one who spoke from a position of ignorance he made no attempt to remedy."
-- Cfr. "A fool's paradise".
"Suppes", like Grice, "loved nothing more than to argue, but he was also quick to admit ignorance if you displayed knowledge he did not (yet!) possess."
"Suppes was eager for his advisees to work on topics that outstripped his background as it offered an excuse for him to “learn from you.”"
Oddly, ditto Grice, as Judith Baker reminisces: Baker found her subject for her PhD dissertation had become Grice's!
"If, however, you made a claim of which he was suspicious, he would demand you back it up with proof."
Ditto Grice. Grice said he got this from his Oxford tutor: Hardie, and from his (Grice's, not Hardie's) father: a non-conformist, if ever there was one!
Isaac:
"More often than not, when you went to seek it out, it was Suppes who knew better than you after all."
On the other hand Grice cherished Cook Wilson's bon mot: What we know we know. Implicature: and what we don't we don't.
"The last time" Isaac saw Suppes "was at the 2012 conference in honor of his 90th birthday."
"Multiple speakers expressed their eagerness to attend the next one, in honour of his 100th."
"At the time it seemed almost inevitable, that Suppes was invincible, because of the sharpness of his remarks and his dynamic response to each talk."
"He put many of the participants decades his junior to shame with his wit and energy."
"Throughout, it was his argumentative nature that showed through."
"I once," Isaac reminisces, "audited an undergraduate course he gave on free will in 2009."
"Each class would start slowly, Suppes had no real plan and languished at the front of the room."
"All it took, however, was one comment to which he objected, and he leapt into action, expounding at length on science and will, habit and explanation—class had begun."
"Whatever Suppes's legacy in philosophy turns out to be, his profoundest effects will largely be invisible", as Saint-Exupery would say, perhaps more otiosely: what is essential is invisible _to the eye_.
"Suppes's unrelenting dedication to a particular way of doing philosophy, and a bottomless commitment to pedagogy, drove him to shape tens of thousands of students."
"Through his mathematics textbooks, his early use of computers with gifted youth, his later innovations in online education, his six decades of undergraduate teaching, his pressure to bring particular figures to Stanford, shaping its legacy in formal philosophy, and his constant use of his own personal financial resources to build buildings, fund speakers, and start the Suppes Center for History and Philosophy of Science, Suppes shaped the intellectual development of generations, in many cases without them ever realizing it."
"Suppes will be missed, both by those of us who knew him, and by those of us who unknowingly have been swept into his intellectual legacy" -- like a few members (implicature: if not a lot) of the Grice Club!
Notes: e.g. free will: “Voluntary Motion, Biological Computation, and Free Will,” 1994; liberty: “Four Varieties of Libertatianism,” 2006; meaning in poetry: “Rhythm and Meaning in Poetry,” 2009; corporal punishment: “Some Formal Methods of Grading Principles,” 1966; hylomorphism: “Aristotle’s Concept of Matter and Its Relation to Modern Concepts of Matter,” 1974; and virtue ethics: “The Good and the Bad, the True and the False” (with Aimée Drolet), 2008“Partial Orders of Similarity Differences Invariant Between EEG-Recorded Brain and Perceptual Representations of Language” (with Marcos Perreau Guimaraes and Dik Kin Wong) How does one prove that concepts are independent? Using Padoa’s Principle of course! See Suppes (1957) Introduction to Logic.“A Comparison of the Meaning and Uses of Models in Mathematics and the Empirical Sciences” and “Models of Data” (pub. 1962) Suppes’ convictions about pragmatism and apprenticeship were also shaped by his experience as a meteorologist in World War 2. He was impressed by the superiority of the predictions of veteran weathermen over those provided by the more theory-savvy youth, such as himself. This experience also contributed to his career-spanning interest in the fundamentality of probability for our understanding of the world. For instance, Roberta Ferrario and Viola Schiaffonati’s Formal Methods and Empirical Practices: Conversations with Patrick Suppes, 2012 Foundations of Measurement, 3 vols. (1971, 1989, 1990, with R. Duncan Luce, David H. Krantz, and Amos Tversky), as well as numerous earlier and later papers
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