Very well-put, Morendil. The decision one should make here depends on the consequences of erring one way or the other and so there’s insufficient information. One quibble though:
Your usual sensory information is inadequate data. You’re dealing with that every day. This seems a good starting point to generalize from
It’s true, but I don’t think there’s anything such as “adequate data” to compare to. In a sense, all data is going to be inadequate. David MacKay’s cardinal rule of information theory is, “To make inferences, you have to make assumptions.” No matter how much data you get, it’s going to be building on a prior. The data must be interpreted in light of the prior.
Human cognition has been refined over the evolutionary history to start from very good priors which allow it very accurate inferences from minimal data, and you have to go out of your way to find the places where the priors point it in the wrong direction, such as in optical illusions.
I wouldn’t call it a quibble: I agree. There is a lovely tension between the idea that all perception, not just seeing, is “inference from incomplete information”; and the peripatetic axiom, “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”.
The only way to have complete information is to be Laplace’s demon. No one else has truly “adequate data”, and all knowledge is in that sense incertain; nevertheless, inference does work pretty well. (So well that it sure feels as if logic need not have been “first in the senses”, even though it is a form of knowledge and should therefore be to some extent incertain… the epistemology, it burns us !).
Very well-put, Morendil. The decision one should make here depends on the consequences of erring one way or the other and so there’s insufficient information. One quibble though:
It’s true, but I don’t think there’s anything such as “adequate data” to compare to. In a sense, all data is going to be inadequate. David MacKay’s cardinal rule of information theory is, “To make inferences, you have to make assumptions.” No matter how much data you get, it’s going to be building on a prior. The data must be interpreted in light of the prior.
Human cognition has been refined over the evolutionary history to start from very good priors which allow it very accurate inferences from minimal data, and you have to go out of your way to find the places where the priors point it in the wrong direction, such as in optical illusions.
I wouldn’t call it a quibble: I agree. There is a lovely tension between the idea that all perception, not just seeing, is “inference from incomplete information”; and the peripatetic axiom, “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses”.
The only way to have complete information is to be Laplace’s demon. No one else has truly “adequate data”, and all knowledge is in that sense incertain; nevertheless, inference does work pretty well. (So well that it sure feels as if logic need not have been “first in the senses”, even though it is a form of knowledge and should therefore be to some extent incertain… the epistemology, it burns us !).