In this post, I’ll describe Andrew Pickering’s notion of “disciplinary agency” from his 1995 book The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. I’ll use the same mathematical example he uses: Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions. My hope is that Pickering’s notion gives some insight into the once-not-exactly-common-but-not-all-that-rare idea that “the code is telling us where it wants to go.” In the modern era, perhaps it could be used to think about prompting LLMs to write code or do math?

(This is a resurrected post from 2004 in honor of Hamilton Day.)

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Twenty years ago, I participated in a ritual at a conference: giving a response to a just-presented, pre-written essay. Its topic was how programmers are no longer allowed to do good design.

What follows is a lightly edited version of my original script, which touted Agile projects as a fragile solution. Despite its air of warning, it feels naive to me now.

But its pointers to Stoicism, Epicureanism, and monasticism are perhaps still useful.

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“Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis,” published August 1878, is the final installment of C.S. Peirce’s essay series “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” It explains the difference between induction and making a hypothesis. Those two, plus deduction, make up the three main kinds of scientific inference.

Note: I have an annotated table of contents for my entire “cover band” reinterpretations of Peirce essays.

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“The Order of Nature,” published June 1878, is the fifth installment of C.S. Peirce’s essay series “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” It further describes induction, using cosmological speculation about what kind of universe is required for induction to work. It also describes Peirce’s take on a hot issue of his day: the relationship of science to religion.

Note: I have an annotated table of contents for my entire “cover band” reinterpretations of Peirce essays.

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This is a blog post I’ve resurrected from just over 20 years ago. I think it’s even more appropriate now.

Tags: inspiration, nostalgia, the value of work, Mercury astronauts

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Wikipedia credits C.S. Peirce as being one of the founders of statistics and specifically calls out the “Illustrations of the Logic of Science” essays. “The Probability of Induction,” published April 1878, shows Peirce groping toward the idea of confidence intervals (a term he would later coin, but hasn’t yet). He also defends Venn’s frequentist interpretation of probability by showing that the dominant subjectivist interpretation and methods lead to absurdity.

Because Peirce and others were still formulating both the terminology and conceptual underpinnings of frequentist statistics, the essay benefits (I hope) from my cover band approach. In my version, I’ll drop some of the digressions that Peirce is so overly fond of. (Let’s just say that, in general, my covers will omit Peirce’s drum solos.)

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“The Doctrine of Chances,” published March 1878, is the third installment of C.S. Peirce’s essay series “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” It describes how to overlay probability on top of logic, and has early thoughts about continuity (in roughly the mathematical sense) and the social character of logic. It also gives hints of his later big theories of absolute chance (tychism), evolutionary cosmology, and the continuum (synechism).

Generally, I try to follow Peirce’s original structure when making these cover versions, but this one is rather a mess (possibly because it was originally one essay edited into two). So I’ve reorganized it.

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This is a rewriting of C.S. Peirce’s earlyish essay “How to Make our Ideas Clear,” published January 1878 in Popular Science Monthly. It’s the second of a series of six essays, collectively titled “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” It introduces the semi-famous “pragmatic maxim” and the idea that truth is the limit (in something like the mathematical sense) of scientific-ish inquiry. Although it’s perhaps Peirce’s most famous text, it’s kind of a mess.

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This is a rewriting of C.S. Peirce’s earlyish essay “The Fixation of Belief,” published November 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. It’s the first of a series of six essays, collectively titled “Illustrations of the Logic of Science.” It’s presumably written for a lay audience, so is simpler than his specialist papers, but I think it still benefits from a cover version. A what? About these covers. TL;DR Belief produces habit. Habit is a rote reaction to particular circumstances.

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C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) was an American scientist, philosopher, and polymath who did foundational or important work in scientific and philosophy-adjacent fields like formal logic, experimental statistics, semiotics, scientific method, and metaphysics. I think his philosophical ideas are, at the very least, interesting. Some are novel, even today. I think them frequently useful for getting around in the world (especially for those of a scientific bent). However, his writing is difficult for a modern audience.

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