Why did you call it “exhaustive free association”? I would lean towards something more like “arguing from (falsely complete) exhaustion”.
Re it being almost good reasoning, a main thing making it good reasoning rather than bad reasoning is having a good model of the domain so that you actually have good reasons to think that your hypothesis space is exhaustive.
An argument in favor of it is, “free association” is inherently a fuzzy human thing, where the process is just thinking for a bit and seeing what you come up with and at some point declaring victory; there is nothing in it that could possibly guarantee correctness. Arguably, anyone who encounters the term should be conscious of this, and therefore notice that it’s an inappropriate step in a logical argument that purports to establish high certainty. Perhaps even notice that the term itself is paradoxical: in a logical context, “exhaustion” must be a rigorous process, but “free association” is inherently unrigorous.
I’m not sure if I buy the argument. The author of “The Design of Everyday Things” warns against being too clever with names and assuming that normal people will get the reference you intend. But… I dunno.
If you don’t have a systematic way of iterating your ideas, your method of generating ideas is just free-association. So making an argument from “exhaustive free-association” means you’re arguing that your free association is exhaustive. Which it never is.
Good post!
Why did you call it “exhaustive free association”? I would lean towards something more like “arguing from (falsely complete) exhaustion”.
Re it being almost good reasoning, a main thing making it good reasoning rather than bad reasoning is having a good model of the domain so that you actually have good reasons to think that your hypothesis space is exhaustive.
An argument in favor of it is, “free association” is inherently a fuzzy human thing, where the process is just thinking for a bit and seeing what you come up with and at some point declaring victory; there is nothing in it that could possibly guarantee correctness. Arguably, anyone who encounters the term should be conscious of this, and therefore notice that it’s an inappropriate step in a logical argument that purports to establish high certainty. Perhaps even notice that the term itself is paradoxical: in a logical context, “exhaustion” must be a rigorous process, but “free association” is inherently unrigorous.
I’m not sure if I buy the argument. The author of “The Design of Everyday Things” warns against being too clever with names and assuming that normal people will get the reference you intend. But… I dunno.
If you don’t have a systematic way of iterating your ideas, your method of generating ideas is just free-association. So making an argument from “exhaustive free-association” means you’re arguing that your free association is exhaustive. Which it never is.
You named it in such a way as to imply that the free-association was exhaustive this time though. You absolutely did that.