Courses/CS 461/Museum of unintended consequences/Fraud

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[edit] Introduction

Merriam-Webster defines fraud as: DECEIT, TRICKERY; specifically :intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right.

This definition is typical. Most of the definitions of fraud in OneLook.com rely on deceive.

Here is how deceive is defined.


In other words, our notions of fraud and deception are tied up with the meaning of truth. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has the following entries (only some of which have been written) for truth.


[edit] The Deflationary Theory of Truth

The article on The Deflationary Theory of Truth begins as follows.

According to the deflationary theory of truth, to assert that a statement is true is just to assert the statement itself. For example, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary theory, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’.

There are many implications of a theory of this sort for philosophical debate about the nature of truth. Philosophers often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; truth is the ideal outcome of rational inquiry. According to the deflationist, however, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. For the deflationist, truth has no nature beyond what is captured in ordinary claims such as that ‘snow is white’ is true just in case snow is white. Philosophers looking for the nature of truth are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn't there.

The article includes the following.

It is commonly said that, according to the deflationary theory, truth is not a property and therefore that, according to the theory, if a proposition is true, it is mistaken to say that the proposition has a property, the property of being true.

[This is similar to the position that existence also is not a property. In both cases, the claim is that there is nothing common to all true propositions (or to everything that exists) other than the fact that they are true (or that they exist). Contrast this with the claim, for example, that two things are mammals.] If two things are mammals, they have the property of being a mammal, but in addition there is some common explanation as to why they are both mammals.

The article includes some criticisms of the deflationary theory of truth. In one it says consider the claim 

(7) Snow is white is true if and only if snow is white
Now, does snow is white refer to a sentence or a proposition? If, on the one hand, we take (7) to be about a sentence, then, assuming (7) can be interpreted as making a necessary claim, (7) is false. On the face of it, after all, it takes a lot more than snow's being white for it to be the case that ‘snow is white’ is true. In order that ‘snow is white’ be true, it must be the case not only that snow is white, it must in addition be the case that ‘snow is white’ means that snow is white. But this is a fact about language that (7) ignores. On the other hand, suppose we take snow is white to denote a proposition; in particular, suppose we take it to denote the proposition that snow is white. Then the theory looks to be trivial, since the proposition that snow is white is defined as being true just in case snow is white. In short, the deflationist is faced with a dilemma: take deflationism to be a theory of sentences and it is false; take it to be a theory of propositions, on the other hand, and it is trivial.

[edit] Propositions, meaning, and truth

The problem I have with this criticism is that it is based on the notion of a proposition, which is generally defined as something like the meaning or content of a statement. As A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names puts it, a proposition is: what is conveyed by a declarative sentence used to make a statement or assertion. That site goes on to say that
Propositions are distinct from the sentences that convey them. "Smith loves Jones" expresses exactly the same proposition [emphasis added] as "Jones is loved by Smith."
The problem I have with all of this is that what is conveyed is (literally) a subjective experience. Meaning occurs in the mind. In other words, it's not clear to me what it means to say that something is a proposition or even that there are propositions. This pushes me into the following position.

Meaning does not exist other than in its understanding. That is, there is no such thing as the meaning of a sentence unless some mind understands that meaning. (I realize that there are formal theories of semantics, again, see Tarski's Truth Definitions, but that seems to me to be another issue.) Thus prior to the Rosetta stone, the hieroglyphics that the Rosetta stone enabled us to decipher, had no (contemporary) meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of those hieroglyphics exists only in the minds of those who understand it.

Another way of putting this is that meaning occurs in the mind and is not a property of a representation. This is similar to saying that the experience of blue is not a property of the sky—or of any blue object or even of the range of wavelenths of light that we see as blue. It is what happens when one looks at such a thing.

I would stick to that argument even though it may be that snow is white leads to what we might all agree is the same meaning in all English speakers—at least to the extent that we can establish that two people have the same understanding about anything, whatever the same means in this context. (Consider, for example, Irvin Yalom's existential psychotherapy position that we are each ultimately isolated, i.e., that we cannot completely know another person's experience and that no one can completely know ours.)

[edit] The hard problem of consciousness

So my position is that we don't have a good way of dealing with meaning or propositions. I agree with Chalmers that there is a "hard problem of consciousness."

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

I'm not sure what Chalmers position is with respect to propositions. Does he agree with me that they to are subjective experiences? I don't know. But that is my current position.

Given that position, truth means something like that what one believes about the world is the way the world is. That's pretty simple, but it also means that one cannot ever fully externalize what one believes about the world. Writing it down is different from believing it. The written expression is different from the thought that the written expression is intended to record. It is, according to my position, simply impossible to record a thought—or any experience. The experience is the experience. No record of it is the same thing.

[edit] An undistinguished example of fraud

Which brings us to fraud. I started this page because of an article on fraud. Fraud is essentially false belief for an advantage. If that is how we think of fraud, fraud can only be committed on a person.

But this entire museum is devoted to fooling mechanisms. Thus one cannot defraud a mechanism. The mechanisms does whatever it does. It may be that the mechanism is intended to represent what someone believes, i.e., a proposition, about the world. But as we said, the record of a belief—or a record of a proposition—is not the same thing as the belief. Even a record of a belief or a record of a proposition that can be executed, say by a computer, is not the same thing as the belief or the proposition.

So what we think of as fraud is generally the exploitation of the fact that we are a country of law, not of men. We write things down, and then we rely on those writings to determine how we act. For the most part, that's a good thing. But it makes us vulnerable to having our writings manipulated.

Here, finally, is the specific instance (which is not particularly insightful) that initiated this page. Most fraud stories are similar. This one is from "Ghosts of a Shuttered College Follow Weld," a story in the New York Times, which describes apparent fraud in a commercial trade school with which William Weld, who is currently running for Governor in New York was once associated.

Carlos Urquilla said he felt lucky when he was hired a year ago to be a dean at Decker College here. A former Army lieutenant straight out of law school, Mr. Urquilla liked the way the school sold itself as a place to help poor students learn a trade.

But in his first weeks at the for-profit school, Mr. Urquilla says, he found employees falsifying student attendance records, instructors helping students to cheat and recruiters arranging federal loans for students who could not read.

Mr. Urquilla said he was fired after he complained to superiors. Months later, William F. Weld, then Decker's chief executive officer, who is now seeking the Republican nomination for governor of New York, signed a severance agreement with Mr. Urquilla. Its terms required him to keep quiet about the school, which offered courses in carpentry, electrical work and other trades, but he considers the agreement breached.

Mr. Urquilla, along with several other former Decker officials, have come forward to describe practices during Mr. Weld's 10-month tenure as chief executive that they say they considered improper and possibly illegal. The school closed in October.

A former admissions director has described the routine falsification of federal loan applications. The former head of Decker's online program says he saw systematic recruitment of students with no access to computers for Internet-based courses. A former instructor in Atlanta says administrators routinely shared test answers with students.

And a former instructor in Louisville says that in 2004 - when Mr. Weld was an active board member in Decker's parent company but not yet its chief executive - officials asked him to set up a sham classroom to fool accreditation inspectors.

Russ Abbott 13:01, 20 December 2005 (PST)

[edit] Unintended Consequence of Science

As the recent major case of scientific fraud in South Korea shows (the stem-cell scandal related to Hwang Woo-suk), fraud seems to be an inseparable side-effect of the scientific system. Science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge aimed at finding out the truth. It is obvious that under certain conditions some participants in the system will only pretend to have found the truth, for instance if the pressure is very high to produce new results, and if it is also very hard to obtain them, then it is a natural consequence that some scientists - depending on their personal values, norms and priorities - will be driven to the means of fraud. Others may use simpler tricks as hiding their ignorance behind buzzwords and complicated formulas.

--JFromm 09:16, 3 January 2006 (PST)

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