Implicative Potential

[Epistemic status: Musings directed at trying to clarify a conceptual handle I've been using.]

A concept/framework/model/theory/mental element is said to have high "implicative potential" if a lot of new structure (new concepts, frameworks, theories, predictions) can be derived using it and this new structure has high counterfactual value grounded in how it influences a thinker's thinking.

Stated like that, implicative potential seems rather context-dependent. Decades ago, philosophers of mind/brain — especially Donald Davidson — were lively debating¹ whether mental states correspond to individual states of the brain (tokens) or categories of mental states sharing some properties (types). Whatever the answer to this question,² it is pointless in the sense of having ~zero implicative potential because. It's a well-stated scientific question but in order to answer it empirically we would need to reverse-engineer the brain to such an extent that we would have known everything that the answer to Davidson's question might imply, and thus the value added by answering Davidson's question would be ~zero.³

But still, I want to say that even if, for whatever magical reason, humanity got stuck on Newtonian Mechanics, and when it broke they used some Chinese Room Equivalent Tables (CRETs) for General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and then somebody introduced them to modern advanced physics, I would want to say that that modern advanced physics has high implicative potential, even if they can just keep their CRETs, even if it is cheaper.

Perhaps this comes down to valuing the knowledge of how things truly hang together, even if there's no practical prospect for practical applications.

Similarly, I want a theory that offers a proper re-explanation of some old piece of evidence to be assignable high implicative potential.

Elements with extremely high implicative potential extend their tendrils far into the mind, like a new technology propagating its impacts across the economy. Although novelty it produces is usually "just" endosystemic, the bigger the change, the greater potential it has to trigger a diasystemic transformation.

Example of things with high implicative potential:

• Theory of evolution.
• General Relativity.
• The Very Idea Of Science.
• The sense that more is possible.
• A proof of P=NP (if it were provable).
• The monster group, e.g. monstrous moonshine.

How is it from "just" "having a large potential for impact"?

The concept of implicative potential is meant to denote the potential for (conditionally?) restructuring one's beliefs in the direction that is either truth-oriented or what-action-to-take-for-the-value's-sake-oriented. Perhaps one could therefore rephrase it as "capacity for enhancing agency/rationality".

But this is not quite right because I want to say Tuning your Cognitive Strategies does not have a high implicative potential. It's a way to rework your mind but it doesn't imply anything directly about your mind, even if you treat it like an algorithm that can take in your mind and return some information about.

[WIP]