Unexpected Uncertainty in Adaptive Learning

Abstract

Abstract Wittgenstein talks in his Philosophical Investigations of a pupil engaging in a repetitive series continuation who suddenly begins to apply a different rule than the one instructed to him. This hypothetical example has been interpreted by a number of philosophers to indicate either a skeptical attitude towards rules and their application (Kripke 1982; Wright 1980), an implicit need of knowledge and understanding of a rule accessible to those engaged in a given practice (McDowell 2002), or a certain normativity that guides our actions but is not cognitive, but processual in nature (Ginsborg 2020). I wish to support and extend Ginsborg’s account of primitive normativity from a novel perspective in a twofold manner: 1) by describing the mechanism of primitive normativity via Kant’s concept of aesthetical and epistemic pleasure and displeasure; 2) by applying the conceptual pair of expected and unexpected uncertainty from adaptive learning theories, which describe the fluctuation of learning rates under uncertain circumstances. I am grateful to Dr. Romain Ligneul's help in better understanding the subtleties of this conceptual pair.