Where does transduction collide?

Piaget's 1928 Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (French original 1924) named transduction as the way a young child reasons straight from one particular case to another without passing through a general rule, so that two events which merely occur together get treated as if one caused the other. It sits between induction and deduction and is taken as typical of the preoperational years, before a child can coordinate classes and relations. The referent here is a pattern of thought in a developing mind, watched in what children say and do, and it has nothing in common with a virus moving genes between bacteria, a philosophical account of how individuals come to be, or a rule for labelling data points.[1]

Unit

One inference that jumps from a single case to another single case

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified in clinical interviews and observation of children's spontaneous explanations and judgments

Zinder and Lederberg's 1952 Genetic exchange in Salmonella coined transduction for the transfer of genes from one bacterium to another packaged inside a bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria, rather than by direct cell contact. A fragment of the donor's DNA is mistakenly carried in a viral particle and delivered to a recipient cell, where it can recombine into the recipient's genome. The referent is a physical movement of genetic material between microbes, measured in the laboratory, and it is unrelated to a child's leap of reasoning, a philosophical process of becoming, or an inference rule in statistics.[2]

Unit

One transfer of a DNA fragment from a donor to a recipient cell inside a phage

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Detected by selecting recipient colonies that gain a donor genetic marker after exposure to phage grown on the donor

Simondon's 1958 doctoral thesis L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information used transduction for an operation in which a structure propagates itself step by step across a domain, each region it has already ordered serving as the ground for ordering the next, much as a crystal grows outward from a seed. For Simondon it names how individuals and their surroundings take shape together out of a charged, not-yet-resolved state, and it doubles as a way of thinking that follows a process rather than fixing it in advance. The referent is a metaphysical account of how things come into being, argued in text, and it is distinct from gene transfer in bacteria, a stage of children's reasoning, or a technique in machine learning.[3]

Unit

One ongoing operation in which order propagates through a domain

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not applicable; developed as a concept through philosophical argument and physical and biological examples, not measured

Vapnik's statistical learning theory, set out in The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory (2000; the idea dates to his work of the 1970s and 1980s), introduced transduction as inference that goes straight from the training examples to labels for a specific, known set of test points, without first estimating a general rule meant to apply everywhere. The claim is that predicting a fixed set of cases is an easier problem than learning the whole function, so it can be done with less data. The referent is a strategy for prediction inside a learning algorithm, judged by error on the target points, and it has no connection to a virus moving genes, a child's causal leap, or a philosophical theory of becoming.[4]

Unit

One prediction of labels for a given, fixed set of test cases

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Evaluated by prediction error on the specific target points, for example in transductive support vector machines