Pat's comment on the messy topic of "Reality is messy and long, Truth is
edited and coherent." including the observation that: (01)
>I think that what Debbie means by the above is
>only this: that reality is large and messy, but
>that 'truth' is always the truth of some
>idea/thought/ontology/assertion, so is always at
>the tidy conceptualized, thinking end of the
>spectrum. And Bill and Don are puzzled, because
>they are living at the tidy end and think of
>truth as a relationship to reality, so the word
>used alone seems to them to be more concerned
>with the reality than the concept or thought (02)
This observation reminds me of the much earlier discussions of "Visual
Complexity" and Sowa's idea of Knowledge Soup. In these he quoted Kant
as follows: (03)
Since the synthesis of empirical concepts is not arbitrary but
based on experience, and as such can never be complete (for in
experience ever new characteristics of the concept can be discovered),
empirical concepts cannot be defined. (04)
Thus only arbitrarily made concepts can be defined
synthetically. Such definitions... could also be called
declarations, since in them one declares one's thoughts or renders
account of what one understands by a word. This is the case with
mathematicians. (05)
C. S. Peirce said " It is easy to speak with precision upon a general
theme. Only, one must commonly surrender all ambition to be certain.
It is equally easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
It is not so difficult to be pretty precise and fairly certain at once
about a very narrow subject. (06)
An also he quoted Alfred North Whitehead (07)
Human knowledge is a process of approximation. In the focus of
experience, there is comparative clarity. But the discrimination of
this clarity leads into the penumbral background. There are always
questions left over. The problem is to discriminate exactly what we
know vaguely. (08)
The topic of every science is an abstraction from the full concrete
happenings of nature. But every abstraction neglects the influx of
the factors omitted into the factors retained. (09)
For more discussion of these and related issues, John points to his
paper on The Challenge of Knowledge Soup at: (010)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf (011)
Gary Berg-Cross, Ph.D.
Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Architecture & Semantic
Technology
EM&I
Suite 350 455 Spring park Place
Herndon VA 20170
703-742-0585 (012)
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