Re: [ontolog-forum] Possible Worlds

[ravi sharma <drravisharma@xxxxxxxxx>]

John

 

Your paper is excellent and I have to request you further information on how you, Pierce or Tarski would possibly describe the notion that the Universe that each of us thinks is described by the same mathematics or logic, if its realization by individual minds could be mapped? Then perhaps we will find that it is not the same but the only commonality is in the overlap among the concepts or common logic (is it the same as CL, I wonder?) i.e. universal aspects of sharable knowledge, including experience?

There is lot more there than I have read briefly - perhaps I will ask more later, due to my ignorance.

 

The other comment is related to Quote -These three categories clarify the issues discussed by the physicist Eugene Wigner (1960) in his classic paper "On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Wigner marveled at
the success of mathematics in describing the universe and predicting the outcome of experiments before they had been carried out.- Unquote

 

I never got the answer as clear as in his above quoted statement whenever I used to ask Wigner as to how he could describe group theory to represent quantum mechanics, especially field theory representations and those for the bound states such as nucleii, in his famous work.

 

I am conjecturing that perhaps Riemann's formalism provided the same motivation to Einstein in his tensorial representation of General theory of Relativity. One exception I want to make is that while the mathematics there represented the curvature of matter filled universe (Geometry aspects of gravity - nature of space in presence of matter) the real - understanding - nature of gravity, still escapes us even though gravitational lenses have been astronomically well observed and sometimes provide insights in to dark matter and dark energy aspects. Whether it will be another 30 pages of terms by Kerr metric (math) or an already established mathematical form like Riemann's that will describe the realistic nature of gravity (or Graviton!) is a question that I would like your reflection on?

 

PS: Of course the LHC in Geneva is approaching it from the angle of massive Higgs Boson in scattering experiments at high energy?

Best regards.
--
Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma)
313 204 1740 Mobile

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 11:42 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chris,

There is an excellent way to clarify the notion of
"possible worlds" -- explain them away.

CP> My opinion is that David Lewis is extremely good at
 > clarifying things.  I believe I am not alone. I recall
 > Ted Sider saying somewhere that he thought Plurality of
 > Worlds was the best book on philosophy in his lifetime
 > (or something similar).

You are certainly not alone.  There are many people who like
that metaphor.  But to consider it as anything more than a
colorful metaphor creates enormous confusion.  And I include
David L. among the obfuscators, not the clarifiers.

I contributed the following paper to a book about possible worlds:

   http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/worlds.pdf
   Worlds, Models, and Descriptions

Following is an earlier paper that goes into more detail:

   http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/laws.htm
   Laws, Facts, and Contexts: Foundations for Multimodal Reasoning

The abstract to the Worlds paper is copied below.

John
__________________________________________________________________

Worlds, Models, and Descriptions

John F. Sowa

Abstract. Since the pioneering work by Kripke and Montague, the term
'possible world' has appeared in most theories of formal semantics
for modal logics, natural languages, and knowledge-based systems.
Yet that term obscures many questions about the relationships between
the real world, various models of the world, and descriptions of
those models in either formal languages or natural languages. Each
step in that progression is an abstraction from the overwhelming
complexity of the world. At the end, nothing is left but a colorful
metaphor for an undefined element of a set W called worlds, which
are related by an undefined and undefinable primitive relation R
called accessibility.  For some purposes, the resulting abstraction
has proved to be useful, but as a general theory of meaning, the
abstraction omits too many significant features. So much information
has been lost at each step that many philosophers, linguists, and
psychologists have dismissed model-theoretic semantics as irrelevant
to the study of meaning.  This article examines the steps in the
process of extracting the pair (W,R) from the world and the way
people talk about the world. It shows that the Kripke worlds can be
reinterpreted as part of a Peircean semiotic theory, which can also
include contributions from many other studies in cognitive science.
Among them are Dunn's semantics based on laws and facts, the lexical
semantics preferred by many linguists, psychological models of how
the world is perceived, and philosophies of science that relate
theories to the world.  A full integration of all those sources is
far beyond the scope of this article, but an outline of the approach
suggests that Peirce's vision is capable of relating and reconciling
the competing sources.

Published in _Studia Logica_, Special Issue Ways of Worlds II, 84:2,
2006, pp. 323-360.


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