On 26/07/2011 2:19 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
RW: "The fact that theories are validated and invalidated,
extended and updated or even abandoned does not mean that they
are not theories."
Certainly, they are not all theories, as far as any true theory
describes the nature and causes of things, some domain of the
world, incorporating laws, facts and proven hypothesis.
Theories are inventions of people not gods.
They are based on what people know at the time that they make them
up.
They are only proven within some scope of thought or physical
experiments.
All what is invalidated and abandoned or wrong concern
hypotheses, conjectures, opinions, possibilities, beliefs, to be
verified or falsified according to the standard techiques and
methods.
And theories.
We apply medical theories, as tested and proven, to make
people healthy; physical theories to create nuclear weapons or
build giant physical structures, chemical theories to create
chemical processes and chemical weapons, etc.
The medical theories from 100 years ago look pretty silly and I am
pretty sure that a lot of the medical theories of today will not
survive the next hundred years.
The theories about physical structures, chemistry and biology from
100 years ago were also incomplete and some of them are laughable by
today's standards.
OTOH, they were adequate to build weapons, cars, telephones and lots
of other neat things.
Academics and business people are inventing and testing new theories
everyday. Some will be useful, some will be found lacking, some will
turn out to be only variants of earlier theories and some will be
huge steps forward.
An example of such confusing is a political/social
hypothesis, the cause of unstable societies, having much less
validity than scientific theories, and trying to survive
experimental testing on human lives.
It is only a matter of degrees and opinions. Every theory has its
limit of the scope of predictions that it can make and some degree
of "scientificness".
The particle theory of light only explains part of the behaviour of
light.
I think that you are reading a whole lot of extra things about
truth, simplicity and beauty into the word "theory".
Azamat Abdoullaev
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2011
11:28 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most classifications
are fuzzy)
On 25/07/2011 4:00 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, July 25,
2011 8:54 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most
classifications are fuzzy)
On 25/07/2011 1:14 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
JS: "The next step beyond predicting how to place
your foot on a slippery slope is to design a wakway or
a bridge to provide a more secure footing. Primitive
societies learned how to develop that technology by a
few steps of cognitive reasoning beyond just trial and
error. Humans did it by thinking, and spiders did it
by genetic learning over millions of years. But the
fundamental principles are *exactly* the same."
Indeed. We learn to do things by doing
things: we learn how to perceive by
perception/sensing, how to walk by walking, how to
communicate by communicating, how to read by
reading, by trial and error. You can draw some
analogies between doing physical actions by trial and
error and problem solving by way of theories,
where the hypotheses are a sort of trial.
Still it's critical to draw a distinction between the
intellectual processes of predictions or anticipations
or forecast and the physical interactions by
stimulus-response coordination mechanisms.
Why?
What is here questioned? That there are higher
cognitive processes (as knowing, search, deciding,
language, intellection, predicition) and basic cognitive
processes (sensing/perception, motor actions).
I am questioning the necessity of drawing a sharp distinction.
There is much more evidence of a continuum. When progressing
from crawling and learning to cross a street in a busy city, at
what point does a child cross the line from basic cognitive
processes (trial and error) to higher cognitive processes
(traffic pattern recognition, street lights, validity of
crosswalks (I live in Montreal where crosswalks are just
convenient landmarks for ambulances), acceleration capabilities
by type of vehicle, prediction of the humanity of strangers
,etc.).
Remember the mental "eye of the soul" with
intellectual intuition, and your unique capacity to see
ideas, to grasp the essence of things. For instance,
more reliable economic forecasts are done not by
various statistical methods, supported by various
theories, but by the intellectual insight of
prevision.
You have got to be kidding!
AA: "The accuracy of economic forecasting has been
reduced by increased uncertainty in the global and
national economies snce the early 1970s... Some of the
greatest contributions to the economic forecasting ...come
from economists who have the insight to understand the
changing economy of today" (Britannica, Economic Growth
and Planning).
One is in need to create a whole taxonomy of sources of
errors in economic forecasting, global and national:
partial theories, ideologies, personal judgments, biases,
old or manipulated statistics; no powerful machine is of
any help here.
The whole global crisis was just missed.
Only now a comprehensive/holistic approach, named as
the FCA and TBL, is getting recognition. Any economic
growth and planning economic changes requests accounting
not only economic factors, but also ecological capital and
social capital.
The fact that theories are validated and invalidated, extended
and updated or even abandoned does not mean that they are not
theories.
----- Original Message
-----
Sent: Monday, July
25, 2011 6:15 PM
Subject: Re:
[ontolog-forum] intangibles (was RE: Why most
classifications are fuzzy)
Azamat,
No. I gave examples of short-term physical
predictions just to illustrate the point. But every
one of those examples can be extended at any length of
time whatever.
> IMO, moving in the physical world, interacting
with the world, manipulating with the world's objects,
processing the world's instant representations, are
hardly about predictions, in the strict sense.
Predicting your next step on a walkway is of
*exactly* the same nature as predicting the weather.
Both of them depend on the same laws of nature:
gravity, the behavior of physical objects in a force
field, the relationships among multiple competing
forces acting on matter, etc.
The next step beyond predicting how to place your
foot on a slippery slope is to design a wakway or a
bridge to provide a more secure footing. Primitive
societies learned how to develop that technology by a
few steps of cognitive reasoning beyond just trial and
error. Humans did it by thinking, and spiders did it
by genetic learning over millions of years. But the
fundamental principles are *exactly* the same.
The fact that the short-term interactions are learned
by trial and error rather than formal lectures in a
physics course is a trivial difference from the point
of view of ontology. There is a continuum between a
child learning how to maintain balance while walking
and engineers using physics to predict how the
International Space Station will interact in the
gravitational fields of the earth, sun, and moon.
As far as ontology is concerned, the child and the
engineer are learning about gravity and how to
maintain a desired position within its range of
influence. They're making the same kinds of
predictions for the same reasons -- but at different
levels of complexity on the continuum.
John
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