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RW: "I think that you are reading a whole lot of extra things about truth,
simplicity and beauty into the word "theory"."
Indeed. Ideally, theories should comprise truth, good, and beauty, giving
the most accurate conceptual representations/explanations/descriptions of
things.
The issue is that empirical theories are evolving by trial and error
mechanisms as well. As a result, the cost in human life is enormous,
like with the medical theories.
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 10:01
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles
(was RE: Why most classifications are fuzzy)
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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