On Tue, July 26, 2011 14:19, AzamatAbdoullaev said:
> RW: "The fact that theories are validated and invalidated, extended and
> updated or even abandoned does not mean that they are not theories." (01)
> 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. (02)
I note a distinction here between "theory" and "true theory". A theory
can certainly be incomplete, approximate, or valid only under certain
conditions. Such theories (such as Newtons laws of motion) can be quite
useful within the context in which they well predict how things happen
in the world. Many theories are initially posed without any knowledge
of the restrictions on the domain in which they are valid. Extreme
speed, pressure, temperature, magnetic field, space curvature, duration,
etc. may result in conditions such that the theory makes invalid pre-
dictions. (03)
> 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. (04)
Theories, also, can have their limitations demonstrated. (05)
> We apply medical theories, as tested and proven, (06)
but you don't know the limits for which these theories are valid. You
may conservatively overly constrain the theory in some aspects, but
some unconsidered additional factors may affect the validity of the
theory in a specific case. (07)
> 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. (08)
Physical theories in architecture end up omitting various physical
aspects until new failure modes become apparent. No one considered that
differential expansion and contraction of floor beams at the World Trade
Center would cause cooling beams to loose their supports. No one
considered that external generators over 10 metres above sea level could
be swept away in a tsunami caused by the same earthquake that shut down
external electric power to a reactor for days. (09)
Construction in these and other cases was based on valid theories, but
the limits for when those theories were valid were breached. (010)
> 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. (011)
When a hypothesis has been shown to have consistent significant predictive
value and it has not been shown to have counter examples within a class
of situations; when it has been sufficiently tested and logical arguments
support its validity, it can graduate from a mere hypothesis to a theory. (012)
> Azamat Abdoullaev
> http://www.eis.com.cy
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ron Wheeler
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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 -----
> From: Ron Wheeler
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 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.
>
>
> Azamat
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> 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
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr:
> http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
> Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
> Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
> Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
> To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J
> (013)
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org (014)
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
============================================================= (015)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (016)
|