On 26/07/2011 4:46 PM, AzamatAbdoullaev wrote:
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.
In theory, they should, but in practice they don't.
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.
Not sure which theories did not arrive in their current state by
trial and error mechanisms.
The theories about matter and space held by the ancient Greeks and
Romans were updated over time by a long series of mental and
physical experiments (trials) that forced their revision until we
reached our current understanding which is still under active trial
and error testing.
Just because we use space stations, multi-billion dollar space
telescopes and planets orbiting distant stars to run our experiments
does not change the fundamental nature of the development of
theories nor the limited time warranty that they carry.
Ron
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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