On Wednesday, July 27, 2011 1:04 AM, Ron Wheeler wrote: "Not sure which
theories did not arrive in their current state by trial and error
mechanisms."
Most fundametal theories of unifying nature, employing conceptual or
mathematical models and high logical abstractions, like in theoretical ontology,
theoretical physics, pure mathematics, mathematical physics, etc.
Although, the interplay of theories and experiments and observations are
significant for scientific advance, in many cases just following the
standards of conceptual/mathematical/logical validity/rigour resulted
with extraordinary discoveries. In theoretical physics, special
realitivy mostly came from the formal rules of Lorentz transformation,
ignoring Michelson-Morley experiments. In many other
cases, experimental results were in need of theoretical foundation.
I'd say most breakthroughs are made by intelligent intuition,creative
insight and innovative imagination.
Azamat
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2011 1:04
AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] intangibles
(was RE: Why most classifications are fuzzy)
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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