tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.comments2023-04-21T20:55:22.881-04:00It's Only A TheoryGabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comBlogger1368125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-69825878078913850202015-11-20T08:24:58.332-05:002015-11-20T08:24:58.332-05:00Hi MIles,
You need to click either on the title ...Hi MIles, <br /><br />You need to click either on the title or on the sites.google.com link below that box!Gabriele Contessahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-20391704031727475262015-11-20T07:16:57.950-05:002015-11-20T07:16:57.950-05:00This is what I get on that page: "This entry ...This is what I get on that page: "This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find."Miles Rindhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03733605717776262840noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-49045681597930249882015-11-20T02:48:58.930-05:002015-11-20T02:48:58.930-05:00Thank you for making this available!Thank you for making this available!Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16401290904495398934noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-82717767040347447932015-09-30T03:33:56.047-04:002015-09-30T03:33:56.047-04:00I think this may be the passage in Sextus Empiricu...I think this may be the passage in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism that James was thinking of:<br /><br />So far, then, as concerns the efficient principle this account will suffice for the present. But we must also give a brief account of what are called the material principles. Now that these are inapprehensible may easily be gathered from the disagreement which exists about them amongst the dogmatists. For Pherecydes of Syros* declared earth to be the principle of all things; Thales of Miletus,† water; Anaximander (his pupil), the unlimited; Anaximenes and Diogenes of Apollonia, air; Hippasus of Metapontum, fire; Xenophanes of Colophon, earth and water; Oenopides of Chios, fire and air; Hippo of Rhegium, fire and water; Onomacritus, in his Orphica, fire and water and earth; the school of Empedocles as well as the Stoics, fire, air, water, and earth - for why should one even mention that mysterious “indeterminate matter” which some of them talk about, when not even they themselves are positive that they apprehend it? Aristotle the Peripatetic takes as his principles fire, air, water, earth, and the “revolving body”‡; Democritus and Epicurus, atoms; Anaxogoras of Clazomenae, homeomeries§; Diodorus, surnamed Cronos, minimal and noncomposite bodies; Heracleides Ponticus** and Asclepiades the Bithynian,†† homogeneous masses; the school of Pythagoras,‡‡ the numbers; the mathematicians, the limits of bodies; Strato the physicist,* the qualities.<br /><br />Since, then, there exists amongst them as much divergence as this, and even more, regarding the material principles, we shall give assent either to all the positions stated, and all others as well, or to some of them. But to assent to all is not possible; for we certainly shall not be able to assent both to Asclepiades, who says that the elements can be broken up and possess qualities, and to Democritus, who asserts that they are indivisible and void of quality, and to Anaxagoras, who leaves every sensible quality attached to the homeomeries.<br /><br />Book III. Chapter VI: Concerning Material Principles. Translation by R. G. Bury in a 1990 edition published by Prometheus Books.Patrick Enfieldnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-53937848089994250862015-06-12T13:20:21.991-04:002015-06-12T13:20:21.991-04:00There is a theorem in the theory of Boolean algebr...There is a theorem in the theory of Boolean algebras according to which for every Boolean algebra A, there is a first order theory T such that the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra of T is isomorphic to A. So the limitations of the so-called synctatic approach depend on the limitations imposed on the set of the axioms of T (e.g. T must have a finite number of axioms, T must have a recursive set of axioms, T must ave a recursively enumerable set of axioms, and so on). Of course the theorem presupposes no such limitation, and indeed T may have any cardinality whatsoever. The semnatic approach is therefore equivalent to accept any first order theory without constraints on the acceptable set of axioms.Alberto Mario Murahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10343523325677398587noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-85864719520610543802014-10-20T10:33:52.996-04:002014-10-20T10:33:52.996-04:00This is more a GET OFF MY LAWN! sign than a form o...This is more a GET OFF MY LAWN! sign than a form of censure: start your own blog if you want to denounce the war! ;-)Gabriele Contessahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-10616852617877460122014-10-20T10:32:51.531-04:002014-10-20T10:32:51.531-04:00Thanks for bringing that to my attention!Thanks for bringing that to my attention!Gabriele Contessahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-74646430311632012322014-09-22T08:46:46.502-04:002014-09-22T08:46:46.502-04:00For a brief moment there, it looked like the Inter...For a brief moment there, it looked like the Internet was going to be something new. It looked like it was going to be a place where information equality finally happened; where my opinion was as good as yours, and the winner in the marketplace of ideas would be the person most effective at presenting ideas not the person with the most powerful financial backers.<br /><br />Anonymous internet comments, especially trolling, was the forefront of freedom of expression. They broke all the rules. That, in itself, made them the champions of human freedom. Who makes the "rules@ that govern what we are allowed to discuss, other than the same controlling bullies and powerful interests who take our resources, confine our lives within narrow limits.<br /><br />For a brief moment, it looked like the Internet would be truly transformational. That on the same article that promotes the latest war, there would be 1000 comments denouncing the war. <br /><br />But the bullies have fought back. And their campaign advances under the banner "no trolls allowed". They have labeled and marginalized information dissent. It's not dissenters, it's "trolls" there is a ready smear word, and the smear word is followed by action to silence any message that is not backed by money and power. CNN has dropped it's comments on most articles citing "trolls" I guess that word is now an excuse for any kind of asymmetrical projection of information. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-893511592123812962013-11-24T05:33:10.285-05:002013-11-24T05:33:10.285-05:00I think the only reason why you can avoid incommen...I think the only reason why you can avoid incommensurability is because you misinterpret the meaning of the problem of induction in Kuhn's framework as leading only to "risk" but not to "uncertainty". What Kuhn is referring to when talking about the future is not its associated "risks" but its genuine "uncertainty" because not only future outcomes are unknown but also the standards to evaluate them. If paradigm choice would be an instance of choice under "risk", then paradigm choice would be as you put it "like choosing between mutual funds for your retirement account." But at the heart of Kuhn's conception of science is the idea that the standards for science are not given but themselves subject to scientific investigation and therefore as it were coevolve with the very theories they regulate. As a consequence it is only after all knowledge about the world has been gathered that we will know what the right standards for their evaluation should have been: "though the experience of scientists provides no philosophical justification for the values they deploy (such justification would solve the problem of induction) those values are in part learned from that experience, and they evolve with it." (Kuhn 1977, 335) In other words, it is only at the end of knowledge that paradigm choice will be reduced to choice under "risk", and until then their choice is made under "uncertainty". <br />The problem with paradigms is that what is at issue is not the solutions to puzzles, but what those puzzles should be and what their solution should look like. Paradigm choice then depends not on a comparison of their (expected) utility, but on what counts as utility. Instead of maximizing (expected) utility, scientists will sometimes simply reconceive of what counts as utility. What standard to use to compare previous performance of paradigms itself depends on future results. "the choice [between competing paradigms] is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue." (Kuhn 1970, 94) There is then genuine "uncertainty" about the future because even the underlying probability distribution is unknown. It is because of this uncertainty that Kuhn can't propose an algorithm for theory choice but needs to resort to heuristics instead. It is well-established that algorithms don't work under uncertainty, but that successful action in such circumstances is still possible by using heuristics. Whereas algorithms provide solutions, heuristic only specify how to look for a solution. Similarly, Kuhn characterized scientific values as criteria that function not as rules but as "Criteria that influence decisions without specifying what those decisions must be" (1977, 330). <br /><br />Ultimately I think whether one believes induction to lead to risk vs. uncertainty hinges on whether or not the standards of science can be established independently of that scientific activity itself. At the heart of Kuhn's account is the connection between the two, this "feedback loop through which theory change affects the values which led to that change" (Kuhn 1977, 336) without which there could not be any scientific revolutions. But if both are independent, then the problem of induction would not cause uncertainty (produced by the combination of unknown outcomes measures by unknown standards) but only two independent risks, namely risk about outcomes and risk about standards. In sum, I think it's not possible to reach your conclusion without arriving at an entirely different account of science than the one Kuhn proposed.Rogier De Langhehttp://logica.ugent.be/rogier/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-40349717267530050012013-10-22T11:54:51.428-04:002013-10-22T11:54:51.428-04:00Thanks for the pointer. I'll take a look.Thanks for the pointer. I'll take a look.P.D.http://laser.fontmonkey.com/foenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-32156220303227721182013-10-21T15:50:23.540-04:002013-10-21T15:50:23.540-04:00Christian Strasser and I wrote an article exactly ...Christian Strasser and I wrote an article exactly on this topic: Kuhn and the question of pursuit worthiness. Here is a link to it: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11245-012-9144-9<br />(a draft version is available also at http://www.academia.edu/772340/Kuhn_and_the_Question_of_Pursuit_Worthiness)Dunja Seseljahttp://ugent.academia.edu/Dunja%C5%A0e%C5%A1eljanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-30905360091798469962013-10-19T14:53:33.058-04:002013-10-19T14:53:33.058-04:00In the original post, I was thinking of the proble...In the original post, I was thinking of the problem of induction in the way you suggest. It would mean that commitment to a paradigm would always involve faith or a gamble, even outside of crises. I suspect that this fits Lakatos, who inherits a distrust of any positive confirmation from Popper.<br /><br />In replying to your comment, I was allowing that inductive conclusions are sometimes rationally compelling. It might suffice for the conservative reading of Kuhn for there to be underdetermination in times of crisis and revolution. Although Bayesians might say that there are expected utilities even then, I don't see any prospect of them being shared and objective.P.D. Magnushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07799239684943144310noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-44929588381184601102013-10-19T07:55:37.761-04:002013-10-19T07:55:37.761-04:00"Given the goal of maximizing future profits,..."Given the goal of maximizing future profits, facts about past returns can never be entirely decisive. So there are periods and cases where there isn't a unique rational choice." But a bet can be rational or irrational even if past evidence isn't "entirely decisive" or "sufficient to settle" which side of the bet will be more successful. The rational bettor doesn't maximize future profits; rather she maximizes <i>expected</i> future profits.<br /><br />Maybe you meant the problem of induction point more seriously than I realized before? But that seems (to me) to prove too much: no bets about future events are rational if we cannot rationally infer anything about the future from the past... Greg Frost-Arnoldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08563986984421570652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-3405044214508615672013-10-19T00:29:06.127-04:002013-10-19T00:29:06.127-04:00Greg: Given the goal of maximizing future profits,...Greg: Given the goal of maximizing future profits, facts about past returns can never be entirely decisive. So there are periods and cases where there isn't a unique rational choice.<br />The same holds for maximizing future puzzle-solving based on a history of prior puzzle-solving. When there one paradigm is in crisis and the other isn't fully developed yet, the evidence just isn't sufficient to settle which one would be the best guide going forward.P.D. Magnushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07799239684943144310noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-22532928098152389922013-10-18T21:24:13.351-04:002013-10-18T21:24:13.351-04:00Interesting points -- the Lakatos point in particu...Interesting points -- the Lakatos point in particular strikes me as insightful and helpful. <br /><br />I wanted to follow up on one bit: "the conclusion does not rely on incommensurability at all." I wonder about this. If there is no incommensurability at all between the paradigms, then it seems like there would be one paradigm that is better supported by the (limited) evidence available to the community (or it could be an objective tie). Put in your framework of gambles: given a choice between two bets, very often one is unequivocally better than another, i.e. there is a unique rational action. (Lots of philosophers characterize rationality in terms of what bets to accept.) Incommensurability disrupts many of these cases of unique rational choices. <br /><br />The above is probably too abstract; let me put it in terms of a concrete analogy. If the goal is simply to maximize profits, then for any bet, we can say which side of the bet is more rational to choose (or that they are equally rational to choose). However, if it is not settled/given that maximizing profits is the only goal -- perhaps other purported goals include maximizing free time, or maximizing chocolate consumption -- then typically there will be no unique/ univocal rational answer to 'Which side of the bet should I choose?' (Just to spell out what I hope is obvious, different goals here are supposed to be analogous to different paradigms.) Greg Frost-Arnoldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08563986984421570652noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-4244929258089599462013-01-18T09:37:57.457-05:002013-01-18T09:37:57.457-05:00Nice summary - thanks Massimo
Steven F.Nice summary - thanks Massimo<br />Steven F.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-72209020674613569162013-01-07T08:21:49.765-05:002013-01-07T08:21:49.765-05:00Wendy,
thanks for the clarifications, much apprec...Wendy,<br /><br />thanks for the clarifications, much appreciated!Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-3649234755323838272013-01-06T23:48:55.300-05:002013-01-06T23:48:55.300-05:00Thanks for giving such a detailed and thoughtful d...Thanks for giving such a detailed and thoughtful discussion of our session! Inevitably, I’d like to clarify a couple of things. <br /><br />First, it’s not my aim to argue that scientists should be describing the results of data assimilation as “observations” or “measurements” – it may well be that doing so would bring more confusion than benefit. Rather, what interests me is how some practices involving simulation (like 4DVar) are in fact more difficult to clearly distinguish from traditional measuring practices than we might expect. While I think it’s intriguing that practitioners do sometimes refer to the results of data assimilation as “observations”, my interest is really in the concept of measurement, rather than observation. I failed to make this clear in my talk (even the title was misleading in this regard!); I will try to make it much clearer as I get the paper in shape. <br /><br />Lastly, regarding the seemingly contradictory conclusions: I don't want to claim that assimilation models produce observations, at least not on their own; I did suggest that a data assimilation system as a whole, defined to include traditional observing instruments, might be considered a complex observing system/instrument whose results might be considered measurements of atmospheric properties.<br /><br />Thanks again for your post!Wendy Parkernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-39041636507625447932012-12-22T17:08:08.993-05:002012-12-22T17:08:08.993-05:00Very interesting. For more literature see http://e...Very interesting. For more literature see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_symmetry and http://www.weburbia.com/press/cite.htm<br />PeteHHhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08545699636937390967noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-73706055098596568132012-11-01T08:40:45.839-04:002012-11-01T08:40:45.839-04:00I attend U of T and I am in my final year of my Ba...I attend U of T and I am in my final year of my Bachelor's Program majoring in Linguistics. I can tell you that Chomsky certainly does rule at this school. Everything we learned was within the Chomskyan paradigm. His word was treated as truth throughout most of my degree. Only now in my final year are we actually assigned to read this Evans and Levinson paper, for example, and actually choose a side of the debate. But it is hard, because we've been indoctrinated with Chomskyan ideas since 2009.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-29790216647935588552012-10-27T16:10:58.462-04:002012-10-27T16:10:58.462-04:00One more thing with regard to the insufficiency of...One more thing with regard to the insufficiency of Shannon information: this has been espoused by ecological psychologists going back to Gibson. Specifically, there's an article in the second special issue on physical intelligence that's highly relevant:<br />http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10407413.2012.702615<br /><br />Yates, "On varieties of information"Henry Harrisonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05262610561319797094noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-34448766276709850172012-10-27T16:07:05.704-04:002012-10-27T16:07:05.704-04:00Sounds like you all should be aware of some of the...Sounds like you all should be aware of some of the work being done on Physical Intelligence coming from the Ecological Psychology community. A lot of progress is being made on the relationship between intelligence, evolution, and thermodynamics, coming from physics, psychology, and philosophy. This special issue should be a good place to start:<br />http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1<br /><br />I know Dennett at least has been a guest at Turvey's pub and is probably aware of the approach.<br /><br />Specifically with regards to the your paragraph, a proposal has been made for a fourth law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases maximally, which would predict the emergence of dissipative structures and complex systems as inevitable.<br /><br />What's lacking is an account of the divide between autocatakinetic systems in general (e.g. hurricanes), which maintain themselves away from equilibrium by the consumption of negentropy, but are slaves to the negentropy gradient and will themselves dissipate when the negentropy source is depleted. Biological systems, on the other hand, can fight the gradient and forage for remote sources of negentropy. An explanation of this divide is the motivation for this special issue (and another one two issues later).<br /><br />Finally, I would have liked to see Robert Rosen come up in the discussion on reductionism. His view is that impredicativity is necessary to explain complex systems, and in fact impredicativity is the general case, not a specific one. In order to understand complex systems science needs to abandon a Newtonian view of cauaslity (and the closely related model of predicative logical entailment). Similarly, Godel showed that in formal systems logical completeness and closure is not the general case but a specific one, and Rosen claims that physics cannot explain biology because biological systems are erroneously viewed as specific cases. In his view, the complex is the general, and science as a whole needs to reorganize around complexity rather than explanations built up from simple systems.Henry Harrisonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05262610561319797094noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-26260316108149914632012-10-27T16:02:58.048-04:002012-10-27T16:02:58.048-04:00Shane,
yes, I referred to Batterman's work in...Shane,<br /><br />yes, I referred to Batterman's work in the workshop. It's a must read.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09099460671669064269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-60705566879811133922012-10-27T14:32:06.177-04:002012-10-27T14:32:06.177-04:00Thanks for the very detailed write-up; it was a jo...Thanks for the very detailed write-up; it was a joy to read and I very much look forward to part 2!<br /><br />One minor thought about using renormalization to "operationalize" notions like reduction and emergence: did Robert Batterman's work (e.g. _The Devil in the Details_ and a number of subsequent papers) come up at all in that context? It might (or might not be) relevant...Shane Steinert-Threlkeldhttp://www.shane.stnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-41553985335917490762012-09-02T12:34:02.749-04:002012-09-02T12:34:02.749-04:00Philosophy of Science has always been the resort o...Philosophy of Science has always been the resort of failed mathematicians. These people have failed in their maths because they were not taught the subject properly and intensively between the crucial ages of 10 to 15. Peter L. Griffithsnoreply@blogger.com