SUO: Re: Critique Of Non-Functional Reason
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| A. Automated Reasoning (AR)
|
| The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference
| to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
|
| B. Inter-Operability (IO)
|
| The standard will provide a basis for achieving Inter-Operability
| among various software and database applications.
[AB]
Two streams of discussion make their confluence here.
I cannot see my way clearly enough to trace every
backwash, eddy, overflow, undertow, whirlpool, or
whatever, so here are a few of the ebbier tides,
that I will try to sump up in the following way:
A. There are formal deficiencies in the
non-functional way of treating logic.
B. There are practical defects in the way that this logical POV
frequently gets bent to the aims and the problems of inquiry.
It difficult to pin the source of these problems down precisely.
Here will be my initial attempt at getting a fix on their cause.
[A]
Half the battle in a formal science like logic or mathematics is knowing
where to draw the right distinctions to capture the form of one's object.
The other half of the battle is knowing when to erase those distinctions,
how to recognize the isomorphisms between superficially distinct objects.
I have stated my appreciation of Quine's skills at hair-splitting,
but where he comes up short, for my part, is in the complementary
act of weaving these strands back together in ways that will hold.
I can recognize that this complementary task is one of the reasons
that category theory got invented. I will pursue this angle later.
[B]
Consider the messiness of real databases, the circumstantial vicissitude
that one can collect data for a very long time before one starts to see
anything like a pattern that might be worth expressing in a succinct
axiomatic form, and even when one does, it would be utterly foolish,
and in many cases actually illegal, to throw out the raw data in
favor of the partial summary that happens to be imprisoned in
a probable approximate theory.
One of the marks of "functional reason" is a naturally empirical attitude.
This is reflected in the reporting of factually informed descriptions of
the domain of one's interest, and in it the flow of information proceeds
in the opposite direction from the unnatural theoretical attitude that
is exhibited in the dictating of 'a priori' axiomatic prescriptions
to the domain that one seeks but to dominate, as if to try and tell
nature how to behave, instead of paying attention to what actually
happens in reality.
A capacity that is sorely lacking in the 'a priori' way of approaching reality
is a tolerance for the unruliness of real experience, the vicious circumstance
that observations, for all of their supposed theory-laden character, are still
not so pre-cut and spoon-sized that they will not forever be found overflowing
whatever ladle of theory one might hope to scoop them up and contain them in.
I'm afraid I have to apologize for the lack of organization,
but it really is a struggle to get clear about this problem.
Jon Awbrey
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