SUO: *Date 06 Apr 2002 -- Formalism Engineering
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BA = Bill Andersen
JA = Jon Awbrey
It is so easy to lose one's focus, especially when confronted
with a formidable duty, but I am determined to give it my best
current effort, one more try, or maybe two, before I let it go
for the time being. It appears that some stylistic variations
in my last few remarks have caused them to be taken in a sense
that is almost entirely askew from their intended direction.
Strangely enough, the misconstruals lead into questions that
are even more interesting than the ones that I have in my
sights, or so it seems at the moment, but still, I am
determined not to be distracted, at least, not yet.
Oh, what the heck -- it's the end of the week -- I need a break.
JA: The other day, in the midst of the survey sutra, I expressed the matter this way:
JA: What is "formalism engineering" if not the critique of existing formalisms and
the art of designing them more to the point of their transcendental purposes?
BA: Well, here's one:
BA: 1. You have some intuitive desiderata for what you want the formalism to do.
BA: 2. You might clean these up using standard tools, or not.
BA: 3. You design your new formalism to do what you want.
BA: A lot like engineering, no? AFTER the fact,
you may critique existing formalisms in terms
of what your magical new one can do, or possibly
you based your desiderata on shortcomings of other
formalisms, but it is not necessary that you start
from there.
It appears that my slogan-engineering has gotten me into trouble again.
I was only using a rhetorical question of the form "What is A if not B?"
to mean something like "I think that A is probably just B". To try and
say it over again, the rational design of any artifact toward a purpose,
one that has a "point" to it, would seem to involve, among other things,
looking at what sorts of comparable things are already in the same field,
directed to the same rough point (objective), to see if you can figure out
what sorts of factors embodied in those artifacts contribute to whatever
degree of success they have, what factors are neutral, and what factors
may in fact be impediments to their achieving what is earnestly desired.
This seems to be the sort of pre-cultivation that one has to go through
before one even bothers to go looking for any new brands of magic beans.
Transcendental? I will tell you the meanings that I learned first:
incapable of being the root of an algebraic equation with rational
coefficients; being, involving, or representing a function that
cannot be expressed by a finite number of algebraic operations.
So roughly an ideal that can only be approached approximately.
Nothing spooky here -- nothing to compare with Sleepy Hollow.
JA: A critical method over any domain, in any field, from any point of view,
depends on being able to consider alternatives, to compare and contrast
them, as our teachers used to say. Now, we are all used to doing that
in regard to many different subject matters, even as far as the words
and languages -- from natural to nominal to nurtural to newfangled --
that we use to carry out our thoughts in poem or prose or program.
That's SCIENCE, not ENGINEERING. Engineers just build. Look at the Segway.
Segue?
You can't possibly mean the things you just said here.
JA: But how do we find a place to stand in regard to logic?
Where is the examen of the balance to weigh our reason?
Where is the fulcrum of the lever to shift for thought?
BA: For the purposes of building an ontology system (or systems),
there is only one necessary condition: that the logic be able
to do any computation we can do on our current von Neumann-style
digital computers. Anything less, and we lose the ability to
choose the point in the expressivness-efficiency space in
which we'd like a given ontology to operate.
The question was: How to design a better theorem-trap,
one that is somewhat higher up in the efficiency space?
BA: Well, quantum computers might come along you say, and I agree.
But the same goes for engineering of physical artifacts as well --
I might get my hands on tri-lithium and warp coils someday too,
and thereby change the rules of engineering as I know them, but
I'm not going to worry about that now.
BA: Now all of that might seem like a cop out, and it certainly is
from an *ontology* point of view. But we're just talking about
necessary conditions for now ...
I am talking about the practical conditions for practical success in applying logic.
But again, those three questions were rhetorical in nature,
posed for the sake of setting up the following reflections:
JA: Well, we make the question too hard for ourselves when we ask it that way!
And yet it seems that many people are blocked in their critical reasoning
by one or another equally facile indentification of their favorite syntax
for tackling their sublunary logical chores with Pure Reason Its Own Self.
That just means: It's hard to improve something that you think is perfect.
But any person who thinks that FOL is GOL, in any of their secular avatars,
is a finitely informed critter with a serious awareness-of-fallibility gap.
I do have a couple of different threads tangled here,
but one of them began the other day when you looked
at somebody else's formalism and "critiqued" it on
a couple of different grounds, one being that it
was contaminated with unexamined assumptions of
an implicit ontological nature that interferred
with its avowed purpose. So it must be possible
to consider such criticisms and to figure out how
and whether to respond to them. If you think that
is somebodys else's job, the scientist and not the
engineer, well okay, but somebody has got to do it,
and the information that comes out of the evaluation
has to be fed back into the application if the quality
is going to improve, continuously or otherwise. Right?
Jon Awbtey
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