SUO: Re: Question about Example in KR Book
Tom,
I wholeheartedly agree with you on the importance of philosophy
for ontology. I began the ontology chapter of my KR book
with a quotation that Peirce directed against Ernst Mach:
Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any
metaphysics... and you have found one whose doctrines are
thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics
with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the
great naturalist Aristotle -- if only to avoid philosophizing.
Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it
will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that
metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose.
I think that we agree on a moderate position (I call it realist
and you call it nominalist), but I believe that the labels
"realist" and "nominalist" are more confusing than helpful at
this point. I would prefer to drop them because they are not
"antipodes", as you put it, but rather two among the seven
metaphysical systems, as Peirce classified them. For a brief
summary of the seven systems, see Section 7 of my paper
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
Signs, Processes, and Language Games
The metaphysical system I recommend is #7, which includes, as
Peirce said, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Thomas Reid, and himself.
I would add Whitehead to that list -- and perhaps you. I won't
say anything further about that on SUO list, since it requires
more discussion of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which
many people would prefer not to hear again.
I'd like to comment on your antipodes, many of which I don't
regard as antipodes:
> (a) realism vs. nominalism;
As I said, realism is System #7, and nominalism is System #6.
They are not antipodes according to Peirce's classification,
because System #7 includes all other systems as proper subsets
and it puts them all into perspective.
> (b) analytic sentences vs. synthetic sentences;
This is a very complex issue, as you know, but again I would not
use the term antipode. I would say that what is analytic or
synthetic is theory dependent.
> (c) observations as reporting what is "out there" vs. observations
> as irreducibly theory-laden;
It is not possible to make any statement that is not "theory laden".
See Peirce's classification of signs, which clearly distinguishes
the way in which conventions and habits (i.e. theories, explicit or
implicit) come into play in all symbolic signs. (Many signs are not
symbols, but they might still be conventional. See CSP's classes.)
> (d) sentences vs. theories as what observations confirm/disconfirm;
Obviously they disconfirm theories. Some thoeries might be as small
as a single sentence, but most are not.
> (e) Aristotelian definition as listing essential but not accidental
> properties vs. definition based on Wittgensteinian family esemblances;
Aristotle presented both kinds of definition. Genus + defferentiae
comes from his logic, and the definition by prototype and family
resemblance comes from his biological writings. Whewell and Mill
had a big debate over this issue in the 19th century, which is just
as cogent, if not more so, than much of the late 20th century stuff.
> (f) the need for our semantic engineering constructions to nimbly
> respond to sometimes very rapidly-changing semantics and to
> family-resemblance type differences in definitions from one business
> enterprise (the area in which I professionally encounter semantic
> engineering issues) to another. (Different definitions of "customer"
> was the example I most frequently used.)
Absolutely. That is one of the major themes of my Knowledge Soup
chapter in the KR book. I used the example of the oil company that
had multiple inconsistent definitions of "oil well", which made it
impossible to merge their geological and financial databases. And
I also used the example of the mining company that assigned employee
numbers to their mules -- when they computerized their records, they
extended the sex field with options for Male, Female, and Mule.
> ... in reading the collection of articles in your Semantic Networks
> book, I saw no recognition that such issues had any import for real
> engineering work.
That was a book I edited, and the emphasis of the book was on other
issues. But see Chapter 7 on Conceptual Relativity in my 1984 book,
and Chapter 6 on Knowledge Soup in my KR book. To see the preface,
table of contents, and index of the KR book, go to:
http://www.jfsowa.com/krbook
> I again saw the same attitude, or better perhaps, the same lack of
> awareness that if these philosophical issues are treated as basically
> irrelevant to our real world engineering work, we are likely to build
> semantic bridges that collapse under their own weight, semantic cars
> that crash into telephone poles despite our best efforts to keep them
> on the road.
It is not possible to infer a "lack of awareness" of an issue from a
note that is addressing a different topic. Nobody has ever complained
that my CS and KR books contained too little philosophy.
> And if the organizers of this forum do decide to set up linked
> sub-folders for each of those participants who would like them,
> I would certainly be willing to cut and paste my stuff into a
> more or less coherent narrative, and put it in that folder.)
I made that suggestion in an earlier note, and I would be happy to
restate it as a formal motion, if you would like to second it.
> ... For example, it covers up the issue of what it is that
> experience/experiments confirm or falsify. Is it individual
> statements? But no individual statements are free of theory,
> and so how is "seeing that they are true" a support for that
> theory through whose conceptual lenses we are doing the seeing?
Those issues are very important, and Peirce emphasized their importance
very clearly. I just didn't want to be accused of citing too much
chapter and verse from CSP. In short, Peirce's lens (or whatever you
want to call his viewing apparatus) subsumed all of issues very nicely
and put them together in the best synthesis I have ever seen. Anything
you find good in Rorty probably comes from Peirce. My major complaint
about Rorty is that he didn't spend enough time studying Peirce.
> When we think of this kind of science, exemplified by such statements
> as "Physical reality exists in eleven dimensions", it isn't quite as
> clear how rock-kicking common-sense realism applies to it, nor how any
> individual experiment would falsify it.
I would say that string theory, in so far as it is consistent with
the predictions made by quantum mechanics and general relativity
reflects something real. By covering the predictions made by both
of those two systems within a unified framework, it makes an important
step beyond them. In that sense, it is a better characterization of
reality and of the laws of physics than the earlier theories. However,
there are infinitely many theories that can make exactly the same
predictions about reality. Mathematicians and physicists usually
prefer the simplest one -- but it is not easy to define what is
"simple", let alone find the simplest one.
The 11 dimensions don't bother me at all. Airplane engineers routinely
use six dimensions to describe the position and attitude of a plane:
three dimensions for position and the three dimensions of pitch, roll,
and yaw. Does that mean that a plane travels in a 6-dimensional space?
In a certain manner of speaking, yes. Are those dimensions real?
In one sense, they describe something real from a particular point of
view. But there are other kinds of coordinate systems that obscure
some of those features while highlighting others.
> Now it becomes possible to understand how a lot of experimental
> evidence can be treated as disconfirmatory by one group of scientists,
> but perfectly consistent with a favored hypothesis by another
> group. Now "scientific methodology" is not the simple, "let's get on
> with it" thing I think you present it as.
I never said anything like that. All I said is that the labels of
realism and nominalism were misleading, and I'd like to dispense
with them. I prefer Peirce's seven metaphysical systems.
John