SUO: On representing the unknown -- RE: RE: On Peirce's Four Incapacities of Man
John,
Thanks very much for your message -- I agree with everything you say below,
and appreciate the background information. At this point I think that we are
"on the same page".
Having gone through this discussion, I'd like to more directly tie it back
to the topic matter of SUO, if possible. Besides the relevance of semiotics
to natural language and knowledge representation in general, it occurs to me
that a question of (at least eventual) relevance to SUO may be the
following:
"To what extent does a standard upper ontology need to provide
representations for things that are unknown? (and how can this be done?)"
Ontologies focus on characterizing things that are known to exist, yet for
extensibility we may also need to characterize things that are unknown. Most
especially, we may need to be able to characterize what is unknown about the
things we know, because that provides the "touch points" for extending
knowledge...(I am of course *not* suggesting we need to represent the
"absolutely incognizable" -- I think we've beat that horse to death, so to
speak :-)
For example, consider waterfalls and gamma-ray bursters. We can describe
waterfalls at multiple levels -- we know how they work and what they are
made of. On the other hand, astrophysicists do not know how gamma-ray
bursters work or what they are made of -- indeed, what makes them most
interesting is the combination of what we know and don't know about them,
the evidence which indicates very large energies, the question of how they
could possibly work and produce the observations that people get.
This is just a suggestion, in case it is of interest to others-- I'm open to
people's thoughts pro or con, and don't claim that this necessarily implies
any immediate changes to work that is ongoing.
Phil Jackson
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Einstein
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org]On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 8:55 PM
> To: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
> Subject: SUO: RE: On Peirce's Four Incapacities of Man
>
>
>
> Phil,
>
> Before getting to the more detailed issues, I'd like to
> make a few points about the background to that article:
>
> 1. Peirce wrote it in 1868, when he was 29 years old. His
> ideas on many of those issues developed a great deal during
> the next 40+ years, so he made many further refinements that
> would qualify what he wrote there. The basic points about
> the importance of signs and the claim that all thought is
> a sign (of one kind or another) was something that he
> considered all his life. But you have to realize that
> images and feelings are also signs -- not just words.
>
> 2. During his college years, Peirce had been very impressed
> with Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_, which he said he
> had read and reread many times over, both in English and
> later in the original German. He also had discussed it
> detail with his father Benjamin P (who was regarded as one
> best mathematicians in America during the 19th century and
> was the founder of linear algebra). But during his mid 20s,
> he began to doubt some of Kant's basic assumptions (altough
> he still had a very high regard for Kant's work as a whole).
>
> 3. So it is best to read the paper on the "Four Incapacities"
> as a rejection of some of Kant's basic assumptions. One
> of Kant's distinctions was between the observable phenomena
> and the "things in themselves", which Kant called the
> "noumena". Kant claimed that the only things that could be
> known were phenomena, and the noumena were absolutely
> unknowable. Peirce called that claim Kant's greatest
> mistake. His rejection of the "absolutely unknowable"
> should be viewed as a rejection of Kant's concept of
> noumena, which Peirce believed is a useless appendage
> to Kant's theory. In short, it has no explanatory value
> whatever.
>
> 4. Another of Kant's claims was that space and time could not
> be learned from experience because they were necessary
> prerequisites for experience. That was K's reason for
> claiming that they could only be known by "intuition".
> P rejected that claim and substituted "hypothetical
> reasoning", which he later called "abduction" for what
> K claimed some kind of intuition was necessary.
>
> >A boundary case might be where one has a thought, but doesn't
> know quite how
>
>
> >to verbalize it, even subaudibly....For an idea that is "on the
> tip of the
>
>
> >tongue", one may know that one has an idea, and even be able to
> act upon it,
>
>
> >but not be able to verbalize it...
>
> Knowing that one has a idea is a sign of a sign. P would have
> no problem with that. I believe that James discussed that
> in some detail, but I'd have to search the book to find it.
> (You can download the source text and search it, if you like.)
>
> Another point: Peirce was left handed, and he remarked that he
> thought that his brain must be rewired differently from most
> people (which has been confirmed by brain scans, although more
> heat than light has been generated by left-brain and right-brain
> debates). He did however comment that writing in English about
> some of his new ideas sometimes felt as difficult as trying to
> write in a foreign language for which he lacked the vocabulary.
> Einstein and Whitehead also made similar comments.
>
> >It still seems worthwhile (at least on occasion) to distinguish between
> >signs used internally for thought, and signs used externally for
> >communication between people. With that understanding, the term
> "mentalese"
>
>
> >still seems to have value..(?)
>
> Yes, indeed. There are many different kinds of signs. One
> implication of treating all of them as signs is that you can
> talk about combinatorics of signs independent of the particular
> medium (inside the brain, inside the computer, etc.). When the
> medium does make a difference, you can also consider that too.
> But usually that difference itself can be represented by a sign.
>
> >... Peirce says we can have "no
> >conception". We seem to be agreeing that we can have "some concepts"
> (which
>
> >are themselves cognizable), about things which are incognizable.
>
> Again, if you think of Kant's noumena as the kind of thing
> that P was criticizing, he wouldn't deny that Kant had some
> kind of concept in his mind. But he denied that it was
> anything more than an empty placeholder. P was claiming that
> the noumena could be eliminated from K's theory without in any
> way detracting from whatever else was useful in the theory.
>
> >The mystery that Feynman referred to was the problem of explaining why
> >nature behaves according to the predictions of quantum mechanics. In
> >discussing the double slit experiment with electrons, and the uncertainty
> >principle, he wrote:
> >
> >"We now make a few remarks on a suggestion that has sometimes
> been made to
>
>
> >try to avoid the description we have given: 'Perhaps the
> electron has some
>
>
> >kind of inner works - some inner variables - that we do not yet
> know about.
>
>
> >Perhaps that is why we cannot predict what will happen. If we could look
> >more closely at the electron, we could be able to tell where it will end
> >up.' So far as we know, that is impossible. We would still be in
> difficulty.
>
>
> >[...] And no one has figured a way out of this puzzle. So at the present
> >time we must limit ourselves to computing probabilities. We say 'at the
> >present time' but we suspect very strongly that it is something
> that will be
>
>
> >with us forever - that it is impossible to beat that puzzle -
> that this is
>
>
> >the way nature really is." (The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
> Vol. III, pp.
>
>
> >1-10,1-11.)
>
> Yes, there are certainly lots of unanswered questions, and there
> probably always will be. But there are three different points:
>
> 1. We know that there are unsolved problems (Feynman) or
> even unsolvable problems (Turing and Goedel).
>
> 2. There may be some things (spirits, other universes, etc.)
> that can never have any effects on any of our senses or
> any scientific instruments that we can ever devise.
>
> 3. We know that there are things that we can never know (Kant).
>
> Peirce would never deny point #1. But he denied point #3.
> He was agnostic about 2: if they had no effects whatever,
> they would be truly unknowable, and we could never know anything
> about them or even their possible existence. But if they had
> any measurable effects whatever, then they wouldn't be
> "absolutely incognizable."
>
> The things Goedel and Turing were talking about weren't totally
> incognizable, because we could discover a great deal about them,
> such as how many there might be, some examples of them, and
> even some possible answers -- i.e., we could define a function
> whose value was either 0 or 1, but we could prove that it was
> impossible to determine which.
>
> >And here's another quote: "... we always have had (secret,
> secret, close the
>
>
> >door!)... a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that
> >quantum mechanics represents. At least I do, because I'm an old
> enough man
>
>
> >that I haven't got to the point that this stuff is obvious to me. Okay, I
> >still get nervous with it." Simulating Physics with Computers,
> International
>
>
> >Journal of Theoretical Physics, vol 21, 1982, p467.
>
> >I recall another quote (but can't find it) where Feynman refers to
> >attempting to solve this mystery as (paraphrasing) an impossible abyss.
>
> >> The only people who have a problem with it are people like
> >> Einstein, who were hoping to find completely deterministic
> >> theories of everything.
>
> >Or people who want to understand how nature works at deeper
> levels, why it
>
>
> >behaves according to the formulae of quantum mechanics...Such
> people might
>
>
> >be satisfied with indeterminism, but still want to understand
> how and why it
>
>
> >arises.
>
> There is a difference: Einstein would never accept the idea
> of a nondeterministic universe. If Peirce had known about the
> uncertainly principle, he would not have been troubled by it
> as Einstein was. However, he would agree with Feynman that it
> was important to explore as deeply as possible to find further
> evidence to confirm whether it was truly nondeterministic.
>
> >It seems that to the extent that we cannot explain why nature behaves
> >according to quantum mechanics, we have an example of something we do not
> >understand (cannot currently cognize) beyond a certain level of
> conception,
>
>
> >i.e. beyond the predictive concepts of quantum mechanics.
>
> Yes. That is a point where we know that there is something
> affecting our results, which we have not yet been able to
> characterize. But that evidence itself shows that what we
> are hypothesizing isn't "absolutely incognizable". The kind
> of thing that Peirce was rejecting is Kant's noumena, which
> can have no effects whatever on anything we perceive. Anything
> that can disrupt the agreement between theory and reality is
> something that we already have some evidence for. It is not
> "absolutely incognizable".
>
> >I am however, very interested in the concept of
> >the multiverse, that there are parallel universes that do
> interact with our
>
>
> >universe, that these interactions can be measured in scientific
> experiments,
>
>
> >and account for the behavior observed in the double slit experiment. As I
> >mentioned in a separate thread, the clearest, strongest argument
> I've seen
>
>
> >for this is David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality". I'd be very
> interested
>
> >in your thoughts on this, also.
>
> Yes, that is very interesting. But if those other universes
> can have measurable effects, then it is possible to learn
> something about them. They are not "absolutely incognizable".
>
> John Sowa