ONT Re: Inquiry Into Models
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
HP: Your diagram is near enough to the way I meant it,
but it was not meant as a formalization, but as a
clarification, as in diagramming a sentence.
| EXTERNAL OBJECTS ____ WE FORM FOR OURSELVES ____ IMAGES, SYMBOLS, OR PICTURES
| | / [SIGNS, BRAIN STATES, WHATEVER]
| | / |
| | / |
| [NATURAL LAWS] . . . SUCH THAT . . . / [LOGICAL, MATHEMATICAL MODEL]
| | / |
| | / |
| | / |
| NECESSARY NATURAL /___ ARE THE SAME AS THE _____ LOGICALLY NECESSARY
| CONSEQUENTS CONSEQUENTS OF THE MODEL
HP: Let me elaborate. The only formal part is in the right vertical column.
All the rest is a kind of epistemological diagram indicating the necessary
conditions for an empirically verifiable formal model to successfully represent
our experience. An important aspect of the Hertz's statement, emphasized by the
diagram, is that the horizontal lines represent the observer's (or agent's) semantic
interaction with the world (i.e., detection, pattern recognition, observation, measurement),
the right vertical column represents the syntactic or formal (usually sequential) manipulations
of the observer, and the left vertical column represents the part of the world (space, time, energy,
and matter) that we choose to model. The separation of semantics (measurement of particular events)
from syntax (the formal model of universal laws) is essential for physical theory.
HP: I often quote von Neumann, although there is general consensus in physics:
| That is, we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system,
| the other the observer. In the former, we can follow up all physical processes (in principle
| at least) arbitrarily precisely. In the latter, this is meaningless. The boundary between
| the two is arbitrary to a very large extent. ... -- but this does not change the fact
| that in each method of description the boundary must be placed somewhere, if the method
| is not to proceed vacuously, i.e., if a comparison with experiment is to be possible.
|
| John von Neumann,
|'Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics',
| Translated from the German edition by Robert T. Beyer,
| Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1955, 1983.
| Princeton Landmarks in Physics Series, 1996, page 420.
The paragraph concludes:
| Indeed experience only makes statements of this type:
| an observer has made a certain (subjective) observation;
| and never any like this: a physical quantity has a certain value.
|
| JvN, MFOQM, page 420.
HP: The most difficult column is the middle vertical column that is often called
the "epistemic cut" because it separates the subject and object, or better,
the knower from the known. This can never be formalized without losing
its essential function which is to provide the initial conditions for
the formal model. As von Neumann has made clear, if you try to move
the cut left to include the measurement process in the model, then
you must create a new measurement for new initial condition for
the new model now including the old measuring device as part
of the model -- an infinite regress.
HP: This is summary and consequently it is oversimplified.
Before saying more, I would like to know if Peirce makes
a clear distinction or defines an epistemic cut between
the world and the inquirer.
Howard,
I think that it would be fair to say -- in fifty words or less, but who's counting? --
that Peirce treats the lines that we draw between self and other as any other brand
of hypothetical construction, to wit, lines of whose positions we are bound to draw
the consequence of their supposed truth, whereon to abandon, defend, or redraw them.
I have strung a few beads, reflective of
this "particular line of thought" (PLOT),
on the random sampler of threads from my
dissertation that I e-nounced under that
mot "Reflective Interpretive Frameworks".
Jon Awbrey
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