Posted by
Steve Smith on
Jun 23, 2017; 7:36pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/the-role-of-metaphor-in-scientific-thought-tp7590080p7590120.html
Marcus -
The _From Other Tongues_
sketch is good. Both what is heard and what is said could
be modeled as a closure over some subjective
representation.
...
The squiggles suggest that the
types are not yet shared amongst the agents.
I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues"
collection is that one culture (and in this case associated
language) has atomic concepts built into it (as a single common
word) which do not have an atomic word in the other language and in
fact may not lend themselves to a succinct description. In fact, I
believe entire books, multivolume sets, maybe even libraries have
been written on and dedicated to a concept native to one culture but
not to another?
My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is
succinctly described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's
possessions by borrowing them one at a time and not returning them".
The fact of a single word for this suggests that in that culture
it is a much more common occurrence than in our own, or that the
number of possessions involved is a tiny fraction of what we are
familiar with, or the attachment to them by the original owner is so
minimal that it is *possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's
possessions before he might notice "what she did there".
Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own
input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have
food-induced conversations with the people you have had a meal
with.
WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the
overtones that Stephen once observed at the Complex: "When you get
together with a group of autistics, they might all appear to be
listening intently to your every word, when in fact they are just
waiting intently for you to pause so THEY can talk about what THEY
are interested in!"
I’m not sure I agree in the
value of the interpolations and extrapolations of
ontologies. It sounds too much like “agree to disagree”.
I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal
experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps
10 years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to
be the most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount
of work put forth to bring it to it's current state. I think the
number of concepts was roughly 5,000 at the time.
Progress I think requires
aggressively creating and destroying types and constant by
negotiation and empirical validation.
I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the
level of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood
that this was more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate
and apt Ontologies from the many subfields... it was more useful
for translation than for understanding, and that real understanding
required learning the language/ontology of the subfields. I don't
think these are "disagreements" but rather an awareness that there
is a fuller richness behind the formalisms agreed upon for
convenience of discussion.
Many “interpretations” just put
off getting to the bottom of things. Keep the
interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a
better interpretation, then press Delete.
I do agree with this in a mild form. Many of us here are very
interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper
understanding residing in a word's original use, just as the calling
up of deprecated terms can turn out to be useful for many
reasons.
John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how
idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated
when it found new utility in quantum loop gravity? I am winging
this if John wants to correct me.
I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists
before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the
Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences
and in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table.
Similarly Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention
Quantum Theory? Each has a domain of utility which may last past a
formal resolution of the differences and an agreement on a shared
view (e.g. GUT)?
Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and
Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how
facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts?
- Steve
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.comFRIAM-COMIC
http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove