Y'all say:
In
http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170619/f46244d3/attachment-0001.pdf:
>
>
> If our analysis is correct, then the distinction between explanation and
> description takes
> on an entirely new importance in science.
> ...
> The young man thinks, "This is not a unique problem, I am just a bachelor,"
> and goes about his
> business with a happier heart.
> However, such relief is the philosophical equivalent of a placebo, and it may
> be short-
> lived. Knowing that he is a bachelor tells the young man nothing about his
> predicament that he
> did not already know. He knew that he was unmarried, and that is all that it
> means to say one is a
> bachelor. Moreover, he has learned nothing that might help him find a
> solution to the problem.
>
>
But, it seems to me that "This is not a unique problem" is THE fundamental
scientific point. It may be the only thing about science that anyone should
care about. You even lectured me way back to be careful about conflating
idiographic vs. NOM-othetic information (emphasis is purposeful). Circularity
(of description or explanation) is irrelevant. What matters is the
reproducibility of experiments. It doesn't matter what you think happens
between the laser and the film. What matters is that it does the same thing
every time you run the experiment and which changes to the experiment cause
which changes to the outcome.
You may notice this is the same sort of criticism I applied to your paper about
filter explanations. Even _if_ a particular bit of reasoning is circular, as
long as it's not trivially circular ("flat", "thin", or "shallow"), there is
information to be gained from examining that _circle_, that loop. So, the loop
of unmarried <=> bachelor has information in it, even if the only information
is (as in your example), the guy learns that because the condition has another
name, perhaps there are other ways of thinking about it ... other _circles_ to
use.
Now, if instead of the vagaries of psychology and natural language, you were
talking in math or logic, even thick loops are more easily reduced to their
thin ("normalized", "canonical") form. So, we can conclude, the more formal
the language used to express the circle, the more obvious the circle. But
you're not talking in or about math or logic. You're talking about psychology,
human thought, etc. in this paper. And therefore my response to you is:
Are YOU relying too heavily on the (silly) metaphor of computer to brain?
Software to thought? >8^D
I'm only on page 7. So, maybe you eventually address this point. Sorry if
that's the case.
On 06/18/2017 09:46 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> FWLIW, The attached PDF is from a book manuscript, pieces of which have been
> kicking around for more than 40 years, which Eric Charles has been trying
> unsuccessfully to get me to pull together into something publishable. If any
> of you is curious, the text will help you to understand the things I said in
> the recent complexity discussion and their relation to the “levels”
> discussion and the metaphor discussion that follows. The specific discussion
> on metaphor is late in the pdf, so that if that is what interests you, you
> can safely skip to the first section on models. For me, a model is just a
> scientific metaphor. Full stop.
>
>
>
> If anybody had comments to share, we, of course, would be deeply grateful.
--
☣ glen
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