Steve, I promised myself I wouldn't do this, speaking of too long and don't read and all.
But do you know how powerful you are, just by being superhumanly articulate? With one line, emphasizing knowing versus understanding, you directed the whole stream into a conversation about information theory. It seemed to me that the original quote had to do with the difference between thinking about doing something, or talking about doing something, and actually _doing something_. We work hard to make good language, with care for lexical items, syntactic rules, and whatever we can do to formalize rules for semantic composition. And I have great respect for people who then try to use that language carefully, recognizing that scientists often don't, as much as perhaps they could. But in the end, we have enough cases behind us that we should now understand that our best attempts to construct good language are always limited reflections of what we happen to have experienced up to that time. (French experience, _experiment_, ...) We could have discoursed, and argued, and reasoned, forever, about the meaning and use of the word "time" pre-relativity. But if we hadn't had to confront Maxwell's equations and various other experiences of the world, we probably could never have merely-talked ourselves into realizing that the word did not have an unqualified, reliable meaning in the way we were using it (who knows, in a different reality, maybe it could have, so logic alone could never have told us which reality we inhabit; I don't know). We had to be thrown back to a stage where the most desperate among us could say "Will you stop talking about 'time' and start talking about clocks that tick, and people whose hearts beat and who get old _where they are_ even as they move about." And from that, we could learn for the first time how to build spacetime diagrams, and so forth, and at some level, once we knew how to be careful using the diagrams reliably, we were free to again use the word time, and perhaps even use it carelessly in cases (when its purpose was not to replace the diagrams, but merely to share attention to them), and still be able to carry out and anticipate acts in the world that we never could have before, with all the linguistic care in the world. I know this is the most shop-worn example, but I still think that it and several others like it carry a relevant piece of meaning. Renormalization and the theory of phase transitions did the same thing for the notion of "object", and (simply passing by any rhetoric that doesn't produce distinguishable results for calculations or experiments), quantum theory taught us that "state" and "observable" were not even in principle the same kinds of concepts. Someday, a sensible theory of ecology, development, and evolution will hopefully lead to a similar sensible thinking about individuality. Each of these has been a wrenching experience, because we really have had to throw away a piece of what had been fundamental to our ability to speak and to reason, and to simply leave a void until we could build a new foundation out of different pieces. It was a very extra-conversational exchange with our world of experiences, even if it was supported all along the way by intense and labored conversation, trying to figure out how to get oriented. It seems that a combination of a willingness to mistrust language while still trying to use it well, but also, to continually try to be rebuilding it from experience, is the pragmatic thing that distinguishes science. Philosophers are good at recognizing the unreliability of language, so no corner on that market. And I think everybody, science and philosophy both, wants to both know and understand. But there is a sense in which scientists can be content if the language of science is something like the calls at a barn dance -- they keep us doing things together, they rely on shared experience, and they have to change as the community changes the dance -- and still do something productive, that seems to capture a major defining characteristic of the enterprise. Along with all the other stuff on information theory that is already in this thread, all of which I also like. Eric ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
