Phil Henshaw wrote: > You seem to suggest it is 'illformed' to have local knowledge and unanswered > contextual questions.
No, not at all. One can easily have an incomplete math representation of some aspect of a concrete thing. But one cannot have a complete math representation of some aspect of a concrete thing and still have part of that aspect unrepresented. I.e. one cannot have a complete representation that is incomplete. That's just plain self-contradictory. I have no problems with incomplete representations. We use them all the time. > It may be 'illformed' in a very real sense, but also > the most common of the circumstances we find ourselves in. To date science > has primarily been an art and craft of mathematical representation of things > out of their context, leaving it to engineers to deal with the 'messy bits'. > I'd like to turn science into an art and craft using math to explore our > contexts. So I would find the question well formed, and propose a variety > of exploratory procedures for investigating the environment of he button to > "catch the thread" of it's connections to other things... OK. So perhaps you might be willing to change your question to: "Given an INcomplete math representation of a button, how would you derive a math representation of a button hole?" If you did that, then we might be able to formulate an answer. However, although that modified question is well-formed, it is too vague. We'd need to see an example math representation of the button to know what's there and what's missing. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ 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
