Dear All,
Terry's phrase deserves at least the attention, if not the agreement of all of
us. In my view, qualitative terms belong in science if they follow some sort of
logic. There are risks, of fraud and pseudo-science, but these risks cannot be
avoided in reality by relying on mathematics alone.
Two comments, one negative and one positive:
How is it that despite the risk most of us are able to recognize pseudo-science
when we see it?
In the sciences indicated by Terry, are not abductions to the best
explanations and implications to process dynamics doing some of the necessary
work?
There seems to be no alternative to living partly with uncertainty, then, at
all levels, and this is not congenial to some people. The existence of this
non-congeniality is an example of the science I am talking about.
Best wishes,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: Terrence W. DEACON
To: fis
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 5:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Fis] some notes
If the definition of science requires quantification and mathematical
representation then most of biology won't qualify, including molecular and
cellular biology, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. Physics envy has
long ago been abandoned by most working scientists in these fields. This is not
to say that just any sort of theorizing qualifies, nor can we be sure that
today's non-quantifiable science won't someday be susceptible to precise
empirically testable mathematical modeling—even semiotic analyses may someday
be made mathematically precise—but being empirically testable, even if just in
precise qualitative terms, is pretty close to being a core defining attribute.
On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 9:34 AM, Terrence W. DEACON <dea...@berkeley.edu>
wrote:
On communication:
"Communication" needs to be more carefully distinguished from mere
transfer of physical differences from location to location and time to
time. Indeed, any physical transfer of physical differences in this
respect can be utilized to communicate, and all communication requires
this physical foundation. But there is an important hierarchic
distinction that we need to consider. Simply collapsing our concept of
'communication' to its physical substrate (and ignoring the process of
interpretation) has the consequence of treating nearly all physical
processes as communication and failing to distinguish those that
additionally convey something we might call representational content.
Thus while internet communication and signals transferred between
computers do indeed play an essential role in human communication, we
only have to imagine a science fiction story in which all human
interpreters suddenly disappear but our computers nevertheless
continue to exchange signals, to realize that those signals are not
"communicating" anything. At that point they would only be physically
modifying one another, not communicating, except in a sort of
metaphoric sense. This sort of process would not be fundamentally
different from solar radiation modifying atoms in the upper atmosphere
or any other similar causal process. It would be odd to say that the
sun is thereby communicating anything to the atmosphere.
So, while I recognize that there are many methodological contexts in
which it makes little difference whether or not we ignore this
semiotic aspect, as many others have also hinted, this is merely to
bracket from consideration what really distinguishes physical transfer
of causal influence from communication. Remember that this was a
methodological strategy that even Shannon was quick to acknowledge in
the first lines of his classic paper. We should endeavor to always be
as careful.
— Terry
--
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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