[Wittrs] Following a rule / Popper
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:21:08 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@...> wrote:
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "jrstern" <jrstern@> wrote:
>
> > Oh, sure, any good behaviorist or positivist or Quinian or
> > probably even a Kripkean, any classical empiricist, is going
> > to say we get all of our data from the world via physical signals,
> > in particular via sense impressions, so everything has to come
> > via observation sentences, yada yada.
>
> I've never been able to work out what "sense impressions" are
> supposed to be.
Mostly tedious.
> If reading the time on a clock means accessing a physical signal,
> then fine. But that physical signal would not be there without
> the clock. And the clock itself is an invention. As far as I can
> tell, without that invention there would be no physical signal
> that provides the same information.
I'm not quite sure what role "invention" is playing here.
However, I believe we're thinking along the same lines, anyway.
I'm more worried about whatever form the information takes,
whatever its acquisition logic, once it's within an agent.
Popper talks of "objective knowledge" and the "third world"
or "world 3" of knowledge.
I'm now willing to argue that a clock does tell time, and that's
why when you look at it, you *get* the time, because the clock
"tells" it, in some appropriately modest and deflated manner.
Actually, I don't care much about clocks, but I do care about how
we talk about the meaning and use of information in computational
models, and if that means I have to talk about clocks now and
again, I'll do what I can. There are some subtleties involved,
I guess, if things-are-what-they-are is a subtlety.
> To me, it makes no sense to talk about discovering patterns in
> physical signals that come from inventions, unless we also talk
> about the inventing that makes it possible.
>
> My view of learning, is that we are inventing more and better
> ways of getting information. And, roughly speaking, science works
> mainly because it has make available so much information that had
> not previously been available. This is roughly consistent with
> the perceptual learning studied by E. Gibson.
But isn't Gibson something of a direct realist?
I'll go with that, as far as it goes, but it doesn't
go far enough.
Josh
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