Re: Operational Closure

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Tim,

I?m not sure where or if we disagree. Let?s leave Plato out of it, since we may disagree 
on how he thought. 

What do you think Rosen means by ?material reality? if it is not, as you say, what we 
impute back to the natural system from our models? Rosen says that organization (or form 
or relation) is as much or more a part of reality as particles. I am quite sure he means 
that there exists in reality (that is, ontologically) something that corresponds via 
encoding to the mathematical model of organization, and that this is what is important. 
Of course, this is in addition to other encodings that model particles. It makes no sense 
in his epistemology to speak merely of ?alluding to the relative importance of a model,? 
as you say, without the necessary implication of the corresponding importance of what the 
models encodes. Only a solipsist can omit such an implication, and Rosen was not a 
solipsist.

The reason I am quite sure of this is that epistemology and the requirements of the 
modeling relation were central to our discussions at Buffalo. In fact, that is where they 
were developed, stimulated primarily from reading Hertz?s Principles of Mechanics. The 
central idea is based on the limitations of what we observe, what Rosen called encoding, 
and what is also called measurement or pattern recognition. To put it bluntly, we say 
what our models tell us depends entirely on how we encode our observations.

One of Rosen?s favorite examples was the active site of an enzyme where an ontological 
form is recognized by the enzyme, leading to its specific catalytic action. One way of 
encoding this site is by x-ray diffraction leading to a molecular (particle) model of the 
site. But it is known that different molecules can produce the same site and the same 
action, so it is not the particles but the site that biologically is the more important. 
Physical observables do not measure or encode such an organized form.

Rosen explains this in LI, pp. 272-275, but here is a much earlier quote:
 
?If you take something like an enzyme, which you feel is carrying out some kind of 
measurement, it?s got a particular mode of functional activity which has a description. 
That description, as I said, is very far from the description of the molecule which 
carries the site.?
[snip]
?Again, I suggested that the kinds of observables that were involved in the action of 
such a thing as an active site were not the ones that were conveniently measured in 
physics; that the biological systems saw each other through different eyes than we would 
use if we were looking at these systems. So, I suggested that there were other 
observables that were involved explicitly in these biological interactions, biological 
measurements.?
[Rosen and Pattee on CBC-FM IDEAS. Published as A Question of Physics: Conversations in 
Physics and Biology, Paul Buckley and David Peat, eds. Univ. of Toronto Press, 1979]

My own favorite analogy is natural language where only form generates meaning. A 
sentence, like an active site, cannot be fractionated, and the same meaning can be 
expressed in words of thousands of different languages. Studying individual words 
(reductionism) is utterly useless. This is the view that motivates the new field of 
Biosemiotics that I think Rosen would appreciate.

Howard