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John M. wrote: I concluded (surprize!) that if insecure of
a meaning, I will take a look at MY dictionary (Webster and Am. Heritage), where
the latter only lists 'to entail' and both as: to have, secure necessitate a
(prescribed) succession (as in a will: inheritance), - a consequence, - the Middle English word refers only to
property-succession. I had to conclude that my "tail-end" view was
acceptable.
That would be unwise, I'm afraid. The dictionary I use is the Webster Universal Unabridged dictionary, which my father also had in his reference library, although I can't be sure if he was using it the first time he started looking into scientific entailment (probably not). In any case, we are bound to find as many different ways of defining any given word as there are dictionaries, and to make matters more difficult, the scientific use of a word is often different enough from the common uses that the scientific version needs to be defined differently. Logic is a case in point. For comparison purposes, I will share with the list what my
dictionary has as definitions of some of the words we have been
discussing:
Entail: To cause or require as a necessary consequence; involve;
necessitate; as, "The plan entails work".
Entailment: The act of entailing or the state of being entailed.
Necessary sequence, as in the order of descent for an entailed
inheritance.
Causation: A causing or being caused; A causal agency; anything
producing an effect; Law Of Causation: the law that every event or phenomenon
results from an antecedent cause.
Cause: (noun) That which produces an effect or result; that from
which anything proceeds, and without which it would not exist.
Cause: (verb) To be the cause of; bring about; make happen; effect
(not to be confused with affect); induce; produce.
Clearly, these terms are closely related and have also often been
used interchangeably just as complexity is often used to refer to what my father
described as "complicatedness" or "intricacy". However, since this list is about
trying to understand Robert Rosen's usage, I promise you that the way my
father saw these terms was as follows:
In the general case (looking at systems or even the entire universe
in totality), entailment is what drives causality. Causality is how we learn
about entailment.
In specific situations, these labels are context dependent
because, in complex systems (especially living systems), the effect of one
process can be the cause of another processes. And-- in the case of an
entailment loop, one would have to straighten out the loop or look at a
linear piece of the loop to try and label anything as a cause and its
resulting effect. Yet, we don't have to do any of this in order
to speak about the loop as a self-entailment loop. In other words,
we can discuss entailment without having specific contexts. This is how we can
say that all living systems have the same organizational entailment patterns,
causing life as a consequence, even though the variety of living systems,
just looking at the sheer number of species we know about, would make it seem
that there is no generality among them at all.
I say again: Entailment is inherent in the set of
organizational relations of a given system, it refers to the
logical consequences of those relations as specified by a particular
organization. This is what relational science is all about and it is also why we
can create models which echo the consequences of a system's organization. The
entailment patterns retain their information even when transferred to a formal
system. When you run a simulation, then, you are testing the entailment patterns
of your models using cause-and-effect (causality).
Judith
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